Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  There were a lot of minuses. As Trippe had for years assumed that the alpha and omega of Pan American was to get across the Atlantic, hydrogen had from day one served as the basis for Zeppelin’s entire operating system. For the Zeppeliners, switching to helium was not as simple as choosing a diesel engine over a gasoline one, and neither was it a matter of stupidly adhering to a gas known to be dangerously flammable.

  It was the one thing everyone at Zeppelin, past and present, agreed on. The ousted Colsman had recently published his memoirs, in which he had warned that the company should never rely on a vital resource, helium, available exclusively from the Americans.27 When Willy von Meister had brought up the touchy subject with Ernst Lehmann, he was told bluntly that “we have been operating our commercial service with hydrogen for years” and that he saw no reason to change to an unfamiliar gas. Hydrogen, Lehmann added, was perfectly safe when handled expertly, as only the Germans knew how to do.28

  Then there were the technical factors involved, including adverse changes in performance, weight, and capability. And cost, of course. Hydrogen was cheap, plentiful, and easy to acquire, but Eckener estimated that purchasing helium in America and then shipping it to Germany would be eight times as expensive as buying locally produced hydrogen.29 The price for the seven million cubic feet of helium needed just to inflate LZ-129, and heaven knows how much more to replenish it regularly, would be staggering.

  But Eckener, like Trippe with Imperial, was forced to face the reality of his situation and make a drastic decision. If he wanted to conquer the Atlantic, he had to have helium, like it or not, and that meant asking the Americans to sell it.

  On October 11, 1934, three days before Trippe announced that Pan American was heading across the Pacific, Eckener boarded the liner Albert Ballin, bound for New York.30

  45. The Medusa

  ECKENER WOULD ONLY be in New York for a short time, and he no doubt stopped by for talks, as he always did, with Adolph Ochs, the publisher and proprietor of The New York Times. His meetings with Ochs were highly confidential, but Eckener served as an unofficial source for German political news. In return, recalled Captain von Schiller, whenever he was “in trouble with the Nazi regime politically, the Times [went] to bat for him editorially or [by publishing] significant news stories” to relieve the pressure.1

  Then Eckener headed to Washington, where he had two related aims in mind. The first was to arrange a helium purchase, and the second, to lay the groundwork for starting transatlantic service in 1935 under the IZT umbrella. The newly formed Federal Aviation Commission was currently examining the latter issue, and Eckener and Goodyear’s Litchfield had been invited to testify.

  He optimistically expected to be able to kill both birds with one stone, but Eckener, who may have been accustomed to dealing with Nazi bureaucracy—a Hydra to be sure—was innocently walking into the lair of Medusa, she of the many-snaked hair. Washington was a far more complicated, if less personally dangerous, place to navigate than Berlin.

  Having been advised by officials that “this government would not aid any foreign country to set up a permanent air service,” Eckener agreed with Litchfield that in their testimonies on October 29 they would instead talk up “the inauguration of American-built and American-operated Zeppelins in intercontinental service.”2 Litchfield assured Eckener that since the Merchant Airship Bill debacle he had been working his contacts at the Department of Commerce. They were now recommending, he said, $17 million in funding for two giant Akron-built airships, a smaller one for South American trips, and the long-desired Atlantic terminal in Baltimore.3 Once this was approved, it would be a simple matter for Zeppelin to acquire its own helium as a courtesy to American-owned Goodyear.

  Unfortunately, Litchfield had gravely miscalculated the balance of power in Washington by proposing that the $17 million come as a grant from the new Public Works Administration (PWA), a New Deal initiative dedicated to building large-scale public works that was headed by Harold Ickes, the secretary of the interior. The Commerce Department, then whose purpose was to promote business interests, could certainly make recommendations, but the decision was in Ickes’s hands.

  In approaching the PWA Litchfield assumed that an airship line would be right up its alley, and in thinking this he may not have been entirely wrong: The PWA did fund airport construction, runways, mapping, and other programs it believed were part of the national infrastructure. These were, however, for public use and the public good; funding a privately owned airship business was quite a different matter, especially when traveling aboard those airships was advertised as a privilege reserved for the affluent few.

