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 side of the North Sea. Around dawn L 53, on the routine patrol, spotted the little strike force and began to follow them. L 53 then climbed to a safe altitude of 19,000 ft. One of these destroyers, the
Redoubt, was towing a lighter, on which was a single Sopwith Camel. Upon spotting L 53,
Redoubt steamed into the wind at flank speed, and the Camel was able to take off with the small runway the lighter afforded. After a half hour, the Camel and her pilot Lt. C.D. Culley had climbed to 18,000 ft, only to discover L 53 was a thousand feet higher. With another half hour of effort, Cully had climbed to 300 ft of the Zeppelin. It's not clear if Cully had been spotted or not, but at any rate, he was not fired upon. Directly beneath the airship, Cully yanked the Camel's nose as high as it would go while firing his machine guns. An entire drum of explosive ammo went into the Zeppelin's belly, and soon the airship was a flaming grid-work plunging into the sea, shedding motors and fuel tanks as she went.
The Hydrogen Zeppelin as a weapon, even if Strasser had lived to the armistice, was in decline. In 1919, airships were going to be replaced in their primary role: naval scouting. The Zeppelin company had designed a new all metal monoplane (the Dornier Ds.III) and these were to take over standard patrol duties from the Zeppelin airships. L 70's sister ships, the L 71 and L 72 had been delivered by this time, and these were to be fitted with six engines to increase their speed. There was also an ambitious plan to refit all the surviving height climber airships with extra engines and displacement to bring their performance close to the newest airships. Had the war continued into 1919, the Naval Airship division would have had about a dozen airships in total, a very small number of giant dirigibles to do things with. They were to be used as very long range scouts, occasional bombers, and would undertake other missions (like the one to Africa) as circumstances warranted. The German command wanted the Zeppelins still around, but with a minimal additional outlay of resources. As for the airship bases, most of these were to be turned over to conventional German Naval Aviation, with only the main bases at Nordholz and Ahlhorn operated as full-time airship aerodromes. And the airship construction program was canceled, save two more of the L 70 type: the L 73 and L 74.
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| The Mad-looking Dornier Ds.III. It had been developed on the shores of Lake Constance, where the first Zeppelins took flight. |
These plans were somewhat tentative, as the military situation for the Central powers went from dire to untenable. Bulgaria became the first Central power nation to sign an armistice with the Allies. In Germany, a million soldiers were sick with the flu. Italy destroyed the army of the the Austrian-Hungarian empire, and the empire spent October 1918 disintegrating. Finally signing an armistice with the west, the nation of Austria found two of her former provinces signing separate armistices along with them. Then, at the end of October, events on the ground reached up and grabbed the skyship men.
Adm. Hipper, now in charge of the North Sea fleet, had decided that the best thing the German Navy could do in this desperate situation was to sally fourth and see how many British battleships could be sunk in a climactic battle that almost certainly would have been the end of the German Surface Fleet. The hope was that such a sacrifice would improve Germany's bargaining position. Fortunately, it never came off: the German Navy mutinied when they heard rumors of this plan. Fanned by socialist revolutionaries, the revolt started on a few surface ships on October 28th, and quickly spread to the sailors of Wilhelmshaven and then, Kiel. It was the last straw for Kaiser. Moderate democratic reformers joined forces with the revolutionary socialists to force the Kaiser from his throne, and he fled to the Netherlands. United under the slogan 'bread and peace' the sailors revolt quickly spread throughout Germany. The men of the naval airship Division remained loyal to the Kaiser – they were an elite within the navy after all – and soon the sailors seized the airship bases and arrested all the officers. (These officers were released unharmed a few days later and sent home.) All Zeppelins were deflated and hung up in their sheds.
A few days later, on November 11th, 1918, the armistice was signed, and all was quiet on the western front.
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The Sailors Soviets had wanted bread and peace, and the fledgling German Democracy hoped for peace with honor. The armistice and resulting peace treaty would deliver neither.
For one, Britain – quite illegally – kept up the naval blockade until the treaty of Versailles was signed in June 1919. The blockade had already starved to death a half million Germans, and it would starve another 100,000 before ending. So not much in the way of bread. Of peace, there was even less: soldiers marching home from the front found their skills needed on German soil. Dozens of socialist republics that sprang up like so many revolutionary mushrooms with the Kaiser abdicated, and soldiers quickly found themselves drafted in the new fight against the socialist revolutionaries. As for peace with honor, the Great War had been an enormous trauma to the nations involved, and it soon became clear that Great Britain and France intended to vent their frustrations and fears on their now-helpless foe. America was dismayed; she had entered the war hoping for peace in Europe and for the implementation of President Woodrow Wilson's 14 points; but clearly her former allies couldn't care less what America thought, now that the battle was over. Clemenceau, the French President, went so far as to describe the future Versailles treaty as “a twenty-year armistice”, a prediction that would prove to be eerily accurate.
