* * *
—
MUSICK HAD BROUGHT no passengers, just mail, which could be lodged in sacks and required no food. Before he could fly people, Trippe first needed somewhere to accommodate them; a shack or tent on an isolated island was romantic but an unaccustomed hardship for wealthy Americans.
The work teams on Wake, in particular, were exhausted, ailing, bored, and homesick. Trippe pushed them harder. The North Haven was again dispatched, this time bearing the contents of two complete forty-five-room hotels, bound for Wake and Midway. He’d commissioned Delano & Aldrich, who’d designed Miami’s 36th Street Airport, for these as well. Two wings emanated from a central lobby, with each room, equipped with coat hangers and ashtrays, enjoying a wide verandah, screen netting, and a bathroom with running hot water. There was even an aquarium in the lobby. The construction crews must have been envious.
For a time, it looked as if the hotel’s occupancy rate would be zero percent. Over the three months between December 1935 and February 1936, Pan American made one successful round-trip to Manila but suffered three false starts. On December 22, for instance, Musick, after unhappily posing in a Santa Claus costume for publicity reasons, took off, encountered a cyclone seven hundred miles out and cautiously returned to San Francisco. On January 5, the China Clipper again left the ramp at Alameda, taxied across the harbor, and hit a floating log, which punctured its hull. The China Clipper finally got away again in mid-February. For thirteen hours it butted headwinds, and at the thousand-mile mark Musick cocked an ear at a bad report from Hawaii and scooted home.
Airship advocates hooted at the delays. These “great air cruisers” of Trippe’s were kept in their hangars by the weather, an enthusiasts’ magazine named The Airship laughed. “What sort of weather?, you ask. Tempest, blizzards, squall lines, ice? Not one of them.” The answer was wind. A “situation that would have been no deterrent to the airship”—the magazine seems to have forgotten the travails of Zeppelin’s early days—was proving, yet again, that airplanes were no match for Eckener’s airships on oceanic routes.
Much to Trippe’s relief, however, these proved to be teething problems, and thereafter the schedule rapidly improved. Passengers stepping aboard one of the M-130s would have been amazed at their surroundings. Reporters certainly were. Trippe had commissioned Norman Bel Geddes, a former theater designer, to prepare the interiors. Soft gray fabric covered the walls, disguising the cork soundproofing, and depending on which clipper one was on, there was either the Green Scheme (green seats with gold piping, corresponding with the curtains), the Brown Scheme (brown seats with eggshell piping), or the Yellow Scheme (yellow with green), all in appropriately subdued shades. The seats could be converted into full-size beds. In the separate lounge, seating twelve, there were clubby easy chairs, sofas, and card and magazine tables with rubber or felt surfaces to prevent slippage.
China Clipper, a Warner Bros. movie, appeared in August 1936 and only further served to advertise Pan American’s Pacific service (Van Dusen was the film’s technical adviser). It broke no new ground in storytelling technique, though it had some fine footage of the China Clipper and contained a potted, if sanitized, history of Pan American. Humphrey Bogart starred as a kind of Ed Musick, and indeed quite looked like him, but was more talkative than the real one. More interesting for some of the audience, however, was Pat O’Brien, who played a Trippe-type figure, a visionary dreamer who sacrificed his personal relationships to forge a new airline. At one point, Bogart’s character says of O’Brien’s, “I was just thinking how swell it would have been if he’d said thanks,” which must have drawn knowing laughs from Trippe’s long-unthanked staff.
By the time the movie was released, however, Trippe had already moved on. The Pacific had been conquered, and in spite of the tremendous achievements it had encompassed, for Trippe that ocean was a sideshow to the main event. He had to get to Europe.
Boeing, which had been split off from Rentschler’s United conglomerate after the Air Mail scandal, was at the time developing a new flying boat, the Boeing 314, with nearly double the M-130’s horsepower and, it was claimed, a range of 3,500 miles with up to seventy-four passengers. One of the most amazing features advertised was that the traditional chemical toilet would be replaced by a “flushing” one—actually, a rotating drum rolled 180 degrees and emptied its contents outside, then righted itself.
