Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  Pruss had to get to Berlin on time. Arriving at 1:40 P.M., the Hindenburg crisscrossed the flag-bedecked city, enthralling the two to three million people congregated in the streets. The Hindenburg thrice traveled the length of Unter den Linden, Berlin’s grand thoroughfare linking what had been the royal palace in the east to the Brandenburg Gate to the west. By then it was three o’clock and Pruss directed the Hindenburg to the new Olympic Stadium, the largest in the world. There, a hundred thousand people, an orchestra, a half-dozen military bands, and a thousand-strong choir awaited its arrival.

  To mark the opening of the games, the Hindenburg, trailing the Olympic flag, slowly passed over the stadium, to the adoration of the handkerchief-waving, cheering crowd. Task completed, Pruss sent a telegram to the Führer thanking “with respect and gratitude the leading sponsor of the Berlin Olympic Games, which bring peoples together.” Hitler replied by wishing the crew and DZR “good wishes for a continuing good flight.”

  With that sideshow out of the way, the Hindenburg could return to its American service in earnest.3

  49. Mr. and Mrs. Brown

  O​N OCTOBER 5, captained by Lehmann, the Hindenburg set off on its final flight to Lakehurst for the 1936 season. By most yardsticks, it had been a tremendous success. On the ten westward crossings from Germany, passenger numbers had averaged 49; on the eastward, 54. Given the full houses, Eckener had already approved expanding Hindenburg’s cabins to accommodate 75 passengers for 1937. In the following year, he wanted a four-berth “family” stateroom (with an in-flight nanny thrown in).

  Over the course of the summer, the Hindenburg had transported some twelve hundred passengers (including flights to South America), and even the airship’s adversaries had to admit that the ocean weather had proved no hindrance; the Hindenburg had stayed almost exactly on schedule, and it had taken off and landed in the type of conditions (fog and rain) that invariably grounded airplanes.

  Average westbound travel time was 64 hours, handily beating by days even the newest generation of liner, such as the British Queen Mary, and to a still greater extent going east, at 56 hours. Strikingly, the Hindenburg and the Queen Mary could leave their home ports within hours of each other, and the Hindenburg—despite having to fly across Germany and even after an entire day spent at Lakehurst for maintenance—would be halfway back across the Atlantic by the time the Queen Mary arrived in New York.1

  But in terms of luxury, the Hindenburg was finding it hard to beat its maritime competitors. The dining room of the French Normandie alone, for instance, was longer than the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, and almost as opulent, while for virtually the same price as a ticket on the airship one could spread out on the Queen Mary in a first-class suite including a spacious bedroom, a separate living room, and a private bathroom. Ludwig Dürr’s monastically ascetic cabins and shared bathrooms could not compete. Neither could guests enjoy the children’s playroom, barbershop, squash court, sauna, and swimming pool that came with the Queen Mary. But if you wanted to get to and from Europe quickly, preferred to avoid seasickness, and didn’t care about having a swim or a haircut, the Hindenburg would admirably serve your purposes.2

  Financially, Eckener had performed quite well, claiming that he had broken even, which might possibly have been almost true. To bring in extra revenue, he wanted to raise ticket prices from $400 to $450 for the coming year.3 The picture was not so rosy at Goodyear-Zeppelin, where Litchfield had been forced to cut jobs after the destruction of the Macon and the loss of navy interest. Where once there had been more than eight hundred men working at the Air Dock and the engineering and design shops, there were now just ten. Apart from Arnstein, who occupied himself building mockups of his dream airship (it would travel at 100 mph, have forty-three cabins, and feature a dining room adaptable into a movie theater), most of the technical staff had already been transferred to other departments, returned to Germany, or joined other aeronautical firms.4

  Litchfield reported that even if he got a commission for a passenger airship, Goodyear would need at least two years to build it.5 Eckener was disappointed but reassured his friend that help was on its way.

