Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  Fulton satisfied Eckener that he had no intention of thieving Zeppelin secrets and offered to pacify Dürr by reducing the number of requests for information and visitors to his triple-locked research office. Eckener in turn promised that he would vouch for Fulton’s honor to get Dürr on board.

  The more politicized Lehmann would be a tougher proposition, but Eckener assured Fulton that within a few weeks it wouldn’t matter very much what he thought. Gemmingen was stepping away from his position of chairman (he would die the following year), and the Zeppelin Foundation board was going to be reorganized with Eckener serving as chairman.

  In fact, once installed, Eckener reorganized the corporate structure. The Zeppelin Foundation remained the Zeppelin Company’s sole shareholder, but now it became also the majority owner of the autonomous subsidiaries run by Colsman. From his chairman’s seat, Eckener was able to direct the activities of the entire enterprise toward a single goal: building airships.

  As magnifico and prince of the Zeppelin empire, Eckener didn’t even have to bother holding board meetings anymore, and there wouldn’t be one for years. In one swift move, Eckener had defenestrated both Lehmann and Colsman, neither any longer having a say in company policy-making. Both, predictably, took it badly: Lehmann’s rivalry with Eckener only sharpened, whereas Colsman avoided visiting the Zeppelin offices if he knew his new boss would be there.19

  By mid-April 1923, Zeppelin and the U.S. Navy were happy partners, and work on the airship, which had been delayed due to the tussles over technical data, picked up steam.20 In August, Fulton could report that, aside from the fins, the hull was complete and the cover had been twice coated in the clear lacquer known as “dope” to render the skin waterproof and airtight. (The third and fourth coats would have aluminum powder added, giving the airship its distinctive silvery glow.)21

  By November, though, months past the fifteen-month deadline with no announcements from the U.S. Navy or Zeppelin, newspapers speculated as to the mysterious cause of the delays. American officials at Friedrichshafen, reported The New York Times, remained tight-lipped, and “access to the shed or any discussion outside is taboo.” Every entrance was under lock and key, and visitors were required to show identification constantly. A correspondent found the naval inspectors there “so guarded in their remarks within hearing of alien ears and so impervious to quizzes that one might as well ply questions at the Sphinx.” The most popular rumor was that workmen at the plant referred to the airship as “our meal bag” and were dragging out construction to stretch their paychecks.22

  It’s certainly possible that there was some procrastination on the job, but the truth of the matter was that ZR-3’s structure was finished, but its engines weren’t. Rather late in the day, Fulton had discovered that if Dürr had been a handful, Karl Maybach was an armful. Intense and prim, he was so secretive that even Lehmann complained about him. After several more months of delays, Fulton finally succeeded in entering his realm to speak with the reclusive genius, whose attitude was “Leave me alone. I know what I am doing. You don’t, and I object to your making suggestions.”23

  To be fair, this man with no master used to say the same thing to Eckener, but now there was nothing anyone could do but wait until Maybach finished the new engine design he was working on.

  27. One Card

  A​S MAYBACH TWEAKED and twiddled in his workshop, Eckener was painfully aware that he had to plan something big to ensure Zeppelin’s survival. Uppermost in his mind was that in its vote to approve the construction of ZR-3, the Conference of Ambassadors had insisted that it was a “special exception” to the rule banning German airships. The U.S. Navy was therefore a one-time client, leaving Zeppelin without a future once ZR-3 was delivered.

  Possible salvation came in the form of an inquiry from Paul Litchfield, a vice president of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio. Litchfield had excellent navy contacts, and the navy, its appetite whetted by the ZR-3 project, wanted more sea-scouting airships—which had to be built in America by an American company to circumvent the “special exception” rule the Conference of Ambassadors demanded.

  Litchfield and company chairman Edward Wilmer traveled incognito to Friedrichshafen in September 1923, when ZR-3 had been all but completed (aside from Maybach’s engines), to negotiate a contract with Eckener. They proposed that a new U.S.-based company, Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation, would build airships for the navy in Ohio at Wingfoot Lake Aviation Field with Zeppelin-provided experts on loan. (There was nothing in the Versailles Treaty forbidding German personnel from helping other countries build airships.) Once flush with navy cash, Goodyear-Zeppelin would develop transcontinental routes across the United States.

