Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  Really, there was not so much to learn of this Man of Secrets: He knew little of history, music, or philosophy, and his “religion,” noticed one observer, consisted of worshipping the airplane: “He literally thinks and reads nothing but aviation.” In public, he talked only of business, football, and golf—all safe, uncontroversial subjects—and restricted his swearing to “Oh, gosh” and “Darn” to avoid offending anyone.1

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  THEIR BUSINESS SITUATIONS, too, were very different. In one sense, Trippe had it easy: During the great aviation boom, everyone was making money, he had a complaisant State Department at his disposal, and South America was right on his doorstep. His problem was that there were many competitors in the airline industry, and breaking out of the Americas to get across an ocean was impossible, given the restricted capabilities of his airplanes.

  Eckener, meanwhile, had to contend with the treacherous political and economic environment of postwar Germany, but he enjoyed a monopoly in the airship business. What he lacked was the money and the opportunity to exploit it.

  Yet there were encouraging signs of a change in fortune. The Dawes Plan had amended Germany’s reparations-payment schedule, much in Berlin’s favor, and foreign loans had consequently flooded in, spurring economic growth. The funds built new factories and modernized old ones that had survived destruction in the war.

  Better still, the Locarno Pact of October 16, 1925, brought Germany in from the diplomatic cold. Berlin and Paris mutually recognized their contentious border and pledged “that they will in no case attack or invade each other or resort to war against each other.” Instead, they would bring disputes to the Council of the League of Nations for arbitration.

  On May 22, 1926, infused with the “Spirit of Locarno,” the Conference of Ambassadors, the body that had originally imposed the one-million-cubic-foot size restriction, lifted its edict. The “special exception” clause, too, was deleted, legally allowing Eckener to build as many Zeppelins as he wanted, of any size.2

  The opportunity was now there, just not the money, thanks to the Spende fund-raising debacle. To get it, Eckener appealed directly to Paul von Hindenburg, former commander of the kaiser’s armies in the war and current German president, to save the Zeppelin. He sent a lengthy memorandum laying out the advantages of the airship over the airplane. There was no hope, claimed Eckener, that the airplane would achieve long-distance flight unless it was so colossal it could barely take off; further, it would never be as comfortable as an airship, and it was uneconomical to boot.

  These were by now all old and much-rehearsed arguments, but Eckener more tantalizingly hinted that he had something big up his sleeve. “For the construction of the next airship in Friedrichshafen,” he wrote, “a change in the design is intended, which has far-reaching significance, indeed, which can almost be called revolutionary with regard to the airship’s navigation, safety, and cost-effectiveness; this change will improve the airship’s situation compared to that of the airplane quite a bit more. Unfortunately, no further details about this design change can be disclosed here yet.”3

  Soon after, the government disbursed 2 million marks to Zeppelin to help pay for this mysterious airship. Eckener was still short, so, ignoring Colsman’s heated objections, he bled the subsidiaries dry to fund the Zeppelin Company.

  Everything, then, had to be sacrificed to the great god of Zeppelin, which manifested itself in Eckener’s announcement in July 1926 that he was beginning work on LZ-127, an airship “in which one would not merely fly, but would also be able to voyage.”4

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  THE PLANNING STAGE of LZ-127 proceeded remarkably quickly. By early 1927, shortly before Trippe was purged from Colonial and Lindbergh embarked on his Atlantic flight, Dürr and his team had completed the technical blueprints, and the duralumin needed for the rings and longitudinals was beginning to arrive. Friedrichshafen was more active than at any time since the war; Zeppelin City sprang to life again. For the first time, Eckener dispensed with the secrecy surrounding his hangars and offered guided tours and souvenirs. No longer had he anything to hide: LZ-127 was Germany’s airship by hard-won right. No more intrusive inspectors from the Inter-Allied Commission or impertinent questions by American overseers.5

  That LZ-127 was essentially a stretched copy of ZR-3 Los Angeles with new, improved Maybach VL-2 engines sped up construction. Eckener had wanted to stretch LZ-127 even more, but Dürr was inherently restricted by the dimensions of Friedrichshafen’s main hangar, built in 1916. The hangar was 787 feet long and 138 feet wide, so LZ-127 was 776 and 100, leaving spare a mere 5.5 feet bow and stern and 19 on each side. Height-wise, with just 24 inches of space available, LZ-127’s upper backbone, 110 feet in the air, barely scraped under the hangar’s arches when walked in or out. A single minor mistake by the ground crew and they would have been tormented by the sound of shrieking metal and ripping fabric.

