Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  Over the course of the war, the Naval Airship Division alone built 68 airships that flew 325 raid missions, 1,205 scouting flights, and 2,984 other flights, for a total of 1,491,600 miles.9 This trove of experience otherwise unobtainable during the limited runs of peacetime was analyzed carefully at the company. For instance, instead of trying to fly above thunderstorms as per previous guidelines, read one instruction, commanders should ride through them and reel in their radio antennae (to avoid electrical charges).10

  Thanks to Eckener’s training before and during the war, Zeppelins were manned by a large number of veterans—some seventy crews of twenty apiece.11 Granted, several hundred had died in the fighting, but afterward many, especially officers, would form the core of a resurrected airship empire.12

  Of these, the greatest was Ernst Lehmann. A native of Ludwigshafen, Lehmann, blessed with “unfailing courtesy and [a] charming personality,” was the son of a chemist and had studied at the Technical University at Charlottenburg before joining the DELAG. He flew dozens of missions during the war and was a favorite of the count’s.

  Lehmann and Eckener, though, had a prickly relationship, Lehmann’s ego equaling Eckener’s own when it came to confidence in, or perhaps arrogance about, his own airship expertise. Their personal brushes later turned into bitter divisions over the direction and future of the Zeppelin Company, though in Machiavellian fashion they occasionally joined forces against a mutual enemy. Eckener, husky, gruff, and bluff, with prominent jowls and eyebags, presented a stark contrast to the wiry, sharp-featured smaller man (Eckener stood a full head taller) whose deviousness and conceit he often found intolerable, even as Lehmann loathed Eckener’s grandstanding and envied his prominence. During the war, they avoided each other as much as possible, Lehmann opting to fly army airships simply so as not to fall under Eckener’s oversight at the Naval Airship Division. In their respective memoirs each referred to the other as infrequently as they could respectably manage, and when they did, it was invariably in the stiffest manner.

  Lehmann was known as the count’s most hawkish acolyte, and Eckener’s alienation from Zeppelin’s bloodthirstiness inevitably put them at odds. Eckener, once a liberal, was, like Colsman, a business-minded centrist of moderate views, while Lehmann moved in ever more extreme right-wing nationalist circles. To Lehmann, Eckener by 1917–18 was a treacherous snake willing to sell out sacred Germany in search of a humiliating peace; to Eckener, Lehmann was a militarist lunatic digging Germany’s own grave with his fanatical desire to fight until there was nothing left to save.13

  But the root cause of their enmity lay, ironically, in their total agreement on the Zeppelin’s potential as a long-haul vehicle. For Eckener, the road ahead was lit clear as day even in the darkness cast by war: He would turn the dream of passenger and commercial travel across the Atlantic, and perhaps even around the world, into reality.

  Lehmann, however, was keener on creating the mortal threat of a global bomber that could, if push came to shove, punish New York. To that end, he creatively claimed that in 1915 Zeppelins had carried out thirty reconnaissance missions along the U.S. coastline (simply an impossible feat) and would later brag that he would have carried out the first transatlantic bombing mission himself had the war continued into 1919, which he dearly wished it had.14

  Self-interest brought them together during the war to strike a deal: Eckener and Lehmann would send an airship to Africa to determine whether such distant voyages were even possible.

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  THE ADVENTURE BEGAN in 1916 when Dr. Max Zupitza, the chief staff surgeon to the German colonial troops fighting in Africa, was captured in Togo. After his release, he suggested to the Colonial Ministry in May 1917 that they send a Zeppelin to support General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, known as the “Lion of Africa.” The general was then commanding an astounding guerrilla campaign in which fourteen thousand German and African soldiers were fighting up to three hundred thousand British, Portuguese, and Belgian troops, and he desperately needed emergency supplies and medical aid. The Colonial Ministry thought the idea crazy but passed it on to Eckener, who didn’t.

  In September, Lehmann returned to Friedrichshafen to work with Eckener to outfit a new airship, L-57, for the mission. Back in July, Lehmann had achieved the world record for flight duration by staying airborne in LZ-120 for 101 hours, so he assumed he would captain the Africa expedition.15 Eckener had other ideas, not least of which was preventing his rival from hogging the glory, and managed to block the appointment by arguing that Germany needed to keep its best men on the job—at home.

