James P. Duffy

Charles Lindbergh won fame at home and abroad by being the first person to fly across the Atlantic ocean. Not only was he a pilot but he was an aviation pioneer that helped develop the aviation industry and became an enemy of FDR during the air mail crisis of 1934. FDR had the last laugh succeeding in labeling Lindbergh a Nazi sympathizer since Lindbergh was for the United States staying out of WWII until after Pearl Harbor. Black listed and unable to join the military effort Lindbergh lent show more his services to Ford manufacturing and before the war ended spend some time flying fighter planes in the Pacific shooting down one Japanese plane and flying something close to 50 combat missions as a civilian. He came up with a way to economize fuel to allow fighter planes to fly for 2 to 4 hours longer on missions. After the war and FDR died Eisenhower awarded him the rank of brigadier general in the Air Force and as a civilian was very active in conservation activities. He was one of the most influential people of the 20th century. And yet, to this day the smear campaign mounted against him prior to WWII casts a shadow over his legacy. Unjustly, as the author of this book argues.

The books has excellent points when it comes with dealing with the history and relationship of Lindbergh and FDR. However, he opens with negative comparisons to Obama and closes with similar observations. This is a horrible mistake, first because history has yet to see how things will turn out with Obama and this book will quickly seem dated because of the way he compares Lindbergh and Sarah Palin. He should have left out any of that type of comparison and let this historical comparison stand on its own merits. The only other thing I would like to have heard more about even briefly is about Lindbergh's contributions after WWII. Telling me he received a commission in the Air Force as a brigadier general and spent a lot of time and effort in the conservation movement is nice but a paragraph on what he did as a general and what he did to further the conservation movement would have been helpful in cementing an understanding of the legacy of Charles Lindbergh. I really want to give this book three stars because I did enjoy reading it and burned through it in a day. But I just can't do it. Let's call it 2 and a half stars....

I do recommend this book to those wanted to read about a successful smear campaign in American politics, someone interested in Charles Lindbergh and his place in aviation history, or someone interested in the darker side of FDR. I just wish the author could have a do over chance to address some of the shortcomings of this book. show less

Was aviation pioneer and popular American hero Charles A. Lindbergh a Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite? Or was he the target of a vicious personal vendetta by President Roosevelt? In Lindbergh vs. Roosevelt, author James Duffy tackles these questions head-on, by examining the conflicting personalities, aspirations, and actions of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Charles A. Lindbergh. Painting a politically incorrect portrait of both men, Duffy shows how the hostility between these two American show more giants divided the nation on both domestic and international affairs. From cancelling U.S. air mail contracts to intervening in World War II, Lindberg and Roosevelt’s clash of ideas and opinions shaped the nation’s policies here and abroad. Insightful, and engaging, Lindbergh vs. Roosevelt reveals the untold story about two of history’s most controversial men, and how the White House waged a smear campaign against Lindbergh that blighted his reputation forever. show less

This book is an interesting comparison with Luftwaffe over America, reviewed earlier. Author James Duffy states his goal was to debunk claims by Patrick Buchanan that the United States was never seriously threatened by Nazi Germany during WWII. He’s not very successful here; while the Axis powers certainly would have carried the war to the U.S. if the means to do so had dropped into their lap, none of the various schemes considered would have been any more than an annoyance even if they show more had worked (with, of course, the salient exception of the Axis nuclear weapon projects).


However, Duffy does succeed in making the case that despite the improbability of an Axis attack, many influential people at the time believed such an attack was possible. This is where the interesting differences between Target America and Luftwaffe over America come in. In LOA, author Manfred Griehl describes things from the German perspective, detailing a variety of plans that the Germans at least gave some thought to; in TA, Duffy writes about things we were afraid the Germans would do.


Some of these are quite far-fetched. A Canadian naval officer expressed fears that a fleet of German freighters would sail across the Atlantic, through the Hudson Strait, into Hudson Bay, unload crated seaplanes, assemble them, and send them off to bomb Winnipeg and Duluth. Thanks to our vigilant northern friends standing on guard for us, no such attack took place.