  For the first time since the day-tripping LZ-120 Bodensee, Eckener was able to devote more attention to passenger comfort than to military demands. The new ship had a galley set behind the control cabin equipped with a stove, electric burners, a refrigerator, and racks carrying silver cutlery and white porcelain ringed in blue and gold and bearing the monogram “LZ” (for Luftschiffbau-Zeppelin).

  The lounge, 16.5 feet by 16.5 feet, was brilliantly lit by four large, outward-slanting windows, two of which opened. Four dining tables could accommodate the twenty passengers on board, with a typical menu comprising creamed chicken soup, fried pork chops, red cabbage, mashed potatoes, cucumber salad, and ice cream sundaes for lunch, and a dinner of grilled fish with salted potatoes, accompanied by cold cuts and salad, and finished off with fruit compote. The lounge was covered with a wine-red carpet, the wooden chairs, cushioned and upholstered in chintz tapestry, complementing the dark curtains and mahogany walls. Eckener’s interior design tastes remained staunchly traditional, and he preferred the clubby look of Pullman first-class trains.

  Behind the lounge were two sets of five two-berthed cabins on either side of a hall, as there had been on the Los Angeles. They remained mostly the same, but the folding sofa was updated with a striped pattern and the walls were decorated with a pretty flower print. A closet, a folding canvas stool, and a small table had also been added. Down the hall were two modern toilets and washrooms with hot and cold water.

  The most radical change—the one Eckener hinted at when he told Hindenburg that it would improve the airship’s “navigation, safety, and cost-effectiveness”—was not immediately apparent.

  A perennial problem of airship flying was that as the engines burned relatively heavy fuel during a trip, Zeppelins became lighter and so naturally tended to lift. In practice, the captain would valve out hydrogen to bring his ship back down into static equilibrium. In this manner, several hundreds of thousands of cubic feet were typically exhausted into the atmosphere on each flight. The Los Angeles, for instance, was no less than twenty-two tons lighter when it reached America in 1924 than when it departed Germany, and fully a quarter of its hydrogen had had to be vented to compensate.

  The more hydrogen that could be preserved, then, the fewer times an airship would be obliged to land to replenish its stock of gas—translating into longer range in less time.

  The solution was Blau gas, named after Dr. Hermann Blau. Used to light trains and heat stoves, it was, chemically speaking, quite close to the coal gas employed by nineteenth-century balloonists but, containing no carbon monoxide, was far less poisonous. Blau gas resembled propane in that it could be transported as a liquid but released in a gaseous state only slightly heavier than air. In the latter form, it could replace liquid gasoline as a fuel. So as it was consumed the airship would experience almost no lift because the overall weight remained virtually the same.

  Some gasoline was still carried for emergencies, as ballast and for takeoffs and landings,
but a comparison between the two on a typical trip shows a dramatic difference in power and endurance: Had it not been for LZ-127’s 918,000 cubic feet of Blau gas, which weighed thirty-three tons and was enough for one hundred hours of flight, a similar amount of gasoline would have kept the airship flying for just sixty-seven hours. In one stroke, Eckener increased airship range by a third and saved considerable hydrogen-replacement costs.6

  On July 8, 1928—on what would have been Count von Zeppelin’s ninetieth birthday and around the same time as Trippe was beginning to flex Pan American’s muscles—his daughter, Countess Hella, christened LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin. Eckener chose the name to honor the count’s risk-everything approach. When Graf Zeppelin soared into the heavens, Eckener wrote, “the result would be either victory and fame, or final downfall and the end of a defective concept.”7