  Korvettenkapitän Ludwig Bockholt, a compromise candidate Eckener suggested, was instead offered the command. Bockholt had a decent if not spectacular record, and, similarly, the crew chosen was experienced but not considered the elite of the Naval Airship Division. Eckener had decided that the Africa voyage was to be a one-way trip: The men aboard L-57 would stay and fight alongside Lettow-Vorbeck, which meant they had to be, in the nicest possible sense, disposable. None of them was aware of this, unfortunately, as to maintain secrecy they were told they were being dispatched for service in the Balkans, a cushier posting than the frigid North Sea or the deadly skies above London.

  Bockholt did not start well. On October 7, during a trial run, L-57 was wrecked shortly after taking off when a sudden high wind dashed it into a metal fence. No one was hurt, but the airship was unsalvageable.

  Eckener arranged for its replacement, L-59, to be significantly modified. Dürr stretched the airship to measure almost 750 feet, but the biggest changes concerned its adaptation for one-time use. Once L-59 landed in Africa, it would be cannibalized, its every part repurposed for military use. The soft gas-cell covering was intended to be cut up and turned into bandages and sleeping bags, the outer fabric into waterproof tents and clothing, and some of its duralumin skeleton into radio masts, with the rest of the longitudinals and girders repurposed as building materials. The internal catwalks were covered in leather, which would be ripped up and used to make belts and shoes.

  Once the outfitting was done, L-59 was loaded to maximum capacity. It carried no fewer than 311,100 rounds of rifle ammunition, 230 machine-gun belts containing 57,500 cartridges, 54 machine-gun ammunition boxes with an additional 13,500 cartridges, 30 machine guns, 22 rifles for the crew (including the hardy Dr. Zupitza), 9 spare machine-gun barrels, 61 sacks of medical supplies (including enough antimalarial quinine to last a year), rifle bolts, binoculars, bush knives, spare radio parts, mail from home, sewing kits for new uniforms, and a case of wine for the crew to celebrate their arrival.

  On November 3, 1917, L-59 set off for its European departure point at Yambol in Bulgaria, a German ally. It was only then that the crew were informed of their real mission. Eckener, in the meantime, traveled there by train. When dawn arrived on November 21, everyone gathered in the hangar as L-59 waited, bathed in the pale glow of the arc lights. All shook hands, and the crew embarked on their grand adventure.

  By 9:45 A.M. L-59 overflew Adrianople in Turkey and that evening left the Turkish coast and headed for Crete (8:30 P.M.), where it adhered to protocol by winding in its trailing radio antennae before combating a storm. At 5:15 A.M., L-59 crossed into Africa over Libya.

  L-59 flew in complete radio silence. As it happened, the Colonial Ministry had recently received intelligence indicating that the British had advanced upon Lettow-Vorbeck’s position and that he would surely be forced to surrender. The ministry informed Admiral von Holtzendorff, who decided to call off the mission. Eckener and the station staff at Yambol urgently tried to contact L-59, but between their weak radio transmitter and the airship’s reeled-in antennae, it was too late. Eckener informed naval headquarters that “L-59 can no longer be reached from here, request recall through Nauen,” home of the most powerful transmitter in Germany. Nauen broadcast all night long, with nary a reply from Bockholt.

  L-59 continu
ed on through the desert. On the afternoon of November 22 it became the first airship to cross the Tropic of Cancer. Trained in northern Europe, the crew experienced strange and unexpected weather phenomena in the unfamiliar environment. During the day, the sun beating down on the airship super-heated the gas, which had to be valved off gently to maintain a stable cruising altitude. Powerful thermal currents rose from the shimmering sands and threw the ship this way and that. Crewmen experienced nauseating airsickness as L-59 bobbed up and down like a roller coaster. Lacking sunglasses, many of them had to endure violent headaches, hallucinations, and half-blinded eyes.

  Still, L-59 dutifully continued, eventually reaching the Dakhla Oasis, where the appearance of this wondrous sky god astounded the local bedouin. (In December 1933, when a pilot had to make a forced landing at Dakhla, he found outlines of a Zeppelin scratched on the wooden huts. The bedouin chief told him that they paid homage to “a mighty sign which, as many years ago as there are fingers on both hands and toes on one foot, appeared in the heavens above the desert.”)

