An aviation exposition in Berlin—Eckener’s home turf, shockingly—took a dim view as to his chances. Even accounting for the challenges Eckener had had to overcome, reported The New York Times, among the experts present “there is beginning to be a doubt about the value in the advancement of commerce by these lighter-than-air craft.” Rather worryingly, “aeronautical engineers of standing say their skepticism has been increased, rather than diminished, and they are more firmly than ever convinced the airplane will soon set other forms of air transportation in the background. Some even predict the Zeppelin will be as big a failure in the commercial world as it was in the World War.”
The airplane-airship debate had taken on new vigor, as well as an alarming new aspect. In the early 1920s, airplanes and airships had been regarded as parallel technologies, neither impinging on the other, and existing in tandem. Everyone knew that airships handled long-range travel and airplanes short- and perhaps medium-range trips. But the calculus was changing as airplanes advanced in leaps and bounds. There were thousands of them now, and as Pan American was ably demonstrating, you could cover an entire continent in routes using these small, cheap, convenient, safe conveyances. Airships still had the advantage of range, comfort, and payload, but how long would that situation last? What would be their fate if a passenger airplane eventually flew across the Atlantic?
Observers now began to see the airplane-airship problem as a ruthlessly existential one when it came to long-haul travel. Inevitably, wrote Arthur Blessing in the North American Review, one would supplant the other to “square with the principle of utilitarianism, and this means the survival of the fittest.”22
For the time being, whether the “fittest” would be the airplane or the airship was an open question, and at the exposition “what all agree[d] upon is that final judgment should not be passed until the Graf Zeppelin makes a round-the-world flight, which should be a crucial test of the worthiness of this type of aircraft.”
One attendee in particular, as usual avoiding the spotlight, listened very carefully to the proceedings: Juan Trippe.23
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THANKFULLY, THE RETURN home helped put paid to the criticisms about the Graf Zeppelin’s lackadaisical flight time. A strong tailwind bore the “silvery mammoth of the air” along at 88 mph, and Eckener and his crew arrived in Friedrichshafen in an amazing 71 hours and 51 minutes—far faster than any steamship.24
Eckener received the traditional greetings and torchlit processions, followed by the bestowal of three honorary degrees and a meeting with President Hindenburg, but once the festivities were over he was still faced with a major challenge: The Graf Zeppelin had to go around the world.
Eckener would have to make do with a ship he knew to be too frail for the task.25 Neither was the irony of the situation lost on him: He had to circumnavigate a globe of nearly 25,000 miles in a small airship to prove that he could traverse an ocean 3,500 miles wide in a big one.
37. Around the World
IF AT FIRST the logistics and distances involved with girdling the globe appeared daunting, the endeavor, once Eckener sat down and began plotting the Graf Zeppelin’s course, was not so very different from taking the airship to America and back several times—and might even be easier than anyone expected. Traveling east across Europe was not hard, and much of Russia (including Siberia) was one gigantic plain; from the east coast of Russia to Japan was a piece of cake, and crossing the Pacific, though it had not been done before in a single leg by either airplane or airship, he did not consider a difficult proposition.
Of the two oceans, the Atlantic was the far trickier route, its storms and winds fiercer than in the Pacific. Crossing the United States from California to New York, Eckener believed, would actually be the hardest part of the voyage, but he had no intention of running the risk of combating the fearsome midwestern tempests that had doomed the Shenandoah. Eckener chose his route carefully to avoid the danger areas as best he could.
Of greater concern was isolation. Siberia was an unmapped region of trackless forest, oozing swamps, and algae-slimed lakes; it was a primeval place, virtually unedited by the hand of man, where very few of the very few inhabitants had ever seen a train or a car, let alone heard of an airship. If the Graf Zeppelin had to make an emergency landing, its passengers and crew would be beyond radio contact and stranded for months—assuming that they could ever be found. Overexcited reporters persisted in asking Eckener whether they would be eaten by “wild Kimucks and other bandits” in that event, to which Eckener always responded that he thought the inhabitants were “not so bad as they are painted.”1
At least, though, if the Graf Zeppelin came down in Siberia it would come down on land; not so with the Pacific, where islands were in short supply and were invariably tiny, meaning that the Graf Zeppelin could easily vanish amid the blue waves.