  Warned by Eckener to be sensitive to German concerns, the ones that had so recently put Dürr’s and Lehmann’s noses out of joint, Litchfield and Wilmer made sure to clarify that while Zeppelin would be allocated one-third ownership in the American business, the Americans would not be involved in Germany, where the company would remain independent and free to pursue its own transatlantic ambitions, if ever Eckener managed to squirm free of the Versailles restrictions.

  There was nevertheless a minor breach of etiquette during the discussions. Litchfield at first proposed having Dürr, of all people, serve as chief engineer in Akron, but he was soon disabused of the notion when Dürr refused to ever leave homey Württemberg, refused to shake hands, and refused to learn a word of English. The designer Karl Arnstein, his next choice, quickly agreed. Anti-Semitism was on the rise in Germany, and the Land of Plenty promised a bounty of food, silk stockings, a car, and fur-lined boots—all of which had been either unavailable or unaffordable to Germans in these hard years. (Even Eckener, the head of a major conglomerate, couldn’t afford an automobile and pedaled around on a bicycle.) Lehmann, who spoke excellent English, was also eager to go, probably to get away from Eckener.1

  Helping to speed things along was that Eckener was uninterested in working for the U.S. Navy once ZR-3 was handed over. He’d had enough of military airships during the war, and all he wanted was to try to turn his dream of building a transatlantic airship into reality. As far as Eckener was concerned, Goodyear-Zeppelin was important only with respect to its cementing American-German friendship and bringing in hard foreign currency when hyperinflation—soon to reach 4 trillion marks to the dollar—was ravaging the economy.

  Time, then, was of the essence, but the longer Maybach dithered on the new engine, the more likely it became that Goodyear would lose interest in the deal, or perhaps just try to build its own airship. In the new year of 1924, Eckener brought the hammer down and ordered Maybach to demonstrate what he had. It was not good. During testing, the engines malfunctioned multiple times and Maybach had to be “persuaded” to bring in two engineering professors to help him rectify the problems. On August 4, 1924, nearly a year after the contracted deadline, Maybach deigned to announce that they were ready.2

  It was worth the wait, for Maybach demonstrated a masterpiece, the VL-1. Combined, the five VL-1s intended for ZR-3 produced 2,000 horsepower, nearly 300 more than seven of the mightiest of their wartime predecessors put together.

  By the end of the month, the VL-1s had been installed and Eckener prepared to test-fly Friedrichshafen’s finest product. He couldn’t afford to waste any time, and the subsequent trials were considerably more abbreviated than was customary. There were no major technical issues, thankfully, and Eckener deftly exercised his publicity skills by releasing “exclusives” to popular magazines and inviting movie cameramen and newspaper correspondents along for the rides.3

  As ZR-3 sailed over a succession of cities or visited Count von Zeppelin’s grave, Germans, for the first time in what seemed like forever, had something to be proud of: their own “swift-winged silver tenant of the air, reflecting the bright sunbeams from her glossy sides, and wending her course proudly and confidently whither she willed,” as the onboard
correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung rapturously put it.4 Tears streamed down spectators’ faces, traffic stopped, people climbed atop their roofs for a better look, and there were spontaneous outbreaks of the national anthem: Nothing like it had been witnessed since the storied days of the count’s flights to Switzerland and the miracle of Echterdingen.

  Eckener was very clever in trying to appeal to all Germans, whatever their class, age, or political stripe, by varying how he emphasized ZR-3’s benefits in the media. To appeal to the powerful Socialist movement, he stressed how the company employed thousands of workers and was a shining example of the virtue of government subsidies. For business-oriented newspapers, Zeppelin was a beacon of profitability, innovation, and enterprise that had been brought back from near bankruptcy. For older conservatives, the airship was a living link to the grandeur and majesty of imperial Germany, a return to the good old days before the “yoke” of Versailles was harnessed to their necks. Younger liberals in turn were attracted to Eckener’s message that ZR-3 symbolized modernity and its marriage of science and technology in the service of peace and mankind. For Germans as a whole, the Zeppelin relieved their war guilt and represented pride in the country’s products.

