One Summer: America, 1927

spoke good English and informed them that they were at Mansfeld, near Eisleben, 110 miles from Berlin and heading the wrong way. The mechanic knew how to order a delivery of aviation fuel – something that would have been entirely beyond them otherwise – but when the tanker arrived its nozzle proved too big for the plane, so fuel had to be transferred laboriously via a long-spouted tea kettle borrowed from the farmer’s wife, who had presumably calmed down a little.
    When at last the plane was refuelled and the adventurers were pointed in the right direction, they took off again. Soon, however, they were lost once more. Chamberlin and Levine spent themorning flying around blindly and bickering over where they were before running out of fuel a second time and making another forced landing. This time they discovered that they had gone some distance past Berlin and were in a small town called Cottbus, almost at the Polish border. fn1
    Too tired to continue, they retired to Cottbus’s best and only hotel and fell into bed. When they awoke, they found that they were national heroes in Germany and that a fleet of military planes had arrived to conduct them to the capital. The following morning, under a guiding escort, the two men flew the last leg to Tempelhof airfield in Berlin. More than 150,000 people were waiting to greet them. An additional 20,000, misled by rumour, turned up at Warsaw Airport and were sent away disappointed.
    Germany gave the two flyers a reception as jubilant and welcoming as Lindbergh’s had been in Paris. No humans would attract larger and more enthusiastic crowds in Germany until the rise of Adolf Hitler. America grew nearly as excited as when Lindbergh had landed. For three days, the Times in New York gave the two heroes its maximum headline – three decks across eight columns – and covered their every thought and movement in exhaustive detail. The general public was excited, too. When Levine’s and Chamberlin’s wives travelled to Hoboken Pier to catch a ship to Germany, six thousand people turned up to see them off – at one o’clock in the morning.
    Soon, however, the celebrations took on a slightly strained air. President Coolidge sent congratulations from America – but only to Chamberlin. His pointed snub was widely interpreted as anti-Semitic. The Jewish newspaper The Day observed from Manhattan: ‘Two men left New York; two men risked their lives; two men have shown heroism and created a record even greater than Lindbergh’s. Two men left; two men arrived, Americans both. But the Presidentof the United States congratulates only one, and by strange coincidence the one whom the President has not found worthy of being mentioned by name is named Levine …’
    Lindbergh, in his daily dispatches to the New York Times from aboard the Memphis , also praised Chamberlin generously without once mentioning Levine, though this almost certainly was more out of bitterness at the way Levine had treated him over the Bellanca deal than because of any active anti-Jewish sentiment.
    The Germans, too, seemed a little uncomfortable with Levine. A restaurant in Berlin started offering roast beef à la Chamberlin with Cottbus potatoes, and a brewery sought permission to issue a Chamberlin beer, but again without mention of Levine.
    Levine for his part did almost nothing to ingratiate himself with the people of Germany. He visited no hospitals, called on no widows, offered no praise to German aviators. He didn’t even have anything good to say about Lindbergh, attributing his success to favourable weather rather than skilful flying. ‘Lindbergh was lucky and we were not,’ Levine told reporters. ‘If we had one-tenth of Lindbergh’s luck, we would have done much better.’ To the acute embarrassment of the German and American authorities alike, a German businessman, Dr Julius Puppe, whom Levine had cheated out of $5,000 in a deal in America, now came forward with a writ and tried to have his plane seized. Chamberlin was amiable, but had nothing to say, and gave the impression of having not a thought in his head when not in the air, which was perhaps not far from the actuality.
    The world quickly realized that it didn’t particularly like Charles Levine and was never going to get anything interesting out of Clarence Chamberlin, so its attention turned elsewhere.
     
    Lindbergh, though far away at sea and steaming home slowly, managed to raise a frisson of excitement with the news that he