Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  This was not, to put it mildly, the most auspicious moment to be suspected of pro-Germanism. To much American disgust, news had just arrived of the new Nazi Criminal Code, according to which individual rights were to be relegated to the bottom of the pecking order, below the rights of the nation, the state, the regime, the Party, and the Führer. It meant that anyone, especially Jews, would be an open target for Nazi judges.

  Within a day or two of receiving Weinstein’s letter, a shaken Roper wrote directly to his correspondent and distributed the text of his reply to The New York Times to make sure that he was on the record. Roper hastened to assure Weinstein that he had never committed “ourselves to Germany in lighter-than-air development plans.” Neither had there been any “treaty or tentative treaty discussed [with] the Department of Commerce.”

  He affirmed that the United States would not “form an alliance with Germany” in this matter and that in his casual conversations with AZT about building American airships he had been interested solely in “keeping the United States in the forefront of modern transportation, of which lighter-than-air service is a segment.”

  Roper was essentially saying that the matter would go no further. In Ohio, Paul Litchfield could recognize Washington code for killing a proposal as well as anyone, and he understood there and then that the dream was over.

  Akron would never build another airship—though it would later, famously, manufacture blimps—and Goodyear-Zeppelin closed its doors. Arnstein and the remaining Germans who had come over in the 1920s were transferred to a new company: Goodyear Aircraft Corporation.13 The name, carefully chosen to avoid mentioning either airships or Zeppelin, said it all.

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  ASIDE FROM ECKENER, who understood the gravity of what had just happened in Washington, life went on as before at DZR, where Lehmann and his allies seemed excited, rather than disappointed, by the prospect of a necessarily all-German airship line. Dealing with Goodyear had long been an albatross around their necks, and kowtowing to American bigwigs for cash was never their style. That had been Eckener’s obsession, not theirs, and everyone knew that Eckener was damaged goods in the eyes of the regime.

  Lehmann and DZR were entertaining the delusion that they could go it alone with the Hindenburg and its successors with only Reich support behind them. When Goodyear’s Harold Dick returned to Germany after several months away, he detected a “confident, even arrogant, attitude” at the DZR about its prospects.14

  Indeed, in early 1937 one might easily have been misled into thinking that nothing of any import had occurred, so steadfastly did DZR ignore the fact that the coming flight season would again have to rely on American goodwill to allow landings at Lakehurst with hydrogen airships.15

  Now that the chance to build a private terminal at Baltimore had vanished, all it would potentially take for the navy to withdraw official permission to use Lakehurst was a diplomatic crisis, public revulsion at a piece of Hitler thuggery, another embarrassing revelation à la Roper, or some other mishap.

  Instead of trying to find a solution to this Big Problem, Lehmann busied himself with fixing small ones, mostly stemming from customer feedback collected by Meister, who had little to do now that AZT had been relegated to the status of a remote back office.

  On the grounds that tipsy revelers had kept other passengers awake tinkling “Chopsticks,” the aluminum piano would no longer travel with the Hindenburg and would be replaced by a gramophone imperiously controlled by the steward. The paltry library would have more magazines and newspapers in English, and there would be two backgammon boards and some jigsaw puzzles to stave off boredom.

  Menu cards were to be printed in both German and English. Too many times, it seems, American passengers had been unexpectedly greeted by such German culinary delights as boiled meatballs in creamy anchovy sauce with beetroot—the feared Königsberger Klopse.

  Beer, too, had to be served colder, and coffee, hotter. The barman urgently needed training: He’d never heard of a Manhattan. Meister went so far as to send the puzzled DZR board of directors a cocktail stick he’d pilfered from the Waldorf-Astoria, along with a note explaining that Americans liked to impale olives and cherries with such implements.

  Other vitally important details were capably handled. The inkwells in the writing room were considered out of place with the décor and were replaced, though a suggestion to change the jam pots appears to have been passed over. Requests for a better selection of onboard gifts and souvenirs were easily fulfilled. Henceforth, there would be chocolates, eau de cologne, cigarettes, Havana cigars, and Champagne available.

