Still, despite the company’s sunny claims of hydrogen’s safety—when used correctly—there was quiet acknowledgment that a different gas, one that was immune to fire, might in future be used to further mitigate risk. Zeppelin conceded as much in a lecture when he mentioned, rather briefly, that “finding…a non-inflammable gas, even if it were not quite so light, is not impossible.” Of course, this necessarily “heavier” replacement—hydrogen was incredibly buoyant owing to its unparalleled lightness as an element—would require much larger airships than those currently existing in order to compensate for the loss of natural lift. But if a satisfactory gas could be discovered, then “the very safest vehicle conceivable would be procured.”18
There were rumors, however, that one called helium might suffice. Unfortunately, scientists had only recently extracted minute samples from the world’s only known deposits of natural gas in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, so for the time being it was hardly a realistic proposition.
* * *
—
MEANWHILE, THE DELAG boomed. Between June 22, 1910, and July 31, 1914, its airships made 1,588 flights, flew for 3,176 hours, covered 107,205 miles, and carried 34,028 passengers.19 Eckener proudly reported that as of April 2, 1914, two airship ports had been opened at Dresden and Liegnitz to complement the existing eight, a second airship-construction facility had been built, and the new airport at Potsdam was attracting hundreds of visitors a day.20
Such rapid expansion did not come cheap, so while the DELAG was generating around 200,000 marks in annual revenue, its costs were in the millions.21 But soon, Eckener forecast, the financial situation would ease.
All the money invested at the outset in infrastructure, he pointed out, was already beginning to pay off: Now that the company had its own hydrogen plant, for example, the cost of inflating a Zeppelin had plummeted by 83 percent.22 Airships, through longevity, were also earning out their construction costs. Whereas the Schwaben had lasted fifty-two weeks, by mid-1914 the other three had all enjoyed two-year operating lives and showed no signs of obsolescence.
Perhaps most important, one key metric was rising fast as airship travel slowly became part of the fabric of everyday life in Germany: the proportion of paying customers to non-paying ones. Initially, Eckener had needed to impress burgomasters, journalists, businessmen, and officers, and so fully two-thirds of the seats on LZ-6A and the Deutschland had been provided for free to garner publicity. By 1913, the DELAG having proved itself, three-quarters of passengers aboard Hansa and Sachsen had paid full price for their flights, and that number was increasing.23
The real issue facing the airline, however, was becoming obvious: Eckener could not earn a profit employing large, expensive airships on short hops. It was like trying to make money using an ocean liner for daylong rides along a canal. As Eckener later admitted, only small, cheap airplanes (“of which no one then thought seriously”) enjoyed sufficiently low running costs and high enough speeds to make quick domestic trips financially worthwhile.24
According to his own careful analyses, Zeppelins were best suited to voyages of 1,800 miles and above, and he accordingly planned to pivot his next-generation airships toward exclusively long-haul routes in the coming years. Soon, scores of Zeppelins would ply the world’s wind-rivers and plant the flag in faraway lands once considered exotic.
But it never happened.
In the summer of 1914, just as the airship season was taking off in earnest, the Great Powers of Europe slithered into the cauldron of a war for which they had ached so long.
20. Z-Ships
ON THE BALMY evening of July 31, 1914, Captain Ernst Lehmann, commanding the Sachsen on an otherwise unremarkable DELAG flight, was passed an odd telegram by his wireless operator. The sender, the War Ministry in Berlin, directed him not to fly Sachsen more than thirty miles from its home base until further notice.1
He knew what it meant. Earlier that day, Russia had ordered its army to mobilize against Germany’s ally Austria-Hungary. A German mobilization in response was inevitable, with the French and probably the British following suit to support the tsar. Overnight, quite literally, the airline Eckener and Colsman had so laboriously conjured into being vanished. According to the terms of their previous agreement with the count, all DELAG airships were to be turned over to the military in the event of war.
