As one magazine remarked a week after the Hindenburg disaster, now “there is a general expectation of tighter safety rules, more gadgets, improvements all along the line” for airplanes and airships alike. In other words, the common reaction to the loss of the Hindenburg may have been one of horror, but also there was an assumption that the introduction of helium, as part of the new push for “tighter safety rules,” would render future disasters impossible.11
It was imperative that the Germans be allowed to have it.
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AS IT HAPPENED, shortly before the Hindenburg fire, the Business Advisory Council (an arm of the Commerce Department) had reported that it saw no danger in selling surplus helium to Zeppelin through AZT. The House Military Affairs Committee had broadly agreed. Public opinion, too, was in favor, with fifty-seven newspaper editorials arguing that helium should be made available to the Germans, with only three opposing.12
In the days following the disaster, Roosevelt established a Special Cabinet Committee composed of the secretaries of the interior (Harold Ickes, serving as chairman), commerce, the navy, war, and state to advise whether helium should be sold to the Germans. It met for the first time on May 19 and was heavily in favor of export.13 Even Ickes, that most unrelenting of anti-Nazis, wanted to extend the hand of sympathy to a bereft nation while improving safety. As he told Roosevelt, “It would appear to be the duty of this country as a good neighbor to share any unneeded surplus [helium] it may have with other countries for the promotion of commerce and science, alleviation of human suffering, and safeguarding the lives of passengers on airships.”14
His backing came with one caveat, as Ickes made clear: Under no circumstances would helium be released if it was to be used for “military purposes.” If a permit was issued for helium exports, it would be canceled at the first hint of the gas being used for anything other than Zeppelin transportation to the United States.15
With the Board of Inquiry winding down at Lakehurst in late May, Eckener traveled to Washington to make a statement before the Senate Military Affairs Committee.
In his opinion, Eckener definitively stated, Zeppelins “would never again be used by Germany as an instrument of warfare,” adding that “it is quite impossible to use airships for military operations in Europe.” When pressed as to what assurances he could provide that the German government would not confiscate the helium for military use, “Eckener said he felt sure such guarantees, if desired, would be forthcoming.”16
In a meeting with Eckener on May 25, Ickes specified what kind of guarantee he wanted. It had to be a written promise not to use helium for anything else but civilian airship flights signed, preferably, by Hitler, though Göring would do in a pinch.17
Ickes’s insistence on an iron clad guarantee was motivated by his knowing something that other people didn’t. In 1933, the Bureau of Mines, under Ickes’s jurisdiction, had discovered that when welding was done in a sealed helium atmosphere, it did not corrode light metals. This was not of particular interest in 1933, but after 1935 and the announcement of the Luftwaffe’s existence, the fact that one could use helium to dramatically improve the weatherability, finishing, speed of construction, and durability of welded airplane wings became of great importance.18
To Ickes, this was a potentially dangerous military application for helium that would enable a rapid expansion of the German air force, already performing deadly service as the “Condor Legion” in the Spanish Civil War. The bombing of Guernica, which devastated the town, had recently occurred (April 26), and Ickes was horrified at the deliberate use of terror attacks against civilians.
In a mistake that would come back to haunt him, Eckener assumed that Ickes’s “written guarantee” condition was just a bit of political puffery he could ignore. After all, Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, Daniel Roper over at Commerce, Harry Woodring at War, and even Claude Swanson at Navy, who’d been so adamantly against the idea a couple of years earlier, favored selling helium, believing that it had no military purpose, and President Roosevelt had raised no objections. Eckener returned home, pleased as punch.19
Helium would soon be on its way to Germany. LZ-130 construction, which had been paused since the disaster, recommenced with renewed effort to get it ready for the 1938 flight season.
Time was of the essence. It was alarmingly clear that Trippe was gearing up for war. He already had all his landing permissions for Britain, Newfoundland, Canada, and Ireland in hand; the Atlantic Division was close to finishing the airport infrastructure; and even Imperial was almost up to snuff. In a nicely choreographed arrangement on July 3, one of its new S-23s tested out the westward route by flying from Southampton in England to Ireland, then on to Newfoundland while a Pan American S-42 simultaneously flew the opposite direction. The Atlantic, finally, could be crossed by airplane, even if only on an experimental basis for the time being.20
It was the following year that would be critical in the fight against Trippe. The first of his Boeing 314s was scheduled to be delivered in December 1937, and sometime in 1938, it was reported, Pan American would have fully six of them operating across the Atlantic.
Eckener was nevertheless optimistic that Trippe was liable to bite off more than he could chew in the Atlantic. Had he not similarly tried to conquer the Pacific? Look how disastrously that was turning out. Neither was it certain, given the production delays and cost overruns, that the Boeing 314 would make a successful airplane. All it might take for Trippe’s Atlantic campaign to come to a sudden halt was a single Pan American or Imperial plane crashing or disappearing amid the gray-blue ocean owing to an error of navigation or a technical malfunction….No, the race was still on.