  Americans like clean bathrooms, and the Hindenburg’s standards had not been up to par. Inadequate ventilation in the lavatories had resulted in “odors”—the Königsberger Klopse had struck again—the hand towels went unchanged, and there had been smeared soap on the basins. Meister was particularly exercised by the hand towel issue, informing his mystified German counterparts that Americans preferred single-use paper towelettes and regarded “general-purpose ones” as fit only for barbarians.

  Meister also insisted on encasing the feather mattresses in fitted sheets and providing two or three blankets as a “concession to [American] living standards” to replace the German-style eiderdown duvets, which some Americans, like Lester Gardner, the publisher of Aviation Magazine, had complained left “parts of his anatomy exposed to the cooling blast of the ventilator” at night.

  It was a long list of improvements, certainly, but, added Meister, “such things do not cost very much and are material to the creation of an overall good impression.”16

  And with those changes made, the Hindenburg would have all the trappings of a most luxurious air yacht. In January 1937, DZR began advertising that the upcoming season’s schedule had been expanded to no fewer than eighteen round-trip voyages. The first was slotted for May 3.17

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  MEANWHILE, TRIPPE RACED to launch his own transatlantic service to compete with Eckener’s. He cared about nothing else, not even the mounting financial losses in the Pacific, where Japan and China were gearing up for war. Business and tourism, as one might expect, were disastrously low. In 1937, many of Trippe’s clippers would travel between San Francisco and Honolulu with just two passengers, and from Hawaii to Manila empty. Pan American would lose $504,000 on its Pacific expansion alone that year, while its rather less ballyhooed South American network would make $1.035 million—90 percent of the company profits.

  The Pacific was turning out to be Trippe’s grand folly, but at least there was progress, finally, being made in the Atlantic. After years of wrangling, the rights and concessions he desperately needed to get across the ocean were beginning to fall his way.

  On February 22, 1937, the British Air Ministry finally granted Pan American permission to land and take off in the United Kingdom and Newfoundland; on March 5, the Canadians followed suit, as did the Irish Free State on April 13.

  With the signatures still wet, Trippe set the Pan American machine in motion. First came the creation of the Atlantic Division, 113 men under the direction of Colonel J. Carroll Cone, and then the beginning of construction on a city-owned flying-boat terminal at North Beach, Long Island, later to become LaGuardia Airport. Afterward, Trippe dispatched teams to Newfoundland to cut down a square mile of forest at Botwood to make room for hotels and offices while construction crews worked on a marine base. Mooring cables, buoys, a radio station, and a new access road appeared at Foynes on the river Shannon in Ireland, seemingly by magic. Before the work had been completed, cadres of Pan American meteorologists arrived to take their measurements.18

  Pan American had Zeppelin in its sights.

  50. Es Ist Das Ende

  EVEN IF AIRSHIP travel was becoming routine, it was still a thrill to watch the Hindenburg land.1 On May 6, five newsreel companies sent camera crews to Lakehurst to
capture the airship inaugurating the 1937 season. They were accompanied by about a dozen photographers from the major news agencies as well as several reporters from the dailies.

  The Hindenburg remained newsworthy, though it no longer dominated the headlines. To a third-tier radio journalist like Herbert Morrison, who hosted a midday farming news and light entertainment show, The Dinner Bell Hour, on WLS in Chicago, the Hindenburg’s coming to the United States presented an opportunity to showcase one of his new sponsors, American Airlines.

  WLS’s fare generally consisted of husk-by-husk coverage of regional corn-husking competitions, up-to-the-minute livestock reports, and crowd-pleasing fare like National Barn Dance, all avidly listened to by midwestern farmers. The previous year, American Airlines had been impressed by Morrison’s reporting from an airplane about local floods and had offered him a chance to take one of its airliners gratis to Newark. As a bonus, he and his recording engineer, Charlie Nehlsen, would be taken to see the Hindenburg land at Lakehurst. (American’s planes connected Hindenburg travelers to nearby airports.) Journalists working in local radio like Morrison rarely traveled outside their areas, so his plan was to interview any Chicagoan airship passengers he could find for some hometown interest, then return to Illinois that night.

