Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  After thirty-two hours in the air, and with the ocean strewn with patches of seaweed as big as small islands, ZR-3 reached San Miguel in the Azores, a smidgen less than halfway between Friedrichshafen and New York. There were some low-lying clouds but nothing to worry about as Eckener flew past the 7,500-foot peak of Mount Pico. “A strange spectacle,” he exclaimed, “this fantastic mountain isle apparently floating in the air in the midst of the ocean!”

  The white-capped waves below signaled that the wind was picking up. Eckener’s fuel calculations had been based on a 15-mph headwind, but this one was already driving at them at 22 mph. By sunset, it had risen to 31 mph, eating away nearly half their speed. If it continued, Eckener was alarmed to discover, he would need seventy hours to reach New York, but he had less than fifty hours of fuel left in the tanks.

  After huddling with Lehmann, Schiller, and Flemming, Eckener decided that the only way to beat the wind was to change course and head northwest to Newfoundland. They would burn more fuel than they’d like getting there, but once in position they could exploit the wind’s counterclockwise direction as a powerful tailwind propelling them southwest to Boston.

  It was quite a thrill ride off Newfoundland. At one point they hit 105 mph, but after encountering fog banks they had to descend from 5,000 feet almost to sea level to take bearings. As the temperature dropped from 77 to 41 degrees they ran into a storm but emerged with no more damage than a single torn wire. “Heartfelt congratulations on the magnificent achievement of [ZR-3],” Eckener messaged Dürr back in Friedrichshafen, “which tonight easily mastered” the heavy weather. He also sent Maybach a signal thanking him for the wonderful engines, “which already have run over sixty hours without any interruption.”

  At 10 P.M., Eckener spotted the lights of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the flight was as good as over. Navigating down the coast from Canada to New York was child’s play for the crew of ZR-3. They arrived at 7:15 A.M.

  “The tremendous city with its stone forest of heaven-raking skyscrapers made a deep impression on us,” wrote Lehmann. “We steered for Long Island, crossed the little towns strewn along the shores, and then followed the course of the East River, and circled the Statue of Liberty while all the sirens in the harbor howled their welcome toward us. Then we cruised over the city, flying here and there over Broadway and the Battery. Shrill factory whistles spat out white clouds of steam and from the roof-tops great crowds of people waved a greeting. In the narrow stone canyons of the streets, omnibuses, trolley-cars, and automobiles stopped, the passengers rushing out to stare raptly into the sky. The sun rose and painted a halo around the ‘Queen of the Air’ as the Americans called the Zeppelin.”7

  After several more leisurely circles over Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty, Eckener headed for Lakehurst. At 9:37 A.M. on October 15, 1924, after eighty-one hours in the air, Eckener landed ZR-3. When he declared, “A new world’s record—5,060 miles of continuous flight,” he was handed a most important slip of paper—an official receipt for the airship’s safe delivery from the U.S. Navy—and the crew was surrounded by a mob of well-wishers and newsmen, souvenir hunters, and autograph collectors.8

  Some German mechanics had brought a large brown teddy bear with them and posed with it for the cameras; they charged five dollars for the privilege, as they needed the foreign currency. Every man aboard was given a carton of American cigarettes, whose fine Virginia tobacco was greatly prized over the rough, austerity-imposed roll-ups they were used to.9

  Just as important to Eckener was the oohing and ahing over ZR-3’s accommodations, installed as part of the ruse to claim that the airship was intended only for commercial purposes, as demanded by the Conference of Ambassadors. Eckener had welcomed the opportunity to show off his concept for a transatlantic passenger airship, and the furnishings, which did not disappoint, provided a mountain of free advertising.