Eckener’s bullishness was tempered, however, on September 1, 1937, when the Helium Act was amended to take account of a potential German sale. There was a surprising change in its wording. In the new version, the State Department had to provisionally grant an export license, then it had to be unanimously approved by a new State committee—the National Munitions Control Board (NMCB)—and then the secretary of the interior, Ickes in this case, was granted the final say for approval. In short, ultimate power over the survival of Zeppelin had fallen into the hands of one man, Harold Ickes.
There was another niggling, minor, tiny detail that would become of major importance—or at least, Ickes would make it so. The amended Helium Act spoke, in a provision admitted even by Ickes to be “very unusual,” of the export of helium to foreign countries being prohibited if it was believed to have “military importance,” not if it were known to have “military purpose,” the phrase everyone, including Ickes, had been using.21
The distinction between “purpose” and “importance” was a subtle one and had probably been lost upon the drafters. Everyone knew that a Zeppelin filled with helium that set off on a bombing mission to London or Paris would be shot down by a fighter. Thus, it had no military purpose in that no rational general would ever employ Zeppelins as bombers. But Ickes decided that “it didn’t matter whether [the airship] could get back or not if it could be used for the purpose [e.g., bombing a city] admitted.”
To the interior secretary, if a German airship lifted off in any kind of military capacity, rational or not, it meant the helium inherently possessed some military importance. Hitler had already shown himself to be mad, in any case, so what was to stop him from dispatching suicide Zeppelins if he so desired, or from finding some as yet unsuspected use for a helium airship?22
Ickes and Eckener had a cordial relationship, and they had met on several occasions. They respected each other, shared hostile views of the Nazi regime, and were both canny political operators. So Ickes’s position was motivated not by a dislike of Eckener but more an antipathy toward Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, who he believed was not sufficiently anti-Nazi, and thus the once-obscure topic of helium exports turned into a cabinet power struggle.
In October 1937, when Meister submitted a request to purchase nearly 18 million cubic feet of helium to cover the initial inflation of LZ-130 plus frequent replenishments over the coming seasons, Hull approved a first installment of about 2.5 million cubic feet and sent the request along to the NMCB, as the new Helium Act required. The NMCB saw no issue and approved the export license, due to begin January 31, 1938.23
As Eckener waited anxiously for news of the helium delivery, Ickes sat on Meister’s application. Finally, in mid-March, he said that he would approve it only if three conditions were met. First, he still needed that written guarantee; second, he increased the price of the helium from an already expensive $8.50 per thousand cubic feet to around $10; and third, on top of the payment for helium he required a “penal bond” for poor behavior of about $500,000 up front. If a government inspection detected any sign of military use, Germany would forfeit the money. To put that colossal figure into perspective, since Ickes wanted to charge $10,000 per million cubic feet of helium, and the Germans wanted 18 million cubic feet of it, the penal bond alone amounted to nearly three times what the gas was worth.24
Germany at the time lacked the currency reserves to pay that kind of money, and the thought of being dependent on a foreign raw material—helium—would be too humiliating for the Nazi leadership to accept, as Ickes well knew. He was also sure that there was no way that Göring, let alone Hitler, would demean themselves further by signing “I promise to be a good boy” letters at the whim of an American cabinet secretary.
All in all, the newly stringent provisions were designed to stop any chance of helium exports while at the same time embarrassing Hull, who had long supported a liberal trade policy and a neutral position toward Germany. Hull retaliated by prescribing a limit of $32,000 for the penal bond and arguing that Washington had a “moral obligation” to honor the helium contract. As for Ickes’s insistence that U.S. inspectors be allowed to visit the airships whenever they felt like it, the State Department commented that “it would not seem to be in good taste for one country to express its distrust of another in such a manner.”25
Ickes suspected that if he just delayed enough, Hitler would reveal his true colors and give him a “good excuse” to quash the helium deal altogether.26 The warning signs of a more bellicose Germany were already present: On February 4, 1938, the aristocratic, relatively cautious foreign minister, Konstantin von Neurath, was dismissed, ostensibly for being too dovish, and was replaced by the servile toady Joachim von Ribbentrop, who could not have been more hawkish (or more stupid). Ribbentrop wanted a war, the sooner the better.
After that, Ickes didn’t have to wait long. On March 12, Germany annexed Austria, not only for racial-nationalistic purposes but to gain control over its raw materials and factories to accelerate arms production. Almost immediately, Jews were attacked in the streets and their homes and stores plundered. Already in force in Germany, Aryanization, the policy of driving Jews out of public life, the trades, and the professions, began in earnest within weeks. In his diary, Ickes, who had for years been warning of Nazi anti-Semitism, wrote that he was glad he had “refrained from signing the [helium] contract as amended. In view of Germany’s ruthless and wanton invasion of Austria I doubt whether it is right for us to sell helium gas to Germany under any pretext.”27
Ickes then stirred up public opinion against the sale through the friendly press. The words of the airshipmen were used, or twisted, against them to prove that selling helium to Germany was dangerous. In a press release, Ickes helpfully compiled a catalogue of their apparently compromising statements.
Charles Rosendahl’s recently published book What About the Airship? proved a rich seam for quote-mining. In it, he’d written that at the end of the First World War “there was being constructed a type of airship capable of bombing New York and returning to Europe nonstop!” He added that “an airship like the Hindenburg, equipped as a bomber, could have a nonstop cruising ability of 9,000 miles with a bomb-load of 25 to 30 tons.”
