On the morning of May 14, 1938, Eckener came to Ickes’s office. He was older and in worse health than ever before. The incessant struggles of the previous three decades had taken their toll, and for more than a year he had been suffering from “chronic catarrh of [the] large intestine.”
It had been hard for Eckener, and he was not in the best of spirits. Indeed, in a recent article for the Zeppelin Company’s internal magazine, Eckener had, for the first time since he had joined the count’s jolly band, expressed some hesitations about the future. After reciting the occasions when prospects had looked almost as bleak—the yawns that had greeted the advent of LZ-1, the destruction of LZ-2 and LZ-4, the loss of so many airships during the war, the shuttering of the DELAG after Versailles, the rise of the airplane—Eckener hailed the spirit of his airshipmen to fight against the odds and to never give up. Only this time, he conceded, the “Zeppelin Crisis” caused by the loss of the Hindenburg and the need for helium was by far “the gravest.”34
So, when Eckener entered Ickes’s office, he knew that his, and the Zeppelin’s, fate lay in the balance. This was it, the final chance. A yes from Ickes would mean LZ-130 would be flying to America that very summer, with the prospect of more Zeppelins to come. The Atlantic would be bridged permanently.
In the meeting, Eckener repeated the point that airships had no discernible military value, which Ickes listened to with the utmost courtesy, without changing his position. Finally, Eckener asked him to explain how a helium airship would be used militarily. Ickes stumbled slightly and suggested that they could be employed to bomb London. Eckener laughed, telling the secretary that Zeppelins in their hangars would be bombed into nothingness within ten hours of war being declared. Ickes retorted that the Germans would have foreseen that scenario and already moved their airships out to sea.
That was impossible, Eckener snorted, but Ickes insisted that it “could” happen while Eckener argued that it “would” not. Ickes, now on his back foot, closed down this meandering could-would syntactical debate by saying that so long as anything was within the realm of possibility, he was legally bound to refuse the helium request.
Then the secretary, seeing Eckener so despondent, spoke frankly to him. He said, in substance, “We know you, Dr. Eckener, your accomplishments, and your reputation for integrity. We implicitly trust you. We are convinced that you are asking for our helium solely to make future Zeppelins for peaceful purposes as safe as is humanly possible. There has, however, as you are well aware, been a complete change of government and political ideology in Germany, with Adolf Hitler at the helm. What guarantee can you give us that the Nazi regime will not seize the helium gas for other than peaceful purposes?”
Eckener paused, weighing his words. “At that moment I knew that my life’s work was at stake. If I assured [Ickes] that in my opinion there was no danger of any seizure by order of Adolf Hitler, I would get the helium; if not, my dream of a lifetime, which now at last seemed destined to come true completely, would be shattered.”
In that one clear, shining moment, Eckener found himself unable to obfuscate. Over the decades, he had sometimes played fast and loose with the facts, he had fudged the numbers, he had cooked the books, he had hedged his words, he had suppressed adverse information, he had exaggerated for effect, he had morally compromised himself—all for the greater good of keeping airships alive. But he could do so no longer. The Nazis, and Germany itself, did not deserve the Zeppelin. Such mendacity and cruelty and brutality could not be rewarded, not by an honest man, even if he knew helium was militarily useless.
Eckener made the moral choice to not fight for what he had so long stood for and told the fatal untruth: “I can give you no such guarantee; in fact, my only fear is the same that you entertain.”
Ickes could see how “painful” the meeting had become and how “terribly disappointed” Eckener was. To console him, “I told him that Congress might amend the law or I might have a successor who would have a different point of view.” But they both knew that was a lie.
As Eckener recalled, “I returned to Germany empty-handed. We obtained no helium. The death knell of the Zeppelin had sounded.”35
* * *
—
SO HAD ECKENER’S. He had never stopped loathing the Nazi regime, and now that there was nothing to fight for anymore, it was time to go. The regime agreed with him.
