The Sea Hunters II: More True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks

by Clive Cussler

  Seven hours after the first attempt, Akron finally moored at Camp Kearney.

  * * *

  Akron traveled north from San Diego to San Pedro. For the next few weeks, the airship would take part in training exercises off the West Coast of the United States. On June 6, the weather was right for the trip east to Lakehurst. From San Pedro to Banning, California, over the Salton Sea. Then south to Yuma, Phoenix, Tucson, and Douglas, Arizona. Next came El Paso, Odessa, Midland, Big Spring, and Abilene, Texas. Across the state line and past Shreveport, Louisiana. Mississippi and Alabama, a stop at Parris Island, South Carolina, and then the return to Lakehurst.

  Akron had been away thirty-eight days and had traveled more than seventeen thousand miles.

  * * *

  As the new year dawned, Akron received her third captain in nineteen months as Commander Frank McCord assumed leadership of the blimp. McCord wasted no time on the ground — two hours after assuming control, Akron set off for a cruise to Miami.

  Throughout January and February, McCord kept up a full flight schedule.

  On March 4, Akron flew over the inauguration of President Franklin Roosevelt. That same night, she returned to Lakehurst and cold temperatures. The cold held for nearly a week, curtailing flight operations. As soon as it warmed enough, McCord set off for the warmer climes of Florida and the Bahamas. The grueling schedule continued throughout the rest of the month.

  Then came the fickle winds of April.

  * * *

  Akron lifted off from Lakehurst on April 3,1933, at 7:28 P.M.

  Commander Frank McCord was in charge, and he was assisted by Lieutenant Commander Herbert Wiley as his executive officer, as well as Lieutenant Dugan as his engineering officer. The crew would consist of seventy-six officers and men, including Rear Admiral Moffett, who wanted to see Akron in operation firsthand.

  The temperature at liftoff was 41 degrees Fahrenheit, and the barometer read 29.72. Akron was carrying 73,600 gallons of fuel, enough for six days aloft, though this cruise was scheduled for forty-eight hours. Because of the fog, plane operations had just been canceled. As Akron lifted from the pad then turned her bow east, one of the pilots who was securing his Curtiss on the runway turned and stared up at the giant blimp. She was a beauty, no doubt about that — her silver fuselage at bow and stem was lit by the red and blue of the ground lights, while the red and green of her running lights added a festive touch as well. The pilot watched as the airship ascended. In seconds, the upper part of the hull was barely visible in the fog; by the time a full minute had passed, only a hazy outline of the lower hull and control car remained in sight. Then that was gone.

  “Set a course east to Philadelphia,” McCord instructed the navigator. “The weather report indicates they have only scattered clouds.”

  “Aye, Captain,” the navigator said.

  Less than an hour later, Akron passed over Philadelphia, finding the visibility fair to good. In the control car, McCord stared at the latest weather report. A thunderstorm was being reported in Washington, D.C., and was said to be moving north and east toward them. McCord decided on a course east by southeast to skirt the storm. If all worked according to plan, he would miss the storm’s fury and arrive off Newport, Rhode Island, for a test scheduled for seven the next morning.

  The test would never happen.

  * * *

  Saint Elmo’s fire. The brush discharge of electricity was dancing from the flagstaff of Phoebus. A flaming phenomenon that never signaled calm or comfort, a sign of disturbances in the heavens, a beacon of foul weather as sure as a snowball in the face.

  Captain Carl Dalldorf burped as his ship rocked, tasting the sour tang of a dill pickle. Phoebus, a motor tanker registered in Danzig, Germany, was crewed by Germans. Dalldorf and his crew had spent a fine weekend in upper Manhattan, mingling with the German population and frequenting the Bierstubes. Casting off from Pier 6 at 2 P.M., Phoebus was bound for Tampico, Mexico. The ship had spent most of the afternoon and evening in a pea-soup fog. Now, just before 11 P.M., lightning began to strike the water around the vessel, while thunder reverberated loudly from the heavens.

  Dalldorf stared at his barometer. There had been a sharp drop.

  He knew the signs — this was a storm that bore watching.

  * * *

  Up the Delaware River, starboard back across New Jersey, hit the water near Asbury Park — that was the course. But the storm kept advancing.