  Still, the PWA was supposed to involve private enterprise in its projects, and Goodyear-Zeppelin could justifiably claim that federal financing would boost employment and spur consumer demand. But Litchfield did himself no favors by asking for so much money. Compared to other PWA air projects it was an absurdly extravagant amount. Between 1933 and 1939, the PWA distributed grants for 384 airport-related projects totaling nearly $20 million—which means Litchfield was requesting almost as much for a single project as the PWA would spend nationally over six years. At a time when the PWA served millions of regular Americans by allotting $18 million to help build Chicago’s subway system, Litchfield’s $17 million proposal to help speed the elite to Europe for their vacations had not a hope of gaining Ickes’s approval.4

  And despite Litchfield’s sunny assurances, the chances of Eckener’s acquiring helium were equally dismal. Since the Helium Control Act of 1927, the Bureau of Mines—responsible to the Commerce Department—held jurisdiction over the production, storage, and sale of America’s helium, but the land the gas lay under and its exploitation rights were controlled by Interior. Further complicating matters, the export of helium, a strategic resource, was subject to the unanimous recommendations of the Departments of War, Navy, and Commerce as well as presidential approval.

  Arguing that this system was somewhat unwieldy, Interior Secretary Ickes, a very argumentative fellow, had won a bruising fight with his colleague Daniel Roper at Commerce in April 1934 to wrest control of the Bureau of Mines from him, though Roper retained a say in whether to approve export. As Ickes was also the PWA head and a noisy critic of Hitler, it meant that Eckener and Litchfield were contending with a man not overly inclined to favor either an American airship plan or, to say the least, the sale of helium to a German firm he thought served only to further Nazi propaganda.

  As for the other players, the army was neutral, but Navy Secretary Claude Swanson was dead set against selling helium to the Germans, saying that “to give our commercial competitors [Zeppelin] the advantage of using helium in the future development of commercial lighter-than-air transportation seems inadvisable.”

  Even so, Eckener made an attempt to convince the government to make an exception. Eckener—as evidenced by his careful reading in 1919–20 of the Versailles Treaty that permitted him, or so he had thought, to build small civilian airships despite an Allied ban—was adept at exploiting pinprick holes in legislation. He believed that he had spotted one in the Helium Control Act.

  In Section 3, there was a line stating that “any surplus helium produced may, until needed for Government use, be leased to American citizens or American corporations.” When helium had been in short supply, the provision hadn’t mattered, as there was no surplus—but now there was, thanks to increased production and less demand from the navy for its diminished airship fleet. Since Goodyear was an American corporation and Zeppelin was in a partnership with that American corporation, all it would require was an exceedingly minor tweaking of the act to allow him to purchase helium. To that end, he testified that it was “imperative that in a future combined service of domestic and foreign airships helium be made available to all companies who will participate in this service.”5

  It was a good try, but a hopeless one: Ickes had the ear of President Roosevelt, and
Swanson remained unmovable on the subject, pointing out that the navy had in fact recently discovered a myriad of nonairship uses for some of its surplus helium. The gas, added to pressurized air, mitigated cramps and nausea in divers, as well as reducing decompression times. Used in recently developed diving bells, helium could help rescue trapped submariners. It could also be employed to treat asthma, croup, and diphtheria, and larger quantities aided the laying of bridge foundations and tunnels—making it also a PWA concern.6

  At this, Eckener realized there was no point pursuing the idea, and during a subsequent friendly meeting with Roosevelt at the White House he never raised the subject. Instead, fully aware of Eckener’s disappointment, the president graciously offered to let him use the navy’s facilities at Lakehurst if LZ-129 visited in the near future.7

  The voyage home in mid-November was a depressing one. With helium out of the question, months of testing had been wasted and LZ-129 would have to be reconfigured as a hydrogen airship. The only silver lining in this particular cloud was that, quite unexpectedly, he would have a giant seven-million-cubic-foot vehicle capable of lifting fifty tons of weight rather than the thirty-two tons achievable with helium. But on the downside, there was no possible way LZ-129 could be ready to fly by the summer of 1935, not with all the changes it was necessary to make.