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  GRAF ZEPPELIN WAS put through its paces in a series of five trial runs over the summer and early fall.8 On one of them, the airship flew over President von Hindenburg’s hunting lodge to drop flowers and a congratulations card signed by Eckener and the crew to commemorate his eighty-first birthday.9

  The airship experienced no major technical problems but caused two minor incidents. Both occurred on October 2–3, when Eckener decided to take the Graf for an evening flight over the English coastal towns of Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth. On the return leg, Eckener sailed toward the Rhineland, where it received an enthusiastic welcome.10

  The French considered the overflight a challenge to the post-Locarno status of the Rhineland. They annoyedly directed, in the interests of keeping the peace, that henceforth Zeppelins fly over French territory only at night to prevent peeking at military bases, keep to scheduled routes, secure all photographic equipment, and stay at high altitude.11 As for the British, the sight of a Zeppelin hovering over towns that had been bombed by them was needlessly provocative. Eckener claimed an honest mistake on both counts, which might have been true, but likely wasn’t.

  Eckener was in fact cannily playing to domestic politics. The Socialists, conservatives, and center-left Social Democrats were resolutely pro-Zeppelin, leaving only the Communists still denouncing the airship as a reactionary tool of capitalist imperialism. But Eckener’s intention had been to throw a bone to the growing nationalist movement, which had previously attacked him for “giving” ZR-3 to America. The nationalists had, however, warmed to Eckener ever since he had announced that the Graf Zeppelin would be entirely German-made, German-staffed, and German forever.

  Just a few weeks earlier, the extreme right had demanded a popular referendum to abolish the parliamentary system and bring back a form of monarchy, either by restoring the Hohenzollern dynasty or by electing a dictator. In the beer halls, too, there was talk of French perfidy and warnings that force of arms might be necessary to take back control of the Rhineland.12 Complementing these dark rumblings was a burgeoning interest in the deeds of the airshipmen of the Great War.13

  Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front was appearing in serial form at the time, and nationalists loathed what they saw as its cynicism, defeatism, and tone of futility. They preferred a new genre of memoirs written by airshipmen and pilots, who had soared above the mud and blood of the trenches and fought a heroic, romantic war in the sky. Accounts written by Eckener’s old comrades invariably deified the mad airship supremo Peter Strasser and gushed over his Wagnerian death in L-70 while fulfilling his duty—unlike the backstabbers who had betrayed sacred Germany in 1918 by surrendering. Even the destruction of the Zeppelins at Nordholz, a stupid act of self-defeating sabotage, was reinterpreted as a brave last stand against the Allied occupiers. Ernst Lehmann, back from America, was a predictably keen proponent of this revisionism and helped popularize the erroneous belief that Strasser’s airship fleet had forced the British to keep a “million” soldiers at home to defend their island.14

  Eckener, who had known Strasser very well and had long been aware of both the Zeppelins’ impotence and Lehmann’s politics, could have quickly put this nonsense to rest. Instead, he placed his dream of airship domination above the truth. By compromising himself, Eckener was getting into bed with some very dangerous people, as he would eventually discover. Convenient allies have a way of turning into enemies at inconvenient times.

  To the outside world, Eckener presented a completely different face. America was his primary market, and it cared little about Germany’s internecine politics. For its inaugural flight, Graf Zeppelin was turned into an international business machine. Advertisers in the American media promoted German products like Zeiss binoculars, Leica cameras, Krupp crankshafts—anything that was on board was packaged and sold as Zeppelin-approved. Eckener gave talks to leading German industrialists explaining how the airship, as an emissary of business, would help their bottom line, and he was gratified when the German-American Chamber of Commerce in New York reported widespread admiration for the Graf and a willingness to buy German products.15

  Eckener always had a purpose. He never embarked on major undertakings like a transatlantic flight without a greater aim in mind. Yes, it was nice to advertise German goods and to bask in the warm embrace of nationalist feeling, but the real point of the coming voyage was to convince American financiers to put up $15 million to amass a four-dirigible fleet (with perhaps a fifth used as a spare), two of which would be built in Friedrichshafen and two in Akron by Goodyear-Zeppelin, in order to run weekly service back and forth across the Atlantic.16

  In fact, Eckener was already sure that the Graf Zeppelin, being too small to be put to the test repeatedly over the Atlantic, was inadequate to the demands of regular New York service. To his mind, the Graf Zeppelin, as impressive as it was, was only a proof-of-concept device to demonstrate long-term commercial feasibility.