Lindbergh considered it a mediocre plane and advised his friend that Boeing’s promise to deliver 314s in December 1937 was utterly fanciful (it would take a team of engineers a year just to design that toilet, as it turned out). But Trippe, swollen with vainglory after his Pacific success, ignored the cautions and spent more than half of Pan American’s treasury ($3.3 million) on six of them in July 1936.
Status, if nothing else, demanded an Atlantic route. Trippe controlled the largest airline on earth. Pan American’s routes now extended over forty thousand miles, nearly double the range of its nearest competitor, Air France. The airline’s passenger traffic far exceeded anyone else’s; it owned or leased 202 airports and 129 radio/weather stations around the world; and it had the highest percentage of on-time departures and arrivals, the fewest fatal accidents, and the most advanced directional radio system.
To Trippe, it was frankly offensive that the mightiest airline king of all time could not fly to Europe, a doddle compared to the obstacles that had been faced in the Pacific, but it rankled still more that there was a way one could cross the Atlantic by air—according to one journalist, “the greatest, most lucrative, most important…blue-ribbon route of trade, diplomacy, and society” in the world”: Eckener’s Zeppelin.5
48. Master and Commander
MAY 6, 1936, was a dark day in the history of aviation—if you were Juan Trippe—but if you were Hugo Eckener, it was an epochal one. At 9:27 P.M., the Hindenburg lifted off from Friedrichshafen bearing fifty-one passengers and fifty-four crewmen. Destination: New York.
Eckener had beaten the unbeatable Trippe and his Pan American colossus. His Hindenburg, said one journalist, was about to “[steal] the show” and win the race across the Atlantic.1 In spite of the dozens of attempts by others, after decades of single-minded struggle, after overcoming obstacles that would have felled a lesser man, it would be he, Hugo Eckener of Flensburg, who would go down in history as the titan who conquered the Atlantic Ocean.
Yet it would not, at least officially, be him captaining the Hindenburg to America. Eckener had expected the honor thanks to his Roosevelt Gambit, but the prickly Lehmann had raised a ruckus about it with Goebbels. He was the head of DZR, not Eckener, and this was yet another instance of Eckener’s grandstanding. Eckener had no other choice but to acquiesce.
So, keeping to the arrangement that when he and Lehmann were both aboard, only one would serve as captain, Eckener was merely cited in the officers’ list under his own name, whereas Lehmann received the coveted rank of commander. But in an admirably diplomatic solution, possibly suggested by Göring, Eckener’s name was positioned above Lehmann’s.
When Louis Lochner, an American journalist based in Berlin filing stories for the Associated Press, asked Eckener about it, he just laughed good-naturedly and “said resignedly, ‘Anyway, I head the list. That’s something!’ ” But in his diary of the flight, Lochner wrote that “I had the impression nevertheless that he felt hurt.”
To Eckener, fussing over who was in command was insignificant compared to the Big Thing he’d achieved. For just $400 for a one-way ticket ($720 round-trip), a mere 10 percent more than the price of a first-class steamship fare and less than a fifth of what it had cost passengers on the Graf Zeppelin in 1928, a person could cross the ocean in three to three and a half days from Germany to the United States, or two and a half back.
Not that he would make a profit. Keeping in mind Eckener’s habitual fuzziness with numbers, each round-trip voyage allegedly cost the company $80,000, though it was pro
bably more. With every berth sold out and taking a heavy load of mail, he would be hard pressed to do better than break even, at least in the first year of operation with ten return trips to Lakehurst planned.
These were no longer the days when Eckener could sell exclusive press rights to Hearst for many tens of thousands of dollars to subsidize his costs, but he got something better in return: international blanket coverage of the flight.
The New York Times, for example, hired ex-Hearst correspondent and indomitable Zeppelin fan Lady Drummond-Hay as its onboard reporter; Karl von Wiegand, her “companion,” worked for the International News Service; Sir Hubert Wilkins, the explorer and another old friend, was there courtesy of Hearst; Ralph Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune was also present, as were Webb Miller for the United Press and writers for the Staats Zeitung, the Paris-Soir, the Völkischer Beobachter, the National-Zeitung, London’s Daily Mail, and a Roman Catholic paper. Making their first appearance on a Zeppelin were two gentlemen of the radio, Dr. Max Jordan (NBC’s European chief) and a correspondent for Germany’s Reichsrundfunk, as well as a cameraman for Paramount News Reel and a shutterbug named Franz Gayk working for Heinrich Hoffman, Hitler’s official photographer and unofficial matchmaker (his assistant was Eva Braun).
