Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  One day, searching for something to report on, the journalist Webb Miller asked for a tour, a request readily granted by the ever effusive Lehmann. On their way to see the engine gondolas, he brought up the touchy subject of the wartime Zeppelin attacks on London. “I was two miles below you dodging your bombs,” Miller said. Lehmann laughed: “Well, that was a long time ago.”

  Only then did Miller realize the catwalk they were walking along was but a foot wide. “I clutched nervously at struts and girders, fearing that a misstep would plunge me through the thin fabric into the ocean half a mile below.” Lehmann waved off his concerns. “That fabric is strong enough to bear the weight of a man. You wouldn’t go through if you slipped off on it.” Miller was, understandably, incredulous. “Here, I’ll show you,” said Lehmann, as he jumped off the catwalk and trampolined on the outer skin, just a fraction of an inch thick.

  When they arrived at the engine gondolas, Lehmann passed him off to Fritz Sturm, the chief engineer. The gondolas were suspended fifteen feet away from the side of the airship; the only things holding them secure were, now that Miller was looking at them up close, some alarmingly spindly-looking struts. Sturm tied a helmet to Miller’s head and pointed to a foot-wide ladder slanting down from an opening in the envelope into the egg-shaped gondola. He showed Miller, now very worried about what he had gotten himself into, “how to clutch the frail ladder on two sides, crooking my elbow around it to the windward and clutching the other edge with my fingers. This precaution was necessary to prevent the eighty-miles-an-hour wind from tearing me bodily off the ladder. I found it a ticklish, frightening business; each time I raised a foot the wind wrenched it away from the ladder rung and flung it back toward the stern of the ship. Nothing in the world could save you if the hurricane-like wind tore you off the ladder.” After a few steps, Miller wished he were back in the bar knocking back martinis, but he couldn’t appear a coward.

  Inside the gondola was a colossal diesel engine driving the twenty-foot propeller that “deafened me with its thunder in spite of my padded helmet.” He felt as if he were “being shot through the air inside a huge artillery shell with open windows.” A mechanic was permanently stationed beside each engine for a few hours at a time. The scenery was splendid, of course, but Miller longed for the whisper-quiet, virtually vibrationless environs of the lounge and cabins tucked inside the ship itself.

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  HIDDEN FROM THE passengers was the muted tug-of-war going on between Eckener and Lehmann, always over small things. The tussle over titles, for instance, continued to rankle Lehmann. For much of the flight, the American newspapers inadvertently insulted him by naturally assuming that Eckener, because he was Eckener, was the captain and Lehmann his underling. Eckener did not trouble to correct the stories.

  Lehmann’s willingness to take reporters on tours of the ship was partly inspired by his desire to set the record straight out of Eckener’s hearing. The ploy paid off—partly—when on May 9 an article finally, and correctly, described Lehmann as the “actual master of the Hindenburg.” Unfortunately, a different article that same day irritatingly added that he served “under the general direction of Dr. Hugo Eckener,” the “Commander of the Hindenburg.”

  Eckener was always aware that it was his name, not Lehmann’s, that sold newspapers, and whenever occasion demanded it, Eckener came first. So when a special dinner for all the guests was held one evening, it was in Eckener’s honor rather than in Lehmann’s, despite the latter having spent almost as many years at Zeppelin. Eckener was accordingly placed at the top of the head table with the most prominent guests, and Lehmann had to settle for the second table.

  Then there was the matter of the radio. NBC had conceived the idea to broadcast a half-hour show from aboard the Hindenburg. At 8:30 P.M., when the Hindenburg was a hundred miles south of Newfoundland, Dr. Max Jordan, head of the network’s European office, radioed in to check reception: “This is the airship Hindenburg calling New York.” And heard back: “Go ahead, signal excellent.”

  Adding to his annoyance, Lehmann had not been asked to make a speech, an odd omission considering that his English was excellent, but Eckener, of course, headed the program—so perhaps not so odd, after all.

