Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  Indeed, so many Zeppelins were coming onstream that Eckener couldn’t hope to train sufficient crews for them. Strasser nevertheless refused to take a breather. He clamored for bigger, better Zeppelins, which would integrate the newest advances in structural and streamlining research.

  At Friedrichshafen, Karl Arnstein (the stress expert in charge of structure and load distribution) and Paul Jaray (his aerodynamicist colleague investigating drag and performance) urgently worked to design the next Zeppelin model. By late 1915–16, they had again altered the shape of the airship. They had gone some way toward this goal before the outbreak of war with the DELAG airships, but now they gained Eckener’s (and Dürr’s) approval to go much further. The new design, which greatly enhanced performance, resulted in teardrop-shaped Zeppelins becoming less blunt at the nose, even “fatter” and “rounder” at their midriff than before, and curving gracefully toward a point at the tail.31

  Airships were changing quickly in other ways, too. In December 1914, the first of a new war-class type of Zeppelin (Z-12) was made of a recently invented aluminum alloy containing copper, manganese, and silicon called duralumin that was both stronger and lighter than its predecessor.32

  From this perfect metal, Dürr was able to conjure ever larger, ever more potent airships at an astonishing rate. The pre-duralumin Z-10 of October 1914, for instance, was 518 feet long and carried just 1,200 pounds of bombs at a maximum altitude of 7,900 feet. The post-duralumin L-10, which first flew seven months later, carried 5,400 pounds of bombs at up to 11,600 feet. By the end of the war, three years later, L-70 would be nearly 700 feet long, bear 10,500 pounds of munitions, and be able to rise to 23,000 feet.33

  Now equipped with proper weaponry, the Germans could begin their most important mission: bombing Britain into surrender.

  21. Pirates of the Air

  I​N THE HUMILIATING aftermath of the Zeppelin losses in 1914–15, the British had laughed.1 For so many years, they had been afraid of what the count’s vaunted airship fleet would do, and now, it seemed, it could do embarrassingly little. Whereas the nurse and writer Vera Brittain had worried at the outbreak of war that “trouble & disasters are menacing us the nature of which we cannot even guess at,” another woman now comically likened one of the notorious airships to the “biggest sausage I ever saw in my life.”2

  So relaxed were the British about the prospect of a bombing campaign that the anti-airship defenses of London and other cities barely existed. There were perhaps just 12 guns, whose projectiles could barely reach normal airship altitude, assigned to defend the 700 square miles of metropolitan London. Paris, of some 49 square miles, was crammed with 215.3

  When the first raid came, it was duly unimpressive, and wasn’t even on London. On the night of January 19, 1915, Strasser’s Naval Airship Division struck Great Yarmouth, Kings Lynn, and a few other towns in the eastern county of Norfolk with a ton of bombs, causing four deaths and a minor amount of damage.

  Shocked British newspapers were quick to dub the surprise attack an “act of barbarism” against peaceful civilians—a deliberate violation of the Hague Conventions forbidding bombardments of undefended towns and attacks on civilian life and property.4

  In Germany, though, there was ecstasy. Schoolchildren chanted a song, “Fly, Zeppelin! Fly to England! England shall be destroyed with fire!” and souvenir commemorative medals were struck to mark the wonderful event.5 German papers cheered the brave airshipmen who had taught the arrogant British a lesson in humility. No longer could they remain safe and sound behind the moat of the English Channel while Germans suffered the naval blockade the Royal Navy had imposed.

  As for the accusations of barbarism, Tageblatt, a Berlin newspaper, claimed that since the airships were (allegedly) fired upon by coastal guns they had naturally “answered by the throwing of bombs” onto the “fortified place” of Yarmouth.6

  The German point of view was not altogether persuasive. In America, the impression was that Berlin was scuttling behind pedantically legalistic definitions of what constituted a “fortified place”—Yarmouth may have been a naval supply base, yes, but it was also a popular seaside resort—and the murder of civilians led to an outcry.7 (A few months later, a still louder one would erupt when a U-boat sank the passenger liner Lusitania, claiming that it too was a legitimate military target.)

