Lieutenant Commander Zachary Lansdowne never wanted to be an international story. He wanted any attention to go to his stately dirigibles, those behemoths that glided across America’s skies in the 1920s. Unfortunately, Lansdowne would become a big story anyway, dying in what a story on the Department of the Navy Web site calls “the nation’s most dramatic aviation disaster yet”—the crash of the USS Shenandoah on September 3, 1925, in Noble County, Ohio.
Until its crash, the Shenandoah, the pride of America and the first dirigible made in the United States, had been called the safest dirigible in the world, because its helium gas could not explode. The world’s only known large supplies of the gas had been recently discovered in petroleum fields at Fort Worth, Texas, a fact not lost on naval leaders, who envisioned the airship as a major showpiece as well as a practical military craft.
Reputation was not the only thing big about the Shenandoah. The infatuated public had difficulty comprehending how anything so large could fly: forty-one tons, nearly 682 feet long, and 80 feet in diameter. The ship came with five three-hundred-horsepower, six-cylinder Packard gasoline motors, manufactured by the Hartzell Propellor Company in Piqua, Ohio. The motors could push the ship to a comfortable cruising speed of seventy miles per hour. Inside, the airship was crammed with twenty gas cells fashioned from the intestines of nine hundred thousand cattle. It was the first dirigible to use helium—2.3 million cubic feet of it. But helium was expensive—more than ten times the price of the highly flammable hydrogen, the most-used agent for ascension.
Zachary Lansdowne in civilian clothes, 1924. (Authors’ collection)
As predicted, the Shenandoah did not blow up. Instead, wind blew it apart. The accident brought the proper and humble officer more attention than he would ever have imagined; his photograph even appeared on the cover of Time magazine. At the same moment, his close friend and defender, Colonel William “Billy” Mitchell, was court-martialed, and there was a federal investigation into Lansdowne’s handling of America’s most popular dirigible.
Today Lansdowne is a minor figure in aviation history, but in the autumn of 1925, headlines blared his name. Succeeding years of flight history have left Lansdowne in the shadows and two Shenandoah monuments at the main crash site. “Few people have heard of Commander Lansdowne,” said Don Harless, a docent at the Garst Museum in Greenville, Lansdowne’s hometown in Darke County. “But if things had gone the other way and dirigible flight had turned out to be safer, the story might be different.”
Instead, Shenandoah crashed, a sad, costly mistake that taught all dirigible commanders a lesson: don’t fly anywhere near a storm. Of course, Lansdowne already knew better; he had even warned the Navy of his airship’s potential destruction by high winds. Only a year earlier he had escaped a serious situation, when a thunderstorm blew the big airship away from its mooring mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey. He later convinced officials to cancel plans for a voyage to the Artic, which President Calvin Coolidge had suggested. Later, summer storms convinced them to also cancel plans for the impending three-thousand-mile goodwill flight across the Midwest, but then the navy reversed its decision and ordered Lansdowne to procede with it on September 2, 1925. The airship was scheduled to be away for six days, flying over forty cities and being exhibited by air at state fairs.
The American public wanted a peek at any dirigible—the largest thing in the skies. It had been invented in 1900 by retired Prussian army officer Count Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin. In the years just before the invention of the airplane, he equipped a long, rigid, cigar-shaped, gas-filled bag with a motor—and he flew it. Intrigued, he continued to perfect more lighter-than-air craft, named in his honor.
Under Zeppelin’s guidance, Germany became the most successful builder of dirigibles. During World War I, these were used as a terror weapon, having become sophisticated enough to fly from Germany to England to drop bombs on London. For a time, the zeppelin competed with fixed-wing aircraft for dominance of the skies, but airplanes were cheaper to build and less dangerous. After the war, the Germans built some of America’s dirigibles, which the navy at first also called zeppelins.
By the early 1920s, the American public was entranced by the grace of any flying dirigible, but most particularly that of the Shenandoah. The nation’s first American-made dirigible used new, high-tech parts and nonflammable helium instead of the explosive hydrogen gas originally used in the zeppelins. The navy wanted to make sure it didn’t repeat the army’s mistake with its dirigible Roma, which crashed near Hampton Roads, Virginia, in 1922, killing thirty-four men. So naval leaders were careful, at first sending the Shenandoah up only when the weather seemed calm.
Unlike its smaller cousin, the blimp, essentially a big balloon, the dirigible was a rigid airship with a metal frame inside its long exterior, with huge cells inside to hold the gas needed to lift it high into the sky. Any dirigible commander, pilot, or crewman would be insulted to hear someone say he was a blimp man: blimps were passive bags of air, while dirigibles were the dragons of the sky, capable of making war, flying passengers to far-flung destinations, and entertaining the public.
