Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  23. See Brooks, Zeppelin: Rigid Airships, tables in Appendix 3, “DELAG Operations in Germany, 1910–1914,” p. 198.

  24. Eckener, Count Zeppelin, p. 256.

  20. Z-Ships

  1. Lehmann, Zeppelin, p. 43.

  2. Meyer, “In Search of the Real Count Zeppelin,” p. 45. On Zeppelin’s militarism on the eve of war, see also Duggan and Meyer, Airships in International Affairs, p. 43.

  3. Quoted in Meyer, Count Zeppelin, p. 103.

  4. Kuhn, “Zeppelin und die Folgen,” Henry Cord Meyer Papers, Box 3, Folder 2, p. 27.

  5. Nitske, The Zeppelin Story, p. 87.

  6. Lehmann, Zeppelin, p. 50.

  7. Goldsmith, Zeppelin, p. 124.

  8. Lehmann, Zeppelin, p. 45; Nitske, The Zeppelin Story, p. 110; Italiaander, Ein Deutscher Namens Eckener, p. 124; for his reasons for volunteering, see letter to Maass, August 24, 1914, p. 12; Nielsen (trans. Chambers), The Zeppelin Story, p. 121.

  9. Lehmann, Zeppelin, p. 52.

  10. Nitske, The Zeppelin Story, p. 87.

  11. Lehmann, Zeppelin, p. 89; Robinson, Giants in the Sky, p. 82.

  12. Hartcup, Achievement of the Airship, p. 93.

  13. General Friedrich von Bernhardi, in his 1911 book Germany and the Next War, was typical in cautiously judging that air vehicles might be a “practical means of reconnoitering the enemy” but considered even that possibility an “open question.” Quoted in J. W. McConaughy, “Aeroplanes in War,” Munsey’s Magazine, August 1915, p. 465.

  14. W. Kaempffert, “Aircraft and the Future,” The Outlook, June 28, 1913, p. 456.

  15. Anon., “Practicability of the Contemplated Raid of Zeppelin Airships,” Current Opinion, December 1914, pp. 410–11; Anon., “Comparison of French and German Strength in Dirigible Airships,” Scientific American, August 16, 1913, pp. 126, 133; Anon., “Aircraft in War: How Aircraft Will Affect Strategy; the Air Strength of Europe,” Scientific American, September 5, 1914, p. 172.

  16. Abstract of article by Nicolas Flamel, La Nature (July 31, 1914), “The Use of Aluminium in War,” published in Scientific American, Supplement, no. 2073, September 25, 1915.

  17. C. Dienstbach, “The Prospects of Aerial Fighting in the Present War,” Scientific American, August 22, 1914, p. 131; and “Has the Fighting Dirigible Arrived?,” Scientific American, May 16, 1914, p. 412.

  18. Anon., “Aircraft in War,” p. 172; Kaempffert, “Aircraft and the Future,” p. 456; Dienstbach, “Has the Fighting Dirigible Arrived?” p. 412.

  19. Goldsmith, Zeppelin, p. 217; Brooks, Zeppelin: Rigid Airships, p. 73. Numbers vary slightly.

  20. Lehmann, Zeppelin, p. 46.

  21. Lehmann, Zeppelin, pp. 48, 55.

  22. Nitske, The Zeppelin Story, p. 88; Robinson, Giants in the Sky, pp. 85–86; Lehmann, Zeppelin, p. 49.

  23. Lehmann, Zeppelin, pp. 53–54; Anon., “The Effect of the Zeppelin Bombardment of Antwerp,” Scientific American, September 26, 1914, p. 248. On the difficulties of aiming bombs, see A. Buttner, “Throwing Bombs from Airships,” Scientific American, Supplement no. 2092, February 5, 1916, p. 85. For an eyewitness account of the raid from the ground, see Anon., “An Airship in the Field: A Personal Narrative from a German Observer,” Scientific American, March 27, 1915, p. 200.