But the greatest risk of all, even greater than crazed cannibals and sinking without a trace, was political. The Graf Zeppelin was entering a diplomatic viper’s nest. Arranging a voyage to the United States had been a simple enough affair consisting mostly of submitting a request for a permit to land and agreeing to abide by customs and immigration regulations. But circling the world required gaining entry to two closed countries—the USSR and Japan—both thought to be as aggressive as they were secretive. In Europe, the insidious spread of Bolshevism was seen as a menace to existing liberal-democratic societies, whereas the Americans were particularly apprehensive of Japanese intentions in the Pacific. A Graf Zeppelin visit, then, came fraught with political tension, and Eckener had to be especially careful to avoid the slightest hint of favoritism or partisanship.
Financially, the costs associated with the Round-the-World voyage were prodigious: a minimum of $250,000 (shipping 900,000 cubic feet of Blau gas to Japan did not come cheap). Generating intense newspaper and newsreel interest, then, was again critical to the enterprise, and Eckener offered the reliable William Randolph Hearst a first-look deal to buy the exclusive media rights. Hearst responded with a colossal offer of $100,000 for the American and British reporting.
The Hearst deal came with conditions. The magnate insisted, for instance, that the voyage begin and end in New York, putting Eckener in the crosshairs of the German nationalists who saw him, yet again, selling out to the Americans.
To forestall criticism, Eckener took the expedient of simultaneously running dual around-the-world voyages. For the Americans, he spoke of the trip as New York to New York, but in Germany he referred to it as Friedrichshafen to Friedrichshafen. The extra effort required mattered little to him. If anything, it would help popularize airships in both his primary markets, the United States and Germany, but just as important, flying Friedrichshafen-to-Friedrichshafen would allow him to cover more costs by selling the newspaper rights for the European portions to German press agencies for $12,500.
The rest of the expenses were covered by a combination of Japanese newspaper fees, passenger fares (at $2,500 per ticket), and sales to stamp collectors of special issues. Eckener later claimed to have turned a profit of $40,000 on the flight. Maybe he did.2
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ON AUGUST 1, 1929, Eckener lifted off from Friedrichshafen with twenty passengers, mostly reporters and American observers like the navy’s airship expert Charles Rosendahl, but also present (though not given cabins) were a baby gorilla named Sue and Louis the chimpanzee, who had been ordered by an exotic-animal importer. Ninety-five hours later, they were at Lakehurst. The only kerfuffle happened after landing, when it was discovered that while everyone’s attention had been diverted by the antics of Sue and Louis, a gang of thieves had taken the opportunity to steal the naval base’s canteen safe containing $700.3
Late on the evening of August 7, the Graf Zeppelin was on its way back to Germany, where it would “restart” its voyage. The fifty-five-hour return trip was incredibly fast (there was no m
ore talk of “slow” airships) but as boring as Eckener had hoped—all the better to prove that flying on an airship could be as routine as taking a train or a steamer. The greatest irritant was not the weather but the incessant, night-and-day clacking of typewriters in the lounge as reporters cranked out their stories.