Vindicated in his belief that Zeppelins were meant for combat not peace, the elderly count proclaimed to the Prussian State Assembly that because “the most devastating war is ultimately the most merciful,” Germany must launch airship-bombing attacks against her enemies as soon as possible.2 General von Einem recalled that shortly after the outbreak of war, he happened to bump into Zeppelin, who exclaimed, “All England must burn!” as “his eyes sparkled.”3 Zeppelin’s fiery vigor—he called for the Reich’s immediate annexation of Belgium and France—would later become so embarrassing that even the Chancellery had to request that he refrain from making any more public statements regarding the war.4
A week after receiving the fateful telegram, Lehmann piloted the Sachsen to the hangar at Potsdam for conversion into a military vehicle. Viktoria Luise and Hansa were already there, and the three airships had their wicker furniture removed while their central gangways were hastily transformed into bomb-storage areas. A few machine guns were mounted in the gondolas and later onto a platform built atop the dirigibles.5
Lehmann was joined in Potsdam by Max von Gemmingen, Zeppelin’s nephew and a member of the board. At fifty-two, he was too old for conventional military service, but he insisted on serving aboard the Sachsen.6 Zeppelin was also trying to acquire a commission as an airship admiral, but that would prove fruitless, so instead he traveled to visit his old regiment. The coming war was just too good to miss, he told the young officers.7
Eckener did his patriotic bit by volunteering for the Naval Airship Division, commanded by his former student Peter Strasser, who had trained aboard the prewar Sachsen. Eckener remained a civilian (he wore the blue DELAG uniform with the cap of the Imperial Yacht Club) and was engaged as an instructor for the naval crews then urgently being recruited.8
Training began almost immediately. Lehmann, for instance, went aloft at 4 o’clock each morning and had his airshipmen drop dummy bombs. When they ran out, so short was their supply, they then had to land and pick them up. For the time being, they used old artillery shells, which spun wildly as they fell, but soon discovered that to help make them hit nose-first they could tie strips of cut-up blankets to their bases.9
If suitable ammunition was scarce, a greater scarcity was airship crews. Each early airship needed a captain, three officers, and around fifteen men.10 In the DELAG era, a year of intensive schooling was required to weld a green crew into a cohesive unit, while the captain and his first officer, navigation officer, and flight engineer needed at least two before they could even be considered for an active post. It fell to Eckener to accelerate the training program to just a few months, and the cigar-chomping ex-DELAG chief became notorious for his gruff, curt directives to recruits as they struggled with the unfamiliar mechanisms and the idiosyncrasies of airship flying.
Eckener transferred seasoned former DELAG men from regular military service to leaven the new crews, but for the war’s first couple of years any number of otherwise avoidable accidents and losses were attributable to inexperienced and undertrained personnel.11 He was particularly exercised by the presence, which he later managed to remove, of General Staff officers assigned by headquarters to oversee operations on board the army airships; they knew nothing of airship capabilities and demanded cavalry-style turning maneuvers that, had they been attempted, would have torn the ships apart.12
If there was an element of improvisation to German preparations, it reflected a wider confusion among European and American military experts as to the role and importance of aviation in the war to come. Both airships and airplanes as working vehicl
es were little more than a decade old, and no one could predict their future—if, indeed, they even had much of one.
Despite the excited pronouncements of prewar novelists like H. G. Wells and Rudolph Martin that thousands-strong armadas of airships and airplanes would devastate whole civilizations, the great majority of war planners conceived a limited role for these new aerial weapons.13 They would be used to scout ahead of the main army, it was assumed, and a few radicals daringly suggested that maybe they could drop bombs on enemy troops or on important chokepoints, like railway junctions and bridges.14
But the real question facing Germany’s enemies was, what would the Germans do? A lack of hard information about capabilities and intentions, tinctured with fear and anxiety, colored predictions of what the kaiser’s airshipmen had in mind—and in store.
On the eve of war, the British and the French knew, or at least thought they knew, three things.
