Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  But most shockingly, most unforgivably, the Zeppelin Company would be converted into a manufacturer of consumer goods. Colsman had it all planned out. Use the precious duralumin trove to churn out pots, cake pans, and pitchers under the brand name Ellzett, based on the German pronunciation of the initials LZ, for Luftschiffbau Zeppelin.10

  Colsman’s proposal horrified the Zeppelin Foundation, the board of directors overseeing the sprawling operation Colsman had assembled as general manager of the Zeppelin Company, which owned the subsidiaries like the DELAG, Maybach, and ZF. The foundation was headed by Gemmingen, the count’s nephew, and it was, in Colsman’s eyes, a fusty old boys’ club packed with Zeppelin’s aristocratic cronies and relatives.

  The board members retained their emotional attachment to the Zeppelin airships but lacked the expertise to combat Colsman’s financial acumen. Colsman succeeded in selling the idea to the board only after agreeing to Gemmingen’s demand that the diversification effort would be only a tactical maneuver to keep afloat until, as Gemmingen put it, “the underlying purpose of the Zeppelin enterprise, the development and advancement of air-transport, [comes] to the fore again.”11

  Colsman accepted the terms because he knew it would comfort the old gentlemen in their dotage. Baron von Bassus, who had traveled in the count’s very first airship, was frail, and Gemmingen was ailing. Once they were gone, he would inevitably control the foundation and through it the company—the short-term fix would naturally turn permanent. Gemmingen, however, was not quite as doddering and naive as Colsman believed. He quietly recruited Eckener, who was not a director, and set about promoting him to the board to counter Colsman and uphold the Zeppelin Company’s original vision.

  On the face of it, Gemmingen arranged a system of checks and balances in which Eckener became vice chairman but was nominally subordinate to Colsman, who retained control over financial and business affairs. If a majority of the board voted with Colsman, he could overrule Eckener, but if the other directors unanimously sided with Eckener, it would be Colsman who was overruled. Throwing this otherwise stable arrangement badly off kilter were the unfortunate facts that both Colsman and Eckener were autocrats accustomed to getting their way and were diametrically opposed when it came to deciding the future of the company.

  The former allies soon became rivals. Whenever Colsman complained that reestablishing the DELAG would drain money out of the subsidiaries, Eckener retorted that airships were the company’s genes, its sinews, its blood, not “pots and pans,” as he dismissively said. Zeppelin, for Eckener, was not a normal business concerned with profits and losses; its special mission was to bring the benefits of the German airship to the world and damn the expense.

  In any case, Eckener liked to add, it was actually Colsman’s diversification push that was bleeding money: Maybach was close to insolvency (nobody was buying expensive cars in post-Armistice Germany), Ellzett was in the red, and ZF’s gear business was a flop (carmakers preferred to make their own). If anything, concentrating the combined assets of all the subsidiaries toward one shining goal—airships—and risking everything in the process were what the Zeppelin Company stood for. It would either succeed, or they would all go down honorably together.

  Colsman, naturally, objected to Eckener’s Sparta-style strategy, accusing him of being a “false prophet” who was misleading the directors into thinking airships could ever be a viable business. They were living in a different world now, and under the new economic conditions “the issues that were accommodated while Count Zeppelin was still alive are not tolerable.” Eckener’s romanticism, as he saw it, was but a futile gesture that would drag them to perdition.

  Eckener and Colsman’s relationship, which had once been friendly enough to counterbalance Count von Zeppelin’s considerable avoirdupois, quickly deteriorated to the point that they only communicated via stiffly formal interoffice memoranda in between their “fierce” and “numerous” fights, as Eckener put it.

  At some point in this epic contest of wills and competing visions, it was clear to both men, one of them was going to have to knife the other.12

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  ECKENER IN THE meantime had to fight on a second front against another rival, Captain Lehmann, who was threatening to destroy the Zeppelin Company by different means. At war’s end, Lehmann had moved back to Friedrichshafen to take over the construction division, or what was left of it.13 Lehmann considered himself the voice of the loyal Zeppelin crews, who had sided, like him, with the conservative nationalists. Deludedly believing that Germany had not really lost the war but had been stabbed in the back at the Armistice by cowards, liberals, and Jews at home, Lehmann and the airship crews, refusing to truckle to the British and the French, vowed to fight on if necessary to secure Germany’s rights and honor.

  As Germany and the Allies negotiated the Treaty of Versailles in the months following the Armistice, the victors’ dictates stuck in German craws, especially the ones concerning the country’s disarmament. To supervise Germany’s adherence to the terms, three Inter-Allied Commissions of Control were formed (one each for army, naval, and aerial matters). The American reaction to the treaty, however, remained a wild card. The United States, under Democratic president Woodrow Wilson, would certainly sign the treaty in Paris, but the Senate still needed to consent to its ratification—and that did not seem at all likely, given Republican hostility and the loud objections of the German immigrant population. As a result, in right-wing German circles, there was a growing belief that America was a closet ally in the struggle against what was seen as Franco-British vindictiveness.14

