Despite its preposterous and convoluted plot, of which the less said the better, Berlin-Baghdad contained dual visions of the airship’s future.* The first, which attracted Zeppelin’s eye, was the extraordinary military potential of these machines. Martin predicted that Germany’s future airships (all four hundred of them) would travel at 250 mph and be capable of ascending to 29,500 feet, rendering them ideal for bombing distant enemy cities, slaughtering millions of people, and bringing Germany imperial mastery over Europe and the Middle East. Martin expounded further on the subject two years later, in the midst of the debate in the Zeppelin boardroom, in a follow-up bestseller, World War in the Air.
This time, as the German airship fleet arrives over Paris, “the most important task…was the destruction of the War Ministry at Boulevard St. Germain 231. Admiral Graf Zeppelin steered his ship to the ministry [while] the rest of the 150 airships were deployed over army barracks, the Bank of France, the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Finance, and the presidential palace, the Palais d’Élysée….A minute later, the immense block housing the War Ministry, from the Boulevard St. Germain to the Rue St. Dominique, lay in ruins.” Before departing homeward, the flying Wunderwaffen—wonder weapons—leave “the whole of the inner city of Paris…in flames.”2
In these fantasies, the count—who appreciated being praised as “Admiral Graf Zeppelin”—found fulfillment and validation. To him, Martin was a genius who shrewdly perceived the military applications of the airship and its place in Germany’s world-leading role to come. It was as if a kindred soul had finally understood him.
In the boardroom, Zeppelin turned ever more belligerent. When he was younger, more liberal, and more desperate to attract supporters anywhere he could find them, Zeppelin had cited the airship as a potential troop transport, a tool of imperial expansion, a mail service, and an instrument to bring peace unto warring nations. But his successes after the Swiss Flight and Echterdingen had brewed into a dangerously heady narcotic.
Rehabilitation in the eyes of his emperor, the satisfying defeat of Major Gross and other critics, a weakness for believing his own adulatory press, an aging man’s reactionary crustiness, a growing dislike of Colsman’s capitalist vulgarity, and the military’s purchase of LZ-3 and LZ-5—all these contributed to his curdling into a militarist rabidly eager to wade through blood to raise Germany to paramountcy among the Great Powers. In his mind, airships were now suited exclusively for martial purposes and would, he boasted, “assure [Germany] world military domination.”3
He dismissed those who thought differently as fools and naifs. When he received a letter from one Ernest Dalle of Bremen pleading that he not turn his wonderful airships into weapons of war, Zeppelin—who habitually replied to all who wrote to him—angrily scribbled in the margin, “No answer for this special saint.”4 Another of his correspondents, who had just returned from a visit to Britain, excitedly speculated upon “what incredible destruction of property and war materiel twenty Zeppelins could wreak in one day on London with its billions of marks worth of structures, goods, banks, etc.” To him, Zeppelin replied that “I fully share your patrioti[sm], and all the more am I determined to develop my airships as splendid instruments of war.”5
If war came, the count announced—clearly taking to heart Martin’s description of him as “Admiral”—it would be the culmination of his life’s work if the kaiser permitted him “to lead the best one of my available airships into battle” since “all Germany expects me to make the first flight over London.”6
In Britain too, Martin’s works were taken seriously, especially after he was quoted claiming that if war came a Zeppelin fleet would “transport 350,000 men in half an hour during the night [and] we would conclude no peace until a German army had occupied London.”7 In March 1909, firm evidence emerged that the Germans were running practice night raids when a police constable named Kettle from Peterborough claimed to have sighted a Zeppelin over Britain. He heard an engine overhead and saw, he said, “a dark body, oblong and narrow in shape, outlined against the stars,” shining a light. After the story ignited a bout of Zeppelin paranoia across the country, it turned out that someone had in fact been flying a large kite with a Chinese lantern, and as for the sound of the engine, said a local, “that was the motor which goes all night in the Co-operative Bakery in Cobden Street.”8
For their part, Colsman and Eckener rolled their eyes at the elderly Zeppelin’s increasingly ludicrous pretensions. They drew a different lesson from Martin’s aeromania: a peaceful and commercial one. In Berlin-Baghdad, Martin had also depicted a New Berlin of 1930, a wealthy capital made prosperous for all by its air-based economy.