  “Get me the latest weather map,” McCord said, just after 11 P.M.

  Wiley headed for the aerological office above the control car and consulted with Lieutenant Herb Wescoat. Wiley liked Wescoat, who, unlike some of the meteorological officers Wiley had served with, had at least an inkling of a sense of humor.

  “What have you got?” Wiley asked.

  “We received about two-thirds of the map — it came in code,” Wescoat replied, handing Wiley the copy.

  “This doesn’t look too promising,” Wiley noted.

  “No,” Wescoat said, “it doesn’t.”

  “Do you have any recommendations for the captain?” Wiley asked.

  “I’d ask him to land as soon as possible,” Wescoat said logically.

  “I doubt he’ll do that with Admiral Moffett aboard,” Wiley said.

  “Hmm,” Wescoat said slowly. “Then I’d recommend we all pray.”

  * * *

  Captain Dalldorf was due to remain on watch until midnight. By the look of the storm, he might stay on duty a while longer. A rogue wave had just rolled over Phoebus’s bow, a most rare occurrence. In addition, not five minutes before, his second in command had come across a sailor lying in the rain on the walkway outside the pilothouse. After he was revived, the man explained that when he’d gone to grip a handrail, an electrical charge had shocked him and thrown him back six feet, where he’d struck his head. That was just bizarre. Lightning usually passes through ships, leaving no damage. Dalldorf guessed that because Phoebus was carrying a load of truck batteries to Mexico, maybe the pooled energy had somehow created the shock.

  Whatever the case, the storm and the general feeling in the air were disturbing.

  “Bring me some more coffee,” Dalldorf ordered a crewman. Then he lit an American-made cigarette and took a puff.

  * * *

  They were minutes from death and miles from safety, as April 3 became April 4.

  A lightning bolt streaked through the sky, and Akron was lit as though it were in the beam of a spotlight. At just that instant, the control car lurched from side to side.

  “Drop ballast,” Commander McCord ordered.

  A second later, the helmsman lost control of the rudder as the wires parted. The wheel began to spin wildly. Five squawks rang out over the telephone system, signaling landing positions. Akron continued to lose altitude.

  “Drop more ballast,” McCord ordered.

  Just then, a horrible shrieking was heard from the hull of Akron. The ship’s structure was breaking apart. The upper fin had been lost to the violence of the storm, and the strain from the loss of the fin broke frame girders. Some of the broken girders punctured the helium bags. Akron began to leak like a water-filled balloon poked by a pin. The airship continued to descend.

  Wiley stared from a small window in the control car, as the blimp lowered through the thick fog. At about two hundred feet, he first caught sight of the waves below.

  “I see the water approaching,” he said ominously.

  No one in the control car replied.

  Throughout Akron, the seventy-plus men made preparations for a water landing. Those with time fastened their coats firmly; a few managed to grab some light personal items. One scribbled a note to loved ones and stuffed it into the pipe forming one end of his hammock, never to be recovered. Many simply awaited the inevitable.

  Akron sagged lower, her bones broken and her lungs punctured.

  Then, at a distance of less than fifty feet above the waves, she stopped and hung in the air for a moment. There
was no doubt she was a beautiful ship. A second later, a final lightning bolt lit her gleaming silver hull and surrounded the ship with a glow of electrical energy.

  Then, like a rock dropped from a bridge, Akron plunged down into the ocean.

  * * *

  “The lights have disappeared,” the lookout declared.

  “Are you certain?” Dalldorf asked.

  “Yes, sir,” the lookout noted, “they dropped below the horizon a minute ago.”

  “It’s probably an aircraft,” Dalldorf said. “Fix our position.”

  The navigator took a minute to make notes on a sheet of paper. “Latitude 39 degrees, 40 minutes north; longitude 73 degrees, 40 minutes west,” he said.

  Just then his second in command burst through the door of the pilothouse.

  “The smell of gasoline is very heavy,” he said. “It’s all around us in the water.”

  “Prepare to lower lifeboat number one,” Dalldorf said, “and stand by to rescue survivors.”

  Phoebus remained until first light, when the Coast Guard arrived. Three men were taken aboard the German vessel. They were the only survivors of the crash of Akron.