Eckener, who rarely partook of alcohol in the air, was so relaxed he joined the other guests in a few glasses of wine and Champagne to celebrate his sixty-second birthday. In Friedrichshafen, Johanna, worried that her energetic husband was overexerting himself, was quoted as saying that the best birthday present for him would be an opportunity to sleep, a comment that led to rumors that the Round-the-World trip would be his last before retiring. Not by a long shot; he was only just beginning, Eckener reassured reporters.4
On August 15, when it was time to depart for the mysterious Land of the Soviets, Eckener crossed his fingers that the trip would prove equally dull. It hadn’t been as hard dealing with the Russians as many had expected, though that didn’t mean it was easy. They had insisted on having their own team of representatives on board; when Eckener had complained that they would weigh the ship down too much, the Soviets grudgingly reduced the number to one, a meteorologist named Professor Karklin, who spoke no other language than Russian. But he had gamely learned a sentence in German by rote, which he repeated at every opportunity: Moskau Industrie, viele Leute, Sibirien nicht gut (“Moscow industry, many people; Siberia no good”).5
The Graf Zeppelin sailed across East Prussia and the Baltic coast, through Lithuania and Latvia, heading for Russia. Eckener was certainly fortunate in his timing. The Russians had ended their bloody civil war a few years earlier and Stalin was firmly in control, yet the horrendous impact of collectivization, the starving of Ukraine, the mass imprisonments in the Gulag, and the paranoid murderousness of the purges still lay in the future. The secret police were everywhere, of course, including on board the Graf Zeppelin, where Professor Karklin was expected to pull double duty as informant. Eckener noticed he was spending more and more time in the control car and growing increasingly nervous as they pushed on.
Eckener was not just using the USSR as a way to get to the Pacific, and his hosts had their own reasons for allowing him through their territory. For the Americans, the Graf Zeppelin may have been a business proposition, but for the Soviets, it was a symbol of a burgeoning politico-economic relationship.
Twelve months earlier, Stalin had inaugurated his first Five-Year Plan with the intention of modernizing a backward Russia to Western standards, and German firms had benefited tremendously from the crash program. In 1928–29, more than a quarter of Soviet imports came from Germany alone, and there were more German companies operating in the USSR than the rest of the world’s combined. The Russians needed German industrial equipment for their modernization drive, and in exchange they played discreet host for armaments research and production still illegal under the Versailles Treaty. Grenades and artillery shells were secretly manufactured, and German “advisers” ran a tank school, a poison-gas production facility, and a pilot-training college, all well beyond the reach of Western inspectors.
Of equal or even greater value was German engineering, technical, and scientific expertise. Hundreds of specialized personnel had already been lent to the Soviet Union, and Moscow was eager to have Zeppelin staff join the ranks, for aviation was also part of the Five-Year Plan. Stalin had demanded that Soviet aircraft must fly “further, faster, and higher” than any inferior capitalist product, and airships were promoted as status symbols of modernity. If the Germans had them, so too must the Soviet Union.
What the airships would be used for was never clearly enunciated, but the main principle seemed to be that brandishing the hammer of revolutionary ideology in the service of state-run industry would only highlight the impotence of such mundane bourgeois concepts as profit and loss, supply and demand. To that end, Soviet proponents stressed quantity over quality to demonstrate superiority.
The head of the Dirigible Construction Trust, for instance, bragged of a fleet of 425 airships of varying sizes, the grandest of them to be inspiringly named Lenin, Stalin, Old Bolshevik, Collective Farmer, and Pacific Ocean Proletarian. None would ever be built, but at the time of the Round-the-World flight and the feel-good era of German-Soviet cooperation, Eckener was hoping to expand Zeppelin into Russia. Unfortunately, he had accounted for neither the singular nature of Soviet politics nor the vagaries of the weather.
