In the falling control car, the men tumbled into one another and struggled helplessly, choking on the gas fumes and smoke as they roasted. It struck a tree and the wireless room was torn off, with the radioman and Mieth inside. Mieth only remembered “a thrill of horror as I opened my eyes and saw myself surrounded by a sea of flames and red-hot metal beams” before blacking out. The radioman’s neck was snapped, but a broken-legged, burned Mieth woke up in a hospital to hear a friendly British voice asking whether he wanted a cigarette.16
Predictably, a gallows humor prevailed aboard the Zeppelins. When once asked if he carried a medic aboard his airship, Captain Mathy quipped that “if we were brought down [in enemy territory] I guess there would be doctors there if we were to need any, which would be unlikely.”17 The joke disguised Mathy’s own troubled psychology. He felt that “it is only a question of time before we join the rest. Everyone admits that they feel it. Our nerves are ruined by mistreatment. If anyone should say that he was not haunted by visions of burning airships, then he would be a braggart.”18
Mathy himself was shot down on the night of October 1, 1916, his final act being to jump from the control car.19 According to Michael MacDonagh, who went to see the crash site, “I saw the imprint of his body clearly defined in the stubby grass. There was a round hole for the head, then deep impressions for the trunk, with outstretched arms, and finally the widely separated legs. Life was in him when he was picked up, but the spark soon went out” of the “first and most ruthless of these Pirates of the Air.”20
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WHEN IT CAME to administering the killing thrust, the British had discovered, the most lethal method was the airplane, matador of the skies. On September 2, 1916, Strasser sent sixteen airships—the largest raid of the war—to deliver a grand knockout blow, only to be frustrated by Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson’s shooting one down in an incendiary-armed B.E.2c fighter.21 The gigantic fireball that erupted so discouraged the other commanders that they turned tail and left. A single man in a single airplane had defeated an airship armada. Between that night and the end of 1916, seven more airships were shot down by airplanes.
In a rare moment of unblinkered acceptance of reality, Strasser, stunned by the losses, called a halt to the raids. They would not resume until October 1917, when a thirteen-strong fleet equipped with the newest models dared again to venture across the English Channel. They inflicted more than eighty casualties, but five Zeppelins were destroyed. Friedrichshafen, where most of their crews had lived, went into mourning.22
So awful were the losses that Eckener could scarcely believe that Strasser refused to give up. In fact, he had ordered four new airships. It was madness, thought Eckener; the air war was already lost.
By 1917–18, it was obvious that airplanes had utterly eclipsed the Zeppelins’ initial offensive advantage. A typical 1915 fighter had required forty-five minutes to climb to 10,000 feet, for instance, but current models could hit 15,000 feet in less than eight, allowing them plenty of time and fuel to hunt raiders.23 Zeppelins could still stay out of harm’s way by flying high, but not for much longer. By 1917, Zeppelins could operate between 16,000 and 18,000 feet, but the newest British fighter, the Sopwith Camel, could reach 17,300 feet.
In response, Dürr and his colleagues designed new classes of “height-climbers” that raised the ceiling by stripping Zeppelins of every ounce of extra weight. Hull girders were shaved to their thinnest feasible width, the control car was made even smaller, the crew’s quarters were eliminated, and most of the machine guns were removed—saving about seven thousand pounds and allowing a maximum height of 20,700 feet.