  Bockholt headed for the Nile, intending to follow its course to Sudan. At 4:20 P.M., an engine gave out, but the other four Maybachs continued working perfectly. The night, however, brought another unpleasant surprise: As the temperature plummeted it super-cooled the hydrogen, forcing Bockholt to dump ballast just to stay airborne. At 3 A.M., after descending from 3,100 feet to 1,300 feet, he came close to hitting the side of a mountain that loomed up from out of nowhere, and nearly the last of the ballast was desperately thrown overboard. L-59, much to the crew’s relief, slowly righted itself and rose to a safer altitude.

  Bockholt was just 125 miles west of Khartoum and two-thirds of the way to relieving Lettow-Vorbeck when, at 12:45 A.M., he received a curious, crackly, coded message on L-59’s prearranged wavelength. Nauen had finally managed to contact him: “Break off operation, return. Enemy has seized greater part of Makonde Highlands, already holds Kitangari. Portuguese are attacking remainder of Protectorate Forces from south.” Lettow-Vorbeck was finished, or at least so it seemed.

  Or more accurately, that is how the British wanted it to seem. At the Admiralty in London, Room 40 was home to naval intelligence, whose cipher experts had cracked the German naval code. Room 40 had also been dimly aware that the Germans were planning something for many months before L-59 set out, thanks in part to an obscure British agent (code-named Mortimer) who had parachuted into Austria to meet an anonymous American of Bulgarian ancestry working for the Secret Service.

  The latter said that he’d heard rumors of an airship that was due to go to Yambol, for reasons unknown. The operation was called China Show. British intelligence later picked up Naval Airship Division radio chatter mentioning China Show, but the pieces couldn’t be fitted together until L-59 was reported to be heading for Lettow-Vorbeck’s location in Africa.

  To prepare a surprise welcome party, London instructed the East African Royal Flying Squadron to keep its fighters on standby to shoot down L-59 and at the same time sent a coded message, purportedly from Lettow-Vorbeck, telling of his encirclement. This was, as intended, picked up in Nauen and thence transmitted to Bockholt. Ultimately, the fighters were not needed as the message did its work all too well.

  On board L-59, Bockholt received the transmission and paused. What should he do? He was so close to Lettow-Vorbeck, yet this was a clear order from an unimpeachable source to break off the mission. He put the decision to the crew and for the next two hours they debated it, with one faction agreeing with Bockholt that they must turn back and another arguing that to depart now would abandon the Lion of Africa to his dreadful fate. Discipline won. At 2:30 A.M., Bockholt ordered L-59 to turn and go home. At 7:30 in the morning on November 25, L-59 arrived in Europe only to discover that that same day, Lettow-Vorbeck had actually put the enemy to flight.

  In a strictly military sense, then, the L-59 flight was a failure, but privately Eckener was jubilant. The airship, because it had never landed in Africa, had completed a nonstop voyage of 4,225 miles—about the same distance as between Friedrichshafen and New York—in 95 hours at an average speed of 45 mph over troublesome terrain and in harsh conditions where the temperature had oscillated between 23 degrees and 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Bockholt still had fuel enough for another sixty-four hours of flight, translating into an extra 3,750 miles.16 L-59 had also borne cargo and passengers—of a military nature, true, but a valuable payload nonetheless—making it evident to Eckener that once the damned war was over the Zeppelin Company had a clear path to developing, at long last, large-scale intercontinental commercial travel.

  The only problem was, would there even be a Zeppelin Company?

  23. The Beginning or the End?

  WHEN THE ARMISTICE that halted the Great War was signed on November 11, 1918, Eckener was in Friedrichshafen, desperately seeking a way to save the ailing Zeppelin Company.

