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The ZeppelinsThe Development of the Airship,
with the Story of the Zepplins Air Raids in the World War
by
CAPTAIN ERNST A. LEHMANN
and
Howard Mingos
CHAPTER I
GERMAN AIRSHIPS PREPARE FOR WAR
It was Sunday in Dresden. For weeks I had been operating the Zeppelin Sachsen on regular experimental flights between Leipzig and the capital of Saxony. Now we were devoting the holiday to taking up a group of inventors who had, or thought they had, perfected various devices tending to make air travel safe.
One of them had a complicated article which resembled a huge umbrella, closed. He explained that it was the latest thing in parachutes.
"Will you try it?" He turned to me as we hovered some 4,000 feet above the airdrome where a great crowd waited expectantly for something to happen.
"No, thank you," I replied. "Surely you have enough confidence in it. Try it yourself!"
But he declined my repeated invitation to step out with it, to the amusement of the others who were now displaying their brain children like proud mothers at a baby show.
"Very well," said I. "Here it goes." Tying a dummy to the thing I dropped it overboard. . It struck the earth like a rock, split open and sprinkled its stuffing of sand over several square yards of the landing field.
The others laughed at their rival's discomfiture, save one. He had kept to himself during this by-play which we were enjoying, because it was a change from the rather monotonous routine of flying throughout the week. He was a professional parachute jumper who always attracted immense throngs when he dropped from a balloon. On such occasions his chute hung from the balloon like those seen at country fairs in the United States, say twenty-five years ago. Now be would do something radically different. He said he would jump from our airship with a new chute, the first of its kind.
"Your turn next."
He did not hesitate, but with a little package tucked under his arm, coolly stepped out of. the cabin doorway and off into space.
"I've sent a crazy man to his death," was my first thought as I watched his body turn and twist during a breathless plunge toward the crowds. At our height the people appeared like little black specks. Fascinated by the sheer horror of the daring leap, I looked to see him strike.
I saw the package leave him as if he had tossed it aside as useless. To my surprise it swung up and opened with a snap like a pistol shot. Beneath a great wide spread of fabric I caught sight of the jumper as at first he swung like a pendulum, then descended ever so slowly and safely to earth. We had witnessed a demonstration of the first model pack parachute which is now the regulation type in all government services and common among fliers.
We ourselves often jumped from the ships. But all jumps were without chutes and had been confined to the lowest possible heights. It sometimes occurred that a landing with a "heavy" ship was unavoidable, for instance, in snow-storms or rain which, depleted the reserve water ballast. On such occasions we had a regular roll-call and drill. The members of the crew were so trained that, when approaching the ground, every dispensable man climbed outside of the car and hung suspended by his arms from the hand rails.
At a distance of six or eight feet above the ground, a signal from me would send them jumping, thus relieving the ship of sufficient weight to check its downward speed. The next instant they would stand ready to grab the handrails again and help prevent it from striking the surface.
This trick in making a safe landing had always worked nicely, although to the uninitiated it must have appeared like an "abandon ship" maneuver. The men went over the side like so much ballast. With the invention of a reliable parachute I saw possibilities of improving our methods. In an emergency we should be able to jump from any height.
Thus far - it was the summer of 1914 - there had been no emergencies. The German Air Ship Transportation Company, the operating branch of Count Zeppelin's organization popularly known as DELAG, had been in existence since 1910. Commercial airship harbors had been established at Baden-Baden, Frankfort, Dusseldorf, Johannisthal, Gotha, Hamburg, Leipzig and Dresden. The company owned other hangars at its construction plants in Friedrichshafen and Potsdam. Nearly everybody in Germany had seen a Zeppelin in flight during the four years of peacetime operations.
Count Zeppelin and Dr. Eckener Viewing the Sachsen, Lehmann's First Command
There had been the Deutschland and the LZ-6, followed by the Schwaben, the Victoria Louise, Hansa and the Sachsen. All told, 37,250 passengers had been carried, 1,600 flights made, 3,200 hours spent in the air and 90,000 miles flown without accident. Tickets were purchased at the Hamburg American Line offices in all cities and towns. The DELAG was looked upon as the nucleus of a growing air transport organization which one day would link every German city by air, and perhaps the other capitals of Europe. We were beginning to think of a North Pole flight. In fact, Count Zeppelin and Prince Henry of Prussia, brother of the Kaiser, had recently returned from a trip to Spitzbergen where they picked a base for the airship which they hoped to fly across the roof of the world. Then occurred the greatest emergency of all.