  II

  No Surfing in New Jersey 1986

  Once I began researching early airships and their often tragic endings, I became hooked on their fascinating stories. The stories of Akron and her sister rigid airships Macon and Shenandoah tell of a bright future turned dark when all three fell out of the sky and crashed. I wondered if any of their wreckage had gone undiscovered.

  Shenandoah’s crash site in Noble County, Ohio, is well known and marked in a farmer’s field by a memorial. Macon went down in deep water off Point Sur, California, in 1937. A search was launched for her resting site because of a desire to find the Curtiss aircraft that she’d taken into the sea with her. An expensive deepwater project was successful in finding her remains and a few of her aircraft, but none was salvaged. Video pictures of the wreckage revealed that the planes were too damaged and corroded by the sea to be restored, so they were left to rest on the bottom of the Pacific.

  That left Akron.

  I wish I could write an electrifying tale of adventure about finding Akron that would fire the imagination and leave a lasting impression. But the search was nothing but a struggle against a violent and unrelenting world. A search of the archives at the Washington Library put me on the track of the salvage vessels that recovered pieces of Akron’s wreckage and brought it to shore on a barge. An examination of the log of the Falcon, the famous navy salvage boat that had raised the submarine S-51 under the leadership of Commander Edward Ellsburg in 1925, and worked as a dive and survey boat for thirty years, put me on the track leading to the Akron’s grave. The logbook gave the coordinates where Falcon moored. Her position was reasonably close to the main debris field that was twenty-seven miles offshore from Beach Haven, New Jersey.

  The volunteer NUMA team assembled in Beach Haven in July of 1986. Most came from Long Island, New York. A1 and Laura Ecke came with their thirty-four-foot boat. Dr. Ken Kamler acted as team physician and diver, along with Mike Duffy, a seasoned oceanographer. Zeff and Peggy Loria also came along to lend a hand, set up logistics, and run things when I had to go home a day early to begin a book tour. My good old pal, dependable Bill Shea, who suffered the seasickness of the damned on our voyages around the North Sea, also came along.

  We gathered at a motel on the beach, a short drive from the marina where the Eckes’ boat was docked. The lady at the desk stood nearly six feet tall, her blond hair pulled back into a tight bun. She stared at me through steely piercing eyes that I swore were focusing on a calendar hanging on the wall directly behind my head.

  “Ja, vas du you vant?”

  I should have known I was in for it. She had the face of the town rat catcher.

  “I have a reservation. My name is Cussler.”

  She snapped open a ledgerlike book with razor precision and perused the names. “Ja, Cussler, a good German name. You will fill out the register.”

  I signed.

  “Your credit card.” It was a demand, not a request.

  She made an imprint and handed back the card, but not before biting one corner as if it were a counterfeit coin. “Now the orders.”

  I looked at her. “Orders?”

  “You will not drink alcohol in your room. You will have no parties in your room. You will not bring animals into your room. You will not smoke in your room. You will not make loud sounds or play loud music in your room. You will not eat in your room.”

  “Can I watch TV in my room?”

  “Twenty-five cents for ten minutes. There is a slot next to the power button.”

  “Can I use the bathroom?” I said, in a pathetic attempt to beleaguer her.

  “If you are hygienically neat.”

  “But can I sleep in the bed?”

  A dark scowl crossed her face as she caught on. “If you do not adhere to the orders, you will have to stay somewhere else.”

  “My friends are here.”

  “That’s your problem.”

  I couldn’t resist one more. “What time do we fall out in formation for roll call?”

  “Here is your key. Room 27.”

  “That’s upstairs,” I complained. “I’d prefer a room on ground level.”

  “We do not play musical chairs,” she said, her hostility rising.

  I could see it was a lost cause, so I picked up my luggage and hiked up the stairs. The room was dark when I entered. Hanging over the bed was a print of a man standing behind a desk. I walked closer, thinking he might have a spit curl over one eye and a clipped broom mustache.

  But, no, it was Elvis Presley. I’d never seen a picture of him standing behind a desk before.

  I unpacked and met the rest of the gang at dinner. We met several local divers, but none were familiar with Akron. The first three days we encountered miserable weather and stayed ashore. I might have risked the rough seas. I had certainly run search lanes dragging detection gear through much worse in the North Sea, but except for Bill, who would go despite his suffering, this was not a crew who relished eight- to ten-foot waves.