Unlike most other dirigible disasters, the Shenandoah crash did not end in fire, because no hydrogen was on board. This saved many members of the forty-two-man crew. The wind did considerable damage, however, sending debris over a twelve-mile stretch between the small towns of Ava and Caldwell, in southeast Ohio.
The Shenandoah’s shocking and sudden demise brought native son Lansdowne back to Ohio forever—the crash will always be Ohio’s most tragic dirigible disaster. It killed Lansdowne and thirteen members of his crew. Most of the survivors were in the front and rear sections of the dirigible; both sections stayed aloft after wind tore the craft apart. Lansdowne’s last words, in a radio message, were: “I’m losing my seat.” He and his officers came crashing to earth in the control car, which hung from cables beneath the ship; a monument now marks the spot where the car hit the earth.
The control car landed in a cornfield owned by a farmer named T. R. Davis and rented by a tenant farmer, Andy Gamary, who woke up at 5:30 that morning when he heard the storm. Today an impressive granite marker, erected in 1976 by the Noble County Bicentennial Commission, stands near Gamary’s house. Another lists the fourteen men who died in the crash. On the field, a crudely carved sandstone boulder reads: THIS IS THE SPOT WHERE LANSDOWNE DIED.
Lansdowne and his men were yanked from the sky by a squall line—a narrow weather zone inhabited by strong and abruptly shifting pressure and decreasing temperatures; squall lines occur frequently before a cold front enters. Even today, most Ohioans probably don’t know the technical definition of squall, although they have seen them in action. The squall in the early hours of September 3, 1925, brought unusually strong winds, of up to seventy miles per hour, and rapidly shifting clouds followed by a storm.
A man named C. L. Arthur was looking for the airship that morning; he wanted to see what it looked like. Then he saw it—sailing through the clouds near Belle Valley, Ohio. “It was a beautiful thing as it glided through the sky and we stood there, almost overawed, by the thing as it came on through the sky and toward the spot where we were standing,” he said in National Geographic in 1925. “Then suddenly there was a roar that resounded over the countryside and the giant bag [dirigible hull] split … but even after it was chopped in two, this main part of the ship did not crash to the earth; it seemed to stay up here, motionless for some time, and then gradually sink.” One of the airship’s three pieces remained aloft for an hour before the crew managed to release enough helium to let their section settle to the ground.
In a macabre hunt for souvenirs and information, thousands of people swarmed the crash site, like ants drawn to a picnic. Meanwhile, reporters arrived in Noble County to interview eyewitnesses. Airplanes flew over the site, with photographers capturing images of the wreck. Farmers charged sightseers a dollar a car to park in their fields, and an additional twenty-five cents to walk to the wreckage. Other entrepreneurs sold lemonade, water, food, ice cream, and hastily made postcards of the twisted remains. Like vultures, the visitors picked at the wreckage, removing anything that wasn’t too heavy to carry, including hull fabric, food, and motors. Any item from the airship was a souvenir or something to recycle. Nothing was too personal; one scavenger, who saw Lansdowne’s body where it lay in a cornfield, half a mile from the crash site, stole his eighteen-karat gold pocket watch, a gift from the people of Greenville.
The navy sent a team to Noble County to recover as much of the debris and personal items as possible, but much was already gone. Aghast at the looters, the New York Times criticized the community, in an editorial titled “Ohio Manners and Morals.”
Reprimands aside, the more ambitious hunters still came with shovels, picks, and axes to help break up pieces of the Shenandoah. They even removed clothes and jewelry from the wreckage—and the dead bodies. Scavengers also stole Lansdowne’s Naval Academy ring, and, in the frenzy to get more jewelry, they hacked up the body of one unfortunate member of his crew. (Lansdowne’s ring was later found in a garden in a nearby town.)
The day after the wreck, the Cincinnati Enquirer told the story on page one:
Craft Caught in Ohio Gale
_____
Front Cabin Is Death Trap for
Commander and 12 Others.
_____
Score Ride Ten Miles on Wreckage
And Descend without Injury.
_____
Third Section Alights in Grove with
Three Clinging to Torn Rigging.
_____
“Line Squall” Brings End to Pride of Navy—
Greenville Officer Perishes with Crew—
Heroism of Aviators Stand Out in Accident—
Fliers Realized Predicament
And Tried to Save Ship, ’Tis Said.
But the tragedy was more than just another airship disaster. It helped discourage pubic support for further dirigible use. Later, a naval panel determined that Mother Nature had caused the crash. Strong Ohio winds had ripped apart the ship’s silver-painted cotton exterior and torn the great airship in two. An obsessed and thieving public took care of the rest of it. As historian John Toland once wrote, the two parts of the Shenandoah “looked like skeletons picked to the bone.”