Questionable actions, like removing the official swastika flag from the hood of his car and pointedly rejecting a dreadful book (The Pioneers of the Third Reich) by the head of the Hitler Youth sent to him for the Zeppelin Company library, had repeatedly called Eckener’s loyalty into question.36
There were also suspicions that Eckener hadn’t tried his utmost with Ickes to acquire helium, though Eckener was careful not to drop any hint that he had helped to sabotage the effort. Still, he was scapegoated for the failure, because someone had to be.
About six weeks after returning home, he announced to a meeting of the DZR on July 18 that he was stepping down from the post of managing director. He would retain the chairmanship in an honorary capacity and be available for consultation, but he would no longer be an active part of the enterprise.37
That month, and it was no coincidence, happened to be the hundredth anniversary of Count von Zeppelin’s birth, and Eckener bade both him and the company farewell by publishing an admiring, if somewhat hedged, biography of the count. It was a small consolation, too, that a poll of 259,000 workers designed to test their political and historical knowledge revealed that 78 percent of respondents—almost four in five—were aware of who invented the rigid airship. To put that in context, the swastika, among the most famous, or notorious, symbols on earth, was recognized accurately by 78.4 percent, and the year the Nazis seized power was correctly answered by 78.7 percent. The count, it seems, was still loved, as were his airships.38
Also that July, Fortune magazine appeared on newsstands carrying an authoritative, lengthy article about the future of long-range air transportation. Crammed with interviews with the titans of American industry, like Glenn Martin and Igor Sikorsky, and filled with detailed analyses of airline financing and engineering, the article featured a splendid, full-color foldout illustration of LZ-130, “Germany’s Bid” for supremacy in the Atlantic.39
The artwork had no doubt been commissioned months earlier, before Ickes’s decision was publicly known, and it was a sad reminder that the struggle for the mastery of the sky was over. The bird had conquered the cloud.
Eckener was happy to leave. He had beaten Trippe across the Atlantic, just as he had beaten everyone with the DELAG all those decades ago, and that would have to be enough. A little less than a month later, he celebrated his seventieth birthday (August 10), receiving, much to his surprise, a leather portfolio from Hitler himself containing a congratulatory letter.
As soon as the delegation from Berlin left, Eckener handed the letter to an aide and told him to burn it.40
53. King Across the Water
HELIUM WAS THE airship’s Achilles’ heel, but even if Harold Ickes had never existed or Eckener had said that he trusted Hitler or Goodyear-Zeppelin had received a slew of airship commissions, the Zeppelin business would nevertheless have been financially ruinous if it had continued.
In mid-1937, Meister conceded in a highly confidential memorandum that two unsubsidized, Akron-built airships would together cost $11.4 million, with a terminal adding nearly $4.9 million, leading to a predicted loss of about $1.2 million annually when regular passenger service began. Even if the American government were persuaded, miraculously, to fund construction, the airships would eke out a profit of a mere $8,150—a sum hardly worth the effort to earn it.
Operating cost per mile, a key yardstick in the air business, painted an equally horrifying picture. Each of the two American-built airships would cost $9.97 (including equipment, handling, fuel, terminal use, running expenses, and int
erest charges) per mile. In comparison, each of Trippe’s Boeing 314s (priced at $550,000) were calculated to operate at $1.10 per mile. Yet fare prices were more or less the same, and even taking into account that the airships would carry twice or maybe thrice the passengers, the extent of the disparity was staggering.1
That, of course, was if one assumed that the airships were even allowed to fly. The destruction of the Hindenburg had been the costliest insurance loss in aviation history: the equivalent of roughly $40 million today, much of it borne in the London market among a number of chastened underwriters, very few of whom would in future be willing to cover the risk of another failure without helium available.2
The picture in Berlin was just as bad. If a helium-filled LZ-130 made fifteen voyages to the United States in 1938, DZR reported, the total income would be 1.3 million reichsmarks, but costs would amount to 5 million reichsmarks. Worse, if this tentative LZ-130 plan proved to be a success, it would bankrupt the company since DZR would then have to build LZ-131 (3.5 million reichsmarks) to alternate with LZ-130 plus another shed at Frankfurt (6.5 million reichsmarks) to keep it in.3 Not even the Reich could afford to foot bills of that magnitude when it was spending everything it had on rearmament.