The airship fleet was the subject of keen interest on the part of all the victors; after all, the United States, Great Britain, France, and Italy all had substantial navies, and Zeppelins had proven themselves as naval scouts. While only the Treaty of Versailles could divvy up the fleet as 'war reparations', that didn't stop the British from doing a through inspection tour a month after the armistice. A team lead by the awesomely named E.A.D. Masterman, a British airship pioneer, toured Nordholz and Ahlhorn, and closely examined the ships there. The British were already a leg up compared to their allies on the latest intelligence: the L 70 had fell in shallow water, and shortly after she was shot down, a dredging expedition was organized. The aluminum struts, the engines, and the control cars were recovered. Also recovered was a notebook of von Lossnitzer, her captain, which allowed British naval intelligence to deduce L 70's capabilities and dimensions.
Great Britain and France had plans for the German airship industry as well: it was to be destroyed. Great Britain wanted to see the airship industry to become a British monopoly: both for commercial reasons, and to build long-distance airliners to connect her far-flung empire. France wanted the industry destroyed simply out of spite.
The winter of 1918 turned into the spring of 1919. The misnamed Spanish Flu, actually starting in America and then spreading overseas, had become a global pandemic. Most dangerous to the healthy and the fit, the flu would kill more people in two years than all of World War 1 did; experts today estimate that anywhere from 3-7% of the world's population died from this virus. Meanwhile the core of German Officers and NCOs in the Naval Airship division looked on as the Naval Airbases were quickly looted of anything valuable – gasoline, spare engines, and tools. Otherwise, guarding the Zeppelins in the now-looted hangers was about all they had to do: Germany's submarines had been surrendered as a condition of the armistice, and her surface fleet was idle and later anchored in the Scapa flow. The impounded fleet was manned by skeleton crews of German sailors, and guarded by the British Grand Fleet. This was by all accounts a misery for the Germans involved: prisoners on their ships, German sailors took to catching fish and gulls to supplement the terrible food they had, and all orders given had to be countersigned by the sailor's revolutionary committees. The surface fleet of Germany had unexpectedly become a thorny political problem to the British, as well. Defeated but essentially undamaged, the Kaiser's war fleet was a powerful naval force, one that still legally belonged to the Germans. That could be fixed by the peace treaty the Allied nations were going to force on the Germans; the far greater problem to Britain was what her former allies wanted to do with this fleet.
The United States, Italy, and France wanted to divide this modern surface fleet among themselves. Britain in contrast wanted the entire fleet destroyed, as they feared anything that would lessen the Royal Navy's advantage in numbers. By the time the Treaty of Versailles was to be signed in June 1919, the matter of the surface fleet had not been settled, and the British resolved to seize the ships themselves, and figure out a better solution later. As it turned out, the German Navy was for one last time to have victory. Acting on rumors that the British intended to do what they were planning, the fleet acted first. Defiantly raising the German Naval ensign one last time, on June 21st the crews scuttled their ships, and the Kaiser's mighty war fleet was sent to the bottom in the home port of their most hated enemy.
The loyal, discontented men of the Naval Airship division had been planning the same thing, though their motivations were slightly different. They had forgotten about their old enemies entirely; instead, they hoped to keep their magnificent skyships out of the hands of the socialists in Berlin. When the news reached Germany of the surface fleet's final action, it was taken as a sign to act by the conspirators. On the June the 23rd, the conspirators stole into the hangers where the empty airships were hung. There, they pulled away the supports the airships were resting on, and then loosened the cables hanging the Zeppelins. The ships slammed into the concrete, all 40 tons of their dead weight snapping keels and wrecking intricate aluminum frameworks. At Nordholz, L 14, L 41, L 42, L 63 and L 65 were wrecked; at Wittmundhaven L 52 and L 56 were smashed. At Ahlhorn the plot was betrayed, and the Zeppelins L 64 and L 71 survived.