  24. Quoted in Hartcup, Achievement of the Airship, p. 93.

  25. On Eckener’s views of Strasser, see his letters to Johanna, December 9 and 12, 1917, and February 12, 1918, printed in Italiaander, Ein Deutscher Namens Eckener, pp. 155–56. On Strasser’s appearance and habits, see Lehmann, Zeppelin, p. 189; on nicknames, see H. von Schiller, “A Million Miles in a Zeppelin,” Schiller Papers, p. 60. This lengthy memorandum seems to have been written sometime between 1937 and 1939.

  26. Letter, Eckener to Maass, August 24, 1914, printed in Italiaander, Ein Deutscher Namens Eckener, p. 127.

  27. Robinson, Giants in the Sky, p. 83; Lehmann, Zeppelin, p. 91; Nitske, The Zeppelin Story, p. 97.

  28. Letter, Eckener to Johanna, March 20, 1915, printed in Italiaander, Ein Deutscher Namens Eckener, pp. 134–35.

  29. Letter, Eckener to Colsman, April 1, 1915, printed in Italiaander, Ein Deutscher Namens Eckener, pp. 135–37. When one reporter later visited the fleet, he “heard expressions of enthusiasm over the latest developments in Zeppelins. I personally know that not many navy people were enthusiastic over them before the beginning of the war. I find now that Zeppelins are held in high estimation by many officers as auxiliaries for the navy.” K. Von Wiegand, “Zeppelins Have Won Confidence of German Navy,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 26, 1915.

  30. L. d’Orcy, “Cost of the War in Airships,” Scientific American, October 2, 1915, pp. 294, 307–8; Lehmann, Zeppelin, pp. 61, 134; Nitske, The Zeppelin Story, p. 90.

  31. Topping, When Giants Roamed the Sky, pp. 36–40; letter, Eckener to Zeppelin, March 26, 1915, printed in Italiaander, Ein Deutscher Namens Eckener, p. 128; L. D’Orcy, “Evolution of the Rigid Airship Design,” Scientific American, December 23, 1916, pp. 576, 579, 581; C. Dienstbach, “The War-Zeppelin,” Scientific American, June 10, 1916, p. 619.

  32. Brooks, Zeppelin: Rigid Airships, p. 78; Dürr, 25 Years of Zeppelin Airship Production, pp. 40–41; on wartime production issues, see Topping, When Giants Roamed the Sky, p. 44. For a general survey, see W. B. Stout, “Duraluminum,” Scientific American, March 1922, p. 196.

  33. Robinson, Giants in the Sky, pp. 101, 137–38; Brooks, Zeppelin: Rigid Airships, p. 94.

  21. Pirates of the Air

  1. See “The Disappointing Zeppelin,” Literary Digest, January 23, 1915, p. 144.

  2. Quoted in A. Freedman, “Zeppelin Fictions and the British Home Front,” Journal of Modern Literature 27 (2004), no. 3, pp. 50–51. See also Anon., “Practicability of the Contemplated Raid of Zeppelin Airships,” Current Opinion, December 1914, pp. 401–11.

  3. P. Scott, “As a British Admiral Saw It,” North American Review, July 1919, p. 65; on the inadequacies of guns at this stage, see C. Dienstbach, “Aircraft Artillery and Bomb-Dropping,” Scientific American, February 6, 1915, pp. 126–27.

  4. Anon., “The Zeppelin Raid into England,” Literary Digest, February 6, 1915, p. 235.

  5. Robinson, Giants in the Sky, p. 92; M. Dudley, “The War Told in Medals,” Munsey’s Magazine, April 1918, pp. 605–15; Anon., “The German Mind as Betrayed in War-Medals,” Literary Digest, February 9, 1918, pp. 27–28.

  6. Quoted in Anon., “The Zeppelin Raid into England,” Literary Digest, February 6, 1915, p. 235.

  7. The General Staff and Admiralty in Berlin argued their case in a statement widely published abroad: “There is nothing in international law, or in any international agreements, against [bombing]. The standpoint taken is that London is a defended city, that its bombardment by Zeppelins would constitute no violation of the laws of war…any more than if London were under the guns of the German Army or Navy, and that the docks, shipyards, arsenals, barracks, railway stations, Government buildings, military establishments, buildings where aerial guns are mounted, etc., are all, by laws of war, proper targets for Zeppelins.” See “A Zeppelin Raid on London,” Irish Times, April 2, 1915.