Leaving the control car after a flight late on the 31st of July, 1914, I was handed a telegram ordering me to keep the Sachsen within 50 miles of the station.
War! We had never given much thought to war. We had been too busy with our airships. For my part, though I had been a naval constructor in the imperial shipyards at Kiel and was now in the reserve, I could not believe that a conflict between the great powers would really materialize. In fact, a career in the navy had not promised the excitement I craved and that was why I had joined Count Zeppelin's organization some sixteen months before. In that period I had piloted the commercial Zeppelins on hundreds of flights and there had been plenty of excitement. Though a flight might be as quiet and peaceful as the lives of the tourists we carried on sight-seeing trips, the operation of an airship in itself was thrilling.
Now as I pulled my naval lieutenant's uniform from the bottom of a trunk I wondered what the war would bring. What would be done with the airships? Some of us discussed the matter at length while awaiting further orders, but none had any idea as to what might be expected of us. The Zeppelins had not figured in any of the war plans drafted by the General Staff.
Though Germany, like all other nations, had held military maneuvers, and the staff, of course, had comprehensive plans as to what to do in case of war, the airships had not been included. They bad received little thought as military weapons.
Besides the three commercial ships then in existence, there were only eight rigid airships in all Germany. The army had three in the western part of the country and three in the eastern sections. The navy had one at Hamburg and another under construction. But none of those ships bad been groomed for war. I saw evidence of this late in July when the situation was becoming critical. The captain of the army Z-8, then idle in her hangar at Trier, which was only ten miles from the French border, had asked permission to inflate his ship and stand ready to use it against the French cavalry which was then deploying on the other side of the frontier. He realized that there was some risk of having his station surprised by the enemy, if war should come, in which case the helpless Zeppelin might be demolished. But the war department had declined to authorize the operation of the Z-8 at that time.
That was significant. It not only showed the lack of definite preparations but indicated clearly that nobody in Berlin could visualize what might be accomplished with that ship. Yet we ourselves did not see all the military possibilities. Our experience and training had been along commercial lines. We were young enthusiastic officers in the new merchant marine of the air. Count Zeppelin himself, though old in years, was as enthusiastic as any novice, and his efforts bad been devoted solely to the peacetime development. The army and navy ships bad been purchased to provide an outlet for the plants and engineering laboratories. More than anything else they represented only government encouragement of the new civilized science.
We had no idea of the extent to which that science was to be developed under the stress of war. Had anyone told me that 88 Zeppelins would be launched during the conflict, each representing an improvement over its predecessor, I should have thought him a visionary. Had he predicted that we were to undergo the inconceivably unique and weird adventures which marked our war activities, I should have thought him the veriest dreamer.
It was only after months of service that we recognized the war as the great laboratory experiment in lighter-than-air. It was to bring about the development of airships beyond the boldest dreams of the inventors, and that progress once set in motion was not to cease with the signing of peace, but was to continue throughout the world.
It is easily discernible today.. All the great powers and several of the smaller nations have airship programs providing for true leviathans of the sky which shall be capable of unheard-of performances.
The war adventures of the Zeppelin crews were not confined to the raids which received so much notoriety, with few real facts getting past the allied censors, nor were the attacks on London and Paris the outstanding achievements. Raiding comprised less than a tenth of their work.
More than that was required to establish the new art and warrant the conclusion of the allied governments - even before America entered the war in 1917 - that "the performances of the Zeppelins proved the practicability of lighter-than-air and the urgent necessity of a nation providing similar craft as weapons in war and mediums of transport in peace."
That is my chief reason for reciting the details of what actually occurred. Since the armistice much has been said of the limitations of airships, their vulnerability to weather and other adverse agencies. There have been accidents. Staunch defenders have rushed forth to explain that this is an "infant science in which accidents must happen," until the millennium arrives, when airships will be foolproof.