  Timing was key. The Graf Zeppelin’s trip alone would probably not be enough to loosen American purse strings and make airships a viable business. In the midst of their aviation boom, the Americans were far too obsessed with airplanes to consider such a huge investment based on a one-time trip. Eckener had to create an unstoppable groundswell in airships’ favor to make success inevitable.

  Thankfully, in the fall of 1928, the winds were blowing strongly his way.

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  FOR ONE THING, the Los Angeles, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Charles Rosendahl, had been performing splendidly since the Shenandoah catastrophe. Rosendahl had been second officer on that doomed ship and was now counted—by Eckener, among others—as the country’s leading airship expert. A broad-shouldered, blue-eyed man, born in 1892 as the son of Swedish immigrants in Chicago, Rosendahl attended the Naval Academy and later saw action in the war on destroyer duty in the Atlantic. In 1922, a call went around for volunteers for the navy’s new airship program, and Rosendahl had put in his name.17

  Over the previous few years, he had impressed his superiors by flying several reconnaissance missions over the Pacific in the Los Angeles. As a result, the navy decided to commission two new 6.5-million-cubic-foot helium airships, ZRS-4 (USS Akron) and ZRS-5 (USS Macon), in the week leading up to Eckener’s departure from Germany.18

  In a radical departure, Akron and Macon were intended to be airborne aircraft carriers. They would have to include a way of storing and launching at least four airplanes either to serve as fleet scouts or to defend the airship against attacking fighters. With an $8 million contract being offered, Goodyear-Zeppelin promised they would figure out how to include an internal hangar and an external “trapeze” to which to attach the airplanes hanging below.

  Akron was to be delivered in thirty months, Macon fifteen months after that, and to build them Arnstein was charged with erecting the world’s largest hangar in Akron, called the Air Dock. The height of a twenty-two-story building and enclosing an area of seven, maybe eight, football fields, the Air Dock could fit the Washington Monument, the
Woolworth Building, and the Lexington and Saratoga aircraft carriers if tipped on their sides. Some visitors, peering into the depths of its cavernous vault, experienced a sense of vertigo or weakness in the legs, and it was said, somewhat plausibly, that a skilled pilot could take off, fly, and land a small plane inside. Its doors alone weighed 2,400 tons, each one so vast that, exclaimed an excited reporter, the task of opening one was “equal to swinging the side of an eighteen-story skyscraper on hinges.”19

  In his spare time, Arnstein had been advising Howard Hughes on the construction and interiors of wartime airships for a new movie being made, titled Hell’s Angels. Hughes, wanting a big Zeppelin-on-fire scene for the pic, had no fewer than four colossal models built, putting him in the airship business almost as much as the navy or Eckener.20

  Between keen anticipation for the epic movie, the announcement of the navy contract, and the Goliathan proportions of the Air Dock, better publicity for the Graf Zeppelin could scarcely be imagined. It was now up to Eckener to deliver a home run to win the game.

  36. Survival of the Fittest

  EARLY IN THE morning of October 11, 1928, Graf Zeppelin slipped its moorings and rose into the slowly pinkening sky. Aboard were twenty passengers and forty crewmen, including Eckener’s three most experienced captains: Lehmann (“small, nimble, keen as a gimlet, always brimming over with good humor and dry wit,” said one reporter), Schiller (“ever active, courteous, charming, with sea-deep eyes”), and Flemming (“tall and handsome”). There was also Knut Eckener, the great man’s son, and not least Jacob Meyer, a junior Zeppelin machinist who’d begged Eckener for a spot in order to bring an engagement ring to Miss Dora Stoeckle, currently living in New Jersey, whom he’d earlier met in Friedrichshafen, “where he passed her home on his way to the hangars daily.”1