  It was now that Eckener revealed to Litchfield that he had a secret airship on the books: LZ-130. This ship had been commissioned in late 1935, in the full bloom of DZR’s romance with the government, and was essentially an updated version of the Hindenburg intended to better compete with the ocean liners’ standards of luxury (some cabins would have space for a large wardrobe and armchair). But construction work had only just begun, and its first flight, he said, would not be until 1938.6

  The plan was for the Hindenburg and LZ-130 to run simultaneously—by which time DZR planned to have at least two more airships under construction. Lehmann claimed that by 1940 Germany would have no fewer than four Zeppelins operating between North and South America, and he spoke enthusiastically about expanding to India and Asia.7

  In which case, Goodyear could still be in the game, so long as Eckener and Litchfield could get the process moving now to ramp up development. If they could raise the necessary funds, Akron could be put back to work and at least one Made-in-America airship would be ready by 1938, just as Zeppelin came into its own.

  And it was for that reason that Eckener headed to New York. He had a flight to catch: the “Millionaires’ Flight.”

  * * *

  —

  EVERY MAN ABOARD the flight, more fully described in the prologue to this book, had been carefully selected. This was by no means a mere sightseeing cruise over New England, optimally timed for the changing of the leaves.

  Each guest had a purpose: He was needed to pony up money, to provide political backing, to supply material for construction and operations, to form a business alliance, to popularize the cause of airships, or to grease the wheels of statecraft.

  So why was Trippe there? As a PZT board member he was probably eligible for an invitation, but Eckener could easily have crossed his name out. And Trippe could just as easily have sent a polite note saying he was busy.

  But there was a mutual curiosity between the two long-standing rivals. Each had read and heard so much about the other, yet they had never met.

  Each wanted to check out the competition, to size him up, to take his measure. Neither believed the other had a chance, and each was confident in the superiority of his chosen instrument. Each knew, too, that the next couple of years would decide the question of airship versus airplane, the cloud or the bird.

  Nothing is known of what they said to each other. Very little, most likely. Eckener was engaged with his other guests, and Trippe was always quiet. Probably there was a shaking of hands, some small talk, a few insincere congratulations on how much the other had achieved, and then the moment passed, just as it once had when Zeppelin met Orville Wright in 1909.

  Yet Eckener’s hooded blue eyes and Trippe’s inscrutable browns must have met over the course of the day. Maybe a nod was exchanged, or glasses were raised, in acknowledgment of two old foes at last meeting on the field of battle.

  * * *

  —

  TRIPPE HAD BEEN appropriately impressed by the Hindenburg but was also nonplussed by the Germans’ assumption that airships would continue to have the Atlantic to themselves. Eckener’s remark in a newspaper interview—“he could see only [airships] regularly transporting passengers across the North Atlantic”—struck him as obnoxious, considering that Pan American was already regularly crossing a much bigger ocean.8

  The stomach-patting smugness of the Zeppelin people seemed bizarre to Trippe. True, he was still stuck with Imperial, but time, money, and effort would eventually pry open the Atlantic to Pan American. With that in mind, shortly after the Millionaires’ Flight, Trippe and his wife, Betty, embarked on an around-the-world trip of their own. It would be a chance to fly, for the first time, on Imperial and compare it to Pan American.

  Starting in San
Francisco on an M-130 and stopping along his chain of Pacific island bases, the Trippes stayed each tranquil night in one of Pan American’s hotels. He had never visited his own properties, now equipped with electricity, private baths, a small movie theater, cultivated gardens, paths of crushed coral, and bamboo furniture.

  From Asia to Europe, they were on Imperial turf and Trippe was eager to see what was on offer. It proved disappointing: Imperial’s planes were slow, old, and uncomfortable. While in Karachi, Trippe noticed that KLM, the Dutch airline, was making the trip from Baghdad in one day on its American-built Douglas planes, but Imperial needed two to cover the same route. It was not a pleasing revelation, and neither was discovering that Imperial’s fifteen-passenger flying boat from Alexandria to Rome flew “like an old tug” (said Betty) at a stately 90 mph, compared to the China Clipper’s zippy 140.