Now the science is not an infant. It grew up into a lusty child in Germany during the war. It is not foolproof and probably never will be. On the other hand, it is a practical and necessary adjunct to modern civilization and must eventually be recognized as one of the world's chief heritages of the conflict.
There was more surprise and confusion in Germany at the outbreak of the war than was generally believed at the time. Of course the machinery of the mobilization functioned like clockwork. But rumor was rampant. It spread throughout the military establishment. A story was circulated that the French were trying to send gold through to Russia in motor cars, and that these were then traversing Germany. The troops took it seriously, particularly the national guards stationed at bridges, railway centers and along the highways. They suspected every automobile of being loaded with French gold and if it did not stop immediately on signal, they fired into it.
A new motor car had been placed at my disposal. Returning to camp one night the driver and I saw a red light swinging some distance ahead. We thought it a signal on the railway which paralleled the road, so did not stop. Next instant we were in an infantry cross-fire. The blue pills bummed about our ears like a swarm of bees. They punctured the new car and surely would have punctured us had not the chauffeur displayed rare presence of mind. He snapped off the lights and stepped on the gas, and soon we were back at the station mourning the mess that the infantry had made of the car.
I never was so angry in my life. This was a ludicrous way for one to receive his baptism of fire. When I found the officer commanding those troops, be beard much blistering language. We were not bothered after that and came and went as we pleased.
From the start the airship forces, though at first numerically small, lived and were treated by the civilian populace and the other branches of the service as a distinctly individual group of men, who, if not cast in a more heroic mold than the others, were entitled to the utmost consideration, for the chances were against their returning from a flight over the enemy,
Within a week I had received orders to fly to Potsdam where we docked the Sachsen for transformation into a military craft. Like everything else in Germany our entire organization was now a part of the war establishment, and the shop force had already started work on a new section of corridor for the airship. It contained bomb-racks, a bomb release station for the officer directing the actual dropping of the explosives, a vastly improved wireless room and similar auxiliaries which had never been required on commercial flights. Machine guns were mounted in the cars slung underneath the big hull and a platform on top of the tail also bristled with guns - the aerial gunner's nest designed to ward off attacks from above.
The first thing we learned at Potsdam was that we were not to become a unit of any other organization, but were to operate independently. The airships and their crews - I had 3 officers and 15 men on the Sachsen - were held for special orders from the "highest command." That meant that we had to take no orders except those which came down through chief headquarters and we would be quite free to use our own judgment both as to the operations and the methods of handling the Zeppelins.
We were not to have an air force organization until after nine months of war experience with its thrilling adventures and tragedies, its mistakes born of unpreparedness and official errors resulting often, I am afraid, from sheer inability and lack of knowledge.
We could see the lack of airship preparedness all about us. We bad no bombs, neither explosive nor incendiary types, though everybody had taken it for granted that bombing would be one of the principal duties of the Zeppelins. The general staff evidently thought so, too, judging by its orders.
I received word that we were to set out at night and patrol an extensive area behind the enemy lines during the following day, returning the next night. Each ship was to carry a load of bombs which would be dropped on railway bridges or similar military objectives. The commander on each ship would be accompanied by a general staff officer who should point out to him what objects to bomb. This officer also was to determine the route and change it as the situation might demand. All this would have been very well with better ships, say the improved types which we were to have two years later. Then it was utterly impossible. Our pre-war types could not carry enough bombs, could not fly high enough, fast enough or far enough to accomplish the missions which the general staff at first assigned to them. But they tried it.
They could not carry sufficient fuel for long patrol flights into high enough altitudes and when it was carried, the heavy load held them close to earth so that they were exposed to enemy fire. Three ships were lost on their first flights.
Early in August the Z-6 set out to assist in the attack on Liege. She carried a few 6 and 8-inch artillery shells in lieu of bombs. They were to be dropped on the forts. Her crew got her over the forts at Liege all right and they dropped the shells, but clouds and over-weight combined to keep her at a low altitude. She was struck repeatedly by shrapnel and even made a fine target for the infantry behind the forts. On the way back to her hangar at Cologne, the crew had to set her down in a forest near Bonn and there she landed, a complete wreck.