First, that the count himself commanded the airship fleet, estimated to be upward of forty giant Zeppelins.15 It was certain that Germany planned to increase this number precipitously. Economic intelligence reports noted with alarm that the price of aluminum in January 1914 was about $400 per ton, and by June it had almost doubled to $700 thanks to German demand. What other reason could there be but to construct a still vaster Zeppelin armada?16
And second, that the Germans possessed military-grade airships of startling might. Their latest naval Zeppelin, for instance, could travel at 94 mph and cruise, undetected and unstoppable, to deliver its payload. Germany had long been secretly practicing bombing and machine-gun target practice and reportedly had already sent scout ships equipped with muffled engines to England at night to confirm targets. In adducing the airships’ astonishing bomb-aiming ability, Scientific American cited Eckener’s “startling revelations” that airship crews could place a bomb right in the center of a fifteen-foot-diameter circle from no less than five thousand feet up.17
And last, that against Zeppelins there was no defense. At 94 mph, airships not only were faster than airplanes but also effortlessly outmatched them in climbing to altitudes beyond any airplane’s ability. Even if an airplane succeeded in closing in on a Zeppelin, an airship could be “riddled…with a thousand bullets [and] still keep afloat.” In any case, its defensive machine guns, thanks to the absence of “vibration,” were astonishingly accurate and could destroy an enemy aircraft at more than two thousand yards, all the while “plunging through the air at express-train speeds” and dropping two hundred bombs at a time on columns of soldiers heading for the front lines. As one commentator wondered, “Who can describe the frightful panic that would ensue?”18
The truth, however, was that Zeppelin had long since been ousted from any position of real influence, and at the beginning of the war the German army and navy together possessed a grand total of nine airships, including the three DELAG dirigibles that had been dragooned into military service.19 The army’s vehicles, moreover, were all based on the civilian models and would soon prove their utter uselessness in combat.
As for the feared L-3, the latest (and currently only) naval airship, it had a top speed of 52 mph—much slower than any airplane. Neither had there been any top-secret missions over England, and the science of “aiming” consisted of tossing handheld, sometimes handmade, bombs over the side and hoping they hit somewhere in the general vicinity of an area, let alone the bull’s-eye of a small circle. Eckener, last but not least, had never made any sort of “startling revelations” to the contrary.
So it was that Lehmann recalled that the High Command, far from having diligently considered airships’ combat role, actually “had no idea what to do” with the few they had. The army’s Z-8, for instance, was based in Metz, just a few miles from the French border, but was kept in storage even after the outbreak of hostilities; when the captain petitioned his superiors for permission to inflate it in case enemy cavalry advanced, he was turned down.20
When the orders eventually did come to launch airship operations against French and British forces, it was quickly discovered that Zeppelins “could fly neither high, nor fast, nor far enough, nor carry sufficient bombs, to accomplish the feats the General Staff demanded of them.” Captains received absurd directives, such as the time headquarters ambitiously ordered Z-9 to “carry out bombing attacks on Antwerp, Zeebrugge, Dunkirk, and Calais. Return via Lille, also to be bombed.” No one in Berlin seems to have realized that Z-9’s full complement of bombs amounted to just ten small artillery shells, making for an unimpressive two bombs for each location.21
Worse, Zeppelin losses were unsustainable. No fewer than three—a third of the fleet—were lost in the opening weeks of hostilities on the Western Front when troops armed with nothing but rifles turned out to be more dangerous than anyone had anticipated. Badly holed by small-arms fire after a fruitless attack on Belgian forts in Liège, Captain Kleinschmidt’s Z-6 limped back to Germany and crashed in a forest outside Bonn. Then, on August 21, both Z-7 and Z-8 were forced down. The former managed to land behind German lines, but the ship was a write-off; the latter also came down hard, but in no-man’s-land near Bandonvilliers. As the crew tried to set fire to it—they were under orders not to allow the enemy to capture an airship and its precious technology intact—there was too little gas left for Z-8 to burn and a party of zealous French chasseurs chased them away. The crew escaped to a friendly advance post only because the high-spirited cavalrymen were having such a good time hacking away at the airship envelope with their sabers.22
Even when airships weren’t lost owing to their low altitude and speed, the minor damage they inflicted hardly justified their cost. In late August 1914, for instance, Lehmann’s Sachsen and Z-9 launched a series of raids on Antwerp. Shortly before dawn, recalled Lehmann, as they approached the city the alerted defenders beamed up the “white fingers of searchlights” and their improvised “anti-aircraft guns” (really, just field pieces pointed as high as they would go) fired blindly, sending explosions several hundred yards behind them but getting closer. The men stood ready, holding their bombs, as Gemmingen spotted the targets (the central railway station, a major wireless station, and the defensive forts).