It was, ironically, helium, the very stuff that might have saved airships, that was also their killer. Subsidized construction or not, helium still cost at least ten times more than hydrogen. For Zeppelin, a concern already trembling under the weight of its finances, it was too much to ask.4
* * *
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THAT RAISED THE question of what to do with LZ-130, the last of its kind. For reasons of national prestige, Berlin could not do the obvious thing and scrap it; if anything, LZ-130’s very existence rendered it more necessary than ever to keep it for fear of losing face. Breaking up the airship because of a slap in the face by Ickes might be taken to imply that Germany was weak—an intolerable idea.
The policy became, then, one of redoubling efforts to keep LZ-130 flying until such time as it could quietly be put out of Berlin’s misery. In a couple of years, once the point had been made that it was Germany’s choice to kill the program, few would notice LZ-130’s vanishing from the scene.
Goebbels proposed reverting to the tried and true—propaganda flights—to invent a reason for LZ-130 to exist. Göring, however, thought that the airship might have some marginal utility by deploying it as a mobile laboratory to carry out radio experiments. But otherwise he agreed with Goebbels in that this would merely help run out the clock.
In the meantime, the two Nazi princes were adamant that under no circumstances was LZ-130 to be risked. Eckener, the honorary chairman of a company that existed virtually only in name, was lured, either through duty, pride, or a desire for a last time at the controls, into captaining three brief test flights of LZ-130.
September 14, 1938, launch day, was a somber one. The only dignitaries present at Friedrichshafen were Eckener, Dr. Issel from the DZR board, and Eckener’s friend Colonel Joachim Breithaupt from the Air Ministry. No one from the government attended, though Göring sent a formal telegram extending his “heartfelt greetings for an auspicious first flight.”
Eckener made a speech extolling the workers for their labor over the years and their dedication to creating the “best of German worksmanship” to show the world. Then he revealed the name of the new ship, which he had been keeping tightly under wraps. Since LZ-130 had been completed in the centenary year of the birth of the founder, it should carry his name: Graf Zeppelin.5
It was an appropriate sendoff, Eckener thought. Initially, there were rumors that LZ-130 was to be called Grossdeutsches Reich, after the pan-German empire the Nazis envisaged, but this was about as likely as Adolf Hitler had been for the Hindenburg, for the same reason.6 The propaganda effects of another disaster would have been suboptimal. For Eckener, the name—sometimes the airship would incorrectly, if fondly, be called Graf Zeppelin II, even by its crew—was a way of honoring the Grand Old Man, of harking back to a more civilized time, and of reminding the world of the glories that had once attended the original Graf Zeppelin.
After the ceremony, Eckener, Dürr, and the old veterans Captains von Schiller and Sammt and First Officer Heinrich Bauer climbed aboard for the first test flight, which would last about ten hours. Two more short flights, visiting several cities, followed over the coming week.7 The last of these, on September 22, would be Eckener’s final voyage. It was a bittersweet one—more bitter than sweet.
Ostensibly, the trip was a farewell for Eckener to one of his favorite cities, Vienna, but as always with the airship in the Nazi era, the political was entwined with the personal. The flight took place at the apex of the Sudetenland crisis, in which Hitler had demanded the annexation of that Czech territory. Indeed, on the very day the Graf Zeppelin visited Vienna and was cheered on the rooftops, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Germany to discuss the issue with Hitler, presaging the Munich Agreement that would dismember Czechoslovakia.