The Z-7 was ordered to reconnoiter by daylight and, if possible, locate the French army which was then retreating out of Alsace with such speed that all trace of it had been lost. The Zeppelin negotiated some rough country in the Vosges Mountains. Clouds and mountain peaks formed a bad handicap to a ship that could not fly much higher than a mile above sea level, and weather conditions made navigation uncertain.
Early in the day the Z-7 passed over several French encampments which were bombed. Then she went into the clouds again. When she emerged, her crew discovered themselves less than a half mile high, with the main body of the French army directly underneath. The air immediately was filled with bursting shrapnel and every soldier, it seemed, was bent on making a hit on the broad hull. She limped off out of range with her gas cells leaking like sieves and finally dropped near St. Quirin in Lorraine.
The Z-8 had also been out that same day. Passing over our troops she was subjected to an intense fire from their rifles. This prepared the crew for their encounter with the French a few hours later. They came upon the enemy without warning and while only a few hundred feet up. They had rifles and artillery shells and as they went over, let the French have everything. Of course the enemy had the best of it from the start. The Z-8 presented a most vulnerable target.
Her steering gear was shot away and the gas cells punctured by thousands of bullets and shell splinters. Luckily, the French then had no incendiary shells, or the highly inflammable hydrogen with which she was inflated would have sent her crashing in flames. Instead, the Z-8 drifted out over no man's land, which was then an indefinite strip many miles across. She settled down on the ground in a mountainous and wooded region near Bandonvillers where the commander expected to find German troops.
All documents were destroyed and every effort made to burn the wreck, but so little gas remained in the cells that it would not ignite. At this juncture a squadron of French cavalry came dashing into the woods and the Zeppelin men had a lively fight on their hands, using their rifles and pistols until they managed to turn and retreat through the forest.,
They trudged along for eleven hours, due eastward, before they saw a detachment of German soldiers encamped on a farm. Entering by way of the back yard they came upon the colonel who was having his boots cleaned.
"Where do you come from?" he asked, surprised.
"From the French," they replied. "Twelve hours from here."
That was the first inkling of the speed with which the French were retreating. Fearing a trap the Germans had hesitated to pursue them too closely. It was now seen that the French army had plenty of time to get back to predetermined positions unmolested. The colonel got busy at once. He telephoned the news into headquarters. Soon the entire army was on a forced march toward the west. Within 24 hours the gap had been closed and no man's land remained in German hands.
That one unlucky flight of the Z-8 justified the faith of her captain when he had made a futile request to go out and scout over the battle area during the first week of the war. He might have kept the Germans so close on the heels of the retreating French that they would have been compelled to accept battle in the open field before having a chance to fall back to their numerous rearward fortresses.
Potsdam had always impressed me as an orderly, quiet place and I found no change in the atmosphere when we arrived there with the Sachsen. There were more uniforms, of course, but the old city remained as tranquil and sleepy as in the hot summer days of peace.
I had finished luncheon on the terrace in front of the Hotel Konigsberg one day when two officers came out and approached my table. The taller of the two was Baron Max von Gemmingen, a general staff officer detailed to represent that body on our ship. I was delighted when he said that he had asked to be assigned to us because be knew we were the best trained Zeppelin crew.
I mention that because Gemmingen and I were to share many adventures together, and as if I had been warned before of what we were going through, I ardently desired this officer to be of the right calibre personally. Of his technical knowledge I had no doubt, though we bad never met until then. He was Count Zeppelin's nephew and had worked with him throughout the long years of struggle.
It is not generally known that Zeppelin was a volunteer officer in the Union Army during the American Civil War. He had been a young lieutenant in the Wiirttemberg Army and tiring of garrison life had come to the United States to fight. I had heard him explain that he had first conceived his idea of a rigid airship while acting as an observer aloft in a captive balloon with the Union army here in the United States.
Later, in the Franco-Prussian War, he had seen the numerous free balloons leaving besieged Paris, and the idea persisted that if they could be powered and controlled, a revolutionary medium of transportation would result. It was not until 1894, when Zeppelin was 56 years old, that he designed his first rigid ship. There were many failures and disappointments from then until 1906 when his third ship was pronounced a success.
