Uncle Tony

No better formula is known for exploiting an autobiography than to provoke a squabble between the autobiographer and some other celebrity. Even the well-told story of so florid a subject as Anthony Herman Gerard ("Uncle Tony'') Fokker* would have created no great splash when it appeared last week had not the book contained some acid comments by Fokker about Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd, and had not an astute press-agent pre-advised newsmen of those comments. The book made headlines last week for the passages in a scant ten pages./-

Byrd's failure to take off for France before Lindbergh did is the first object of Fokker's scorn. Concerning the flight itself (in the Fokker-built America), Fokker dwells upon what airmen already knew: that the ability and steady nerve of Pilot Bernt Balchen were largely--if not solely--responsible for the right-side-up landing of the plane near Ver-Sur-Mer in France and the escape of the crew. Here he italicizes a sentence from Byrd's own book Skyward: "Balchen happened to be at the wheel."

A cause for Fokker's rancor suggests itself earlier in the same chapter, where he tells of selling his first trimotored plane to Byrd for the latter's North Pole flight of 1926 "on condition that the Fokker name would be left on it. Edsel Ford had liberally financed Byrd, still, I was somewhat surprised to hear later that the Fokker had somehow become Josephine Ford."

Sought out by newshawks last week, the scattered crew of the America made characteristic comments. Said Byrd in Little Rock, Ark.: "I have no objection to Mr. Fokker's saying that Balchen did the better job on the transatlantic flight than I did. I have always felt that way myself." Said Bernt Balchen, shy by nature and embarrassed by his present position as a Fokker testpilot: "I don't know where Tony got all his information; but there are no mistakes in it." From Noville in Los Angeles: "Byrd commanded, and the rest of us, including Balchen, took orders. Acosta was the best flyer aboard." From Acosta in New York: "If I had anything to say to Tony I'd say it to his face." According to the New York Evening Graphic, Acosta also said: "So far as Anthony Fokker and his book are concerned, he can go to hell."

Of greater consequence than this squabble is the story of the Java-born Dutch boy who "grew up with flying" to become one of the world's foremost builders of aircraft. The outlines of his success-story are well known. Not so familiar are details of Fokker's experience as builder of the German fighting planes which, for a time, raked the skies clear of Allied aircraft. When the War broke out Fokker was a Dutch citizen in Germany, building planes for the German army. He had previously tried without success to sell his designs to his own Government and to the British. Scarcely aware of the War or its causes, uninterested in anything but the business of designing and building planes, Fokker suddenly found himself with an assured market and unlimited backing. He was then 24. Before the War ended, Fokker reveals, the British Secret Service tried to reach him with an offer of $10,000,000 if he would leave Germany. Even had he received it, he could have done nothing. Germany forced citizenship upon him. gave him the choice of building planes for the army or going to the front trenches as a soldier.

At first, planes of both sides were unarmed, used only for scouting. Then the Germans captured a French single-seater with a machine gun crudely rigged to fire through the propeller, with metal strips attached to the propeller blades to deflect bullets which struck it. This plane was immediately turned over to Fokker and, 48 hours later, he had invented a synchronized machine gun. Skeptical German officers insisted that Fokker prove it himself by bringing down a French or English plane. Reluctantly he flew over the lines and soon encountered a French Farman. Unsuspecting, the French pilots saw Fokker's plane draw near, "wondering, no doubt, why I was flying up behind them. Another instant, it would be all over for them. . . . I had no personal animosity towards the French. . . . Suddenly, I decided that the whole job could go to hell. It was too much like 'cold meat' to suit me. . . . Let them do their own killing!"

Fokker flew back to the German lines. A German officer took the plane and proved the deadly efficacy of the gun. Within a few weeks a half-dozen German pilots (including the famed Immelmann) were shooting the Allies out of the sky, until one of the Germans made a forced landing on a French airport and the secret was out. Before long the Allied flyers were revenging their "Fokker fodder" with a synchronized gun of their own.

Fantastic is Fokker's story of smuggling from Germany to Holland after the War 350 carloads of airplanes and engines which by the terms of the Armistice had been ordered destroyed.

As a youngster in Holland, whither his father returned with his family and a modest fortune from his Javanese coffee plantation, Anthony Fokker was a "bad boy." He failed in all school subjects except where he could utilize an ingenious contrivance which enabled him to read examination answers through a slit in his desk. But in manual training he needed no ''crib." He evaded military training by simulating "flat-feet"--a trick acquired from his native playmates in Java, with whom he used to skin up trees, monkey-like. But such shirking was all for the purpose of making time for work in his home laboratory. Now, a multimillionaire at 41, he is still the enfant terrible, headstrong, belligerently independent. He is notoriously unpunctual, dozes at banquets, works days and nights on end when an idea possesses him, neither smokes nor drinks, cares nothing about his appearance, cares about scarcely anything except designing and building planes. He was twice married, twice widowed. His second wife fell to death from the window of their Manhattan apartment two years ago.

*FLYING DUTCHMAN, by Anthony H. G. Fokker and Bruce Gould--Henry Holt & Co. ($3). /-Except in the New York Times, loyal friend and backer of Byrd, which relegated the disparaging statements to a few sentences at the end of its article.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.