Document created: 29 September 03
Air University Review,
May-June 1974
Lieutenant
Colonel John H. Scrivner, Jr.
Is it right to consign lighter-than-air travel to the grave when it was not given a full or fair trial? This has been the recurring argument of historians and writers since an explosion and fire caused the destruction of the German Zeppelin Hindenburg in 1937 at Lakehurst, New Jersey. To counter that argument, heavier-than-air proponents point out the vulnerability of the huge airships, their high cost, and the almost consistent run of bad luck suffered by lighter-than-air craft during their development.
Neither side convinces the other; the argument for lighter-than-air for other than combat use still rages, and some go so far as to say the time of the dirigible has returned.1 Three recent books* on the subject indicate that interest in lighter-than-air continues despite its detractors. None of the books will convince a heavier-than-air purist, but each contributes to the knowledge of the development of lighter-than-air flight.
*Michael Macdonald Mooney, The Hindenburg
(New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1972, $8.95), 278 pages.
Robert Jackson, Airships (Garden City: Doubleday &
Company, Inc., 1973, $6.95), 277 pages.
Douglas H. Robinson, Giants in the Sky: A History of the Rigid
Airship (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973, $15.00), 362 pages.
Michael Mooney’s book, The Hindenburg, details a well-kept secret about one of the most shocking tales of sabotage against the German Third Reich ever uncovered: theoretically, the deliberate destruction of the dirigible Hindenburg, apparently to discredit Hitler’s Germany in the eyes of the world. Instead, the disastrous crash effectively ended lighter-than-air development. After 1937, except for coastal patrol by “blimps” of the U.S. Navy and the familiar Goodyear advertisement airships, lighter-than-air vehicles (especially dirigibles) disappeared. By 1962 only the advertisement blimps remained.
The second volume, Robert Jackson’s Airships, is a detailed recounting of the historical development of lighter-than-air from the original concepts presented by Roger Bacon to Pope Clement IV in 1268 to the present. He traverses the well-worn stories of the Montgolfier brothers and their successors and the development and destruction of the leviathans of the sky, such as the British R-38 and the American Roma, USS Shenandoah, USS Akron, and USS Macon, ending with the Hindenburg and a plea for lighter-than-air.
Had Jackson stopped there, his book would have little to recommend it over other airship histories now on library shelves. He has much more to say, however, and as a result his book makes a worthy addition to the history of lighter-than-air.
Jackson limits his narrative history to dirigibles, those blimps with rigid metal framework. Doing so allows him to cover a most significant, but often-slighted, period in the development of lighter-than-air—the dirigible in World War I. With few exceptions, the dirigibles of that period were Zeppelins constructed in Germany. Remarkable for their advanced design and impressive durability, Zeppelins were formidable only because the state of the art in fighter aircraft had not yet reached a point where a plane could climb fast enough to intercept a dirigible or maintain, for more than a few minutes, a Zeppelin’s combat altitude once it was reached. Beginning on the night of January 19-20, 1915, the Germans raided English towns and cities using dirigibles in what could well be termed early strategic bombardment. The Kaiser, in an Imperial Directive a month later, specifically instructed his dirigible pilots that”. . . the air war against England will be carried out with the greatest energy.” Nevertheless, he explicitly exempted residential areas of London, the royal palaces, and his royal cousins, the King and Queen, from what was thought at the time would be a rain of bombs.
It is in the author’s detailed handling of dirigibles and blimps in World War I combat that his book is lifted out of the ordinary. He records the tracking of German submarines by British blimps and the first successful sinking of a submarine in this manner. He shows the growing effectiveness of antiaircraft defenses against the huge Zeppelins and, with the invention of the incendiary bullet, the terrible vulnerability of the hydrogen-filled airships.
Also chronicled is the obvious advantage of lighter-than-air craft: their amazing endurance in flight. During their early use in 1914 and 1915, dirigibles made reconnaissance and naval fleet-hunting flights. This was followed quickly by aerial bombardment as the dirigible’s possibilities were recognized. Initially, the duration of the flights was short, but as the state of the art progressed so did the Zeppelin’s capability to link the distant areas of the Central Powers and the German Empire.
Operating out of Bulgaria and Rumania, the German airships began recording raids of 37 to 52 hours in duration. Extended range was not remarkable at this stage; Yambol, Bulgaria, to Naples, Italy, or Port Said, Egypt, established records until, on November 21, 1917, the Zeppelin L-59 was called upon to deliver supplies and ammunition to besieged German forces in East Africa. Departing from Yambol, the airship reached Khartoum, where the crew learned that the German garrison had fallen. The airship was turned about and, without stopping, returned to Yambol after 95 hours and 35 minutes in the air, covering a distance of 4200 miles.