All in all, a fun, hard-drinking, chain-smoking group. The number of women aboard—ten—soon prompted jokes about hanky-panky in the cabins, and the journos entertained themselves discussing “a suitable name for the first child conceived in mid-air aboard a Zeppelin—a possibility nowadays,” with Webb Miller getting some laughs by suggesting “Helium if it were a boy, and Shelium, if a girl.”
Their fellow passengers were a mixed bag.
There were several businessmen, like William Beckers, a director of Goodyear-Zeppelin; Carl Bruer, fountain-pen king; and Hans Hinrichs, a grain dealer and brewer.
There were some professionals: Harold Dick from Goodyear and Lieutenant Commander Scott Peck of the navy. They spent most of their time in the control car.
There were the glamorous, such as the enigmatic, dark-eyed beauty “Madame Titayna” (actually Elisabeth Sauvy-Tisseyre), the Soir reporter who turned up, said Lady Drummond-Hay, “in a symphony of royal blue and red.” She had recently published a fawning interview with Hitler (“I was astonished and surprised by the bright blue of his eyes….His face radiates intelligence and energy and emits a special glow when he speaks”) and would become an enthusiastic collaborator during the German occupation of France.
There were the famous, like Leslie Charteris and his current wife (the first of four), Pauline. In 1928, Charteris had created the character of Simon Templar (“The Saint”) and was currently working on his seventeenth adventure involving the proto–James Bond battling sundry evildoers. In full thriller-writer mode, he quickly announced that “I think it would be actually possible for a small group of men to overpower the crew and take possession of the ship.”
There were the fliers. Miss Clara Adams, a Pennsylvania bluestocking and inveterate world traveler, was on board—as was Erla Parker, the long-widowed spouse of a Cleveland physician and a friend of Adams’s. “Traveling [by airship] is a wonderful beauty secret,” said Mrs. Parker. “It is so absolutely calm and effortless. There’s no nervous strain—now any woman knows what that does for her appearance.” Frederick Murray Simon, too, was present. He had been the navigator on Walter Wellman’s misbegotten America dirigible flight back in 1910. “I vowed at the time that I’d fly across the Atlantic yet and now that moment has come,” he said.
There were the special guests. One, the Reverend Paul Schulte, was known as the “flying priest,” as he had established a service to bring missionaries via air to the remoter parts of Africa. Pope Pius XI had given him dispensation to conduct Mass on board the Hindenburg—a first in aviation—on the grounds that it was “a place of dignity and history and that the great airship is so steady that sacramental wine will not be spilled.” Schulte had agreed, however, not to light any candles.
Another was Dr. Franz Wagner from Dresden. As Lehmann’s previous attempts with the accordion had not been crowd-pleasers, he’d been hired to play a specially commissioned aluminum piano. A small grand, the piano weighed just 356 pounds and was covered in thin pigskin, presumably to reduce its tinniness.
And then there were the Nazi Party hacks and hangers-on. Wilhelm Traupel, for instance, was an SS officer who, when he was not traveling in comfort across the Atlantic, kept himself busy liquidating the mentally ill. Joseph Berchtold was the deputy editor of the Völkischer Beobachter, the official newspaper of the Nazi Party. As Party Member number 964—indicating serious commitment—Berchtold had participated in the Beer Hall Putsch and had commanded Hitler’s bodyguard, which later evolved into the SS. His comrade from the National Zeitung, Eberhard Graf von Schwerin, was a Nazi of the aristocratic variety. The trio don’t seem to have chitchatted with the other guests much.
More entertaining was Dr. Karl Ritter, chief of the Economic Department at the Foreign Ministry. Lochner the journalist found him a “jolly soul.” After Lochner said he’d mentioned his name in a news report, Ritter “exclaimed in mock distress, ‘Good heavens, did you do that? Now all [my] American sweethearts will be at Lakehurst to meet me.’ ”
Lochner, who was sharing a cabin with Ritter, thought the response all the more humorous because he had assumed Ritter to be a “confirmed bachelor,” despite Ritter’s having an affair, or at least being thought to be having an affair, with another passenger on the Murder on the Orient Express–like Hindenburg: the redoubtable Countess Rosie Waldeck.