  8. Interview by K. von Wiegand, “Zeppelins Have Come to Stay, Says Inventor,” The Bemidji Daily Pioneer, February 9 and 10, 1915.

  9. For instance, E. Campbell, Zeppelins: The Past and the Future (St. Albans, U.K.: Campfield Press, 1918), p. 13.

  10. This section is based on A. D. Harvey, “Against London: A Zeppelin Officer’s Account,” [memoir of Oberleutnant zur See Hans Gebauer], Air Power History, Summer 2010, pp. 16–18; Robinson, Giants in the Sky, pp. 95–102, 130; Nitske, The Zeppelin Story, pp. 99–101, 107; Lehmann, Zeppelin, pp. 64, 67–68, 148–50, 156; Goldsmith, Zeppelin, pp. 218–19; interview by Karl von Wiegand of Lieutenant Commander Mathy, “Not a Zeppelin Lost i
n Raids,” Boston Daily Globe, September 22, 1915, and a reprint, “How I Bombed London,” Peking Gazette (from the Daily Mail and the New York World), October 25, 1915; Anon., “The Thrills of Air-Raiding,” Aircraft, July 1, 1915; A. Seim (trans. C. W. Sykes), “The Rigger Tells a Tale,” in R. Hedin (ed.), The Zeppelin Reader: Stories, Poems, and Songs From the Age of Airships (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), pp. 77–80.

  11. L. R. Freeman, “Sharks of the Air over London,” Current Opinion, June 1916; F. L. Mayhew, “Report from Royal Engineers,” in Hedin (ed.), The Zeppelin Reader, p. 90; “Zeppelin Bombs,” Scientific American, Supplement no. 2084, December 11, 1915, p. 375; P. Maxwell, “The Death-Ship in the Sky,” Forum, July 1916.

  12. One option, mysteriously not acted upon, called for airplane pilots to martyr themselves by ramming airships. See J. A. Steinmetz and C. Dienstbach, “The Air Bomb: A New Method of Mining the Air and of Thwarting an Attack by Flying Machine or Dirigible: The Inventor’s Explanation and a Critic’s Objection,” Scientific American, August 15, 1915, pp. 113–14. More promising was a French scheme to use a network of huge megaphones to pick up and locate the sound of approaching airships and then use triangulation to calculate their position and altitude. Anon., “Aerial Range-Finding with Electrical ‘Ears,’ ” Scientific American, October 30, 1915, p. 377. The British, on similar lines, developed “sound locators” employing blind men, whose fineness of hearing was considered acute, to listen to large conical horns to detect direction and range, but they did not work as well as had been hoped. On this matter, see diary entries, October 14, November 2, 3, 7, 1917, Ashmore Papers 66/75/1, Imperial War Museum, London; A. Rawlinson, The Defence of London, 2nd ed. (London: Andrew Melrose, 1923), pp. 108, 112. On average, the ear’s range is 4.49 miles; sound locators were only able to increase this by 1.29 miles. Table 7.1, in R. Burns, “Air Defence, Some Problems,” in Radar Development to 1945, ed. Burns (London: Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1988), p. 116.

  13. Report by J. T. Babington, approx. September 27, 1915; letter, Rawlinson to Percy Scott, September 25, 1915, AIR 1/2316/223/19/24, Public Record Office, London. See P. Scott, “The Defence of London Against Zeppelins, 1915 to 1916,” The Strand Magazine, May 1919, pp. 349–54. Much of the material in this section is based on my “Radar Strategy: The Air Dilemma in British Politics, 1932–1937,” Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University (1996), ch. 1.