The crash occurred only two years and one day after the multimillion-dollar airship’s maiden voyage, on September 3, 1923, at Lakehurst, New Jersey. The ship had been barely broken in.
Dirigible expert Zachary Lansdowne was born on December 1, 1888, in his grandparents’ home at 338 East 3rd Street in Greenville. He was the youngest son of James M. Lansdowne, who began his career as a cashier at the Farmers’ National Bank, and Elizabeth Knox Lansdowne. He attended the Episcopal Church and Greenville schools. His two older brothers were John, born in 1878, and Harry, born in 1880. John, a businessman, eventually moved to Cincinnati; Harry, a mining engineer, to Utah. Their mother continued to live in town after the death of her husband.
After Lansdowne graduated from high school in Greenville in 1905, Congressman Harvey Garker appointed him to the U.S. Naval Academy. The recommendation came easily, for he was a bright young man and a nephew of Admiral Harry Knox (his mother’s brother) and a descendant of the Calvinist reformer John Knox. Lansdowne entered the Naval Academy that fall. Before graduating in 1909, he had read Jane’s All the World’s Airships and become fascinated by dirigibles. At that moment, he knew what he wanted to do, but his mother, to whom he was close, thought flying too risky. Out of respect for her, he left for two years as ensign aboard the battleship USS Virginia.
In 1913, the navy sent him back to Ohio, to become a recruiter in Cleveland. There he met and married Ellen MacKinmon, a Wisconsin native. They had a son, Falkland “Mac” Lansdowne, who was only one year old when his mother died, at just twenty-eight, in 1916. The couple had been married only three years.
Seeking a change of scenery after her death, Lansdowne asked for a transfer to the naval-aviation training program in Pensacola, Florida. Months later, he became the United States Navy’s 105th trained aviator, learning to fly a Curtis flying boat. In August 1917, he left for Akron and the navy’s lighter-than-air training program, which continued to fascinate him; something about the size and speed of the airships intrigued him. The rubber-manufacturing city in northeast Ohio was also a center for the navy’s balloon and dirigible operations.
Recognizing his interest and ability, the navy soon sent Lansdowne to Wormwood, England, to learn more about dirigibles. By World War I, the British were ahead of the Americans in dirigible manufacturing, knowing they had to keep up with rival Germany. “During this time he [Lansdowne] became well-acquainted with his British airship contemporaries, who recognized in him a leading expert in lighter-than-air development,” wrote Nick Walmsley, editor of the British periodical Dirigible: The Journal of the Airship and Balloon Museum.
England, Germany, Italy, France, and other European countries were all more advanced in dirigible technology than the United States. Airplanes were not yet powerful or sophisticated enough to fly extremely long distances and carry a crew or dozens of passengers. But the dirigible could.
In 1918, when America finally entered World War I, Lansdowne was given command of the United States Naval Aviation Base at Guipavas, near Brest, France. The base initiated convoy patrols in western waters. When the base was closed in 1919, the British recognized Lansdowne’s growing knowledge in lighter-than-air craft, Walmsley said, and asked him to join them in developing postwar dirigibles. That July, he became the first American—a “guest,” they called him—to fly nonstop across the Atlantic in the newly built British dirigible R-34, which was 634 feet long. The voyage took 108 days and twelve hours. For his contributions to the R-34’s successful mission and other acts, Lansdowne received several medals, including the Air Force Cross from the King of England and the Navy Cross from the United States.
Acknowledging his talents, the navy made him commanding officer of the naval station at Akron. Two years later, he left for a new job—White House military aide. During his time in Washington, D.C., he met Margaret “Betsy” Seldon, nineteen, who worked in the office of the new Federal Bureau of Investigation. Lansdowne asked her to lunch; she accepted. When she realized a bureau agent was observing them, she complained to director J. Edgar Hoover, who explained that a third person at the lunch, Lansdowne’s high school friend Kurt Winder from Greenville, was a suspected communist sympathizer. After that, every time Hoover would see her, he would ask, “And whom are you lunching with now, my lass?”
Lansdowne and Seldon were married December 7, 1921, at the Washington Cathedral. Two months later, the couple left for Lansdowne’s latest assignment—assistant naval attaché in Berlin. There, he often visited the zeppelin works to monitor construction of the new ZR-3, which Walmsley called a war prize awarded to the United States at the Treaty of Versailles. Soon this German airship would become America’s second dirigible, the USS Los Angeles, joining the service just after the Shenandoah.