  There were five compartments resembling first-class railway sleepers, each equipped with two velvet sofas (convertible into beds) and two foldout berths above. Electrical lights, a curtained window, a vase of fresh flowers, and wood paneling completed the picture of luxury in the air for twenty lucky passengers. Two lavatories were down the hall, and fine cuisine (heated by “the white-hot exhaust pipes”) was freely available. Nothing like it had ever been seen.10

  In a telegram, President Calvin Coolidge congratulated Eckener on a “trail-blazing exploit [that had] proved as never before the ability of lighter-than-air craft to make long-distance flights with considerable quantities of freight and passengers.”11

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  THE SCALE AND ambition of his astounding achievement entitled Eckener to the honor of a New York ticker-tape parade, after which he embarked on an exhausting series of celebrations.12

  His first stop was to give a speech at the Capitol Theatre, where nearly a quarter of the rapturous audience were German-Americans. Before the event, the orchestra played Wagner to accompany a short film extolling ZR-3. Eckener, who disliked the composer’s politics and listened instead to the more internationalist music of Beethoven, kept diplomatically silent but later murmured that “the older one gets, the more one forsakes Wagner in favor of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart.”

  In his address, Eckener expressed the hope that Germany and America would forever be friends and was greeted by “stormy applause” when the orchestra played the German national anthem. It was the first time it had been publicly performed in the United States since before the war. The audience rose to sing along and, some years later, Eckener patriotically recalled, “my eyes clouded over, and to this day I cannot think of the occasion without tears coming to my eyes. As a German, I sensed how the national anthem once again paid tribute to me and my people. I left the theater as I were in a dream.” It was as if the ice had been broken between the two nations.13

  After a visit to Philadelphia, he took the train to Washington and was escorted to the Department of the Navy to meet its airship experts. The navy secretary, Curtis Wilbur, announced that ZR-3 would be christened Los Angeles “because it came to us like an angel of peace.”

  Afterward, Eckener was whisked to the White House to see Coolidge, then back to New York, where he met the mayor and was given the Freedom of the City. Eckener was then rushed to the Polo Grounds stadium in upper Manhattan to watch a soccer game with seventy-five thousand spectators. “The most excruciating thing I had ever experienced” was when Eckener had to walk around the field as the crowds cheered.14

  After that, it was all business. Eckener, joined by Lehmann, headed out west. By now, Eckener was genuinely famous and complained that he couldn’t enjoy a minute to himself on trains or in restaurants without people shaking his hand and introducing themselves. His celebrity also had the benefit of opening doors, all in the service of Zeppelin. In Detroit, Henry Ford gave the Germans a tour of his workshops. He told Eckener, “The next time you come to Detroit, you should bring your airship with you. I might be impressed into taking a ride with you.”15

  Lehmann and Eckener were getting along, but after too much time together their always tense relationship was beginning to chafe. Lehmann was jealous of Eckener’s fame and his own delegated role as number two. He especially disliked how at the unending succession of dinners and toasts, it was always Eckener who, as the main attraction, spoke first and left it to Lehmann, as if he were some kind of flunky, to translate. In his own speeches, Lehmann then had “to improvise my own comments so as not to repeat what Eckener had just said.” It quickly became an annoyance.16

  For Lehmann, Akron couldn’t come fast enough. That was the location of their most important meeting, with Zeppelin’s Goodyear partner, Paul Litchfield. From Goodyear’s point of view, there could have been no better start to the relationship than the success of ZR-3, and Litchfield looked forward to receiving a cascade of navy orders for airships. When the others left, Lehmann, with a great sigh of relief, stayed
behind in Akron to help start the new company. His first task was to prepare to welcome Arnstein and a dozen Zeppelin engineers and designers, instantly dubbed the Apostles.17

  In Germany, when news came through that ZR-3 had landed at Lakehurst, thousands gathered in public squares to sing the national anthem, students from the various university fraternities marched with flags, and there were band-led processions to nearby war memorials.18

  In Friedrichshafen, cannons boomed 126 times (LZ-126 being the German designation for ZR-3), and church bells joyously pealed. Residents held a torchlight parade to the statue of Count von Zeppelin and then made their way to the homes of Arnstein and Dürr to give them “tumultuous ovations.” Dürr, as curt as ever, dourly murmured a few words of thanks and closed the door, but Arnstein more loquaciously handed reporters the inspirational quotes they wanted: “All of us…who saw the work rise from its beginnings, never even for a moment doubted that our Zeppelin would succeed in crossing the ocean. It was a piece of ourselves that we set free into the air.”19