Some two thousand pounds’ worth of bombs tore holes in ten houses, pocked a field, wrecked a diamond-cutting store, destroyed the home of a luckless factory owner named Van Geel, and blew up an inn. All the ordnance fell more than half a mile from the targets—testament to how unexpectedly difficult it was to drop bombs with any accuracy from a moving aerial vehicle. The raids in total seem (estimates vary) to have left twelve civilians dead and ten injured. One journal commented that “in a densely populated city this can hardly be called slaughter,” and even Lehmann, who had an interest in promoting the efficacy of airships, conceded that little damage had been done.23
After these disastrous episodes, German High Command called a temporary halt to all airship missions in France and the Low Countries. Losses so far had been confined to prewar airships, and it was abundantly clear that they were not up to the task required of them. Commanders would have to wait for the next generation of airships, due for delivery in the coming months. One captain recalled that for a time it seemed as if “the High Command forgot all about us….We waited for weeks and no orders came.”24
If the army’s airships had been a disappointment, the Naval Airship Division promised great things. Peter Strasser, its dapper commander, was a silent tornado of a man who rarely lost an argument—primarily because he refused to listen to what opponents said. After dinner he would finish off a large glass of wine and a potent black cigar before sitting alone in his room to cut himself off from the rest of the officers and draw up his plans. “A strangely close-mouthed oddball” driven “by the demon of his will and his ambition,” Eckener once called Strasser, whom he considered an iconoclast more ruthlessly obsessed with airships, and winning, than even Zeppelin.
That said, the two always m
aintained good relations, and Eckener thought highly of his skills. Strasser, he told his wife, was “a great fellow and stands tower-high above the average and above his personal detractors.” Even if the cohort of airship captains did not like him much, they still respected Strasser’s authority, nicknaming him “God Himself” (Eckener remained the “Pope” or “Pontiff”).25
Eckener and Strasser agreed that the army had been using its airships incorrectly by risking them over the Western Front, where they were easily shot down. Deploying them at sea was a different matter: “The crews can see everything coming from a distance,” wrote Eckener, and they weren’t faced with massed artillery or infantry.26
Nevertheless, they had to contend with an ingrained navy bias against airships—an understandable one given the still-raw L-1 and L-2 disasters. It was only thanks to Strasser’s prodding that Admiral Tirpitz had even (reluctantly) approved the construction of L-3 in early 1914; now they had to prove the importance of the Naval Airship Division by sending their new airships, like L-4 and L-5, on attention-grabbing missions to spot minefields in the open sea.27
When a spate of losses temporarily soured naval opinion on the airships—L-3 and L-4 were blown out to sea in February 1915, never to be seen again, and L-8 was lost with all hands the following month—Eckener and Strasser made sure to organize publicity-friendly missions to restore confidence.28 Gradually, they pulled the navy around to believing “that it can, at least occasionally, obtain great service from the Z-ships,” as Eckener informed Colsman in Friedrichshafen.29
Eckener and Strasser’s campaign was almost too successful. As a result of all the skill, all the expertise, developed at prewar Friedrichshafen being leveraged to matchless effect under wartime conditions, when funds, manpower, and resources were virtually unlimited, the pace of airship construction was beginning to exceed demand. Whereas it had once taken the count years to build a single airship, by mid-1915 production time had been slashed to a mere two to three weeks, with several airships being outfitted at the same time in multiple factories (the Friedrichshafen facilities alone would employ twelve thousand people). The era of the painstaking craftsman was over, replaced by industrialized efficiency. Airships were now assembled using mass-produced girders rapidly bolted together by teams following set instructions.30
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