  There was better news in England, where Woods Humphery took them to Rochester to see the factory where the much heralded, completely redesigned Short Empire S-23 flying boats were being manufactured.

  The Empires were not as good as the Martins or the Sikorskys, but they would be good enough. They were, at least, notably spacious and comfortable. One engineer had spent two years fine-tuning the reclining seats, which on American planes were a constant problem and had prompted innumerable customer complaints. But on the Empires, said one awestruck journalist, all you had to do was press a knob “and the chair stretches you out to any length within the limits of decency.”

  Just a few weeks earlier, Major Brackley, Imperial’s air superintendent, had flown the first Empire off the production line to Marseille in France with no problems. And Woods Humphery told Trippe that a new plane was coming off the production line each month. In the coming new year of 1937, two more Empires were set to fly nonstop from England to Egypt as a test.

  Best of all, Woods Humphery expected an S-23 to cross the Atlantic—from Shannon in Ireland to Botwood in Newfoundland—nonstop on an experimental basis sometime in early July 1937. By the end of that summer, Trippe realized, the unsuspecting Eckener might have some unwelcome competition on his precious Atlantic route.

  Soon afterward, Trippe and Betty visited their old friends the Lindberghs, who’d decamped to England, where the two men discussed aviation problems. Anne Lindbergh noticed that Trippe, now older and wiser, was not as “close” as he had been several years earlier, by which she meant he “did the right things, but he was not suave, he was very closed in, shy.” Yet she also saw he was markedly ebullient now that he’d been to Rochester.

  This was turning out to be a fantastic business trip. Trippe was in such high spirits that he decided to surprise Betty: They would not, as she had assumed, be returning to New York by ship. How would she like a detour to South America aboard the Hindenburg?

  After flying into Berlin, they were met by Lufthansa officials and stayed at the famous Hotel Adlon. “Our German friends,” noticed Betty, “were tight-lipped concerning any reference to Hitler and the political situation.” At dinner parties and lunches, whenever she asked about “anything relating to German politics, the subject was immediately changed, by asking me if I liked to swim or did I care for music.” A visit to the Air Ministry set off further alarm bells when she saw that the windows were equipped with automatic sliding steel blinds to provide protection against bombing raids.

  The Trippes took the train to Frankfurt, where they had breakfast with Martin Wronsky, who was on DZR’s supervisory board. Many years earlier, they had known Wronsky, then a “bright, ambitious boy,” when he had briefly worked for Pan American in New York, but he had since changed, said Betty, into an “overbearing, conceited, opinionated man [who] was almost rude in his controversial attitude about the future disadvantage of airplanes versus airships.”

  Trippe kept his own views to himself, finding it more interesting to listen to what he regarded as typical Zeppelin hubris brought on by the success of the 1936 flying season and the Millionaires’ Flight than to bother arguing the point. They would be humbled soon enough.

  Trippe was concerned with keeping his upcoming flight secret. A newspaper story about the head of Pan American taking a Zeppelin across the Atlantic would be too juicy to spike, so he and Betty traveled under the aliases “Mr. and Mrs. Brown.”

  For Trippe, it was a chance to do opposition research, to see where Eckener was weak, to understand his enemy. For years, he had closely studied Eckener, and though he rarely admitted it, he feared the Zeppelin. William Van Dusen, his publicist, later recalled that Trippe was intensely concerned about Eckener’s plans for the Atlantic. In fact, the year before he had cabled Van Dusen not to travel on the Graf Zeppelin “because it would be misunderstood over here as favoring lighter-than-air if I did that.” Asked why Trippe was so worried, Van Dusen replied that “it was a pretty hot issue [and] so many people [and big wheels in this business] favored airships over airplanes at the time….These damn things would fly—and they kept on flying. They were big and impressive.”

  Betty enjoyed her trip on the Hindenburg, spending much of it chatting to her fellow passengers. The flights to South America tended to be more diverse than the higher-status and more expensive ones to New York. On board their flight were forty-eight men, seven women, and a three-year-old. Germans, British, and Americans predominated, but there were also Argentinians, Brazilians, Uruguayans, Chileans, and a lone Turk. Zeppelin travel, to many of them, had become routine.