  In November 1918, Germany had sixteen Zeppelins left, nearly all housed at the northern airbases of Nordholz and Wittmundhafen. At the end of that month, their crews composed a declaration proposing a transatlantic voyage to help forge a German-American axis against the French and British. “It may sound dangerous to speak of crossing the ocean, yet we have no fear of it,” the airshipmen continued. “We remind you of the Africa flight of the naval airship L-59, and of [Lehmann’s] 100-hour flight of the airship LZ-120….With reasonably favorable weather we could make the crossing in a flight of 100 hours and together with 30 passengers, we could transport a quantity of leaflets and other propaganda material.”15

  Lehmann took up their cause. He persuaded Gemmingen that he, Lehmann, should captain L-72, the last and most modern giant Zeppelin commissioned during the war, and undertake the mission. It was what the count would have done, he argued; never would he have allowed the pride of the German airship fleet to be surrendered to the enemy. Lehmann proposed to fill L-72 to the gills with fuel and hydrogen, recruit a crew of patriots, and then, late one night, take off and secretly—even the government in Berlin would not be informed—head to America.16

  When he heard about it, Eckener couldn’t believe that Gemmingen was backing Lehmann’s lunatic scheme. Did he really think the Americans, who had so recently suffered more than three hundred thousand casualties in the war fighting Germany, would conduct business as usual when a stolen Zeppelin appeared above New York—an airship piloted by the same man rumored to have been the one who would have bombed that city had the war continued?17

  More dangerous still, Eckener added, had Gemmingen not considered the adverse reaction by the British and the French to an escapade of this nature? At the moment it remained to be seen just how diligently the (Aerial) Inter-Allied Commission would take its job of confiscating Germany’s remaining airships and razing the infrastructure. With any luck, hoped Eckener, the commission would honor its remit more in the breach than the observance, and he would soon be able to get back to business.

  But stirring up the hornet’s nest, as Lehmann intended to do with his futile gesture of defiance, meant that “the Allies will jump on us and knock everything to pieces. They will destroy everything so thoroughly that we’ll never again be in a position to carry on Graf Zeppelin’s work!�
�18 A buccaneering bit of bravado by Lehmann would not just bury any hope of ever reestablishing the DELAG but also hand Colsman the right to claim that airships were indeed a dead business.

  Much to Lehmann’s dismay, Gemmingen changed his mind. To make sure it stayed that way, Eckener discreetly informed the government of Lehmann’s scheme. Berlin, not wanting any trouble at this delicate time, contacted the Inter-Allied Commission and sent a telegram to Friedrichshafen forbidding the departure of L-72 from German soil.

  Lehmann was mystified as to how the Inter-Allied Commission “had learned of all the particulars of our plan” but soon fingered Eckener as the perpetrator. “Treason was cheap amongst us at the time,” he later, darkly, hissed.19

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  ECKENER ALSO HAD other reasons to thwart Lehmann’s designs. He was, in fact, already secretly in touch with the Americans, and they did want to conduct business as usual, but Lehmann’s antics threatened Eckener’s plan of selling them L-72.

  Even before the war, the Americans had been interested in acquiring or developing airships but had enjoyed no success.20 Lady Fortune had finally smiled in October 1917 when L-49 lost its bearings over France after a raid on London. A fighter patrol intercepted it; according to the eyewitness Joseph Ganson, an American officer, “when the Germans saw luminous [incendiary] balls whizzing past they knew they were lost, and hung out a white flag.”21 The fighter leader ordered it to descend at Bourbonne-les-Bains. Upon landing, its captain tried to set it on fire but was prevented by a local man armed with a shotgun. His friends took the rest of the complaisant crew prisoner.

  Hearing that a Zeppelin had come down, Colonel William “Billy” Mitchell, one of the leading American airpower advocates, rushed to the site and was awed by his first vision of the downed monster. “I immediately climbed through it and inspected it from end to end,” he wrote. “It was one of the latest models and was in a perfect state of preservation.”

  The “Super-Zeppelin” L-49, just four months old, provided a windfall of technical knowledge thanks to its being captured nearly intact. For the first time analysts saw how the Germans so magically controlled their airships when they discovered an apparatus containing thirty-eight red and white buttons—the top-secret mechanisms that regulated the expansion and compression of the gas cells. The Americans could only gasp at the excellence of Arnstein’s and Jaray’s handiwork. By their calculations, since 1914 the Germans had halved aerodynamic drag resistance, a feat previously thought impossible.22

  In July 1918, the army-navy Joint Airship Board recommended building four airships based on L-49, but after the Armistice, defense budgets were slashed—by 90 percent in the navy’s case. With such a small pot of money available, the Americans were forced to search for bargains.23

  In the spring of 1919, eager to keep L-72 out of Lehmann’s hands and knowing that the Americans were hoping to get their own cheap airship, Eckener had sounded out the U.S. military attaché at The Hague, Colonel Edward Davis. Davis asked Washington for instructions and received a top-secret cable from the War Department informing him that it was sending Colonel William Hensley, a skilled balloonist, to Germany for a clandestine meeting with Eckener.24

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  ECKENER WAS, AS real estate agents like to say, “highly motivated” to sell. Though a first-class airship in perfect condition, the very apex of Zeppelin’s technological skill, and the pride of the fleet, in fact L-72 would have been no better than scrap if it remained in Germany.