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  MORRISON AND NEHLSEN were just happy to be there, but few of the more veteran New York newsmen were. For much of the day, there had been persistent rain, and a thunderstorm hadn’t improved their moods. One cameraman, from Universal, had already given up and gone to see a movie.

  The Hindenburg was late. It had been due to land at about 6 A.M., and many of the journalists had risen before dawn to get to Lakehurst on time. It was now about 4 P.M. Where was that damned airship?

  On board the Hindenburg, Captain Max Pruss was even more annoyed than the inconvenienced press corps. On the way over, he had run into headwinds and fallen some eight hours behind schedule. When he radioed Commander Charles Rosendahl at Lakehurst to tell him of the delay, Rosendahl moved him provisionally up to 6 P.M. and promised to have his landing crews ready earlier if need be.

  A half-day’s delay, though irritating, might not otherwise have mattered too much, but Pruss was scheduled to depart Lakehurst at 10 P.M. with sixty-five passengers, now at the Biltmore Hotel “laughing and joking while photographers took their pictures,” said one reporter. Ten of these planned to connect with Deutsche Lufthansa at Frankfurt to attend the coronation of King George VI in London on May 12.

  It would have to be a fast turnaround to prepare for the return leg, but Pruss thought he could make up for the delay by exploiting the favorable tailwinds. One thing was certain: Hindenburg needed to land at Lakehurst as soon as possible.

  Thankfully, he wouldn’t have to do it alone. Joining Pruss in the control car was Captain Anton Wittemann, his fellow Nazi Party member, though he was there only as an observer. Lehmann, too, was right there alongside him, ostensibly serving in an advisory role.

  As the head of DZR, Lehmann captained few flights these days, but he had come along on this one as part of his eternal quest to replace Eckener as the Face of Zeppelin. Once in New York, he planned to give newspaper interviews to publicize the Hindenburg’s first voyage of the 1937 season, but he also had other business to attend to. One of the passengers aboard was an aviation journalist named Leonhard Adelt, who had co-authored Lehmann’s memoirs. Together they were working on the final chapters and hoped to whip up interest among Manhattan publishers. (Abiding by his arrangement with Lehmann, Eckener had decided to absent himself from the flight by embarking on a lecture tour in Austria.)

  Pruss was known to be a good airshipman. He had years of wartime Zeppelin experience under his belt, and had served as the elevator operator—the most demanding post for any crewman—during Eckener’s voyage to America in LZ-126 Los Angeles. In 1934, he was promoted to commander of the Graf Zeppelin, and then became watch officer on the Hindenburg for much of the 1936 season. Harold Dick of Goodyear remembered that when he “was in command of the ship, every landing was perfectly executed.”

  Still, as Lehmann’s protégé, Pruss naturally tended to look to the senior man for guidance in difficult situations like this one. On the thoroughly Nazified Hindenburg, it was critical to Lehmann, Pruss, and Wittemann to represent the “new” Germany and the “new” DZR by distinguishing themselves from the “old” Zeppelin ways, as represented by the habitually ultra-cautious Eckener. This mentality, combined with Lehmann’s propensity for what Eckener regarded as unnecessary risk-taking and cutting corners, would help determine their subsequent decisions.

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  IT HAD BEEN a strange day, weather-wise, at Lakehurst. Shortly after 4:30 P.M., a cold front advanced through the air base, lowering the temperature to the mid-60s, followed by a local thunderstorm. The Hindenburg, after a tour of Manhattan to wait out the poor weather, was now nearing Lakehurst, but the storm had not yet passed. Exasperated and powerless to do anything else, Pruss turned the airship in the direction of eastern New Jersey to kill time.

  At 5:42 P.M., Rosendahl radioed him, in the telegram-ese of the era: “Conditions still unsettled recommend delay landing until further word from station advise your decision.” Ten minutes later, following a discussion with Lehmann and Wittemann, Pruss replied: “We will wait till you report that landing conditions are better.”

