RUTHFULLY YOURS

Since World War II, the U.S. military has been united around a single principle—air supremacy. Because of it, no American soldier has been killed by enemy air attack in 60 years. Likewise, the American aerospace industry has been the world leader over the same period and the master of space and satellite technology as well.

According to Winston Groom, the author of many works of military history (though perhaps best known as the creator of Forrest Gump), we owe this legacy, in part, to three extraordinary men. The first is Eddie Rickenbacker, America’s top ace during World War I, who, as an executive at Eastern Airlines in the 1930s, helped to lay the foundation of modern commercial air travel. The second is James Doolittle, the Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering who as a record-breaking racing flier introduced high-performance, high-octane fuel to the aviation industry. The third is Charles Lindbergh, whose solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927 triggered an explosion of interest in air flight in America, not least in the military.

In “The Aviators,” Mr. Groom reminds us that, in the 1920s and 1930s, these men were celebrities—the object of “frenzied admiration.” Yet when World War II broke out, all three, now in middle age, risked their lives in the air once again. As Mr. Groom’s absorbing narrative unfolds, we see one man enduring a horrendous ordeal on the open sea; another nearly losing his life in a bombing run; and yet another finding a sort of redemption for his battered public image.

Rickenbacker had been a race-car driver before World War I (known as the King of Dirt). Flying planes in combat was a natural transition, and he proved adept at it, shooting down 26 German planes. He was a 51-year-old airline executive when bombs fell on Pearl Harbor.

He immediately offered to help and became the secretary of war’s personal representative on a series of missions to bolster Allied air power, including one to the South Pacific. On Oct. 12, 1942, the plane he was on missed a refueling stop and had to ditch, leaving Rickenbacker and 11 others adrift in three tiny rafts a degree or two from the equator and thousands of miles from anywhere.

Mr. Groom gives a vivid description of Rickenbacker and his team enduring 24 days with almost no food under a broiling sun. Many back in the States gave them up for dead; one man did die before a Navy vessel spotted the survivors and picked them up. It took Rickenbacker just two weeks before he was back in the air and back on the job.

Jimmy Doolittle had learned to fly in the Army and was working at Curtiss Aircraft when he came back from a tour of Germany in 1939 shocked by the Nazis’ leap forward in military aviation. He volunteered to return to the Army Air Corps, after a decade hiatus, to help it close the gap. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, he was asked to lead a squadron of B-25 bombers off the deck of an aircraft carrier to bomb Japan. The plan was for the planes to land in China, but most ran out of fuel and ditched. Given the loss of all the planes, Doolittle fully expected to be court-martialed when he got back to the States. He became a national hero instead, having proved only months after Pearl Harbor that Japan’s days of ruling the skies of Asia were numbered.

Of the biographical narratives in “The Aviators,” it is that of Charles “Slim” Lindbergh—perhaps the most famous American in the world after his 1927 flight—that is the most trenchant. His belief in the supremacy of air power led him, in 1939 and 1940, to insist that the U.S. needed time to face the likes of the German Luftwaffe; he thus opposed, with many other Americans, U.S. entry in the growing war in Europe. But it was a speech he gave in Des Moines, Iowa, in September 1941—in which he said that the three groups pushing America toward war were “the Roosevelt administration, the British, and the Jews”—that turned him from hero to pariah.

“In towns and cities across the country,” Mr. Groom writes, “Lindbergh’s name was removed from streets and schools.” The 1940 Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie called him “un-American”; the press compared him to Hitler. Mr. Groom quotes Lindbergh’s friend Harry Guggenheim saying, “Slim never had the slightest anti-Semite feeling” and tries to argue that Lindbergh was misquoted—that he was actually blaming German Jews, not American ones, for the war agitation (a proposition that seems almost as offensive and false as the other). When America did finally enter the war, Lindbergh was given a second chance. He volunteered to serve first as test pilot at Ford Motor‘s huge aircraft plant at Willow Run, Mich., then in a series of experiments on the effects of extreme high-altitude flight that nearly killed him several times.

In 1943, he headed Rickenbacker’s way, to the South Pacific, where he demonstrated to Navy and Army pilots how to get the most range and power out of their newest fighters, the F4U Corsair and P-38 Lightning. He even managed to talk his way into flying combat missions and shot down two Japanese planes in his P-38.

When the war ended, Lindbergh’s reputation, though still tarnished by the Des Moines speech, had been revived. Whatever he meant to say that day in Iowa, it’s hard to argue with Mr. Groom that Lindbergh’s legacy, like those of his friends Rickenbacker and Doolittle, lives on—and shows how some can achieve greatness even when they seem disgraced or forgotten.

Mr. Herman’s latest book, “The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization,” is just out from Random House.