This act of sabotage enraged the Allied control commission, who demanded the surrender of all remaining airships immediately. The modern survivors were L 61, L 64, and L 71. As most of the Zeppelins the Allied nations had wanted were now smashed, the commission felt justified in seizing any other airships it could find as well, and demanded the L 72, just completed by the Zeppelin company. Speaking of the Zeppelin company, Count Zeppelin had died in 1917, and its new head was Dr. Hugo Eckener, a crony of Zeppelin since the early days on Lake Constance. An advocate of the rigid airship, the doctor had resurrected DELAG, the first airline, and had completed two airships as civilian airliners, the Bodensee and the Nordstern. France and Great Britain took this opportunity to press their personal agendas: they claimed the two civilian airships as 'war reparations' and ordered the Zeppelin works at Friedrichshafen destroyed.
Things had reached an all-time low for the Zeppelinauts. But believe it or not, this story has a happy end, and it was thanks to that act of defiant sabotage by the Naval Airship men.
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| In 1920, men who had served on the airships were given this special
medal. Of the 50 or so flight crews trained during World War 1, 40% died
in combat. |
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America by this time was thoroughly disgusted with Europe, and actually refused to sign the treaty of Versailles, making a separate peace with Germany instead. A mood that little had been gained by America's intervention in the European war quickly developed into a stance of isolationism, which would not be broken until Pearl Harbor and Nazi's Germany's deceleration of war twenty-two years later. In truth, America could be described as the only real winner of World War 1 – Allied nations now owed the United States a vast sum of money – but in the mean time she was mostly cut out of the reparations gravy train. When it came time to divide up the remaining airships, the United States didn't get any. France got first pick and took L 72, L 113 and the
Nordsterm. Britain got L 71 and L 64. Italy got L 61, LZ 120, and
Bodensee. Belgium was given the L 30 (which had survived her combat career to end the war as a training Zeppelin), but had to have her disassembled, as there was no place to keep her. Japan was given L 37, who choose to receive her by mail. SL 22 was the last Schutte-Lanz airship, and bits of her were sent to all the allied powers. The allies even claimed the sheds the Germans had built, rebuilding them in their own countries. Most of these airships were never to fly again after they were delivered: with literally no crews trained to fly them, they were usually scrapped.
It will not surprise you to learn that the nation with the best Helium supply - the United States - had the most postwar success with rigid airships, despite missing out on the skyship giveaway. The attempt to transfer airship technology to allied countries aside from the U.S. was in a large part, a failure. To understand why, I'd like to briefly cover the other two nations that experimented with captured Zeppelin technology: France and Great Britain. This failure was also partially thanks to the Germans themselves, who gave up what the Allies commanded them to, but refused to give the taking nations any further help. And even knowing the dangerous nature of hydrogen, France and Great Britain gave no thought to the vast body of experience Germany had constructing and operating hydrogen airships, and made little attempt to learn what the Germans knew. Painful lessons lay ahead. One other thing notable about all the post war Zeppelin experimenters: all of them focused on long distance flying, and in fact all set records flying long distances with airships.
France took L 72 to the south of, ah, France, where she was renamed
Dixmude (a town in Belgium.) When her lifting cells were re-inflated in 1921, they were found to be full of holes. Instead of buying new cells from the Zeppelin company, it was decided that French made lifting cells would be better. It was not until 1923 that the technology was (sort of) mastered. Dixmude then made several long distance flights, at one point setting a new record for staying aloft over French North Africa. On this 118 hour flight, she covered over 7000 km. Unfortunately, it was only six months before a sharp lesson had to be learned. On December 21st, 1923, off the coast of Sicily, Dixmude fell to that old foe of the hydrogen airship: the thunderstorm. Burning with the loss of all hands, she crashed into the sea, when presumably a sudden low pressure system opened her safety valves.
Strangely, despite her wealth of intelligence on Zeppelins and her vaunting ambitions for a post-war airship fleet, Great Britain was only a little more successful than France. By the time of the armistice in 1918, the Royal Navy had constructed several rigid airships, most of which had been disappointing. In 1917 for example, the R 23 class took to the sky, it being a second-rate copy of the P class Zeppelin which the Germans had been flying in 1915. In the middle of 1918, another airship, the R. 31, had been constructed. She had a good top speed and a useful lift capacity like the P class – and had been built of untreated wood, which made the frame dangerously fatigued during her initial flight testing. The wood then warped when stored in a leaky hanger, rendering R. 31 useless. The one real advance made by the British during this time was the docking tower, which allowed a docked airship to rotate with the wind, allowing a dirigible to withstand storms on the ground. This advance was soon adopted by all nations, and is still in use today.
