Back in the Bicentennial year of 1976, a celebrated science author flew across Florida in Adolf Hitler’s airplane, a Junkers JU-52. This unique craft belonged to Martin Caidin — daredevil pilot, historian, amateur scientist, futurist, space and defense expert and bestselling author. Caidin had fully restored the plane, later sold to Lufthansa Airlines as a promotional and historic (but airworthy) relic. A flight maestro, he once set a world wing-walking record with it, piloting the JU-52 with 19 wing-walkers on its left wing. A friend of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and all the first astronauts, Caidin was Florida’s quintessential figure, shaping its modern identity, though he’s now largely forgotten. A book bio once said, he is “making our world exciting, and shares with us all that excitement in his books.”
If warplane tales were his only claim, his life would still captivate. In 1961, he flew a fleet of B-17 Flying Fortresses — World War II junk barely airworthy — across the Atlantic for a John Hersey film. But he wasn’t just a collector; he aided the U.S. in smuggling planes to Africa for the Portuguese and crafted drug blockade strategies for the DEA.
His novel Cyborg inspired “The Six Million Dollar Man” and the idea of artificial limbs. Caidin made major contributions to military aviation literature and hands-on aeronautical restoration. But it was smaller contributions that resonated.
In 1977, Caidin was in Bradenton, at a lecture at the Bishop Planetarium, part of the convention of the Florida Association of Science Teachers. He was there to conduct workshops with high school students, where prizes were awarded for top science fiction writing.
Self-educated childhood
Martin Caidin was born on September 14, 1927, in New York City. He was raised by his extended family on a farm in New York and spent time in an orphanage. “He was sprung from the orphanage when he was 14,” said his daughter Pam, a successful jewelry artist in Santa Fe.
Leaving formal education in his teens, Caidin headed to New York City. “He was tough, and he was a streetfighter. A tough kid,” Pam said.
His first service to the country was in the U.S. Maritime Service and Merchant Marine, which took him to the Pacific. He was only 14 when the war started, so by all accounts, he should not have been there at all.
“He was in occupied Japan by age 17,” Pam said. Japan, after the war, was destroyed. She said that her father’s death by thyroid cancer at age 69 might have had something to do with the radiation.
When he returned to the U.S., he did not go to college. Instead, he had an education in life. During the early Cold War, he was a nuclear warfare specialist for New York State. In some ways, he knew more than the experts, as he had actually seen the war up close.
“He wrote an article,” said Pam. “How to build an atomic bomb.”
A kids’ cartoon book from the 1947, True Comics, featured Caidin. The comic was called “Aviation Wonder Kid,” and it spoke of his technical knowledge. The cartoon shows Caidin being picked up by the FBI. The blurb reads, “Early in the war, the FBI was on the trail of a certain Martin Caidin, who topped generals with his knowledge of aviation secrets,” said the cartoon.
It turned out he had a knack for studying, figuring things out and asking questions. He served as a consultant on aviation physiology to the FAA and worked on space systems with the Air Force, later flying with the Thunderbirds. By 1950, he was down in Florida, as the space correspondent for WNEW, the New York radio station. One of his earliest books was “Jets, Rockets and Guided Missiles,” in 1950. That was the year of the first rocket launch in Florida, the Bumper 8. It launched July 24, 1950, combining a captured German V-2 rocket with an American rocket from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Advocate and expert
During his time as a reporter of the Space Program, he also became an advocate. In 1961, he detailed the cost of labor strikes on the program, making the contention that union rules and territory had slowed the program down and kept it behind the progress of the Soviets. With fellow reporter Jay Barbree, he helped to alert the government to endless openings and closings of the bridges out to the Cape, across the Intracoastal Waterway. It turned out that shipments of rockets and equipment were being delayed by pleasure boat traffic.
In a time of the Cold War, he believed that individuals were not a party to it. The second astronaut in space, and the first astronaut to orbit the Earth multiple times, was Gherman Titov. He wrote the book “I Am Eagle” with Titov in 1962, well before the Apollo-Soyuz effort to break the Cold War by having the two space programs meet in space and connect.
In 1963, he wrote “Red Star in Space,” which was a detailed accounting of the two space programs of the U.S. and Soviets. The book helped truthfully look at what it would take to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
Unlikely scenarios were the genius of his science fiction. In 1967, his book “The Last Fathom” considered the possibility that a nuclear bomb could be set off secretly, underwater, off the Atlantic, posing a new threat to the U.S. A critic called it a “dazzling array of hydrospace terminology.”
Predictor of the future
While Caidin presaged the most futuristic life we lead today in Florida (including the Space X rescue), he is almost completely unknown. From his time, 20th-century writers who were more focused, and less diverted, have bigger legacies, including Isaac Asimov and Kurt Vonnegut. While Caidin had plenty of fame in his lifetime and his books, which were prolific, sold millions, they are not still in print.
Through his life, he believed much more was possible than had been imagined. He was quoted as saying to an interviewer:
“What you believe someone else can or can’t do hasn’t got beans with the doing. Or lack of doing. Just go back through your history books and you’ll discover that just about everything you take for granted today in your daily lives was absolutely impossible not so many years ago.”
Hitler’s Junkers plane “Iron Annie” was his prize; he fully restored it. The plane, after serving the German government and Hitler during World War II, went into service as a commercial airliner in Norway. It later sank in a fjord and was abandoned in a jungle of Ecuador when it was restored by Caidin. But it was expensive for an individual, even one like Caidin who had Hollywood contracts and money. At the time it was visiting air shows in Florida and across the U.S., it had a crew that included Air Force co-pilots Frank Urbanic and Ted Anderson. By 1982, he was forced to sell it, after 1,800 hours of flight. Lufthansa later purchased it for a promotional plane and still flies it today.