Stalin, rather strangely, never spoke publicly about airships, and unbeknownst to the Germans, the whole subject was a contentious one within senior Party circles. True, the people were thoroughly excited about the prospect of a Zeppelin visit and their coming airship fleet, but in the topsy-turvy world of the USSR popular enthusiasm for something was counted as a black mark. In Stalin’s eyes, homegrown, organic excitement was suspect; great projects had to be planted and cultivated by the Party and imposed on the people, like broccoli to children, for their edification and improvement.6
Innocently unaware of these internal Party struggles, Eckener had headed for Russia assuming it would be a normal trip. Hence he could not understand Professor Karklin’s mounting anxiety when he announced in passing that he would have to skip the scheduled Moscow visit. High winds were heading toward the city and Eckener, wishing to reduce risk and fuel consumption, wanted to fly north around it. Karklin, growing ever more agitated, kept pointing at the map and signaling that Eckener must go to Moscow. “Siberia no good,” he repeatedly insisted.7
Eckener ignored the warnings and pushed on. To him, this was a small matter—in America and Germany, he occasionally had to postpone an arrival and leave spectators disappointed—but he was taken aback by the hysterical Soviet reaction to his apolitical, weather-related change of course. Pravda devoted large amounts of space to attacking Eckener, German perfidy, and sinister capitalist influence. A long article by one Michael Kolzoff declared that the West was terrified by the “twelve years of proletarian dictatorship” that had resulted in Soviet superiority in automobiles and airplanes and that Eckener, owned by “insatiable Uncle Sam” and swayed by his “bourgeois foolishness” and “degenerate arrogance,” had deliberately bypassed Moscow in order to avoid witnessing the achievements of collective farms and parades by the Young Communist League. He menacingly concluded that Eckener had better remember that the way to the Far East ran through Soviet territory, and “if it suits us—we’ll allow the path to be used; if it doesn’t suit us—we’ll close the path.”8
To help patch up relations, Eckener asked the German ambassador to convey his “deep regret” at having had to disappoint the hundreds of thousands of Muscovites who had gathered to see the Graf Zeppelin and to explain his reasons. As a result of his obeisance, the Soviet press was directed to tamp down the outrage and extend an olive branch.9
All’s well that ends well, but the uproar over nothing in 1929 had convinced Eckener that there could never be a truly globe-spanning airship line, in the sense of a virtually nonstop voyage, at least not while Stalin remained in power. The thought of having to deal with Moscow’s whims and tantrums on a repeated basis simply because the USSR happened to own some useful real estate was off-putting, to say the least. Instead, Eckener would stick with the Atlantic, where at least the Americans could be counted on to be sensible.
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IN CONTRAST, THE flight to Japan was easy and the Graf Zeppelin was everywhere greeted with fulsome acclamation. Wrote a reporter rapturously, the airship “glinted in the sky over the land of cherry blossoms where geisha girls halted their clip-clopping to watch her pass, and where Fujiyama was mirrored like a tinted shell in the dark waters of Lake Hakone.”10
To the Japanese, Eckener had brought their country closer to Europe, within four days of Berlin, as opposed to a month aboard a fast liner. Some four million people craned their necks at the sky to watch the heavenly chariot pass ove
r Tokyo and rocked the earth with their cries of “Banzai!” while the newspapers proclaimed the flight the “greatest accomplishment mankind has achieved.” Eckener, for having avoided a typhoon on the way over, was instantly dubbed the Storm King.11
Then it was on to Kasumigaura, where a quarter of a million people awaited the Graf Zeppelin’s arrival. From then on, Eckener scarcely had a moment to himself as the Japanese laid on an unending series of formal ceremonies.
First there was a visit to a teahouse, where Eckener, bemused at a geisha’s gesturing at his shoes, experienced mild panic at the thought of taking them off and exposing a large hole in one of his socks. After several minutes’ earnest discussion of the diplomatic ramifications of such an insult, the Japanese produced small woolen bags to protect his modesty. Then came the state banquet at Japan’s grandest hotel with the foreign minister, the minister of communications, the minister of war, and the admiral of the navy in attendance, splendidly outfitted to the nines in formal tails or dress uniform. Finally, that rarest of honors: tea at the Imperial Palace with the recently enthroned 124th emperor, Hirohito, who presented Eckener with a pair of silver cups—which joined a ceremonial sword, silk embroideries, ornamental daggers, and porcelain vases in crates shipped back to Germany by freighter.
Back in her modest little house in Friedrichshafen, Johanna, busy making a sweater for Eckener, was told by a reporter of her husband’s safe arrival. Accustomed by now to hearing about the accolades heaped upon his head and the medals pinned to his chest, she said modestly, “Isn’t that wonderful? We go to sleep when the ship sails and awaken when it returns. Now I must get on with my knitting.”12
Empires of the Sky Page 38