There, every high school student learns how to fly; aerial parks have gardens, skating rinks, and tennis courts suspended high above the ground; factory workers can fly to Switzerland for weekend breaks; hospitals float fifteen thousand feet above cities to mitigate the risk of infection; and there are aerial Autobahnen for the commuters who take off from flat roofs doubling as runways. Many homes have mini-hangars to dock the family airship.
Relations with Amerika have never been closer. Zeppelin’s airships, twelve-engine luxury behemoths carrying more than a thousand passengers, fly the transatlantic route regularly to New York while smaller ones allow tourists to visit the North and South Poles. Within Germany, smaller airships have replaced trains for traveling between cities, and the entire country is connected by a network of airship-ports for rapid and efficient transfers. Colsman and Eckener could not have wished for a better advertisement for the launch of their airline than Martin’s anticipations of the glorious Airship Age that lay ahead.
To that end, Colsman proposed, with Eckener’s support, building passenger airships that would travel regularly scheduled routes between, at first, German cities, and then to Paris, London, Rome, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Vienna, and Saint Petersburg.9 Ultimately, the route to the holiest of long-haul destinations—New York—would be opened. Ticket income—the flights wouldn’t be cheap—would help offset the spiraling expense of building airships, excited investors would flock to buy DELAG shares, and the Zeppelin Company would establish a new line of business with no competitors, a potentially huge market, and a dizzyingly high cost of entry.
Over my dead body, retorted the count. Airships were only to be sold to the military, he insisted. Zeppelin’s argument might have had more force had the military been more interested. Granted, during the Zeppelinitis craze after Echterdingen, General von Moltke had suggested purchasing no fewer than fifteen airships, but he soon slashed the order to just three.10 For him, Zeppelins remained too expensive, too short-ranged, and too unreliable to be worth diverting money from the budget when generals and admirals were clamoring for more guns and ships.
Zeppelin was told that the huge military contract he hankered after was not in the cards—at least until his airships had proven themselves.11 With ill-concealed lack of grace, in November 1909 Zeppelin was forced to go cap in hand back to Colsman and agree to back the creation of the DELAG as a commercial airline. But this was merely a tactical retreat in preparation for his strategic offensive to come. If Zeppelins could be put through their paces in the civil market, the count calculated, eventually the military would have to take notice and issue the purchase orders. With Eckener serving as broker, Zeppelin did manage to wring one key concession out of Colsman in exchange for his blessing: Any commercial airship built by the company had to be readily convertible to military use if war broke out.
It was a deal Eckener would come to rue, but for the moment he had big plans for what was to be “his” airline.
* For the masochistically inclined, herewith a summary. The action opens in 1910, when the kaiser declares that Zeppelin’s airship is on a par with the world-shaking importance of the invention of gunpowder. The Reichstag subsequently appropriates a billion marks to build a fleet of them—for defensive purposes, of course. Three years lat
er, after Japan defeats a tottering Russia, a tyrant named Suwarow seizes power in Moscow and uses a secret flotilla of three airships to bomb his way across Central Asia. In 1916, Suwarow, who, like some megalomaniacal Bond villain, lives aboard a two-mile-long battle-airship, turns his greedy eyes toward Europe, where only Germany, the mightiest air power and defender of civilization, stands between him and world domination. The Germans defeat Suwarow by massacring thousands of his soldier-slaves with airship-borne artillery. The tyrant holes up in a Himalayan fastness to lick his wounds, but not before the Russians have devastated Berlin in a vengeful bombing raid. More than 100,000 casualties are the result. The lesson is that the Germans’ pacific ways have led to this cataclysm. What Germany must do is expand its borders to provide security for the future. Through conquest and confederation, Germany creates a new empire absorbing Poland, Austria-Hungary, Ukraine, Turkey, the Caucasus, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and Morocco. Eventually the empire expands into the Middle East—Mesopotamia, in particular, where German colonizers resurrect Baghdad to its ancient glories. Poles are used as overseers for the hordes of Persians and Turks working in the cotton plantations of the new Fertile Crescent. By 1930, the last holdout from joining this pan-German Utopia is Britain, which haughtily refuses to acknowledge Berlin’s legitimacy, let alone its supremacy. Tensions rise when the German chancellor reminds the British ambassador to Berlin that if he so wished he could transport an army of two million to Britain within three hours by means of his unstoppable Zeppelin fleet. As Parliament stalls for time, Suwarow attacks British India and London is humiliatingly forced to beg Germany for assistance in destroying the Russian menace. The kaiser magnanimously assents but stipulates that the price will be eternal friendship between the Anglo-Saxon peoples—and the transfer of all British possessions in Africa to Germany as a kind of voluntary contribution to the war effort. Parliament accepts these generous conditions, and together the two great empires march forward to inevitable victory over the repellent race-traitor Suwarow and his Asiatic/Slavic minions.