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  WORSE, ANY LINGERING hope that the navy would order another Goodyear airship vanished on February 12, 1935, when the USS Macon encountered a storm off Point Sur, California, causing structural failure in the ring securing the upper tailfin. Harold Miller, one of the scout-plane pilots off duty in the smoking room, remembered a feeling “as though a giant hand had swatted us.” The bow suddenly dropped, then the airship swerved wildly to starboard, and the Macon started sinking.

  If one had to experience an airship crash, being aboard the Macon in the Pacific Ocean would be most people’s choice. The crew had twenty minutes to prepare themselves for collision as the ship gently deflated; the navy had this time provided sufficient life rafts; the water was relatively warm and calm; and there was plenty of time to send rescue vessels. After a soft, stern-first landing, Macon sank within a few minutes. Only two men died among the eighty-three-strong crew.

  The loss nevertheless left the navy’s airship program with neither airships nor friends. President Roosevelt declared he would spend not a penny more on airships, and Carl Vinson, who chaired the House Naval Affairs Committee, and after whose home city Macon (Georgia) had been named, said he recognized a “death-knell” when he heard one.

  Press reaction was predictably hostile. As the usual investigations got under way, the New York Post, with all the nuance for which it is famous, shouted that “no more funds of American taxpayers [should] be squandered on these useless gas-bags.”

  The Post was right. The American record with airships had been disastrous. ZR-2 (R-38): destroyed. Shenandoah: destroyed. Akron: destroyed. Macon: destroyed. The U.S. government had spent, or wasted, more than $16 million on its airships and now-forlorn hangars. The only one left was the venerable Los Angeles, which had recently been decommissioned after eight years of faultless service—and it, of course, had been built by the Germans.

  As always, the Germans were the exceptions. Eckener’s products experienced minor problems here and there, but so too did any aircraft, and his had never, in more than three decades, suffered a fatal peacetime accident—a safety record unequaled by any other form of transport. Between September 1928 and December 1934, the Graf Zeppelin had made 423 individual trips covering a distance of 630,000 miles; it had carried 10,500 passengers and spent a total of 10,005 hours in the air; and it had sailed the world and had crossed the South Atlantic no fewer than sixty-eight times.

  American opinion was not against airships per se—there was due excitement about the prospect of a visit by LZ-129 and the start of transatlantic service—but was directed against navy airships in particular. The leading American airshipman Charles Rosendahl fought a rearguard action by claiming that since 1918 trains had killed “300 times,” and cars “1,000 times,” more Americans than airships ever had, but the navy airship program was dead. In its place, the navy commissioned aircraft carriers like the USS Ranger, Yorktown, and Enterprise.8

  Eckener at this point considered approaching the Americans once more about purchasing helium. After all, the navy now definitely had excess capacity, but he wisely refrained. With Ickes in the saddle, he would have been turned down, and in any case, within a couple of weeks he was in no position to.

  * * *

  —

  THERE HAD BEEN a coup at Zeppelin, and Eckener, a past master of internal dogfighting—as his struggles against Lehmann and Colsman attested—now found himself the loser.

  The government was following through on its secret memorandum of a year earlier, which had laid the groundwork for Eckener’s ouster and the Nazification of the company. To Eckener, the move came as a surprise, but he could not have been shocked. Other large companies were gradually being brought under state control or had Nazi loyalists appointed to their boards. Now it was Zeppelin’s turn. An early warning sign had come at the beginning of 1935, when he’d been advised to prepare to move Zeppelin’s operating base (though not its manufacturing facilities) to a terminal being built outside Frankfurt. Deutsche Lufthansa, the government-backed airline, would share the new airfield.