Born into a banking family, she had briefly married Ernst Gräfenberg, a high-society gynecologist (the G-spot was named after him) before moving on to Franz Ullstein of the Ullstein publishing fortune. According to an American intelligence report, while married to Ullstein she had embarked on “an intimate personal relationship with RITTER for many years, and she was, according to one source, deeply in love with him.” That at least explains her presence on the Hindenburg, though Dr. Ritter was perhaps not as smitten with her as she was with him.
She and Lady Drummond-Hay—the two people who brought the most clothes, commented Lochner—were assigned a cabin together. They got along well enough, thankfully, and took turns at the tiny mirror. The countess said that the cabins had been designed by a misogynist (Ludwig Dürr, more of a misanthropist, was responsible) and a “very mean one” for not including enough wardrobe space (there was room for six suits) and no drawers. “I always dress for dinner and no airliner can stop me,” Waldeck determinedly added, yet her gabardine suit “was breathlessly unwrinkled,” remarked Lady Drummond-Hay (who was taken aback to learn that unstylish Pauline Charteris had brought only the dress she was wearing and a small suitcase).
The flight itself passed uneventfully enough. Up there in the clouds, it seemed as though the Continent, a happy and contented place, was at peace. Most of the passengers did not realize that the French had banned the Hindenburg from their territory owing to Hitler’s provocations; that the Hindenburg could not cross Spain, where a civil war was brewing; or that the British had ordered the airship not to fly over London because Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts were causing riots in the streets. The last thing the authorities wanted were giant floating swastikas further inspiring them.
Instead, the air-pressurized smoking room was always full—the barman’s responsibilities included stopping anyone walking in with a forbidden box of matches or walking out with a lit cigarette. Inside, there was an automobile-style electric lighter, which was tough on cigar aficionados and even tougher on pipe smokers. With a modicum of charm, it was possible to persuade the steward to provide, “with a rather reluctant mien,” a single match, but, said a traveler, he “retains hold of said match with great tenacity, from ignition to charred cinder. For the passenger to do his own lighting is streng verboten [strictly forbidden].”
The fo
od was not bad but was (wrote one correspondent) “neither inspired, nor much varied,” and sometimes a little too German for American tastes: heavy on the meat and heavier on the cream sauce. Frankfurt sausages were served for breakfast, Bavarian fattened duckling for lunch, and smothered venison cutlets for dinner. Some 250 bottles of wine were carried aboard, the great majority Rhine and Moselle whites with a leavening of French reds. Heinrich Kubis, the head steward, who had been with Zeppelin since before the war, performed up to his usual standards.
Belowdecks, as they say, the fare was rather more monotonous. To prevent tiffs breaking out between the south German and north German members of the crew, they alternated between fish (for the northerners) and pasta (for the southerners), the pattern broken occasionally by chicken—the crew suspected the cooks of giving them vulture—as a kind of mutually acceptable dish.
Many passengers repaired to the writing room to compose postcards and letters for hours at a time; others napped or admired the wonderful sights—cruising over an iceberg was a highlight—from the windowed promenades; they also played cards and munched on sandwiches. At night, the stewards drew the curtains separating the public rooms from the promenades to prevent the light pollution from inside ruining the vista of moonlight glistening on the blacky waves amid the unparalleled constellation of stars.
If a passenger hadn’t brought something to read, he or she was out of luck: The airship’s “library”—all in German—consisted of a copy of Hindenburg’s tedious war memoirs (good for insomnia, though), a dictionary, a few other random tomes, bound volumes of the newsweeklies, and a novel by John Knittel, a Nazi-approved Swiss writer. All were primly locked away in a cabinet to discourage theft. (The reading matter on board Trippe’s Pacific M-130s was better: Each carried four copies of Margaret Mitchell’s new novel, Gone with the Wind; there was talk of a movie adaptation.)
Empires of the Sky Page 50