18. The Lucky Ship
EVER SINCE ECKENER had first joined Zeppelin, he had stayed in the background and allowed his superior to bask in the glory justly due to, and demanded by, the World’s Greatest Aeronaut. But now he was eager to step into the limelight, or perhaps the lions’ den, when Colsman appointed him general manager of the DELAG with a director’s seat on the board. It was quite a promotion for the former publicity man, but Eckener had proven his loyalty.
Creating an airline from scratch was no simple matter—especially since no one had done it before. The first priority was financing a network of hangars around the country.1 The DELAG could not itself afford to fund such a large-scale project, so Colsman and Eckener undertook a national tour to charm a succession of burgomasters into paying for their own municipal hangars. It wasn’t a hard sell. At the news that the company was considering establishing a prestigious passenger service in their fair city, local papers printed special editions cheering the prospect. Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Baden-Baden, Stuttgart, and Cologne quickly agreed to the proposal. In turn, the mayors encouraged the local bigwigs and trade associations to invest in the DELAG. In short order, 2.6 million marks flowed into DELAG coffers.2
Flush with cash, Eckener demolished the old floating Reichshalle at Manzell and moved the airship-building operation to Friedrichshafen, where a new hangar was furnished with the most modern equipment.3 The resort town, however, was too remote to serve as the business headquarters of a major enterprise. Frankfurt, the country’s financial center and blessed with excellent facilities left over from an aeronautical exposition earlier that year, would be home to the DELAG’s head office and main hub.4
The nascent company received a huge boost when Albert Ballin, the father of the modern cruise ship, approached Colsman and Eckener with a proposition. Head of the giant Hamburg-America Line (HAPAG), Ballin offered 100,000 marks a year in advertising for the airline in exchange for HAPAG becoming the exclusive seller of airship tickets.5 The shipping magnate had offices in every city in the country and, better still, had made inroads into the American market. Tourists there would be able to buy their tickets in New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, sail to Germany on his planned SS Imperator, and thence board a DELAG Zeppelin to whichever destination they wished.
For Ballin, it was a neat way of outplaying such rivals as the White Star Line (owners of the much-anticipated Titanic and Olympic) and Cunard (the new Lusitania and Mauretania) in the race to dominate the profitable transatlantic route. For Colsman and Eckener, the partnership, by allowing them to sell domestic flights to a global audience, was an immensely valuable one. At this early stage, their plan was to offer scenic Rhine River journeys and short return flights from Frankfurt to and from other regional cities before establishing longer routes to Munich, Hamburg, Dresden, Leipzig, and Berlin, and afterward to major European capitals. Then, several years down the line, the jewel in the crown: New York.
It was a grand and ambitious vision, but reality soon intruded.