After the armistice, the British airship program retained its vaunting ambition, but faced a new foe European readers today will be familiar with: austerity. Britain ended the war owing a vast debt to America, and Great Britain, birthplace of economic orthodoxy, imposed a draconian series of measures to balance the budget. Brutally deflating the currency and returning to the gold standard, the predictable result was economic damage orders of magnitude greater than anything the Zeppelin raiders ever accomplished. Worse, this austerity shrank the tax base, so there was very little money for new skyship experiments, and even those projects started often had to meet unrealistic timetables. Impatience: just what you want when dealing with giant amounts of hydrogen.
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| The R 34. If you forget her markings, you could mistake her for a later R-type Zeppelin. |
The British did have one notable success with rigid airships: in 1919, just a few weeks after Alcock and Brown became the first people to cross Atlantic in a Vickers Vimy bomber, R 34 became the first aircraft to cross the Atlantic and return. To a large extent a reverse engineered L 33, R 34 was the second of two airships the British built with the displacement and the rough capabilities of the initial R class. Only taking to the sky in 1919, both airships were seen by this time as testbeds for further rigid airship development. R 34 became operational in early March 1919, and by the summer, had accomplished several impressive endurance flights. On her crossing of the Atlantic, hammocks were hung in the gangway for the crew, and hot food was provided by welding a hot plate to one of the exhaust pipes. The flight took 108 hours thanks to stiff headwinds. In fact, the R 34 had been aiming to fly to New York, but these headwinds meant the ship was flying on vapors by the time the east coast was achieved, and the airship landed on Long Island instead. This flight broke the previous endurance record held by LZ 120 (the Baltic flier who patrolled the Baltic Sea for nearly four days).
While the R 33-34 were still under construction, the Royal navy in 1918 once again tried to commission a small fleet of six airships for patrol of the North Sea. The performance was to be close of the later-era height climbers, with a displacement of 2.7 million cubic feet. When the war ended, the construction of all these airships was canceled, save one which had already been started, named R 38. Now with access to the latest Zeppelins, details recovered from the height climber Zeppelins closely influenced the design. The British engineers improved on the design as well; it was found that L 71 and L 64 had poor maneuverability in flight tests, which the British engineers improved in the R 38. What the engineers didn't know was that this low maneuverability was a safety feature on the part of the Zeppelin builders: later height climbers were so lightly built that low altitude maneuvers at full speed could warp the fuselage. Trouble was brewing.
Even R 38 was not going to be completed, except that the United States, denied actual World War 1 airships, wanted to buy it. After initial flight-testing was done, about a ton of extra weight was added to the bows so R 38 could use docking masts, and another ton was relocated to the tail, to counterbalance these improvements. This made the likely inevitable. Nearing the time when she would be transferred to the United States, American sailors had come over for training on the R 38, and the registration number on her hull had been replaced with a ZR 2. On the 23rd of August 1921, while on maneuvers over Hull, the overstressed frame snapped, and drooping by the bow and stern, R 38 caught fire and exploded. Once again, windows broke in Hull because of a rigid airship. The disaster killed more people than the
Hindenberg calamity did; that day the crew had been supplemented by 17 U.S. Navy sailors. 49 men set out that day and only 5 survived.
This catastrophe ended British military interest in rigid airships. Any remaining rigid airships were rolled into the civilian airship program, which despite all difficulties was still pushing forward. The British would eventually launch a new program of gigantic civilian airliners – the R 100 and the R 101 - but these massive airships would not take to the sky until 1930.