  Millions of Americans tuned in to hear Eckener. “Many passengers told me today all this seems unreal,” he said. “How long will it be until all this will have become just [an] ordinary thing, that will cause fear to nobody, and will hardly be mentioned in the newspapers any more. I really wonder when that will be.” Then he announced the imminent inauguration “of regular airship travel across the Atlantic.”

  Afterward, Sir Hubert Wilkins, Lady Drummond-Hay, Lochner, and Wiegand gave addresses enthusiastically backing Eckener’s dream of oceanic travel. To round out the show, Lady Wilkins trilled a current hit, “I’m in the Mood for Love,” accompanied by Dr. Wagner on the piano, who then played Schubert’s “Serenade” and Strauss’s “Blue Danube” for an inoffensive touch of the light-classical.

  Father Schulte’s Mass was equally uncontroversial, if attended only by about a quarter or perhaps a third of the guests (the Church was not in Hitler’s good books) and crew. Neither Eckener nor Lehmann, who weren’t the believing sort, appears to have been present, though Lochner, a Lutheran, went out of curiosity and a nose for a good color story. By fitting happenstance it was the Feast of the Apparition of St. Michael the Archangel (the patron of mariners), and the priest conducted the service without spilling a drop of consecrated wine, using a portable altar equipped with a chalice, host, and crucifix (the lit-candle problem was solved with electric ones). Max Jordan, who later became a monk, served as choirboy to Wagner’s accompaniment.

  The service was interrupted by the incessant whirring of cameras, prompting the good-natured Schulte to say that “never before have I conducted a divine service in the presence of so many camera clickers and so few members of my faith.” But, he added, he had experienced “the most impressive feeling I ever had. It was all quiet up there and one seemed near heaven.”

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  AROUND DAWN AT Lakehurst on May 9, Commander Charles Rosendahl, now in charge of the naval air base, waited anxiously for the Hindenburg’s arrival.

  He had nearly three hundred sailors and soldiers serving as ground crew. Separately, Willy von Meister had arranged for four small American Airlines planes to be on hand to whisk passengers to Newark airport, thirty minutes away, whence it was a brief drive into the city. Passenger processing through Customs and Health had also been vastly improved: No one wanted another embarrassing holdup like the one in 1928.

  Then the siren atop the great hangar sounded. Hindenburg was here.

  The crowds awaiting its arrival were noticeably smaller than in previous years. Owing to the hour, many of Rosendahl’s men were not quite ready, so several journalists and German diplomats volunteered to help guide the airship in with its ropes. One Jewish reporter dryly wondered, “Hell, who would ever have thought I’d help land a Nazi airship?”

  That was the problem right there. One might partly explain away the diminished crowd of only 8,000 to 20,000 waiting at Lakehurst as a consequence of airship flight becoming more routine: “Zeppelins were no longer the fabulous aircraft they were a score of years ago,” remarked one report.

  But the primary reason was that the Hindenburg was a “Nazi airship,” and could not help but be identified with the regime. That uniformed members of the pro-Nazi Bund would frequently try to barge their way close to the airship for photos did nothing to improve its image. And the impact of the recently passed Nuremberg Laws on the Protection of German Blood and German Honor and the Reich Citizenship Law was felt particularly keenly in New York, with its large Jewish population. The laws forbade marriage between Jews and ethnic Germans and stripped non-Germans of their citizenship rights. Boycotts and vandalism of Jewish-owned stores were common, and Jew
s were banned from practicing medicine and the law, purged from the universities, and forbidden from employment in the civil service.

  In the little borough of Lakehurst (pop. 968), near the naval air base, which had been hoping for a bonanza—stores had stockpiled $5,000 worth of sandwiches, ice cream, peanuts, and pennants (inaccurately) reading “Hindenburg—Maiden Flight”—the mayor, Harold Fuccile, despondently said that local merchants had sold just a thousand dollars’ worth. He blamed “Hitler” for the “financial fiasco,” with others adding that a lot of potential attendees were put off by all the Bund’s swastikas (and the giant ones on the tail fins).

  Eckener put a brave face on the slight turnout. He was after bigger game, but first he had to deal with the Lehmann Issue. During the flight, Lehmann had confronted him to complain about his second-class status, and Eckener had promised to fix the problem.