  At 6:12 P.M., another thundershower followed on the heels of the storm, but Rosendahl believed that by the time the Hindenburg arrived it would have passed on, so he radioed an update: “Conditions now considered suitable for landing ground crew is ready.” Hearing nothing back, Rosendahl pressed Hindenburg for instructions ten minutes later: “Recommend landing now.”

  Oddly, silence from Pruss. Perhaps he was discussing the matter with Lehmann. Finally, at 7 P.M., Rosendahl advised: “Overcast moderate rain diminishing lightning in west ceiling 2,000 feet improving visibility.” Then, eight minutes later, he radioed once more: “Conditions definitely improved recommend earliest possible landing.” Finally, Pruss acknowledged the message at 7:10 P.M., then shut down the ship’s transmitters and reeled in its trailing antennae. Rosendahl went outside to the edge of the landing circle, where he met Meister, there to take care of passengers.

  The Hindenburg began the approach maneuvers. It was coming in from the southwest at an altitude of about six hundred feet, with the wind blowing from the east. Pruss checked the landing circle below: There was a light rain falling, and he could see that the ground crew was not quite in position, despite Rosendahl’s assurances.

  Airship captains usually liked to land heading into the wind to help slow them down, and that is exactly what Pruss now did. He overflew the landing circle and turned to port, intending to describe a large oval that would bring him back pointing to the east.

  So far, everything was by the book, but in the control car there were several curious departures from the norm. Standard textbook practice, as laid down by Eckener, was for the captain of the ship to stand aloof from the watch officers and let them perform their duties, supervising them closely, of course, and intervening only if a disagreement or a sudden problem should arise. Thus, one officer was in charge of the rudder and engine power, while another looked after the elevators, ballast, and gas.

  On this flight, however, there was a more specialized division of labor. Pruss himself took over the rudder and engine position, while First Officer Albert Sammt supervised trim and altitude and Eduard Boetius manned the elevators. Sammt also directed Watch Officer Walther Ziegler, charged with overseeing the gas and valving, and Second Officer Heinrich Bauer, handling the ballast.

  Lehmann’s role was vague. As he was the senior officer on board, perhaps Pruss had pliantly deferred to his wish to command the landing, or perhaps Lehmann had long hankered to get rid of what he saw as Eckener’s outmoded policy and had ordered a change in
the hierarchy.

  The Hindenburg continued turning left at full cruising speed—about 73 mph—and Sammt ordered Ziegler to valve hydrogen for fifteen seconds to reduce altitude and bring the ship level. A minute later, the Hindenburg had come around the bend almost 180 degrees and was about to straighten and head directly east to the landing circle. Pruss idled the engines to reduce speed to 33 mph, and a minute after that, Ziegler valved gas again from the bow cells to bring the nose down.

  The Hindenburg was closing in on the landing circle very nicely, but then the wind shifted direction, from the east to the southwest. Now, at 393 feet, the Hindenburg was forced to change course at short notice and tacked east-northeast. Pruss put the rear engines into full reverse to slow down, then stopped them to allow the forward engines to draw the ship around to the northeast. Within a minute, he idled the forwards, too.

  About three-quarters of a mile from the landing circle, Sammt noticed that the tail seemed a little heavy. To bring the ship back level, at 7:18 P.M. Bauer dropped 661 pounds of water ballast, and then a thousand feet later another 661 pounds, followed finally by a third drop of 1,100 pounds. Six men were sent to the bow to equalize the weights. Sammt confirmed that the ship had been righted.

  Trimming an airship like this on its approach was a common occurrence, and nothing of the procedure so far was worrisome. Most likely, the rain the Hindenburg had recently passed through hadn’t yet had time to roll off the back of the ship and the elevator fins.

  More serious was the track the Hindenburg was pursuing. Lehmann and Pruss had opted to make a partial S-curve, beginning from the earlier port turn to the northeast and then swerving sharply starboard in a clockwise semicircle to bring them in to land. This turn was performed at a speed of about 27 mph, a third as fast as Hindenburg’s cruising speed.