In the latter instance, poor Rosendahl had, of course, been referring to building new American airships to use as bombers, but Ickes then quoted Lehmann’s posthumously published memoirs, where he had remarked that Germany’s airships “are under the administration of the National Air Ministry.” As such, they were not civilian vessels, suggesting (or at least as Ickes suggested) that Göring must therefore consider airships militarily important.
In his diary, Ickes, pleased with his handiwork, recorded that the labor unions had come out against selling helium, editorials now favored a refusal, and that “ninety-nine per cent” of the letters he was receiving backed his position. Much of Congress, too, had swung around to withholding helium. It was quite a turnaround from the situation of the previous year, though support of his position was not as uniform as Ickes flattered himself to think. Scientific American, for instance, thundered that Ickes’s antagonism was a “crime against science [and] a shameful commentary on human nature that [his] obvious personal prejudices should be permitted to shut the door against development of a useful science.”
The most important person, President Roosevelt himself, was “quite open-minded” on the subject, said Ickes, but still refused to be drawn out one way or another. The president knew perfectly well that Ickes was being sanctimonious about a negligible point—the distinction between military purpose and importance—but he could neither fire nor prod into resigning one of his most loyal supporters and effective fundraisers months before the midterm elections. Roosevelt seems to have treated the whole affair with some humor, telling Ickes he could drag out the issue a while longer, probably to avoid antagonizing the German-American vote with an outright denial.28
At the end of April, Ickes heard that Eckener was planning to come to America in a few weeks to get a definitive answer on the helium question. Eckener needed to know one way or another.29 For Zeppelin, it was make or break: LZ-130 was virtually completed, and there was still just enough time to have the helium shipped before the flight season began.
But Ickes was not going to budge. “I believe that our decision should be against selling this helium to Germany,” he wrote in his diary. Hitler was behaving in an increasingly threatening way, and everywhere Ickes could see Fascism marching victorious over the dead bodies of the democratic countries. With Austria gone, he believed that Czechoslovakia would fall next and that General Franco in Spain would eventually defeat the government forces and install a pro-Hitler regime.
Ickes, as interior secretary, had no international duties, but on this one exceedingly minor issue, of the sale of helium for an airship or two, he could insert himself into foreign affairs. Cordell Hull complained mightily about this, noting that in Berlin there was angry talk of the dishonorable United States reneging on contracts and that a very annoyed Göring had summoned the U.S. ambassador, Hugh Wilson, to have him explain the meaning of the diplomatic insult.
Göring, speaking “with deep emotion and bluntness,” had told Wilson that German-American relations were reaching a “low point” over this ridiculous matter and warned of repercussions. As a warning, Germany announced on April 26 that it was withdrawing from the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Hull and Wilson worried that the next form of repercussions would involve shutting down talks on aid to Jewish refugees, the very people Ickes claimed he wanted to protect.30
The “steady flow of letters” he was receiving, however, as well as increasing congressional support, only encouraged Ickes’s intransigence.31 By this stage, the aggravated Hull was beginning to believe that, in the words of a State official, it was “easier to deal with an irate and distant Germany than with an irate Secretary of the Interior at hand.”32
On May 11, by which time Ickes had bombarded Roosevelt with memoranda on the subject, he got the indirect backing he needed from the president after a discussion at the White House to solidify the policy before Eckener arrived “to lobby helium out of
us,” as Ickes put it. During the meeting, Roosevelt argued that helium had no military use as far as he could see, but Ickes countered that the whole decision process was going to have to be restarted from scratch in any case.
It turned out that, legally speaking, the NMCB meeting that had approved the sale months earlier had to be attended by no fewer than six cabinet secretaries, but in the event only their representatives had been present. So its decision was invalid.
The solicitor general, Robert Jackson, who had told a State Department official only the day before that Ickes was full of “legal rubbish,” piped up: “Mr. President, under the law I do not think anything can be done so long as you have such a stubborn Secretary of the Interior with so much information in his briefcase.”
“At this point,” wrote Ickes, “the President gave up.” Roosevelt did not say no outright and block the helium deal—that was never his way—but instead stated officially that according to the terms of the amended Helium Act, “the President is without legal power to override the judgement of Secretary Ickes and to direct the sale of helium for export.”
Roosevelt didn’t much care about helium, but he had realized, wrote Ickes, that saying yes to the Germans, given the growing opposition to dealing with Hitler and the upcoming midterm elections, would be “a bad political move” and that by piously quoting the law “he had a perfect out in letting me carry the responsibility.”33
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AT THIS STAGE, the one person who stood even the slightest chance of persuading Ickes to release helium was Eckener, of whom Ickes still had “a very high opinion.” The interior secretary, an untrusting man, trusted Eckener’s word and he wanted to speak to Eckener one-on-one. If Eckener crossed his heart and said that the helium was and would always be strictly for his Atlantic airships, then he, Ickes, could overlook the possibility that the gas would be exploited by Hitler if it was found to have any military importance or purpose.
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