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| R 33 testing parasite aircraft in 1928. The Germans had done similar
experiments during the first- what, who's laughing back there? What's so
funny? YES, YES, CLASS, SETTLE DOWN |
Meanwhile, this latest turn of events left the Americans fit to be tied. Not only had they been denied German airships from the source, but now their replacement was lost! The United States Navy decided to do 2 things: one, using the plans made from the captured L 46, it started construction on its first rigid airship. This was to become the USS
Shenandoah, (ZR 1.) Taking to the sky in September 1923, the
Shenandoah (who’s name is a native American name meaning ``Daughter of the Stars`) displaced some 2 million cubic feet, was 680 feet long and 70 feet wide, an American interpretation of a L 70 type Zeppelin. Powered by Packard engines, she had a top speed of 58 knots, and a useful lift of 48 tons. In keeping with her ship-like flight profile, she had a regular crew of 40. The most important innovation was that the USS
Shenandoah took the sky with helium instead of hydrogen. Originally she was to be a hydrogen airship, but the ZR 2 disaster convinced the U.S. Navy to use Helium instead. Since Helium was both rare and expensive, this prompted some basic changes to how American Zeppelins flew. If you remember from way back, Zeppelins vented hydrogen as part of normal operation; the Americans began experimenting how to fly without venting. At any rate, for a first time aeronautical experiment, the USS Shenandoah was remarkably successful, flying in all weathers for two years.*
In the meantime, somebody in the U.S. Navy finally proposed the obvious: if we want an example of a German airship, why not just have the Germans themselves build a Zeppelin for the U.S.A? This move was to save the German airship industry. Already it had been given a stay of execution from France's spite-based economic scheme by Britain. (The British were in a recession of their own making, and they suddenly realized Germany had been a major trading partner of theirs, and destroying Germany's economy would hurt Britain's as well.) The Americans wanting a new airship built at Friedrichshafen, and this gave the capital injection the Zeppelin company needed to consider other projects. It also preserved the skills of it's unique workforce, the most experienced airship builders in the world. The project laid down by the Zeppelin company was given the traditional hull name, in this case, LZ 126. As completed, she was shorter than the
Shenandoh, (650 vs 680 ft) but displaced more (2.5 million cubic feet vs 2 million). Her engines were 5 Maybach V12s that made 400 hp each, giving her 2000 hp total, which gave her a cruising speed of 57 mph, and a top speed of 80 mph! Her control Gondola was now attached to the hull directly, instead of standing off with struts, a design feature of all future rigid airships.
To deliver LZ 126 to America, she had to be flown there, and Dr. Eckener made sure the delivery made international headlines. On October 12th, 1924, with Dr. Eckener himself at the helm, LZ 126 flew directly from Friedichhaven Germany, to the naval air station at Lakehurst, New Jersey. There, LZ 126 was rechristened the USS
Los Angeles, (ZL 3), and Dr. Eckener and his crew were met with jubilation from the American populace. Given a ticker-tape parade through New York city, the good doctor and his crew also got to go to the White House and meet President Coolidge. The
Los Angeles, meanwhile, was to become the most successful of America's rigid airships, the only one to be retired and scrapped rather than destroyed in an accident. The U.S. Navy was to experiment further with rigid airships (building the almost-the-largest-aircraft-ever-to-fly USS
Macon and
Akron in the 1930s) but got the best results with helium blimps, using them to great effectiveness in world war 2 as anti-submarine aircraft.
As for the Germans, the record-breaking flight (in fact, the last successful flight across the Atlantic until Charles Limbergh's famous flight in 1927) returned the Zeppelin to where it had started: as a enormously long-range flier the German people were very proud of. The Zeppelin company with DELAG would go on to build the world's first intercontinental airline, with their first Zeppelin airliner, the appropriately named
Graf Zeppelin. Recruiting crew from the former Naval Airship Division,
Graf Zeppelin would repeat
Los Angles's first flight, fly over the North Pole and eventually, provide the first regular passenger flights across the Atlantic Ocean.
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| Some men repair storm damage to Graf Zeppelin while flying over the Atlantic Ocean. |
The End
*The USS
Shenandoah did, ah, break apart and crash over Ohio, the victim of either her height climber heritage, or *sigh*, an accident with her venting valves. Originally built as a hydrogen airship as mentioned, all her lifting cells had the “safety” valves, even though she floated with helium. Helium, even to the U.S. Navy, was so expensive that the
Shenandoah was deflated and hung up temporarily so her helium could be used to fill the newly arrived
Los Angeles. After a refit, many of these valved were removed as a economy measure. This also meant that if ZL-1 was to rise faster than 400 ft a minute, her lifting cells might rupture or expand into the airship's framework, tearing it apart. So when
Shenandoah met a storm over Ohio, she broke apart, killing 14 of her crew.
Images
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| The ZR-2/R-38. Like the R 34, almost a doppelganger for a German Zeppelin. |
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| The USS Shenandoah. |
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| Peter Strasser and the sky-captains, 1917. If you know World War 2
Naval History, you may have noticed how many of the German commanders
had ships named after them in the second World War. (Tirpitz, Scheer,
Hipper, etc.) Stasser nearly had a similar honor bestowed. The first
German aircraft carrier in World War two was confusingly Graf Zeppelin.
The second was supposed to have been named Peter Strasser. |
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| Another shot of the Shenandoah, showing her thin, tapered fuselage. |
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| The USS Los Angeles. |
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| USS Shenandoah under construction. |
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| Graf Zeppelin over Rio. |
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| USS Los Angeles over New York. |
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| A Navy Blimp patrolling over a convoy during World War 2. |