  The German authorities prevailed upon the aged Count von Zeppelin to explain the facts of the matter to Karl von Wiegand, a Berlin-based American journalist and a friend of Eckener’s. His exclusive two-part interview was published widely in the United States and did much to calm the gathering storm.

  While Zeppelin admitted that, tragically, airships had killed civilians, he claimed that British artillery had also killed German civilians. The indignant yelps now emanating from the British had been prompted by their lack of airships, and they feared, he believed, that the war would be won by the Zeppelin.

  The count’s master class in evasion skipped over the fact that the German casualties caused by British artillery had been an unintentional by-product of military operations, whereas he himself had been calling for airships to be used as terror weapons against the general British population. Wiegand did not press further, instead letting Zeppelin recount his sentimental tale of ascending with Professor Steiner in Saint Paul all those years ago.

  Finally, in a bid for warmer German-American relations, Zeppelin announced that he had “always hoped to be the first to pilot an airship across the Atlantic.” When Wiegand gingerly asked about a British-circulated rumor that he was intending to sail a Zeppelin to New York to bomb it, he exclaimed, “Throw bombs on people who have been so kind to me when I was among them? Never! Never! I want to sail on a peaceful mission when I go to America.”8

  Those who had been bombed by Zeppelin’s creations were less enchanted by the old man’s reminiscences than was Wiegand, who was dubbed a “notorious” propagandist when the interview made its way to Britain.9

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  WARTIME SERVICE ABOARD a Zeppelin was by no means the pleasant summertime jaunt of the old DELAG days, especially once British defenses improved and the airships, despite the count’s assurances, found themselves at an increasing disadvantage.

  Bombing missions took place at night, timed to arrive over the target just before dawn when the defenders were sleepiest and the attackers could return undetected ahead of the rising sun. The less moonlight the better, as it lethally illuminated the shimmering silver mass of an airship. In the control car, now wholly enclosed behind glass, the only light that shone was the dim bulb of the telegraph machine. “The two helmsmen stood like phantoms beside the wheel,” recalled Ernst Lehmann. “In his narrow cubicle the radio operator sat with his headset over his ears, listening to the confusion of signals and voices whispering in the infinity of space.”

  Wartime control cars had been thoroughly redesigned to make room for more bombs. Now, crammed within a space of 6.5 feet by 9 alongside the helmsmen, were the rudder man, who turned them back and forth using a small spoked wheel and a compass, and the elevator man, who manipulated a similar wheel to regulate direction upward and downward.

  Behind them stood the captain with his chart table and special maps, rather like the old DELAG ones, only these “looked like an astronomical chart full of stars. The Thames was the Milky Way; the stars denoted searchlights, [anti-aircraft guns], and everything else which was to be avoided or destroyed.” The captain relayed orders via a small telegraph device and speaking tubes to the mechanics in the rear, the bomb room amidships, and the machine-gunners on top and at the rear of the airship. The executive officer worked near the captain; he operated the bombsight during the raid.

  In the rear corner of the control room an aluminum ladder extended into the body of the ship and thence to the machine-gun deck on top of the ship, a dangerous post, for “it sometimes happened that a man was overcome by
vertigo and slid off,” never to be seen again. Behind the control car there was the euphemistically named “officers’ lounge,” really a space with two large open windows from which protruded a pair of machine guns.

  In the belly of the ship was a bay with high-explosive and phosphorus bombs hanging like “rows of pears.” There a bombing officer would lie on his stomach “staring impatiently through the open trap-door” waiting for the orders to release the bombs from their womb.