Nor does Jackson, a Britisher, stop there in his research of early dirigibles. He carefully details the construction and use of each of the British, French, German, and American dirigibles during World War I and in succeeding years. He includes the details of the construction and crash of Britain’s last dirigible, the R-I01, while en route from England to India. That fiery crash into a hillside in France in October of 1930 snuffed out the lives of many of the finest lighter-than-air designers in Britain and ended British participation in dirigibles.
The famous German passenger dirigible, the Graf Zeppelin, receives full attention and deservedly so. In the annals of dirigibles, the most successful was the Graf Zeppelin. Its maiden trans-Atlantic flight from Friedrichshafen, Germany, to Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1928 set an airship record of 111 hours and 43 minutes for crossing the Atlantic. More important, it proved that dirigibles could weather storms, make repairs while in flight, or take alternate routes when weather was too bad, and still arrive at their destination. The Graf Zeppelin, successful as she was, lacked speed, and the Zeppelin Corporation had insufficient funds to build another huge airship with that requisite capability. Dr. Hugo Eckener, chief pilot and head of the Zeppelin Corporation, devised an ambitious plan to publicize dirigible flight by proving the reliability of the huge airships in passenger service around the world.
A round-the-world flight had been made by American planes, ending in March of 1924, with numerous stops en route and covering a period of 175 days. Eckener planned the dirigible global flight with only three stops while carrying a normal load of passengers and mail. On August 8, 1929, the Graf Zeppelin departed Lakehurst for Friedrichshafen, Germany, on the first leg of the history-making flight. Jackson’s account even details the freight aboard, as well as the passengers and crew. Worthy of note is the fact that Commander (now Vice Admiral, USN, Ret) Charles E. Rosendahl was aboard the Graf Zeppelin on this flight. Rosendahl later piloted every U.S.-owned dirigible and was in charge of the U.S. Navy’s blimp program during World War II. Since the retirement of the last blimp, he has remained an outspoken proponent of lighter-than-air.
Circumnavigation of the globe took the Graf Zeppelin 21 days, 7 hours, and 34 minutes, with stops at Friedrichshafen and Tokyo before returning to Lakehurst. Total elapsed flying time was 14 days, one hour. The scheme to publicize dirigibles worked. By 1930 regular passenger service between Germany, Brazil, and the United States had begun, with each year proving more profitable than the previous one. Success permitted the laying of the keel of a new and better airship.
In 1936 the Graf Zeppelin was joined in service by the Hindenburg, and the following year the Graf was retired from service. By 1937 all U.S. dirigibles except the German-built USS Los Angeles had crashed. England had given up her dirigible program while other countries had never seriously begun one. The Hindenburg held the world’s monopoly on airships and began immediately to continue the achievements of her sister ship, the Graf Zeppelin.
Jackson’s narrative repeats the well-known story from this point on. However, he has assembled an extensive chronology of airship events that make the book a valuable reference document for anyone studying lighter-than-air—a subject which, if Jackson could have his way, would come under increasing study as a means of transportation, if not for passengers, then for cargo. The bigger a cargo airplane becomes, the more difficult it is to fly, land, and handle. The bigger a dirigible is, so Jackson’s thesis goes, the more efficient in lift and capacity it becomes, and it requires no long runway; it can deliver cargo to a pinpoint location and hover there during loading and offloading operations. The Soviet Union has conducted research along this line recently. The late Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, testifying in 1945 before the President’s Air Coordinating Committee, stated that if “the airship had had the experimental money in proportion to that the airplane has had, it would be with us today.”2
The dirigible Hindenburg played a unique role in aerial history. Large,—it held 7 million cubic feet of hydrogen—sleek, and gracefully beautiful, the leviathan was bigger (800 feet long) than any other flying machine ever built except for the short-lived Graf Zeppelin II, which first flew in 1938 and subsequently was broken up in 1940 for scrap aluminum. The outstanding record of the first Graf Zeppelin paved the way for a triumphant beginning for the Hindenburg. So dramatic and attention-getting was the dirigible in flight, or when merely moored on the ground, that Hitler’s propaganda minister, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, ordered the Nazi swastika painted on each tail fin for “advertisement.”
The Hindenburg’s keel was laid in 1934, and the airship entered service during the summer of 1936. By then Eckener was Chairman of the Board of the Zeppelin company, a figurehead position in the Zeppelin organization controlled by the state. The new dirigible made seventeen round trips across the Atlantic either to Lakehurst, New Jersey, or Brazil during the summer of 1936. During that winter twenty new passenger cabins were installed, which gave the ship a capacity of nearly one hundred passengers. This modification was completed in late April 1937, and the Hindenburg prepared to enter the summer trans-Atlantic travel season.
