Daydream Notes

Last time, on Achtung Zeppelin, leader of airships and all-around airship fanatic Peter Strasser met his untimely end on August 8th, 1918. While he was in many ways an excellent, even a visionary commander, and a key figure in the operation of German airships in the first World War, he had a few failings: namely his willingness to substitute wishful thinking when the facts were against him. Without him, and with roughly three months left in the Great War, this tale is nearly done. In this final Achtung Zeppelin, I'm going to tell you what happened during the remainder of the first World War, and what happened to the men and their improbable skyships after Germany's defeat.     Speaking of defeat, the death of Peter Strasser and another airship loss two days later was the end of the Naval Airship Division as a fighting force.  On August 10th 1918, a flotilla of four light cruisers and thirteen destroyers left Harwich to see what trouble they could find on the German...

If you've been reading these posts, you probably know the story of the final year of World War 2 for Germany. On January 1st, 1918, the situation for Germany was the similar in some ways, but in other quite different from Germany in 1944 and '45. By 1918, Industrial output was off by 53% compared to prewar Germany, and various shortages were pinching the German economy everywhere. Unlike World War 2, this was caused not by bombing, but the blockade Britain imposed at the start of the Great War. Another difference from World War 2 was that hunger was widespread in Germany. (1) Defeatism had begun to spread through German society, inflamed by socialists and other political revolutionaries. The German high command believed the war could still be won – somehow – but Germany's chances at this point rested entirely on defeating France before America could get the vast army she was training over to the western front.  The collapse when it finally came started that summer, when the...

 Though it was mostly forgotten by the end of 1917, one of the reasons Germany had entered into World War 1 was to get a bigger slice of the colonial pie. France held large chunks of Africa, Vietnam, and Tahiti; the Dutch held what is now Indonesia; the British Empire (and its syndicated offshoots) were proverbially vast; and even tiny Belgium had the Congo (the modern Democratic Republic of the Congo) as a slave-state. Germany, latecomer to the colonial game, held the very darkest parts of Africa, half of what is now Paupa New Guinea, and a scattering of South Pacific islands. By 1917, these  undefended colonies had surrendered to invading forces, save one: German East Africa. (Nowadays we know this area as Burundi, Tanzania, and the garden spot of Rwanda.)     That Germany had one colony left was thanks to the extraordinary efforts of one German Colonel: Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck.  Lettow-Vorbeck was the German T.E. Lawrence: a brilliant and unorthodox ge...