On board the Graf that day were twenty Air Ministry radio technicians, belying the claim that the visit was merely for publicity. On the way back, the Graf Zeppelin was ordered to cruise along the Czech border to conduct radio surveillance. Just in case the Czechs got irritated by the airship’s presence in a sensitive area, the Graf Zeppelin was escorted by four Messerschmitt fighters.
This was not the end Eckener wanted, but it had to be. The airship was no longer his and he had no say in its (mis)use. The Zeppelin was once vaunted as the bridger of commerce and connector of peoples, but all that was history now. As a conductor of spy missions against nations upon which Hitler had designs, the Graf Zeppelin had proven Ickes’s perspicacity in seeing a potential “military importance” (and purpose, for that matter) to airships, whether helium- or hydrogen-filled.
That November, following the outrages and violence of the Kristallnacht pogroms against German Jews, Ickes derived great pleasure from publicly announcing that the original helium contract approved by the NMCB had officially expired and that there would be no chance of a sale in the future. By now, even Cordell Hull, his foe at the State Department, recognized that Ickes had been right and backed him.
The Graf Zeppelin, now commanded by Captain Sammt, made another twenty-seven flights. The vast majority of them were visits to various cities and flyovers of air shows and the like before Goebbels tired of propaganda tours and threw the problem over to Göring, who thought perhaps the airship could be used to spy on the British.
The former dining room was filled with banks of radio consoles and oscillographs, with the more top-secret equipment being kept in what had been the passenger cabins, whose berths and washbasins had been torn out. Dozens of Luftwaffe technicians and linguists, as well as several Gestapo agents to make sure the Zeppelin crew didn’t get too inquisitive, were placed on board.
Since 1935–36, the British had been developing radar to locate and track incoming aircraft, but very little was known of their progress or how the technology worked. By mid-1939, the British had constructed seventeen large radar installations with tall antenna masts, known as the Chain Home network, along the southern and eastern coastline.
Flight 24, of August 2–4, 1939—a month before war was declared—was dispatched to elicit what the purpose and capabilities of these masts were. The Graf Zeppelin flew across the Channel and proceeded up the east coast to Aberdeen. There the crew cut the engines and let the airship drift at sea, listening for radio signals. At one point, several brand-new Spitfires darted toward them, forcing the airship to hightail it out to sea as the Luftwaffe personnel took photos of the unfamiliar airplanes.
Flight 24’s biggest failure was reporting that Chain Home was non-operational because the technicians had not scanned a wide enough frequency spectrum. But the radar system had actually been active since April and had tracked LZ-130 for some time—indeed, the British could hardly have failed to
notice such a giant, radio-wave-bouncing metallic object. That mistake would prove costly the following year, during the Battle of Britain, when the Luftwaffe would learn to its cost how effective radar really was.8
* * *
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TRIPPE HAD BELIEVED that he could make hay from Eckener’s travails. With the loss of the Hindenburg and the lack of helium, a dangerous competitor in the Atlantic had been removed. Alas, his own travails were only just beginning, just as Eckener had shrewdly expected.
The root of the problem was the delayed delivery of the six Boeing 314s he needed to open Atlantic service. The first of these was originally scheduled for December 1937, which had long since passed. Lindbergh had been right to warn Trippe against buying them: Boeing simply couldn’t get the plane to work properly.
Initially neither able to float nor fly, the Boeing, it was soon discovered, could not land, either. Pilots coming in experienced what was known as “porpoising”—a bouncing and skipping off the water. Pan American told Boeing that the aircraft was unacceptable until the problem was solved. Trippe regretted not sticking loyally with Martin and Sikorsky.9
In the meantime, Imperial too was having a terrible time developing a suitable airplane for its reciprocal Atlantic flights. A stretched version of the S-23 Empire flying boat, the S-30, was decent but too short-ranged—it needed in-air refueling, a tough trick to pull off—and barely improved on its predecessor’s already lackluster performance. A trial flight across the Atlantic was canceled at the end of 1938.
Empires of the Sky Page 58