Rumors were abroad that sabotage of the Hindenburg might be expected in an attempt to embarrass the Third Reich. The 97 passengers manifested for the first flight were carefully screened and their luggage searched. Nothing unusual was discovered, and the Hindenburg took off on May 4, 1937, on her maiden flight for the year and on what was to be her final Atlantic crossing.
This historic and pivotal flight has been meticulously recreated by Mooney in his book, The Hindenburg. Amazingly, the detailed conversations of the passengers and crew have been reconstructed as well as daily routines and menus. Mooney’s investigation of the ill-fated flight led him to contact surviving members of the passengers and crew. He found that they had astounding memories for detail, which he in turn has faithfully recorded and placed in minute-by-minute order. He also used to excellent advantage the extensive file in the National Archives on the investigation of the crash of the dirigible. A member of that investigation commission was Commander Rosendahl, appointed to the job by the commission chairman, Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the late President of the United States.
From these records and the exhaustive interviews, Mooney declares that the destruction of the Hindenburg was due to sabotage.3 Officially, the investigating commission ruled that the dirigible exploded due to a spark of static electricity which ignited leaking hydrogen as the airship prepared to land, a fact that Jackson repeats in his account of the Hindenburg career.
Mooney finds, however, that, even during the investigation of the crash, members of the commission felt that sabotage was the cause of the fire. The reason this fact was not brought out was that “a finding of sabotage might be cause for an international incident, especially on these shores.” Accordingly, the author states, the Board of Inquiry did its best not to discover any sabotage during the public hearings. It was during the evening off-the-record sessions that the initial rumors of sabotage turned into “inescapable evidence.” Part of that “evidence” was the discovery of the remains of the flimsy bomb that blew up the huge airship as it prepared to dock.
Mooney, like Jackson, begins his book with a long chapter on the early history and growth of dirigibles. However, he quickly proceeds to the backgrounds of the crew and the political overtones surrounding the construction and launching of the dirigible that became the pride of Germany and the symbol of her post-World War I expansiveness. One American newspaper said that the Hindenburg’s flight indicated that the Germans had become the “fearless conquerors of space.”
The Hindenburg was the immediate object of an international dispute when Germany asked for American helium to fill the gas cells of the airship. Approval was almost granted when Hitler himself spoiled all chances of obtaining the nonflammable gas by marching into Austria. The U.S. Congress suspended approval of the gas sale, and the Hindenburg’s gas cells were filled with the dangerous, hydrogen that sealed her fate.
Mooney has been able, by extensive research, to name a Hindenburg crewman, Eric Spehl, as having planted a flashlight-battery-energized phosphorous bomb which he detonated by a photographer’s timing device. It was timed to explode after the ship had been moored at Lakehurst, the passengers had disembarked, and the airship was being prepared for the return voyage. Instead, due to a weather delay prior to landing, the bomb went off between two huge hydrogen gas cells near the stern of the airship as it hovered preparatory to landing. The spectacular radio broadcast of Herb Morrison, who witnessed the crash, and the photographs of the disaster are familiar to all students of history.
As Mooney reconstructed arsonist Spehl’s motives for destroying the airship, it becomes clear that the confused crewman saw his deed as his “act of genius.” Spehl, in destroying the symbol of German might, created his own masterful stroke of rebellion against the brutality and power of the German Reich, which had done him no favors. Ironically, he did not survive the explosion and fire he caused.
The best of the three books, and the most authoritative, on lighter-than-air is Robinson’s Giants in the Sky. The author writes to remind the older generation of the glory and pageantry of the great airships and to answer the question posed by those much younger, “What was a rigid airship?” Robinson answers that by stating:
The rigid airship. . . was one of the most extraordinary and romantic creations of men, enthralling millions during its reign from 1900 to 1940. It offered the promise of great range and load carrying capacity long before the aeroplane was really developed. . . . all work stopped, traffic ceased to move, and thousands crowded into the streets to watch their majestic passage, announcing the attainment of man’s dreams of exploring the farthest reaches of the earth, and of connecting the actions of the world in peaceful commerce through the air. (p. xv)
Robinson’s extensive and enlightening story of these airships details the history, building, use, and eventual destruction of 161 of the regal giants. Beginning with the innumerable problems of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, the inventor who gave the ships his name, he chronicles their growth and use during their forty years of existence. Of the total number of them built, the firm that Zeppelin founded built 119.
Troubled initially by finances and technical problems, Count Zeppelin eventually produced the giant airship concerning which Jackson and Mooney write with such admiration. Robinson joins these authors in admiration, and he excels them by telling not only the story of the rigids but also what they meant to the world politically, economically, and militarily.