Gemmingen knew as much about Zeppelins as anyone in the organization and we were fortunate indeed that be had come with us instead of our having another general staff officer as observer and in part, dictator of our military activities. For the others had no knowledge of Zeppelins, and I believe this accounts for some of the disastrous results of the early war flights. For example, the observer had authority to order the commander of the ship to take his craft over a certain position no matter whether it might be physically possible or not, or when for instance it could barely fly high enough to avoid hitting the mountain tops.
Baron Gemmingen was then past military age and did not have to serve, but he had volunteered and had asked to be assigned to the airships. There never lived a better man for the hazardous duty which was to be ours from the moment the Sachsen was outfitted for war. He was an aristocrat, sincere, able and frank, utterly without fear or hesitancy. These qualities were combined with a radiant personality which inspired confidence, and every member of my crew came to love him. He and I became close friends. This was more remarkable because we shared the responsibility and there was every chance for disagreement and bitterness because of the divided authority.
I refer to him in the past tense because be fell ill near the close of the war as a result of exposure on some of our most arduous flights. The strenuous life weakened his constitution and he was suffering acutely with stomach trouble in the spring of 1917 when be left me to succeed Count Zeppelin as head of the company. He died in the spring of 1924 while planning to come to America on the transatlantic delivery flight of the latest Zeppelin, now the Los Angeles.
The officer who accompanied Gemmingen at our first meeting was Lieut. Ackermann who was to be our bombing officer the next few months. He was a wealthy sportsman who bad become a Zeppelin pilot some months before through sheer love of flying. Poor high-spirited Ackermann! He was to lose his life the following June in the first engagement between an airship and an enemy airplane. He bad been transferred to another ship shortly before that battle and I was able to learn the details from the sole survivor, the coxswain, who owed his life to a freak incident, one of many that happened to war fliers.
"There were ten of us in the crew," he explained when I visited him at the hospital. "We had been out on a raid and were flying back near Ghent, Belgium, which we thought a safe distance from the lines. Some of the crew had a premonition of impending trouble but this was attributed to the strain of flying so far on the short summer nights when dawn might find us still over the enemy country and fully exposed to their fire.
"That was why the engineers were constantly tinkering with their motors. They knew that they might require the maximum power on a moment's notice. We had started late the night before, because the weather looked doubtful and the captain had waited for the latest reports. We went up from the station at Brussels, over the North Sea and then swung back over the northern end of the front line in Flanders. Near Calais we dropped bombs on an important railway junction behind the British lines. They fired at us but missed in the darkness, and as they could be guided only by the sound of our engines, we were not particularly worried, so long as it remained night.
"But the night was passing, and to avoid running into their fire again we made a detour which delayed us somewhat. Then we ran into heavy headwinds which held us back so that it was daylight when we reached Ghent. Here, however, the strain on our nerves was relieved because we thought we were out of the danger zone.
"Imagine our surprise, then, to find an airplane coming at us from the rear. I had the wheel which controls the lateral fins on the tail. We were more than a mile high. Suddenly the speaking tube whistled. The gunner from the platform on the top reported: 'Airplane in sight 700 yards astern and above the ship.'
"That meant it was an enemy plane already in the best position to attack, for we could not fight him from the control car. Only our gunner on top had a chance at him. Before the captain could give orders to fire, the gunner was at it, sending a stream of machine gun bullets to meet the oncoming plane.
"An instant later I felt a shock. The ship trembled. My wheel went dead. There was no 'feel' to it and I knew our controls had been shot away. As the car lurched sidewise I was knocked flat, and it must have been while I was trying to regain my feet that the rest of the crew either jumped or were thrown out, for I saw none of them again. And well might they have jumped, for the great hull of the ship was now a roaring, blistering hell. We were falling, a blazing mass. Without thinking I flattened myself on the floor and gripped the boards, trying to escape the unbearable heat from above which was actually roasting me. I wondered how long it would take to fall a mile. That would be the end, I knew, but it would be a blessing for then I would no longer feel that terrible heat. Then it let up. The car had torn loose from the ship. But everything went black and I came to my senses here in the hospital."
The car with the coxswain in it struck the roof of a convent, plunged straight through and down. He was hurled out of the car at precisely the instant it struck the floor and landed squarely in a bed which had been vacated by one of the nuns only a few minutes before. That saved his life.
CHAPTER II -- AIR RAIDS DURING THE SIEGE OF ANTWERP | Contents