  An unforeseen problem was Ecke’s boat. Though a nice and comfortable craft for short day trips, it had only one engine. If it faltered in a gale, forget it.

  Stormy weather or not, since I was a California beach bum and enjoyed body surfing, I put on my swim trunks and headed to the beach, thinking the storm might kick up some good waves. Never having surfed the East Coast, I was stunned to find that the waves didn’t come up much above my knees, a condition that ranges from the Florida Keys until Long Island, New York. I went back to the motel, sat under an umbrella by the postage stamp-sized pool, and read the New York Times.

  At last, after we enjoyed the preeminent lifestyle of Beach Haven in the rain for three days, the sun appeared, and our jolly band of sea hunters set sail from the dock at Little Egg Harbor and cruised out to sea. With only one engine, the boat drove through the waves with the sensation of a hacksaw cutting marble. It took us four hours to run the twenty-seven miles to our search grid.

  The instant we arrived, Captain Ecke peered at some dark clouds on the eastern horizon and proclaimed, “We have to return to port. There’s a storm coming.”

  “Storm, hell!” I protested. “We just got here.”

  I argued, pleaded, and begged, finally cajoling him into remaining on station. The storm, as I predicted, continued north and we had calm seas for the search. The sidescan sonar went out and we began running lines. After four hours, not so much as a beer bottle could be seen protruding from the surface. Then the sonar recorded a strange anomaly, and I sent Mike Duffy and Dr. Kamler over the side to investigate. Ten minutes later, they surfaced and said the anomaly was nothing but a grotesque rock. Could the sands have buried Akron? I didn’t think so. The divers said the bottom had the consistency of gravel and seemed quite firm.

  With a four-hour trip back to port staring us in the face
, I called it quits for the day. We pulled up anchor and chugged home. Later, before we all headed out to a seafood restaurant for dinner, Ecke and I sat at a patio table and studied the charts to see if there was a discrepancy in the positions given by the navy salvage ships. No gleam of joy could have pierced the dismal gloom when I realized Harold had mistakenly converted the Falcon’s logbook coordinates to the wrong LORAN coordinates. We had searched over a mile away from where we were supposed to be.

  When I called Harold on the error, he became indignant and shrugged his shoulders, as if the entire wasted day were a voyage down the lazy river in the noonday sun. Since he was supplying the boat, I bit my tongue and slinked off to the restaurant, wondering about the meaning of life.

  The weather looked good the next morning, so we tried again. Déjà vu. We had no sooner arrived at the search grid than Harold swept his hand toward another front of storm clouds and turned the boat back to shore. These flights of fancy were beginning to get to me, but this time Harold had a point. The Coast Guard hailed us over the radio and urged us to find a safe harbor.

  We sailed into the Beach Haven Channel just as the squall struck with fifty-mile-an-hour winds. Harold was in Nirvana. I’ve never seen a man in the throes of ecstasy before. He seemed to experience an unrestrained joy from motoring four hours out and four hours back without accomplishing anything. Still, I had to hand it to him. Being a fireman, he was as hardy as they come.

  The third day was the charm. Clear sky and calm seas. We arrived at the proper coordinates and began searching. We quickly began to record debris scattered around the seafloor eighty feet under our keel. The divers went down and found a galley stove from the dirigible, as well as twisted duraluminum beams. No more were we broken and saddened souls.

  I had to fly out the next morning to begin a tour for my latest book. The crew, bless them, then went out again with Zeff Loria running the sidescan, and found the aircraft’s lower fin lying on the bottom. Divers searched a small part of the seven-hundred-foot debris field and found piles of twisted beams and support frames half-buried in the seafloor. No aircraft were visible, since none were aboard when Akron crashed into the sea. There were few intact artifacts left from the great zeppelin, whose hull was only a hundred feet shorter than Titanic. Her career was short, but she and her sisters had made a lasting impression on the history of lighter-than-air aircraft. It was sad and unfortunate that the great airships could not have been a major stepping-stone into air transportation, but most all met with tragic fates. Now the graves of Akron, Macon, and Shenandoah are all accounted for. I wish that someday professional archaeologists would return to Akron, retrieve her artifacts, and put them on display in the museum at Lakehurst, New Jersey.