  During the press conference afterward in the hangar, Eckener made a point of standing Lehmann right next to him as he clarified the situation. “It was quickly established,” wrote a reporter bemused at why he had opened the session on such an inside-baseball note, “that Dr. Eckener had relinquished the post he has held for so long as an airship captain.” Eckener made sure that everyone knew “it was Lehmann who wore the uniform today and it was Lehmann who gave the commands from the bridge of the great airship.”

  Journalists are sometimes like cats in that they sense the slightest movement in the dark. A few quickly realized that there was something else going on here, one asking Lehmann point-blank, “Are you in command?” which he headed off with “a ready smile” but did not answer. Then came the inevitable follow-up: “Then is Dr. Eckener’s position advisory to you?” “Oh yes,” answered Lehmann, who then “turned and smiled affectionately” at Eckener, as if there were an understanding between them.

  The press gang suspected the change in leadership was related to the reports of Eckener’s rift with the Nazi government and asked him what the situation was. Eckener had his answer down pat. “Oh, that was all a misunderstanding and…is all quite settled,” he said casually, waving away the problem. “I went directly to Berlin and saw General Göring and we straightened [it] out.”

  With the unpleasantries out of the way and Lehmann’s hurt feelings assuaged, Eckener changed the subject to a happier one. “I think that, with the completion of a dozen trips on schedule, we can show the American people what the airship can do, and that is the purpose of our flights this Summer.” When they were done, he said, he expected to be able to raise private capital for Goodyear and Zeppelin to form an airship line.

  Eckener spent the remainder of his visit hammering home this point and trying, not altogether successfully, to avoid airship politics. Before a dinner—which included such delights as Chilled Melon Cocktail à la Eckener, Okra Soup Friedrichshafen, and (recognition at last), Filet of Bass Almondine à la Lehmann—at the Waldorf-Astoria that evening organized by the Board of Trade for German-American Commerce, the orchestra had played the “Horst Wessel Song,” the Nazi anthem, and about half of the thousand attendees stood and made the required salutes. As there were too many people watching—including German ambassador Hans Luther and Lehmann, plus who knows how many informers—to not follow suit, Eckener was reported as reluctantly holding “the salute by lifting his arm slightly above the level of the table.”

  Eckener was relieved to be out of there to catch the 1:40 A.M. train to Washington to see Roosevelt in the White House—his “Get Out of Jail Free” card. Unfortunately, he had two undesired escorts, Lehmann and Luther, so the meeting the next day was amicable, but nothing important was discussed. Old fishing and sailing stories seem to have been the main topics of conversation. Nice and safe, in other words, and guaranteed to bore Lehmann and reassure Luther that nothing untoward was going on. Sensing Eckener’s discomfort at not being able to talk freely, Roosevelt claimed he had some pressing engagements and had to cancel luncheon, but the large photograph of Eckener and FDR that appeared in the newspapers the next day stood guarantor of Eckener’s safety.

  Afterward, the trio rushed back to New York as Lehmann and Eckener were due to depart later that night. The Hindenburg took off at 11:27 P.M., carrying forty-eight passengers and 150,000 letters.

  There had been complaints about the lack of fruit and vegetables, and Kubis, the steward, had made sure to include more “typical American edibles” for the return journey. A thousand pounds’ worth of turkeys, lobsters, ice cream, potatoes, lettuce, spinach, grapefruit, oranges, bananas, and apples (along with American whiskey, ginger ale, and sparkling water) had been loaded into the storerooms.

  There were far fewer journalists this time, their places being taken by an interesting variety of regular Americans, such as eighty-seven-year-old Harriet Hague, a longtime air enthusiast, and Billy Googan of Cleveland, aged thirteen. He was a Boy Scout, was wearing long trousers for the first time, and when asked for his views on airship travel, said “I dunno” a lot. Paul Mack-Hale, a restaurateur of Worcester, Massachusetts, officially became the fattest man to ever fly in a Zeppelin, tipping the scale at 235 pounds. The newspapers, pretending this was a serious issue, solemnly calculated that three thousand cubic feet of hydrogen would have to be reserved to lift him. A not-quite-yet-famous passenger was Dr. William M. Scholl, described as a “foot specialist and manufacturer of orthopedic appliances.” And for unknown reasons, there were three people from Peoria, Illinois, where the Hindenburg evidently played well.