  Politically, though, the situation was much more complicated than in America. The Socialist daily Vorwärts congratulated Eckener for using “German engineers and German workers, with German machines and German tools” to build his airship: The more Germans Zeppelin employed, all the better for the labor movement.20

  But, as Eckener’s wife, Johanna, told him, the “completely right-wing-oriented papers aren’t joining in the general elation.”21 If older conservatives retained their soft spot for Zeppelins, seeing in them nostalgic echoes of the vanished glory of the kaiser’s Germany, their younger and more zealous successors were more inspired by the dynamic, driven Fascism of Mussolini, who had recently led the March on Rome, when his Blackshirts seized power over Italy.

  Mussolini, a self-described “aviation fanatic,” had learned how to fly and proclaimed that pilots were natural Fascists. To govern a Fascist country, one must be an aviator in practice because “life must be risked and risked daily, continually, demonstrating that one is ready to throw it away when necessary.”22

  Considering that Eckener emphasized his airships’ sedateness and safety, one can see how a movement attracted by the speed and violence of airplanes—“we’ll cut off their heads with our propellers,” threatened Mussolini of those who stood in the way of Fascism’s progress—might have dismissed Zeppelins as quaint relics with no place in the coming age of revolutionary might.

  To that end, Hermann Göring, a former fighter pilot who had recently participated in an abortive coup (the Beer Hall Putsch), said that the rising National Socialist Party would one day “recapture the German Empire” by building fleets of military airplanes.23 He made no mention of Eckener’s airship or its inconsequential, bourgeois flight to America.

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  PARTLY EXPLAINING THE nearly universal ecstasy that had greeted his arrival in America was Eckener’s auspicious timing. A week before he touched down, the U.S. Navy’s American-built Shenandoah (ZR-1) had, in a lovely complement to Eckener’s transatlantic voyage, made headlines by beginning a transcontinental one.24

  Under Lieutenant Commander Zachary Lansdowne, Shenandoah, proudly emblazoned with “U.S. Navy” painted amidships and a red, white, and blue star-in-a-circle on the rudder, had departed Lakehurst on October 7 and headed for a cruise down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., and thence on a tour of the South before swinging toward Fort Worth, Texas, on its way to the naval air station at San Diego, culminating in a visit to Seattle. Shenandoah arrived back in Lakehurst on October 25.25

  Eckener sent his congratulations to Lansdowne for his excellent, almost German, mastery of the arcane secrets of static lift, dynamic lift, superheating, supercooling, weather forecasting, navigation, and loading and weight distribution that had made the voyage a success. Privately, though, he had mixed feelings about Shenandoah’s most radical innovation: the use of helium instead of hydrogen.

  In the previous five years, the price of helium had fallen to $55 per thousand cubic feet, but it remained dauntingly high compared to that of hydrogen.26 Maybe the rich Americans could afford to throw money away, but what worried Eckener more was the performance hit airships took from what he regarded, despite its immunity to fire, as an inferior substitute for hydrogen. It was helium’s “heaviness” compared to hydrogen that was the main problem: Shenandoah contained roughly the same gas capacity as a 1918 Zeppelin but enjoyed less than half its useful lift. The disparity was staggering.

  Helium’s reduced useful lift had the knock-on effect—a fatal one in Eckener’s eyes—of cutting an airship’s cruising range by between 30 and 40 percent because, once you included the weight of the crew, machinery, engines, and infrastructure, less fuel could be carried, and less fuel, of course, meant more frequent refueling and an inability to make the giant oceanic leaps he wanted. Indeed, the primary reason that Eckener could bridge the Atlantic in a single bound while Lansdowne had had to stop to refuel in Fort Worth and San Diego was that Eckener used hydrogen rather than helium.

  If that weren’t already enough of a negative, the logistics of using helium were formidable. To transport millions of cubic feet of fresh helium from the Texas fields to Lakehurst and the West Coast required specially built freight trains bearing giant steel canisters. The charge for subsequently shipping the helium to Germany would have been astronomical.