Unfortunately, human frailty became their weak point. The crews, from 12,000 feet and up for prolonged periods, relied on oxygen masks to avoid hypoxia, or altitude sickness. Impurities in the gas caused intense nausea and vertigo, but anyone who removed the mask, as many did, would feel at first a throbbing in the teeth and blurred vision, followed by an expansion of abdominal gases—the symphony of farting aboard a Zeppelin was something to behold—before exhibiting symptoms similar to those of carbon monoxide poisoning or a severe hangover. Whereas fighter pilots stayed up so high only for short periods, continued exposure by airship crews could fatally result in fluid in the lungs and brain swelling (leading to bladder and bowel dysfunction, loss of coordination, paralysis, and confusion). At some point, the Zeppelins simply could not climb any higher without killing their crews.24
Worse, in the spring of 1918, the British devised a rudimentary aircraft carrier that allowed their long-range planes to hit Zeppelin bases. In July of that year, the Tondern sheds were bombed by seven sea-launched Sopwith Camels. Now the Zeppelins were soft targets not just in the air over Britain but on the ground in Germany itself.25
So impotent, indeed, had the Zeppelins become that in January 1918, the novelist (and grinding snob) Virginia Woolf complained that the desultory raids were not so much dangerous as mildly annoying—in the sense that when she was obliged to take shelter she had to talk to the servants, which she found “boring.”26
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WHY DID GERMANY continue with the raids for the duration of the war when they were clearly unable to achieve their goal of bringing Britain to its knees? The simple answer is that German airshipmen, with the major exception of Eckener, were convinced that they were bringing Britain to its knees. Among the Old Guard it was an article of faith that a “million” soldiers—as Ernst Lehmann was still claiming as late as 1927—had to be kept in Britain to counter the Zeppelin threat. These men, who would otherwise have been sent to France to fight, were a huge drain on the British war economy—all thanks to the mighty Zeppelin.27
But these numbers were a delusion. If anything, Germany spent more of its own blood and treasure on quixotically pursuing the airship campaign than the British did in withstanding it. In June 1918, there were precisely 6,136 men dedicated to fending off the bomber menace—a drop in the bucket relative to the two million British Empire soldiers on the Golgotha of the Western Front.28 Put another way, the number of able-bodied men working in the Friedrichshafen facilities alone doubled that assigned to defend Britain against their products.
The reality was that over the course of the war Britain suffered £1.5 million worth of property damage—not an insignificant sum. But on the other hand, in early 1918 one expert estimated that Germany had hitherto spent up to £13.25 million on airship construction, maintenance, personnel, hangars, gas production, and fuel, thus making the Zeppelins nearly nine times costlier to their owners than to the assailed.29
The losses were enormous. Of the ninety-one Zeppelins built and operated during the war there were just sixteen left (including an unfinished experimental model, some training ships, and a few obsolete ones) at the Armistice in November 1918. The list of the fates that the others experienced makes for depressing reading: “shot down in flames,” “forced down,” “dismantled,” “destroyed in explosion,” “wrecked in landing,” “burned accidentally,” “bombed in shed,” “rammed a mountain,” “crashed,” “lost in North Sea,” and so forth.30
What the Germans received in exchange was hardly worth the effort. In terms of loss of life, when in May 1915 the submarine U-20 sank the Lusitania, its captain, Walther Schwieger, inflicted more than twice as many fatalities with a single torpedo as did three years of Zeppelin raiding (1,198 to 557). Indeed, deaths among the Zeppelin crews came close to equaling the number of their victims.
Nevertheless, the German bombing campaign continued almost to the very end, motivated by an unshakable conviction that the raids were inflicting enormous damage on the British economy and morale—an impression only strengthened by seemingly authoritative articles in the German press. The Magdeburgische Zeitung, for instance, reported that two raids, on August 1 and 3, 1916, killed and wounded some 21,000 people, yet British figures showed that to date the tota
l number of fatalities in all raids was 334 civilians and 50 soldiers.31
The Germans dismissed any British claims contradicting their doctrine of faith as disinformation, and in this they were not completely wrong.32 The Zeppelin raids did cause more damage than the British censor let on: A raid near a major gas facility at Greenwich on January 19, 1917, for instance, combusted eight million cubic feet of gas, wrecking it so completely that even two and a half years later it had not been fully repaired.33
But this was a rarity. More often, the censor didn’t have to bother spinning a story, for the great majority of Zeppelin raids were a complete waste of time, money, and life. In early 1916, for example, when L-19 set out on its first and only mission, its modest contribution to Germany’s war effort would end up being the razing of a pub in the quaint town of Tipton and the murder of several farm animals; on its way back, it suffered engine trouble and crashed at sea, and the entire crew died.34