  The crew quarters nearby were rudimentary. A few hammocks hung from the girders, and there was a bit of plywood serving as a makeshift table. The amenities were seldom used. No one slept, ate, or drank much, on the principle that “either we returned in twenty hours or we did not return at all.” Some captains ran dry ships (Lieutenant Commander Mathy claimed his was “the strictest Sunday school institution”), but others were more lenient and issued the occasional nip of schnapps.

  In the engine compartments, which resembled metal nutshells, the clanking din of the Maybachs ruled out even shouting, and there was scarcely room to turn around. Gasoline fumes and exhaust gases filled them, and the mechanics were widely regarded by the rest of the crew as a strange breed who suffered an above-average incidence of hearing loss and mental instability.

  In the warmer months, especially in the opening stages of the war, men wore their service uniforms, greatcoats, and rubber-soled boots. Regular hobnailed military footwear was banned, owing to the risk of sparks. Even so, everyone was always cold, a problem that only worsened as summer turned into fall and winter. One February, Captain Lehmann’s thermometer dropped to minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

  In later years, as Zeppelins were forced to remain at ever higher elevations to avoid being shot down, temperatures of minus 27.5 degrees Fahrenheit were the norm, and airshipmen adopted fur-lined coats and thick gloves. Those in the control car had to contend with snow blowing in through chinks in the window frames that formed into small drifts at their feet, but the “lookout men”—those assigned to observation duty on the top platform of the airship—had it the worst. They could be up there alone with the wind howling in their faces for hours at a stretch and masochistically looked forward to when the captain valved hydrogen (which was colder than the air) because, after a few minutes of enduring its icy current, said August Seim, “the air round you felt as warm as a hothouse.”

  Crews quickly learned new lessons about the weather, too, especially when an airship found itself combating the forked flashes and earsplitting roars of a storm. During one thunderstorm, recalled Hans von Schiller, “hailstones rattled on the dripping outer envelope, and the airship shuddered like an animal whipped by a lash. Sometimes it was tossed a hundred yards high and sank again two or three hundred yards before it steadied itself.”

  In these instances, those aboard frequently experienced the disconcerting but beautiful phenomenon of Saint Elmo’s fire. A man stationed on top of the Zeppelin could spread his hand and see “little flames spurt out from [his] fingertips,” one said, while Schiller noticed that wires and cables “glowed with a bluish-violet light.”

  The most important revelation, however, was that lightning was not dangerous so long as the gas remained contained. After one fierce encounter with Mother Nature, Lehmann inspected his Zeppelin and found only a few melted metal joints and some pea-sized holes where bolts had struck.

  But after all the hardships and the toil came that wonderful moment when, in the words of one veteran, “there bobs up in the deep black night below us the weak rays of light of a city or a village,” and the crew experienced “the same feeling as a bird of prey when it spies its victims.” Once he spotted the dimmed lights, Heinrich Mathy, probably the war’s most audacious airship captain but insinuatingly described in the British press as being an “entirely bald, smooth-faced figure, [as] slender and supple as a young woman,” always directed his craft toward the darkest spots, assuming that the enemy would make sure to blacken their most important assets, like the Bank of England and the dockyards.10

  The Zeppelins had arrived.

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  FOR THOSE BELOW, as the British soon realized, a Zeppelin raid was terrifying. In 1915, roused by the sound of an explosion, Lewis Freeman, an American living in London, went to the window of his apartment and within moments the “awakening searchlights” were slashing the darkness “to ribbons.” For several minutes they searched until they focused on two or three “slender slivers of vivid brightness” gliding above the city that “swiftly, undeviatingly, relentlessly” came on. One Royal Engineer manning a searchlight recalled that a Zeppelin locked in a beam looked “just like a goldfish in a bowl.”

  Freeman could hear the “wooden clackity-clack” of the Zeppelin propellers as the crew dropped bombs a hundred yards away. Then the raid leader flashed a light to signal “rapid fire,” and “a number of sputtering fire-trails—not unlike the wakes of meteors” erupted from the Zeppelins. As the bombs fell, “the hiss of cloven air—similar to but not so high-keyed as the shriek of a shell—became audible, and a second or two later, the flash of the explosion and the rolling boom were practically simultaneous.”

