A huge dead end

***image2***With the development of the airplane in the early 1900s, the military rivalry between the great European powers – notably France and Germany – spread to the skies.

By 1910 the French were using airplanes in military maneuvers, but while the French concentrated on heavier-than-air aircraft, the Germans split their efforts between conventional aircraft and lighter-than-air airships, especially the huge products of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin.

These highly-visible airships were seen as visible symbols of German aerial superiority and would offset what was seen as French superiority in aircraft – and the airship companies had excellent political connections in the German government. The zeppelin seemed to offer excellent military advantages – both bombing and reconnaissance – long range, better high altitude performance than most airplanes, and the ability to carry a large load of bombs, communications equipment and defensive machine guns.

By the beginning of World War I in August 1914, the Germans had hoped to have 15 zeppelins ready for combat, but they only had seven available. This should have been no surprise. The zeppelins – over 500 feet long, powered by three 200 hp engines, costing the equivalent of 34 biplanes, and filled with 1 million cubic feet of flammable hydrogen – were difficult to build and hard to house, requiring huge hangers to keep their relatively delicate skins out of the elements.

Once the war started, zeppelins were sent out on reconnaissance missions over the front, but their size and hydrogen gas made them terribly vulnerable. In the first few months of the war, five of the seven were destroyed by ground fire and replacement was slow. By the end of 1914, the giant dirigibles were only used on dark nights, which negated their effectiveness. At this point a German naval officer, Peter Strasser, stepped in and took over the zeppelin fleet for maritime scouting and for a radical new mission – bombing England.

***image1***Kaiser Wilhelm was at first reluctant to give his permission, but as the land war slowed he relented. On Jan. 19, 1915, three zeppelins took off for the first over-water strategic bombing raid in history on the English town of Yarmouth. The zeppelins dropped 15 bombs and damage was slight, but a new type of war was underway. Newer, much larger zeppelins were built, and for accurate bombing from over the clouds a new system was developed – a “sub-cloud car.”

This was a bomb-shaped, streamlined duralumin container that carried one man and was lowered by winch from the zeppelin. Once the sub-cloud car was below the clouds, the observer would use a telephone to give the zeppelin directions to the target and the airship would bomb invisible to the ground defenses – the first case of accurate all-weather bombing.

During the summer of 1916, zeppelins flying at over 12,000 feet conducted regular night raids on England, and it was not until Sept. 2, 1916 that a British fighter was able to shoot down one of the huge airships with incendiary bullets. The zeppelins continued to be useful as scouts for the German fleet and, in 1917, were joined by large, conventional German bombers for attacks on British targets. However, the RAF was deploying more and more modern fighters that could reach the zeppelins, and the raids gradually ended in mid-1918.

But the end of the war was not the end of the airship. Its very long range made it especially attractive to navies, and the U.S. Navy, looking at the wide Pacific and Atlantic and its coast-defense mission, bought German technology and built experimental craft themselves. The U.S. airships used helium gas for lift, and even though it meant 80 percent less lift for an equivalent volume of gas, safety was vastly improved.

By the late 1920s and early 1930s, the U.S. Navy’s airship program was expanding, but a series of accidents with their huge airships – three times as big as the largest German zeppelin – ended the program. It was the crash of one of these, the “Shenandoah,” in a storm that led Billy Mitchell to publically accuse senior leaders in the Army and Navy of incompetence and “almost treasonable administration of the national defense,” words that brought on his court martial.

Questions or comments, contact Dr. Michel at marshall.michel@ramstein.af.mil.