  Perhaps Eckener had missed the flashing danger signal because Frankfurt, as an airport, made a lot of sense: Unlike Friedrichshafen, it was near two new national highways and a major city, and coordinating flight schedules with Deutsche Lufthansa would make connections for airship travelers to or from Germany that much easier.9 But it also meant that Deutsche Lufthansa would have increasing say in Zeppelin affairs, which really meant Berlin’s voice would be amplified.

  In early March, the blow fell. Eckener was informed that a new, virtually nationalized company was being formed, to be called Deutsche Zeppelin Reederei (German Zeppelin Airline Company, or DZR), with one half owned by Deutsche Lufthansa and the other by Göring’s Air Ministry, and headquartered in Berlin. Until then, Eckener had ruled over both the Zeppelin Company (which built the airships) and the DELAG (which flew them). The DELAG, which Eckener had birthed in 1909, was wound up and its duties transferred to DZR, while the Zeppelin Company would continue construction work on LZ-129 and its successors.

  Under the new arrangement, Eckener was sidelined as head of Zeppelin building in Friedrichshafen and was “promoted,” or so he was told, to become the toothless figurehead chairman of DZR and a member of its Supervisory Committee, where he was joined by several regime stalwarts to keep an eye on him.

  No longer serving as king and pope, Eckener would remain the outward face of Zeppelin in its dealings with the Americans, but real power—management of flight operations and oversight of commercial affairs—would no longer be in his hands. That job fell to his rival, Captain Ernst Lehmann, who had lusted after it since being outmaneuvered by Eckener in the early 1920s. Lehmann, a friend of the regime (Eckener subtly remarked that he was “more acceptable than I”), would be a far more pliant and pleasing chief executive officer of DZR than the irksome Eckener.

  Eckener suffered no illusions as to what was actually happening. The Nazis, he said, had pushed “the old nuisance out of the control car and behind a desk where he won’t be so much in the way.”

  There was no doubt that Göring had organized the “putsch,” and it was of a piece with a related plan to turn Germany into a great air power. A week or so later, on March 11, he revealed the secret existence of the Luftwaffe to a stunned world. Then, on March 22, Göring commemorated the formation of DZR with a speech. In it, he was rather gracious to Eckener, considering that he’d just knifed him, thanking him for his “great endeavors” in representing “the German engineer on the one hand and the German worker and spirit of enterprise on the
other.”

  Then came the big change. The airship “does not have the exclusive purpose of flying across the Atlantic, but also has a responsibility to act as the nation’s representative.” The pursuit of service to New York remained a goal, in other words, but it was more important to fly the flag, exemplify German power, and “make known to the world the healthy and workmanlike spirit of our Fatherland.” Zeppelins would henceforth serve the Reich, not just Eckener’s dream of creating a transatlantic airline.

  A tangible sign of Eckener’s diminished power came after the Graf Zeppelin’s first flight under the new DZR flag several days later: Not only were both sides of the tail fins carrying the swastika but a photograph of the company leadership and captains showed Lehmann front and center, with Eckener humiliatingly off to the side. Snappy Nazi salutes were now expected, though Eckener, recalled a colleague, used to make minimal efforts with “a somewhat lackadaisical upward swinging movement of his right arm.” (“No one advances here without these acrobatics!” murmured Eckener to a friend.)

  By altering Zeppelin’s mandate, Göring was throwing a bone to Goebbels at the Propaganda Ministry. Göring himself had little interest in airships, as Eckener well knew. If anything, he viewed them, as Eckener said, “with contempt, if not actual hostility.” When Eckener once asked him whether he’d like to take a ride, the air minister “vehemently declined and declared that he had no real confidence in the ‘gas bag.’ ” Goebbels, however, keenly understanding the spell they wove on Germans, wanted to employ them as propaganda tools for the upcoming Olympics and for other nationalist purposes.10

  With government control came a fraught discussion over what to name LZ-129. Some of the more servile flunkies at the Führer’s court “suggested” it be christened Adolf Hitler, but on second thought, it was hardly likely that the Great Leader would want his name associated with the project. How his critics would snicker if the Adolf Hitler went down in flames over one of his own ridiculous rallies.