  Freeman was rare in staying inside, where it was safer. Outside, there was pandemonium. During a raid on Walthamstow, Perriton Maxwell saw “men, women, children, all ludicrously clothesless, [as they] swarmed aimlessly like bees in an overturned hive. Stark terror gripped them….The night-gowned and pajamaed throng could not be persuaded that safety lay not in sight of the Zeppelin but away from it. The hypnotism of horror lured them on to where twelve houses lay spread about in smoking chaos.” There, “women frankly hysterical or swooning were roughly swept aside. Children shrieking in uncomprehending panic were swept along with the crowd or trodden on. Lumbering men ran and shouted and cursed and shook hairy fists at the long blot in the clouds.”11

  As time went on, however, it became harder for airships to bomb London and other towns with this kind of near impunity. Defenses, once so rudimentary, rapidly improved as British and French commanders frantically raced for solutions to the airship menace.12

  One effective method was to establish concentric rings of defenses connected by telephone and including more high-angle, high-velocity guns supplied with fragmenting or incendiary shells. Searchlights would fix the airship with their beams and allow the guns time to adjust for range, speed, and height and then concentrate their fire.13

  By the summer of 1916, noticed Freeman, there had been a vast sea change in the London defenses from a year earlier. The alerted searchlights now came on before the airships arrived. “There was no wheeling or reeling of the lights in wide circles, as a year ago, but rather a steady, persistent stabbing at the clouds, each one appearing to keep to an allotted area of its own….There was nothing ‘panicky’ in the work of the lights this time, but only the suggestion of methodical, ordered, relentless vigilance.”

  Once a searchlight caught sight of a Zeppelin, the others quickly latched on and created a glare so intense it dazzled and disoriented the airship crews. Then a hundred guns opened up in unison. Within ten seconds a staggering, helpless Zeppelin would be “straddled” (shells exploding above and below before finding their range), and for a minute and a half the air would be “vibrant with the roar of hard-pumped guns and the shriek of speeding shell”—enough to ensure destruction.14

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  FOR ZEPPELINS, OPERATING in enemy airspace was infinitely more dangerous than encountering a storm. Unlike an airplane pilot, who stood a fighting chance of landing safely in a bullet-riddled machine, the survival rate among airship crews who were shot down was essentially zero, especially after the advent of incendiary projectiles in 1916.

  There were no parachutes in Zeppelins, as a full complement reduced bomb load, so the men aboard a stricken airship knew they were dead as soon as they saw the first licks of flame.15 Only four men, as far as
can be ascertained, survived a burning Zeppelin during the war.

  One of them, Otto Mieth, the bombing officer of L-48, left behind an account of the collapsing world inside a doomed airship. In the early morning of June 17, 1917, L-48 was caught by a searchlight and an airplane swooped in, pumping incendiary bullets. The gunner on the upper platform cried, “Fire in the stern!” Mieth leaned out of the control car and saw a reddish flame creeping slowly up the body. “Dancing, lambent flames licked ravenously at her quickly bared skeleton,” remembered Mieth. He turned to Captain Schütze, but it was not necessary to make a report. Standing motionless as he fixed his eyes on the blaze, Schütze calmly said, “It’s all over.”

  The engines were still running, and the mechanics called from the rear to ask whether to turn them off. Schütze replied that it didn’t matter now. The fire rolled forward from the stern as the men fled along the walkway to the control car, and the flames folded over it like a “purple canopy” as black smoke enveloped everyone within. One man, lighting up his last cigarette, joked, “No smoking allowed!” L-48 held an even keel for a few seconds and then turned into a flaming ball ten thousand feet above the ground. The airship broke asunder with a frightful jolt, plummeting like a burning newspaper.