  He was less successful in gaining the support of the more extreme, and noisier, factions of the left and the right. There were sour notes from the Communists, who claimed ZR-3 was part of a sinister capitalist-imperialist conspiracy to steal the labor of the proletariat. Ultranationalists accused Eckener of treachery for handing over German assets to the United States. “What is it with this airship built in Germany by German workers and engineers, paid for with German money, but which belongs to America?” grumbled one curmudgeonly Berlin columnist.

  From there it was but a small step to attacking Karl Arnstein, who was charged by the usual anti-Semites with being a member of an Eckener-backed Jewish cabal at Zeppelin apparently intent on selling out Germany. That probably no one else at the company was a Jew—even the Jewish Telegraphic Agency believed he was “the only Jew in Friedrichshafen”—and that Arnstein was a designer, not a board executive, did not seem to faze his detractors. The viciousness of the accusations only affirmed Arnstein’s decision to depart Germany to join Goodyear in Akron.

  In the fevered charges of Jewish plotting and German backstabbing were shades of the fate that had awaited the Jewish politician-industrialist Walther Rathenau, who had approved the 3-million gold mark advance to build ZR-3.

  He had been assassinated by the Organization Consul, a secretive ultra-nationalist murder gang so deranged even the nascent Nazi Party kept its distance. Rathenau was only the most prominent of hundreds of German “traitors” executed by the Organization Consul and its kin, so when Eckener’s own life was threatened by these blood-and-thunder zealots, he took it seriously. A sensible decision it proved to be when a rifle-armed student who’d sworn to assassinate him was arrested.5

  More unexpectedly, Eckener was running into opposition from within the government. One might have assumed that Berlin, having paid for it, would have been excited by the prospect of ZR-3, but the Foreign Ministry was raising objections.

  The immediate cause stemmed from Germany’s fortunes turning earlier that summer when the ongoing resistance in the Ruhr against the French occupation had persuaded Britain and the United States that the reparations system, as it stood, was unworkable. Paris did not agree, and the franc came under heavy assault from Wall Street and London banks as investors bet against the French government’s surviving the reparations crisis (they were right). Soon afterward, Édouard Herriot and the leftish Radical Party came to power and, under Anglo-American pressure, accepted the need to restructure Germany’s debt.

  An international committee chaired by Charles Dawes, the former head of the United States Bureau of the Budget, convened to calm the roiling economic turmoil. The resulting Dawes Plan was implemented in September, coinciding with Eckener’s test flights. Among other things, the plan guaranteed American and British loans to allow Germany to make reparations payments of just 1 billion of the new, post-inflation marks in the first year, rising to 2.5 billion marks annually by the fifth year. French troops would in the meantime vacate the Ruhr to help German industry get back on its feet and make the higher payments demanded by Paris once the five years were up.

  From German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann’s perspective, it was critical not to antagonize the French in any way for fear they might not leave the Ruhr. Stresemann’s main worry was what would happen if a German-crewed ZR-3 overflew France, where memories of the once-feared Zeppelins were still raw, on its way to America.

  As there was no way to stop the airship from taking off—American fury at being denied could scarcely be imagined—Stresemann at this point had a quiet word with Eckener, who had announced that he would captain ZR-3.

  Under no circumstances was he to provoke the French by flying over the Ruhr, and neither would any photographs be taken of French fortresses or military bases. He was to keep strictly to a preapproved flight path over French territory and must not fly at night so that he could be observed from the ground at all times.6

  Lastly, to avoid any appearance of official backing of what might be seen as a political statement at a sensitive moment, the government would not underwrite the flight to America. Eckener was shocked. If Berlin didn’t insure ZR-3, then no else would, either. And without insurance against damage or loss, Eckener was at the mercy of the contract he had signed with the U.S. Navy, which, burned by the R-38 disaster and the loss of its deposit, had stipulated that “until accepted delivery at Lakehurst [naval base] the company is to assume full liability for the airship.”7 This meant that if ZR-3 were wrecked for any reason—an ill-judged turn, an unexpected gust, a gas leak, a weak girder, a saboteur, even an act of God—then the United States would come calling for its compensation money.