Robinson sees in the use of the rigid airship what the leaders of Germany, England, France, Italy, and the United States saw: a national symbol. He terms Britain’s entrance into that field after World War I as an “imitation,” a verdict with which Jackson would quite probably not agree. At any rate the British Royal Navy insisted on duplicating the German airship during World War I, to permit aerial scouting of the North Sea in support of the Grand Fleet. While the Germans succeeded in their early airship program, the British did not. Robinson blames the failure on a lack of British public interest and support and the fact that British designers and engineers so slavishly copied the Germans that they failed to advance the state of the art.
In the United States it was the Navy that looked both long and hard at the dirigible. With the vast Pacific to be covered, an increasing awareness of the value of air power, and the growing possibility of war with Japan, our Navy saw in the huge dirigibles a means of reconnoitering the ocean. In 1919 the U.S. embarked upon its own program of dirigible building, the first one being the ZR-1 (USS Shenandoah). The Shenandoah’s first flight on September 4, 1923, was a first for a dirigible inflated with the safe but expensive helium.
With the Shenandoah began a series of American innovations in lighter-than-air. The British-invented mooring mast was improved upon and put to practical use, including one mounted on the stern of a Navy tanker. The American public began to see the possibilities in lighter-than-air when the Shenandoah was flown from Lakehurst to the West Coast and back. This flight, coupled with the advent of the Graf Zeppelin’s passenger service, seemed to forecast a new and incredibly luxurious method of transcontinental and transoceanic travel. The German-built USS Los Angeles took the place of the ill-fated Shenandoah, after the latter’s crash in 1925. The USS Akron and Macon also met tragic fates, yet both represented enough inventive and creative features to earn for the United States Robinson’s accolade as “innovators.” Included among the innovations were aerial hookups of small U.S. Navy combat biplanes to the Akron and Macon, the mooring masts, an all-metal-skinned airship (ZMC-2) known as “the tin balloon” and first flown by the U.S. Army’s Captain William E. Kepner,4 water recovery while in the air, “orange-peel” doors for the sheds to house the huge airships, new ground-handling procedures, and much-improved engines and design. The crashes of the Akron and Macon, plus the none-too-friendly attitude Robinson attributes to some of the shipbound Navy brass, spelled the end of U.S. innovations with the dirigibles. The field, from the time of the Macon’s crash in 1935 until the Hindenburg’s burning in 1937, belonged entirely to the Germans. Thereafter, the Graf Zeppelin II was built and flown, but as World War II approached it was retired and scrapped.
To these three authors the rigid airship is not simply a product of a dramatic but short past. To each of them it has a future despite the huge airship’s shortcomings. Robinson sees the major problem of the future airship not as one of innovative design but rather one of sufficiently interested financial circles to back the leviathan after such an ill-starred past record. After World War II the Goodyear Aircraft Corporation tried to interest the U.S. government in a ten-million-cubic-foot Zeppelin for an overnight passenger/cargo run from the mainland to Hawaii, but no subsidy was obtained. Atomic power was discussed seriously, plans for an atomic-powered airship were drawn, but no company was formed and no action ever taken.5 Robinson sees airships as the cheapest, if not the fastest, way to move cargo by air. He also points to the luxurious means of passenger travel that the airship of today’s technology could provide. In short, the obstacle to seeing another rigid airship in the sky is not technical; it is psychological, resulting from the crashes, and financial. Perhaps a really severe energy crisis could revive the rigid airship.
For devotees of lighter-than-air, for those who still cling to the hope of its phoenix-like renaissance, for those who want to recreate an important era in the history of man’s flight, these books are a welcome addition. For many, they anticipate fulfillments yet to come.
Kent, Ohio
Notes
1. Michael F. Conlan, “Dirigible Revival: ‘Airships Practical for Consumer Use,’” Akron Beacon-Journal, August 1, 1973, p. D-4.
2. Edwin J. Kirschner, The Zeppelin in the Atomic Age (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957), p. 52.
3. Others have made similar findings. See A. A. Hoehling, Who Destroyed the Hindenburg? (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1962).
4. Kepner went on to fame as one of the three balloonists in the National Geographic balloon Explorer in 1933 and as an Air Force lieutenant general before his retirement in 1953.
5. Kirschner, p. 39.
Lieutenant Colonel John H. Scrivner, Jr. (Ph.D., University of Oklahoma) is Professor of Air Science, Kent State University. Commissioned from AFROTC in 1950, he worked in supply and property accounting at several bases and in Germany and Greenland. After duty at Air Force Academy, where he taught history, he was Associate Editor, Air University Review, and Editor, Aerospace Commentary, then served as a historian in Vietnam until his present assignment.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official
position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air
Force or the Air University.
Air & Space Power Home Page | Feedback? Email the Editor