  14. L. R. Freeman, “The Passing of a Zeppelin,” The Living Age, January 20, 1917.

  15. On parachutes, see Nitske, The Zeppelin Story, p. 104.

  16. O. Mieth, “Shot Down by the British: A Zeppelin Officer’s Story,” The Living Age, April 17, 1926, pp. 143–47; Lehmann, Zeppelin, pp. 164–66. Lehmann’s and Mieth’s accounts differ in some minor ways.

  17. Interview by Karl von Wiegand of Lieutenant Commander Mathy, “Not a Zeppelin Lost in Raids,” Boston Daily Globe, September 22, 1915.

  18. Mathy, quoted at wwi.lib.byu.edu/​index.php?title=Mathy&redirect=no.

  19. W. Forest, “London’s War Slogan ‘Business as Usual’ Disrupted by First Zeppelin Raid,” New York Herald Tribune, May 22, 1932.

  20. M. MacDonagh, “In London During the Great War, October 1, 1916,” in The Zeppelin Reader, ed. Hedin, pp. 98–100. Those assigned to guard the wreckage often made the biggest profits from selling souvenirs. When some men of the Royal Buckinghamshire Hussars were given the unpleasant task of “gathering up the crew,” who had fallen into marshy ground, “there were indentations in the soft soil of the shape of their bodies, arms, legs, everything—a mould of the bodies really.” But the good news was that when their officers weren’t looking, they flogged sticks of “wicker chairs, loaves of German bread and bits of burnt silk and pieces of aluminum” to collectors and sightseers. “It kept us in beer for months!” said one. C. Williams, “Report of the Royal Buckinghamshire Hussars, September 25, 1916,” in The Zeppelin Reader, ed. Hedin, pp. 94–95.

  21. Robinson, Giants in the Sky, p. 123.

  22. Campbell, Zeppelins: The Past and the Future, pp. 32–33; “Friedrichshafen in Mourning,” The New York Times, October 24, 1917.

  23. See Flight Lieutenant Faulkner’s comment, quoted in Anon., “The Answer to the Zeppelin,” Literary Digest, February 10, 1917; Robinson, Giants in the Sky, p. 125; Nitske, The Zeppelin Story, p. 97; “Flying by Night,” Literary Digest, November 4, 1916, pp. 1170–71.

  24. Robinson, Giants in the Sky, pp. 127, 130; Nitske, The Zeppelin Story, p. 107; Hartcup, Achievement of the Airship, p. 100. On hypoxia and the 12,000-foot principle, see Baumgarten, “Aviation Medicine: Its Past, Present, and Future,” in From Airships to Airbus, ed. Trimble, volume 2, p. 80; see also D. T. Courtwright, Sky as Frontier: Adventure, Aviation, and Empire (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005), p. 41.

  25. Nitske, The Zeppelin Story, p. 110; Robinson, Giants in the Sky, p. 138.

  26. V. Woolf, The Question of Things Happening: Letters, 1912–1922, ed. N. Nicolson (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), p. 214.

  27. Lehmann ghostwrote, or advised the ghostwriter of, an article by Paul Litchfield, “Lighter-Than-Air Craft,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 131 (1927), May, p. 81. See also Lehmann, Zeppelin, p. 198.

  28. For a typical claim that Zeppelins forced Britain to devote significant resources to home defense, see Nitske, The Zeppelin Story, p. 106. On British counter-bomber defenses, see W. Raleigh and H. A. Jones, The War in the Air (London, 6 vols.), cited in J. Griffin, Glass Houses and Modern War (London: Chatto & Windus, 1938), p. 56.

  29. The British official historian notes that in 51 airship raids about 196 tons of bombs were dropped, killing 557 people, injuring 1,358, and inflicting “material damage estimated at £1,527,585.” Quoted in Hartcup, Achievement of the Airship, p. 104. The figure for Zeppelin costs comes from Campbell, Zeppelins: The Past and the Future, pp. 20–21.

  30. Figures vary slightly, though the effect is the same. See Robinson, Giants in the Sky, Appendix A, “The 161 Rigid Airships Built and Flown, 1897–1940,” pp. 330–39; L. d’Orcy, “German Airship Construction During the War,” Table II, “German Airship Losses, 1914–1918,” Scientific American, May 1921, p. 458. Vissering claims there were 88; see Vissering, Zeppelin, p. 24.