A similar fear taken very seriously by the U.S. Government was that Vichy would join the Axis and make the Vichy navy and colonial possessions available. This resulted in a 36-hour ultimatum to the Vichy admiral in Martinique, requiring the disarmament of the aircraft carrier Bearn and other naval vessels in Fort de France harbor. The admiral complied. The U.S. also feared that access to French North Africa would allow Germany to construct air bases around Dakar and fly troops across the Atlantic to seize Brazil. The US prepared a pre-emptive strike plan (in late 1940, before American entry) to seize Brazilian airfields with a Marine force and two Army divisions.


Late in the war reconnaissance photographs of U-boats with unidentifiable deck structures lead to fears that the Germans would launch V-1s from submarines. This concern actually made it into the New York Times in January 1945. A large hunter-killer force was deployed to intercept the supposed missile carriers. Ironically, although the Germans did have a plan to launch V-2s from canisters towed behind U-boats, and went so far as to begin construction of three towing canisters, there were no plans for launching V-1s. I hadn’t realized this before but in late 1944 the US Army had successfully built and test-flown a copy of a V-1 assembled out of parts recovered and sent over from Britain. The Army used black-powder catapults to launch them, which could get them off in a much shorter distance than the steam catapults used by the Germans. Thus the possibility of a submarine deck launch must have seemed reasonable.


While hindsight makes all these concerns look silly, it’s important to remember the “shock and awe” that ensued after the rapid German conquests of Poland, Norway, and France. The unconventional paratroop and airlanding tactics used made the Allies believe that the Germans were capable of almost anything.



An interesting sidelight deals with Italian plans to carry the war to the New World. It was proposed to load “pigs”, the Italian manned torpedoes, on Cant Z.511 seaplanes and fly them to New York, where the crews would attack shipping. The seaplanes would refuel from an Italian submarine and fly back. Other proposals involved using the small but ultra-long-range P.23R to drop a single bomb, and using Z.511s to conduct a leaflet raid. Exactly how New Yorkers would have reacted to Italian leaflets falling from the sky is best left unconsidered.


Of the two, I prefer LOA. Griehl is much less sensationalist than Duffy, who describes every long-range German aircraft as an “America bomber” and keeps referring to “Hitler’s plans to attack America”, as if nobody but der Führer ever would have thought of it. OTOH, Duffy has obviously done considerable research - I’d never heard of the Italian plans before. I’d say this one is worthwhile, but I’d get Luftwaffe over America first. show less

What a great idea for a book: a review of the all the German plans, some completely bonkers, some plausible, to strike back at the United States during the Second World War. One of the striking things about that war (and the First World War as well) is that at no point was the security of the American homeland in any real danger. No other major power had that experience in the war, and most suffered terrible and ongoing attacks.

The German plans (and some Italian ones thrown in as well) show more included long range bombers that could be refuelled over the Atlantic by U-boats, early versions of intercontinental ballistic missiles, midget submarines and even a “space plane” that would bomb U.S. cities from the upper stratosphere. Most of the ideas generated some memos and little more. The author has found some lovely “artists impressions” of weapons that were never — thankfully — built.

So, yes, a great idea for a book. But sadly, not a very good book. The author seems to rely entirely on popular secondary sources, many quoted so often that one wonders how much research actually went into the book. And there are loads of glaring errors (there is no such country as “Columbia” nor a people called “Columbians”; the Germans had not yet invaded the USSR in 1940, and so on).

The constant references to “us” (meaning Americans) is strange, in particular when jumping forward decades. To write that Osama Bin Laden “underestimated the American people and then paid severely for it” in a book published in 2004 when the terrorist leader had not even be caught yet is, well, odd.

Perhaps if the author had focussed on one or two of the plans and done serious research on them, this would have been a more interesting book. show less