Lying at the heart of the matter was that German strategists relied on the reports of their airship captains, but these were often highly inaccurate. Of a January 31, 1916, raid, Germany officially stated that the Zeppelins “dropped large quantities of explosives and incendiary bombs on the docks, harbor, and factories in and near Liverpool and [iron foundries and smelting furnaces in] Birkenhead [and] on Manchester factories….Everywhere marked effects were observed in the gigantic explosions and serious conflagrations.” A stunning success, it seemed, except that no airships had gone anywhere near Liverpool, Birkenhead, or Manchester. Admittedly, some breweries, several railway sheds, a couple of factories, several workmen’s houses, and a few churches were damaged elsewhere.35 Such misestimates were not mere propagandistic fodder for public consumption but were swallowed whole at the highest levels.36
It was not that airshipmen lied outright; it was more that they believed untruths to be true or perhaps told untruths to serve the greater poetic truth that Zeppelins must be war-winning weapons. It was very easy to get confused. At night, over an alien country where landmarks were elusive and unfamiliar, using maps purchased in souvenir shops before the war, airship captains often found themselves not just a few but dozens of miles away from their objective.37 Hans Gebauer, the observation officer aboard L-40, saw the nine-hundred-foot-wide Thames River below him during a March 1917 raid and, assuming his airship to be directly above London, was gratified to see the bombs raining death and destruction upon the hated enemy. Unfortunately, L-40 was actually hovering over the sixty-foot-wide Royal Military Canal sixty miles southeast of the capital. The bombs fell into a marsh.38
Gebauer’s was by no means a unique error: Up to a third of all missions throughout the war were abandoned or ineffective simply because the crews got lost.39 During the course of just one five-Zeppelin raid on August 9, 1915, L-10 claimed to have reached London when it was actually thirty-five miles distant, L-12 ended up over Dover instead of the Harwich naval air base sixty miles to the north, L-9 found itself over the Humber River in the north of England, L-11 turned back at Lowestoft in Suffolk claiming navigational errors, and L-13 didn’t even make it past the coastline before heading for home.40
Eckener, who knew airships and their flaws, quirks, and capabilities better than anyone else, was one of the very few observers who was skeptical of the claims of immense damage being inflicted on the British war effort. As early as February 1916, he was confidentially telling Colsman that the airship captains “never report anything that diminishes their competence and contributions. Based on the radio notifications that we’ve received, I’m convinced that most of them didn’t know for sure where they were this time….It’ll be more residential buildings than factories that are hit, I’m certain of that.”41
Unfortunately, he was ill-placed to do anything about it. So dispirited was Eckener by his wartime experience that he would devote just a single page in his 184-page book, My Zeppelins, to the subject.42 In 1917, he requested permission to resign his post as head of training but was refused.43
The fatal decision to pursue the Zeppelin raids come what may lay, Eckener thought, with Strasser. Through remorseless force of will, he seemed to exert a Rasputinesque hold over the minds of his superiors. When they wanted to call a halt, Strasser would persuade them not only to stay the course but to give him more resources to build bigger and better.44
Disastrously, Strasser accepted no weakness, either in himself or in others. When it was discovered that Zeppelin crews were passing out from lack of oxygen at high altitudes, said Eckener, Strasser dismissed them as “listless and cowardly,” and he attributed airship losses to airplanes as “accidents.”45 It was only Strasser himself coming to grief in August 1918, just a few months before the Armistice, that startled the Germans out of their trance.
Commanding the behemoth L-70 as his flagship, Strasser embarked on a giant raid against London on August 5. He had boasted that L-70, containing more than two million cubic feet of hydrogen, outfitted with no fewer than seven Maybachs, and carrying six thousand pounds of bombs, was invulnerable.
It wasn’t. When L-70 was shot down off the English coast by a fighter, it burst into flame and Strasser was last seen jumping out. He was, commented Eckener sadly to his wife, “simply too confident that he was unassailable.”46
Within the week, the new head of the Naval Airship Division canceled an order for Strasser’s planned swan song: a super-Zeppelin so colossal that he had decided to skip the usual format of sequential numbering and jump directly to “L-100.” It was to have been a staggering 3.8-million-cubic-footer, able to climb to 28,600 feet (nearly the height of Mount Everest), propelled by ten engines, and insulated from incendiary bullets by an innovative fireproof cover.47
22. China Show
THE TRUE END to the era of the wartime Zeppelin was not, however, Strasser’s death but Count von Zeppelin’s, in March 1917.