  For first-timers like Mr. and Mrs. Brown, though, the sights were breathtaking. At night, black as pitch, the sea would sparkle owing to a multitude of phosphorescent creatures, and during the day shoals of flying fish skimmed over waves and dived like torpedoes. You could see rays, looking like butterflies, patrolling and playing beneath the water, as well as whales coming to the surface.

  Trippe had no complaints, and there were many things to be said in the Hindenburg’s favor, to be honest, but the trip had confirmed his own view, as he told Betty, that the end of the age of the airships was nigh. Within the next five years, he predicted, airships would be no more.9

  * * *

  —

  ECKENER WAS JUBILANT when he returned home. All the talk about the Millionaires’ Flight had been positive. Many of the participants, Eckener reported to DZR, had “expressed lively interest” in launching an American-based Zeppelin business.10

  In New York, Willy von Meister got to work. Since IZT had been dormant since Rentschler’s departure, he rebooted it with new directors and renamed it the American Zeppelin Transport Company (AZT). AZT would play a major role in the reinvigorated Zeppelin enterprise. First, it would handle all the investment capital that would doubtless flow into Goodyear-Zeppelin to build new airships. And second, and more important, it would serve as an independent partner to DZR. Henceforth, all Zeppelin flights to and from the United States would necessarily be a joint DZR/AZT venture.11

  That AZT had to be the fulcrum of operations was a key consideration too often lost, downplayed, or ignored by DZR in Germany. Lehmann could crow all he liked about running four German airships across the Atlantic, but success hinged on using American facilities, constructing an American terminal, getting permission to enter American airspace, and buying American helium—all of which required federal approval. And to get that you needed an all-American company—AZT.

  The real heart of the matter was that without Washington backstopping such an ambitious project with subsidies, no bank would lend additional funds or extend credit, no matter how much the millionaires had enjoyed their flight. Without that government money, there could be no Goodyear airships, and without American airships to disguise Zeppelin’s German origins, there would be no federal support.

  Eckener understood that this particular circle could become either virtuous or vicious, and warned his colleagues about the risks of the latter, but amid the celebratory mood at DZR’s annual meeting in November 1936, no one was listening
. Nor did they heed his caution that they must obtain federally approved helium to reassure American investors of the airships’ safety. Lehmann had instead sharply shut down any further discussion.12

  * * *

  —

  COINCIDING WITH THE DZR festivities, U.S. commerce secretary Daniel Roper received a letter. It was from a Michael Weinstein of Asbury Park, New Jersey, probably a real estate broker, who was serving as the “National Junior Vice-Commander-in-Chief” of the Jewish War Veterans of the United States (JWV).

  The JWV had been established in 1896 and now comprised around twenty-six thousand members. Since 1933 it had joined its Catholic partners to organize anti-Nazi marches and boycotts of German goods in order to highlight the persecution of religious minorities in Germany.

  Little could he have known it, but Weinstein’s unassuming letter would be the proximate cause of the downfall of Eckener’s entire Zeppelin scheme in America.

  In it, Weinstein mentioned that the AZR/DZR arrangement was no innocent “commercial treaty” between two companies. In fact, because DZR was a Nazified entity, each visit by the Hindenburg would serve Berlin’s purposes by “promot[ing] Nazi principles,” while Goodyear’s proposed American ships would in effect be German propaganda fronts.

  Until that moment, Roper had been encouraging the DZR/AZT scheme—he was the commerce secretary, after all, and his job was to foster such business deals—but now its dangerous implications had been rammed home. If the Department of Commerce backed the DZR/AZT venture, financially or otherwise, then it could look as if Roper had officially endorsed a political alliance with Berlin—and one, moreover, that stipulated no provision for ensuring religious freedom in Germany. The White House, Harold Ickes over at Interior, and the State Department would have a collective fit. (Roper also may have been worried about the reaction of his son-in-law, Frank Bohn, a senior figure in the fiercely anti-Nazi group the German-American League for Culture.)