* * *
—
IN THE BEGINNING, the DELAG had only one airship in its fleet: LZ-6A, originally built in the hopes of a military sale but modified (hence the “A” designation) to include a handful of seats. It was intended only as a stopgap until the first airship built specifically for the DELAG was delivered on June 22, 1910. LZ-7—christened Deutschland for marketing purposes and in homage to one of the count’s earliest prototypes—took off from Friedrichshafen for its new home base of Düsseldorf, three-hundred-odd miles away.
Arriving in Düsseldorf to grand fanfare, Eckener experienced mobs of people, desperate to secure reservations for upcoming trips, quite literally thrusting money in his face.6 The airship was placed under the command of Captain Kahlenberg, the DELAG’s director of flight operations.
On June 28, Deutschland embarked on a three-hour flight carrying twenty journalists as a publicity outing before beginning ticketed, scheduled service. Those reporters fortunate enough to be selected were astounded at the luxury on offer. Nothing like it had ever been seen before. At a time when a (single) passenger on an airplane had to don goggles and overalls to prevent motor oil from the engine from spattering all over him or occasionally her, the Deutschland provided a lounge equipped with wicker chairs set next to large, sliding windows that allowed optimal viewing of the countryside passing by below. The walls and ceiling were veneered in dark mahogany, with the pillars and roof beams of the same material but richly inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Every sharp corner was swaddled in soft leather, and the floor was thickly carpeted to absorb the engine noise. A tiny galley provided sandwiches and drinks. All the cutlery, plates, and cups were made of aluminum to reduce weight. Even the lavatory—itself a revelation—had aluminum fittings.7
Ward Price, a Daily Mail correspondent, expressed surprise that the Deutschland ascended “so steadily and gently that if I had not been leaning out of the window of the car I could not have believed that we had left the earth,” and told his unbelieving readers that “we lay back in our wicker chairs. A plate of caviar sandwiches stood on the window-ledge beside each of us. The surface of the wine in our glasses was unrippled.” There was not, he assured them, “the least sensation of giddiness, sickness, or insecurity.”
Price gazed down upon the unrolling surface of the earth and “the quaint little toy world a thousand feet below. It was as if we saw it from another planet. How neat and tidy it looked. The roads were so straight; the gardens so charming, with their geometrical displays of color.” From above, people looked like “curious mannikins” as they ran with “curious, awkward, jerky movements” to try to keep up with the airship.8
Unfortunately, Kahlenberg, through lack of experience, had omitted to check the weather reports and now a fierce storm was unexpectedly approaching. When it hit, the three-hour pleasure jaunt turned into a nine-hour nightmare ride as Deutschland fought the unrelen
ting, turbulent wind. At one point, the airship was actually traveling backward.
Compounding the problem were the airship’s overfilled gas cells, which floated Deutschland dangerously high and obliged Kahlenberg to valve hydrogen prodigiously to bring the ship lower. After descending, precious fuel was burned to keep the airship steady as the storm’s upward gusts violently tried its strained engines.9 Worried passengers repeatedly asked what was going to happen, only to be told by the exhausted, exasperated officers that “we do not know what is going to happen.”10
They found out when the fuel tanks were empty and there wasn’t enough gas to keep the airship up.
Deutschland plunged slowly through a thousand feet of air. “We were lost,” said the man from the Berliner Tageblatt. “We heard a frightful crash; the balloon trembled through its whole length.”11
By sheer good luck, the passengers were saved by Deutschland’s falling into, or rather onto, the tall pines of the Teutoburg Forest directly below. “At the absolute instant of the crash into the tree-tops we became for the moment extremely scared human beings,” wrote Price, “and hung on grimly to the uprights of the cabin, bracing ourselves against the end that seemed so near.” But, amazingly, no one was hurt, despite the enormous tree trunk that pierced the windows of the lounge. The crew ushered the passengers outside onto the bough and they were able to clamber down the thirty feet to the ground.
Price’s faith in the airship was undaunted. It was obvious to him that “the practical era of flight had in fact begun. We were, it seemed to us, in at the making of world history. The generations of the future would look back to this June day…to find the beginnings of regular practical commercial air-travel, where passengers paid their money and had their flight just as they have a ride in an omnibus.”12
Empires of the Sky Page 17