  Eckener took the biggest risk of his life and, without consulting anyone, “bet everything on one card,” as he said, by pledging the entire Zeppelin Company and its subsidiaries as surety for the endeavor. If he failed, he said, Zeppelin—its patents, its assets, its facilities—would be owned by its creditors, the world would lose its “trust in airship travel,” and he would be “out—done with work—forever!”8

  28. Queen of the Air

  I​T WAS TIME for ZR-3 to leave the homeland. Everything—the Goodyear alliance, Zeppelin’s survival, an Atlantic passenger service, U.S. Navy support—now hinged on one thing and one thing alone: delivering ZR-3 safely.

  Eckener selected his best men to ensure nothing went wrong. He tapped the three most experienced of his wartime and DELAG commanders—Lehmann, Hans-Curt Flemming, and Hans von Schiller—to come with him. Lehmann, whatever his other feelings about Eckener, was dedicated to the cause of Zeppelin, and his skills were formidable. They all understood what they were signing up for. If ZR-3 was destroyed in a storm, or blew up, or crashed on landing, they would all die together, but what was there to live for if the dream had no future?1

  In public, of course, Eckener betrayed no misgivings as to his chances. He, an inveterate smoker, made sure to be quoted as saying, “The idea of leaving my pipe behind is what is bothering me and not how I will get the ship across.”2 Privately, he was less cocksure. It was not the size of ZR-3 that worried him—it was slightly shorter and a little wider than previous Zeppelin giants—but running out of fuel. With 43 tons of useful lift available, Eckener had to keep crew and ballast to a minimum to make room for the 33 tons of fuel and 2.2 tons of oil he calculated he would need to make all five Maybachs last the entire voyage. If he encountered sustained headwinds, the engines would guzzle so much fuel he’d be left drifting aimlessly across a trackless ocean.3

  Keeping the weight down was no joke. On the eve of departure, Flemming calibrated the ship and found some mysterious excess poundage. “The vessel is tail heavy,” he informed Eckener, who ordered a search, which uncovered t
wo stowaway journalists. He eventually consented to take a canary they had bought to give them a self-created scoop: “The First Bird to Fly the Atlantic as a Passenger!”4

  At dawn on October 12, the date when Columbus had first sighted land in 1492, which Eckener had cannily chosen to appeal to the Americans, the crew of twenty-eight Germans (nattily attired in new uniforms) and four American naval officers gathered to prepare the ship and wait out the fog. At 7:30 A.M., ZR-3 lifted off, and the gathered crowd spontaneously sang the “Deutschlandlied,” better known to many as “Deutschland über Alles.” They were “the last words we heard before leaving our native land,” remembered Lehmann.5

  ZR-3 floated “above a shimmering ocean of mist lit by the rising sun, while the chain of the Swiss Alps rose through the mist to the south.” Soon they saw the stony hills of Burgundy’s vineyards and the level fields of Bordeaux rolling beneath them. By midday, as the crewmen were settling down to a sumptuous lunch of turtle soup, Hungarian goulash, pudding, and coffee, Eckener reached the mouth of the Gironde estuary on the Bay of Biscay and saw the surf “stretching out to right and left like a bright, dividing line between land and sea.”6

  In the late afternoon, ZR-3 made for Cape Ortegal on the northwest coast of Spain. As it grew darker, the local fishermen returning with their catches craned their necks to watch the wandering silver star float overhead. Once they were past the cape at midnight there was nothing but four thousand miles of the boundless gray-blue plain that would determine whether Zeppelin had a future.

  Some way out into the Atlantic, they flew over the freighter City of Boston, whose crew had been at sea so long they hadn’t heard the news. Mystified at the apparition above, they wirelessed: “Who are you? Where are you going?”