  Leakage and loss, as well, added to the headache of using helium. Helium unavoidably trickled out through valves and loose connections during repurification, transport, storage, and refilling. Even when the airship was docked in the hangar, it leaked: The Shenandoah lost 150,000 cubic feet of helium each month doing nothing. If you included normal flight operations—Lansdowne had blown off 640,000 cubic feet, more than a third of Shenandoah’s capacity, on his trip—it was estimated that every year the navy would have to replace at the very least one and a half times Shenandoah’s total ship volume.27 Hydrogen leaked, too, but it was cheap and easy to replace and was less prone to wastage as it was manufactured and stored locally.

  For a time, Eckener weighed whether to switch to helium anyway, but soon decided to rely on hydrogen. His crews were accustomed to handling it, the gas was perfectly safe in experienced hands, it was economical, it yielded high useful lift, and, most important, it bestowed the priceless advantage of immensely long range on his airships.

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  AS OF OCTOBER 1924, then, Eckener had not one, but two, proofs of the airship’s gleaming future. A better advertisement for the coming supremacy of the Zeppelin Company’s products could scarcely be imagined than the twin triumphs of ZR-3 and Shenandoah.

  In a lengthy interview with the American press, Eckener boasted that in a few years customers would be able to travel by airship from Hamburg to New York in the same amount of time as taking the train from New York to Chicago (twenty-five hours) and in the process lop four days off a sea voyage. While the plan was for Zeppelin to reserve the Atlantic route for itself, Goodyear-Zeppelin would handle the transcontinental ones. Its airships, he claimed, would cut the New York–Los Angeles route to a third of the time a train needed.28

  Eckener’s vision seemed so enticing, so futuristic, so inevitable, because it appeared precisely when America had reached the very nadir of the airplane business.

  In that same year, 1924, the only “airlines,” to put it charitably, existing in the entire United States were a small seasonal service to Catalina Island, two tiny mail contractors in Puget Sound and the Mississippi Delta, and an experimental mail run in Alaska, which after a single round-trip to prove that airplanes were faster than dog teams gave up the ghost.29

  Compared to airships, airplanes were laughably inept when it came to long-range flying. An around-the-world attempt mounted by the U.S. Army Air Service using four grandiosely named “Douglas World Cruisers”—single-engine, two-seater biplanes—required 175
days and 69 stops to complete the circuit, with two of the airplanes crashing on the way.30 In contrast, Eckener’s nonstop eighty-one-hour cruise across the Atlantic seemed effortless.

  With good reason, perhaps, Eckener was confident that long-haul passenger airplanes were a dead end—and he wasn’t afraid to say it. François Nitschke, a trainee pilot, later recalled that Eckener visited his school at this time to give a lecture, during which he told them the harsh truth that none of them would have a job if they stuck to airplanes. “The future of air transportation, especially transatlantic air transportation,” warned Eckener, “rested solely with the airship.”31

  29. Annus Horribilis

  I​F 1924 HAD been Eckener’s annus mirabilis, 1925 would be a year of unrelenting disappointment.

  With his stock riding high, Eckener wanted to begin work as soon as possible on a new Zeppelin, one that would dwarf ZR-3 and finally initiate true transatlantic service. The problem was, the company had no money to build one. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the count’s first flight, however, was coming up in the summer, and Eckener realized all the attention would provide a perfect opportunity to launch a fund-raising campaign using the Zeppelin as a symbol of German pride.

  He immediately ran into trouble with the foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann, who had the temerity, as Eckener saw it, to ask him to postpone any celebration. Stresemann was then in the midst of delicate negotiations to end the French occupation of the Ruhr. The last thing he wanted was for Eckener to be stirring up memories of the war with what might be seen by the Allies as nationalistic calls to arms.1

  During a stormy meeting with Stresemann, Eckener angrily refused to postpone anything, to which Stresemann threatened that he would not attend the event, followed by Eckener disinviting him. The meeting ended a moment later.2