Eckener had known that Zeppelin was faltering for some time, though for much of 1916 the count had kept up a busy schedule visiting hangars, workshops, and factories; he even took a trip on the maiden voyage of the first of a new class of Zeppelin and toured army headquarters at Pless, where he was hosted by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, the de facto commander-in-chief of the German armed forces and, like Zeppelin, the subject of a cult of personality.1 The count had lost weight, recalled a friend, Rudolph Stratz, and had turned into “a very old man…with an aloof expression in his eyes—the fanaticism of a discoverer of new worlds. A sacred fanaticism. Otherwise he looked like the typical old, reckless hussar.”2
The “touching simplicity” to his manner that Hindenburg would later mention in his memoirs as well as, possibly, the aloof, fanatical look in his eyes may have been due to the onset of dementia, and he certainly seemed to suffer from a failing memory. In February 1917, Stratz bumped into him at an aeronautical exhibition in Berlin. The count, looking lost, shook Stratz’s hand. “I am sure I know you well,” Zeppelin said softly to his old friend. “But I do not recognize you. Who are you?”3
At the end of the month, the count was taken violently ill and rushed to the Sanatorium des Westens, where he was diagnosed with an obstruction of the intestines. An operation was successful, but he soon contracted pneumonia. His daughter, Hella, hurried to Berlin, but doctors had advised his wife, the countess, that he would probably recover and she arrived, too late, a couple of days later. He had died on March 8.
When the sad news was announced, all the houses in Friedrichshafen hung out black-bordered flags, and a special train was hired to take hundreds of employees to Stuttgart, where the count was to be buried.
The funeral on March 12 was a stately affair, befitting a Hero of Germany. Ten thousand mourners were present, including his family, the kaiser, the king and queen of Württemberg, a bemedaled gaggle of field marshals, generals, and admirals, and a consort of leading scientists. As the funeral procession, headed by a military band and trailed by a column of his old regiment,
marched toward the family vault along roads adorned with black-draped stone columns topped by urns aflame, bells solemnly pealed and twenty-four guns fired in salute. His casket was borne by twelve cavalrymen, while up above, two giant Zeppelins, their hulls draped in black crepe, paid homage to the master of the air. They dropped wreaths as the casket was lowered into the grave.4
Most foreign observers, notwithstanding their hatred for what his creations had become, generously remembered Zeppelin for the man he once was. He was ranked, in The New York Times, as equal to the Wright brothers as a “very great inventor” and in other places praised “for the unfaltering courage with which he pursued his vision of a practical dirigible through disappointment to ultimate success.”5
There was, however, no disguising the fact that the airship had been a total loss in war, with some outlets’ obituaries alleging that Zeppelin’s death had been hastened by his realization that his namesakes had so signally failed to deliver on their initial promise.6
The passing of the Old Gentleman, as Eckener and Colsman called him, finally released, or perhaps liberated, them from his deadweight, his heavy hand, his long shadow. Eckener had loved the count but, all too aware of the challenges of dealing with Zeppelin before and during the war, was relieved that he had finally departed. Even a year after the count’s death, when Eckener was asked to write an official obituary for him, he refused, “as a kind of horror still grips me when I think I’m supposed to sing a hymn in his honor. An objective appraisal—yes, that would be a different matter. But he’s still too alive in the people’s love to allow that. He was certainly a fine person, but we shouldn’t overdo it with the praise.”7
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ZEPPELIN’S DEATH ALLOWED Eckener at last to think about the future—the future of the airship in a postwar world. He wanted to pick up where the DELAG had been so abruptly terminated at the outbreak of war, but on a grander scale.8 If nothing else, the war had accelerated airship development to an unprecedented degree—the most modern Zeppelins were about as similar to the prewar ones as a new passenger jet is to its 1950s ancestor—and bitter experience had offered valuable lessons about flying in a matter of years as opposed to decades.
Empires of the Sky Page 22