  31. Cited in Anon., “Germany’s Dominion of the Air,” Literary Digest, September 16, 1916, p. 660; British figures are in Anon., “Do Zeppelins Pay?” Literary Digest, October 7, 1916, pp. 880–81. Of the British tally, a French military expert named Gustave Hervé chirped, “Why, a single machine gun, properly placed on the day of an assault, has disposed of as many infantrymen in half an hour!” Quoted in Anon., “More and More Zeppelins,” Literary Digest, December 2, 1916, p. 1458.

  32. When the American William Cooper Stevenson was traveling through German-occupied France he happened to run into an old friend, a Captain Schroeder, who introduced him to a lieutenant assigned to LZ-74. Stevenson asked the lieutenant, who had invited him to come aboard for the next raid, why he bothered with the bombing when it accomplished so little, only to be told that the British censor had been blacking out reports of real damage. W. C. Stevenson, “Raiding England from the Sky,” Outlook, October 25, 1916.

  33. “Eight Million Cubic Feet of Manufactured Gas Burned in a Few Seconds, Lighting Up All of London,” American Gas Engineering Journal, June 28, 1919. In another instance, the acquisition from an intelligence source of the transcript of a House of Lords debate in March 1916 was music to German ears when it reached Berlin. During the proceedings, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu asserted that two major factories, one manufacturing munitions and the other airplanes, had missed destruction by “only a few yards.” Report found among Eckener’s papers, printed in Italiaander, Ein Deutscher Namens Eckener, pp. 131–32.

  34. On the tragic story of L-19, see “The Last Messages of the Doomed Zeppelin L-19 Crew,” The Fatherland, Octo
ber 18, 1916; Lehmann, Zeppelin, p. 93; Anon., “A Zeppelin Tragedy,” Literary Digest, March 11, 1916, pp. 634–35. The Fatherland was a pro-German American newspaper.

  35. Quoted in Campbell, Zeppelins: The Past and the Future, p. 27.

  36. The chief of the naval staff informed the kaiser on April 11, 1916, of the results of a series of raids on England between March 21 and April 1: “At Grimsby…a battleship…was heavily damaged by a bomb, and had to be beached. At Kensington an aeroplane hangar was wrecked, near Tower Bridge [in London] a transport ship damaged, in Great Tower Street a factory wrecked….It was reported that a big fire had broken out at West India Docks, and that at Tillbury Docks a munition boat exploded (400 killed).” Again, an impressive achievement—but not a word of it was true. Quoted in Robinson, Giants in the Sky, pp. 115–16.

  37. On the maps, see Schiller’s letter to Wilbur Cross, November 14, 1961, p. 3, attached to Schiller, “A Million Miles in a Zeppelin,” Schiller Papers.

  38. Harvey, “Against London: A Zeppelin Officer’s Account,” p. 16.

  39. Lehmann, Zeppelin, p. 65.

  40. Robinson, Giants in the Sky, pp. 104–5.

  41. Letter, Eckener to Colsman, February 3, 1916, printed in Italiaander, Ein Deutscher Namens Eckener, pp. 137–38.

  42. Letter, Eckener to Colsman, February 3, 1916, printed in Italiaander, Ein Deutscher Namens Eckener, pp. 137–38; Eckener, My Zeppelins, pp. 17–18.

  43. Letter, Eckener to Johanna, December 8, 1917, printed in Italiaander, Ein Deutscher Namens Eckener, p. 155.

  44. Letters, Eckener to Johanna, June 25, 1917, and December 8, 1917, in Italiaander, Ein Deutscher Namens Eckener, pp. 147, 155.

  45. Letter, Eckener to Johanna, May 25, 1917, printed in Italiaander, Ein Deutscher Namens Eckener, pp. 140–41.

  46. Robinson, Giants in the Sky, pp. 136–39; letter, Eckener to Johanna, August 6, 1918, printed in Italiaander, Ein Deutscher Namens Eckener, p. 159.