  In the proposed Treaty of Versailles there were two key provisions directly affecting the Zeppelin Company. Clause 198 explicitly stated that “no dirigible shall be kept” by Germany, and Clause 202 added that “all military and naval aeronautical material” (including airships) that “are or have been in use or were designed for warlike purposes” must be handed over to the Allies within three months of the treaty becoming operative.

  Eckener read and reread those passages, then read them again. Depending on how one looked at it, they were both clear and unclear, definitive yet ambiguous. First, in Clause 198, what did “kept” mean, exactly? The Allied negotiators assumed that the Germans could not “keep”—in the sense of possessing them—any airships whatsoever. But Eckener could argue that “kept” alternatively meant that Germany could not retain any airships that, like L-72, had been built during the war. Clause 202 was equally slippery. Unquestionably, it forbade keeping any army and navy airships left over from the war, but from Eckener’s perspective it did not unequivocally declare that civilian airships built after the Armistice, airships that were neither used nor designed for “warlike purposes,” were outlawed.

  In other words, Eckener had just discovered a Zeppelin-sized loophole in a treaty painstakingly sweated over by scores of international jurists. There was nothing, according to his interpretation, legally preventing the Zeppelin Company from building a civilian airship for the new DELAG. That did not, however, make it wise to twist a tiger’s tail. If it so wished, the Inter-Allied Commission could, like Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland, make words mean whatever they wanted them to mean.

  To avoid rousing the Inter-Allied Commission’s ire, in March 1919 Eckener instructed Dürr, Arnstein, and Jaray to design and build an airship from scratch. He had one condition. Under no circumstances could it be seen as being in any way suitable for “warlike purposes.” The ship had to be small and humble and patently unable to carry bombs. It must have no connection to the Naval Airship Division, was to be operated by a relaunched DELAG, and would be crewed by civilians. He even chose an appropriately harmless name for the new craft: Bodensee, an homage to the lovely prewar Hansa, Viktoria Luise, and Schwaben. Who could ever fear an airship christened so bucolically?

  In private, Eckener had bigger things in mind. Bodensee, he promised the board, was merely the stepping-stone to the great water jump across the Atlantic. Once the principle was established that Germany could build small civil airships and run a domestic passenger service, there was no logical reason why Zeppelin could not build large civil airships and run an international one.25

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  BUT FIRST HE had to get rid of L-72. The negotiations with Colonel Hensley were proceeding smoothly, or at least they were until the night of June 23, 1919, when a band of former airship crewmen sneaked into the hangars at Nordholz and Wittmundhafen and destroyed seven deflated Zeppelins by tearing away their supports and letting them crash onto the concrete floor.26 Now there were just nine left (including an unfinished experimental model), and the British and the French were, understandably, furious at being deprived of their loot just five days before the Treaty of Versailles was signed (June 28).

  Eckener could not believe the magnitude of the stupidity at work. The timing of the sabotage was particularly suspicious: Could it have been coincidence, or had someone—a vengeful Lehmann came to mind—tipped the crewmen off that L-72 was about to be sold?

  It didn’t matter now. Eckener was dealing with a major crisis. The Inter-Allied Commission swooped in to confiscate the surviving airships as prizes, allocating them thus: L-72 and LZ-113 to France, L-71 and L-64 to Britain, L-61 and LZ-120 to Italy, L-30 to Belgium, and L-37 to Japan. Within a few years nearly all of them would crash, be dismantled, or fall into decrepitude. In the end, a sullen German crew duly delivered the controversial L-72 to France; upon entering, its new owners discovered the inside daubed with pornographic graffiti as a welcome gift.27

  As the Romans had sowed salt into the ruins of defeated Carthage, a livid Inter-Allied Commission insisted that all airship facilities were to be immediately leveled or repurposed—the twenty-five-airship base at Ahlhorn, for instance, became a children’s home, a tuberculosis hospital, and a convalescent center—to ensure that Germany would never again menace their cities from the air.

  The victors, aside from the Americans, had their s
poils. They had originally been promised two of the now-destroyed Nordholz Zeppelins as war booty; in the revised allotment, the Americans received none because they said they would be satisfied to be compensated in cash by the German government for the loss of their two airships. With an eye on the future, they also asked the commission to save the Friedrichshafen hangars and assets as a favor to them.

  With L-72 now in French hands, Eckener obviously had no airship to sell. Colonel Hensley suggested using the compensation the United States was owed to commission an all-new giant airship (LZ-125) at Friedrichshafen. Eckener was enthused with the idea. Building an airship for a foreign government as a form of reparations was not expressly forbidden by the treaty, it would keep his workers busy, and he’d earn points with the Americans, who would form a useful counterweight to further Franco-British machinations.

  A major downside, however, was the enormous financial risk: LZ-125 would essentially be an airship built for free by Zeppelin on the strength of a government IOU to Washington. As it was, inflation was daily eroding the value of any cash reserves the company still had, and none of Colsman’s business ventures were working out, so whether Zeppelin would remain sufficiently solvent to finish the airship was the real issue.