  Even before the Armistice, chaos had engulfed a collapsing Germany, and Friedrichshafen, like many other places, experienced a dangerous wave of popular unrest and outright rebellion as millions of demobilized and deserting soldiers returned home to unemployment and impoverishment. They found their wives and children stricken with tuberculosis and pneumonia—consequences of malnourishment—with the death rate among women a quarter higher than before the war.1

  Meat, eggs, butter, and milk were scarce, as were clothing, shoes, and furniture. In Friedrichshafen, a military official noted, “bread was of the worst quality and damp, the potatoes were already rotten when they arrived from northern Germany, and there were no vegetables.” Zeppelin employees were fortunate in one way, however. They were permitted to purchase up to five yards of the fine Egyptian cotton cloth so recently used to make the airships’ outer skins; the material could be turned into shirts and trousers that could be bartered for produce from the local farmers.2

  Even so, at the Friedrichshafen hangars and workshops, an official report recorded, employees were suffering from “a total collapse of morale, an overall hopeless emotional state, a collapse of nerves, and a deep-rooted bitterness.” In an alarming sign of things to come, on October 22, eight hundred workers had left the Maybach factory and marched to the town hall shouting, “Down with the war! Up with the German Republic!” A strike had been called for October 26, but the Zeppelin factories were shut down to prevent it. Angry men, four thousand strong, then marched again to the town hall, where one radical shouted at Colsman, “For you, too, Herr Colsman, we have a bullet.”

  The new Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council called another strike for November 5, this time to force an immediate peace and the installation of a Socialist republic. Colsman bravely demanded to speak to the crowd and managed to calm the marchers down, but on November 10 red flags were for the first time raised in Friedrichshafen, and up to ten thousand people crammed into the streets to cheer the coming revolution. Ultimately, police and troops dispersed the workers, but they did not return to work—for there was no work to return to.3 Thousands of jobs had vanished overnight, and by the end of the year there were just one hundred part-time employees left.4

  With the factories shuttered, the hangars uncharacteristically quiet, and the once prim and pristine employees’ village falling into disrepair, Friedrichshafen had tumbled hard from its glory days. An American reporter who visited the town noted seeing “a barbed wire [fence] and a bored-looking bulldog” guarding the forlorn workshops, and a member of the Workers’ Council spoke the once-unspeakable: “We are not proud of these Zeppelins. [They] have aroused the indignation of the world against Germany. They must go.”5

  Eckener, surveying the gloomy scene that greeted him each morning as he passed the noiseless hangars and headed to the emptied offices, promised himself that the Zeppelin Company would rise again from the ashes of defeat. But how?

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  THE WAY FORWARD, he believed, was “to begin again in 1918 where we had stop
ped in August 1914.”6 That is, to resurrect the DELAG and commence domestic passenger service while the German government negotiated the final peace terms with the Allies as quickly as possible to stave off anarchy. He was convinced that the British and the French were “damn eager to finish us off” by imposing such harsh terms that Germany would be under their heel forever—which made it all the more important to invigorate German industry while he still could.7

  Colsman, as a fellow businessman of moderately conservative temperament, agreed that a peace treaty was in the best interests of all but was adamantly opposed to talk of bringing the DELAG back from the dead.8 He had helped birth it, but the DELAG was in the grave and should stay there. Here was a golden opportunity to forge a new direction for the Zeppelin Company, he argued, pointing out that while Germany was poor and the factories closed, the company was, thanks to his efforts, rich.

  During the war, the government had spent lavishly on its airship fleets and paid for hangar upgrades and modernized facilities for Zeppelin. Colsman had wisely—especially in light of the inflation that was then beginning to grip Germany—invested the rivers of cash flowing into Zeppelin coffers in material assets, such as the large stockpiles of duralumin sitting in the company’s warehouses.9

  Now that that gravy train had crashed to a halt, Colsman wanted to get out of the airship business. Airships were a losing proposition, and an airline nobody would want to travel on (given the Zeppelins’ dreadful wartime record) would inevitably be a bottomless money pit. He argued that the only means of survival lay in diversifying into a multitude of industries: Maybach would stop making engines and become a luxury automobile manufacturer; Zahnradfabrik Friedrichshafen (ZF), which made the gears and transmissions for the airships, would produce them for budget carmakers; the assembly workshops could repair railway carriages and hammer out cheap furniture. He even hired out an airship hangar as a movie set and turned the factory that had made the airships’ outer skin into a textile plant.