  The airship passed over Manhattan and traffic came to a halt as it made its way up Broadway, where the post-theater crowds cheered. The Hindenburg acknowledged their applause by dropping below a thousand feet, with the blaze of lights along the Great White Way illuminating its path. Then past the Empire State Building, where late-night office workers watched agog from the windows as it cruised at eye level and headed toward the bay. There, the ninety-two floodlights shining on the Statue of Liberty went dark for a moment and lit up again, blinking their salute to the queen of the air.

  Hindenburg would not be returning to Friedrichshafen; it was bound for a new home, the “Airdrome” at Frankfurt, to share the facilities with Deutsche Lufthansa. There, the new airship hangar was the largest in the world at 900 feet long, 170 feet high, and 170 feet in width—a benefit of being a “Nazi airship” was that the Nazis had virtually limitless funds.

  There was another reason, too, for the Hindenburg to be granted such largesse: The Berlin Olympics was coming up in early August, and Goebbels had ordered the Hindenburg to put on a good show.

  Eckener was not invited to participate, much to his relief, and he was pleased when Lochner informed him on the way home that, because Goebbels’s “unperson” edict had been lifted, his name was again being mentioned in the press, albeit without the usual glowing plaudits and only after his meeting with Roosevelt. To Lochner, whom he knew he could trust, Eckener growled, “Die Giftkröte [the venomous toad] has seen after all that I am not without friends.”

  Lehmann remained a problem, despite the choreographed press conference at Lakehurst. The dynamic between him and Eckener was becoming increasingly testy and tense, though they tended to keep their arguments out of the public eye. Once back in Friedrichshafen, unable to contain his anger anymore, Eckener wrote him a politely nasty letter, informing Lehmann that he’d decided not to come on the next scheduled Hindenburg flight. In saying that “I’m withdrawing willingly, and your ambition shall be fully satisfied,” Eckener touched a nerve: He’d long accused Lehmann of being too obsequious to the Nazis for his own good.

  And then, in a prickly reminder that Lehmann should know his place, Eckener added, “I reserve the right to take part in future flights, when it suits me.” The next day, Lehmann dashed off a curt note saying that in fact it was Eckener’s vanity that had put him on the outs with the government and forced him to step aside.

  The sniping continued. In June, Lehmann made
sure that a twenty-four-page special supplement included with the leading Frankfurt newspaper celebrating the new airport and the history of Zeppelins kept Eckener out of the main section and lauded his own contributions. Eckener was relegated to providing a brief word buried in the back pages. A subsequent letter from Lehmann to Eckener demanding a higher salary to suit his new status didn’t even greet him with a pro forma salutation but was addressed instead to “The Supervisory Board,” as if Eckener no longer counted.

  Aside from these unpleasant clashes, however, the American voyage had achieved Eckener’s intention of stirring up interest for a full-fledged Atlantic line. When Meister released a schedule of that season’s flights—one every ten days or two weeks—that would end on October 7, every cabin was fully booked well in advance.2

  Most important, for early October Meister was arranging a special domestic flight from Lakehurst to Boston that he had taken to calling the “Millionaires’ Flight.” This was intended to be the main sales pitch for American financiers and businessmen to fund new Goodyear-Zeppelin airships.

  One invitee in particular must have attracted Eckener’s eye as he glanced down the impressive roster: a certain Mr. Juan T. Trippe of Pan American, apparently still on the board of PZT.

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  IN THE MEANTIME, DZR had work to do. On August 1, shortly before 7 A.M., the airship, now bearing on its sides the Olympic rings, departed Frankfurt carrying sixty-five passengers, mostly Nazi officials and their wives, some officers, and various journalists.

  Eckener was not on board, for obvious reasons, but neither was Lehmann, who was overseeing operations from Berlin, and so the Hindenburg was instead commanded by Lehmann’s ally Captain Max Pruss, a Nazi Party member.