His knowledge seemed to predict what would happen; even his last book with Jay Barbree was entitled “Destination Mars,” first published in 1972, and last republished and updated in 1997, the year he died. It showed how man has perceived Mars through history and anticipated a day like today when Americans might even go there.
Facts and Ideas
His work blended factual precision with imagination. But overall, it had to sell. While some called him Hemingway of the Air, he was not because of his writing style. His fiction, mostly out of print, has some earthy bits, evidence that most of his fiction books would sell on the paperback shelves. A sex scene in “Three Corners to Nowhere” has a character having sex immediately after bloody hunting with a bow and arrow, and just before a helicopter arrives overhead: “He took her as she wanted, as an animal ruts in passion with its mate.”
Perhaps the Hemingway reference came because Caidin was a man of action, who did the things he wrote about. More often, there were the technical details, often filled with arcana that would be interesting to a science buff, or the actual scientists themselves, which were a core audience. But he was straightforward with words, mixing the multiplicity of scenes and sources with the smallest details.
In a letter to his wife in 1958, from the Starlite Motel in Cocoa Beach, he wrote, “And there she stood, the first moon rocket. They have her well covered in the big gantry, but the three stages were unmistakable. One hundred feet high, all alone in its pad area. It still seems a bit impossible, and tomorrow afternoon I hope, as I said, to get onto the gantry to whack her a shot on the ass!”
Caidin’s writing married reporting and storytelling. Some critics have looked at his writing and referenced the challenge of being a successful writer of both fiction and non-fiction; at some point, the non-fiction becomes a bit exaggerated.
His daughter said that he wrote quickly; of course, at that time it was on a typewriter. She said he could type at 80 words per minute. After a month writing the outline, he would dash it out. “It would take him a week to write the book,” Pam said.
Movies and television
Like Michael Crichton, who fathered “Jurassic Park” and the TV show “E.R.,” Caidin was all over Hollywood. There were several critically acclaimed blockbusters. The biggest was “Marooned,” a book about U.S. astronauts stuck in space, rescued by the U.S.S.R. Frank Capra, director of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” directed the film version, which starred Gregory Peck and the recently deceased Gene Hackman, as well as Richard Crenna and James Franciscus. He dedicated a book to Howard Minsky, the producer of Love Story, with the notation, “He dreamed it. We did it.” The movie directly predicted the national scare of Apollo 13.
His best-known book was “Cyborg,” a 1972 story about an Air Force pilot and astronaut who had replaced his legs and arms with mechanical limbs and an electronic eye. The book inspired the 1976 ABC television show “The Six Million Dollar Man.”
The TV show was a rollicking success and spawned a spinoff, “The Bionic Woman.” What was compelling about the original book, however, was that it was far more realistic. Instead of the atomic parts and actual eye connected to a brain, Steve Austin was powered by flywheels and had his skull replaced by metal. He also had storage containers for poison darts in his legs and a metal head, impervious to bullets. Just in case, there were radio transceivers, and his head could fire projectiles. Through the book, there was a wistfulness. “He became the ultimate man. But he couldn’t find his soul.”
The idea of bionics was not just ideas in his head. His daughter said that he actually invented a pair of legs that were spring-loaded. While the TV show took many liberties with the space program and current technology, much of the realism survived. Many of the characters of the TV show were based on NASA staff; Caidin had known just about all of them since the beginning.
Caidin also hosted a television talk show called “Face to Face” during the mid-1980s, syndicated across the state. The show would challenge representatives of various prominent American far-right organizations and hate groups. The one-hour broadcasts were co-written and produced by Bob Judson and taped at the Nautilus Television Studios, located just outside of Orlando. Guests included John Bircher John McCann, Nazi party head Matt Koehl, Aryan Nation member Dick Butler and Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was later murdered as a member of the Jewish Defense League.
In 1989, he continued to push for Florida’s motion picture industry and hosted local production groups at his house in Gainesville.
Touching the supernatural
Caidin’s curiosity, in life and fiction, hit no bounds, naturally touching the mystical. Near the Cape, he knew Wiccan, Dame Sybil Leek, author of 60-plus occult books. In Leek’s childhood in England, she met infamous Aleister Crowley, who spoke of “vibratory qualities” and “magick.” Caidin thanked Leek in the credits for a book bicycle warfare, along with Jay Barbree. In 1993, “Natural or Supernatural: A Casebook of True, Unexplained Mysteries” he probed telekinesis, UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle, mixing doubt and awe. “The Messiah Stone” blended Jerusalem diamond lore with Nazi facts, while two Indiana Jones novels for George Lucas, like Indiana Jones and the White Witch, fused adventure and mystery.
He was of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry; his family had fled pogroms. But he was not a religious man.
“His Jewish heritage meant nothing to him,” Pam said. “My father was not even remotely religious.”
Still, he held a license to marry couples, and told the American Baptist Magazine in 1975 that astronauts’ lunar awe moved him: “There has been a tremendous change, very quietly, in the attitudes and the lives of the men who have gone to the moon, where they can see the planet the way God must have seen it. It is strange that only when man left his world could he see it. Most of the men who came back had a spiritual experience.”
His last year battling thyroid cancer, his wife Dee Dee, an American Airlines purser, worked to keep his insurance. He died March 24, 1997, at 69. His papers live at the University of Wyoming; his ashes reached space on a memorial flight.