Meanwhile in Berlin, the Lansdownes welcomed a daughter, Peggy, born on October 7, 1922. (In 1942, she would christen the USS Lansdowne, a destroyer named for her late father. Ironically, it would become known as the “Lucky L,” for its charmed tenure in the Atlantic, where it sank two German U-boats, and in the Pacific Theater, where it received twelve battle stars. It also received fame for taking Japanese envoys to the USS Missouri to sign the surrender documents that ended World War II. The Lansdowne featured a poignant good luck charm—Zachary Lansdowne’s class ring, displayed courtesy of the family. The destroyer was scrapped in 1973, by which time Lansdowne’s name had faded from the public memory.)
In 1924, at age thirty-six, Lieutenant Lansdowne took command of the new Shenandoah, and he guided the nation’s premier airship to California and other places and through all kinds of weather. By then, he looked much older than his years. He stood just over six feet tall and had eyes that seemed to look through people. He had a thin, narrow face and receding hairline. He was stern, reserved, and quiet, and preferred to deal with his men personally. They liked him for his straightforward ways and high expectations. Toland once described the commander as “a tall, rangy, rawboned man who had a reputation as a strict disciplinarian aloft, but also as an understanding and affable officer who lent a sympathetic ear to the personal problems of the crew.”
His airship was a behemoth. Even at less than capacity, the Shenandoah could hold more than nine thousand pounds of water and sixteen thousand pounds of gasoline. Its midsection diameter was seventy-eight feet, nine inches, and its normal cruising speed was sixty miles per hour. The crew lived in quarters in the keel corridor. Stars and Stripes were painted on the end of the vertical rudder, and a United States Navy star graced each side of the ship, whose Native American name, in Algonquian, meant Daughter of the Stars.
“This big airship,” Lansdowne told National Geographic, “is in reality a floating laboratory, which by its construction and operation is developing not only into a new element of national defense, but is testing the efficiency and adaptability of allied industries which in time will become of extreme importance in … air navigation as a commercial enterprise.”
Stripped of its cotton exterior, the Shenandoah looked like a big skeleton. Girders—made of Alcoa’s special Duralumin, a new lighter-weight alloy developed by Alcoa especially for this purpose—covered every part of the framework. At the time, the navy believed airships would become a successful adjunct to airplanes. In 1919, Congress agreed, authorizing money for the first American-built dirigible. But construction had to be delayed while a huge hangar was built in Lakehurst, New Jersey. It cost $3.5 million—an expensive undertaking in those days.
America wanted to finally enter the dirigible era because other nations were continuing to use rigid airships for military and nonmilitary purposes. They were expensive, time-consuming, and labor intensive, requiring a ground crew of three hundred to four hundred men. The nation’s first, the Shenandoah, initially called ZR-1 (Zeppelin Rigid One), was built similarly to a German zeppelin named L-49, captured in France during World War I. Many of that ship’s features were copied for the ZR-1. But Lansdowne and American designers had added improvements, making their airship larger, better, and safer. It could carry more gas—the new and inflammable helium. Its motors—in part also made of Duralumin—were fitted at the navy’s dirigible headquarters in Lakehurst. The ship, as tall as an eight-story building, had a cruising radius of nearly four thousand miles. Its bow was expanded to allow mooring to a mast. And the controls for its fins and rudder were redesigned to conform to wind tunnel tests.
American naval engineers changed one important feature: they used helium instead of natural gas to inflate the rigid airship. Helium could not be set on fire—under any circumstance. This was a major advancement, as earlier dirigibles were prone to catching fire and exploding. Engineers also redesigned the airship’s fins and rudders and built an in-flight walkway for inspection on top of the ship. After waiting for months for Congress to approve funds to build the ship, workers finally began constructing the Shenandoah in 1920 at Philadelphia’s large naval aircraft factory. The airship’s parts were manufactured in Philadelphia and at the navy’s lighter-than-air complex in Akron.
Two decades after the American wonder was built, aviation writer Lewis H. Gray explained the Shenandoah’s purpose: “Her official mission was to serve as a scout for the fleet, and she made several flights scouting and reporting on an imaginary enemy. But Shenandoah had, by the very fact that she was there, another role to fulfill: that of a national symbol. Requests literally poured into the Navy Department asking the ship to fly over this and that town, and to generally display herself as a tribute to Yankee ingenuity.” He ended by saying he hoped that “this dirigible will help sustain the dream of all airshipmen, past and present, who believe in the ultimate worth of rigid airships.”
Gray noted that the Shenandoah had many firsts during its brief career: it was the first “made-in-USA rigid,” the first rigid to be inflated with helium, and the first to be moored to a floating mast—on the naval oiler USS Patoka. The mooring was celebrated with a feature story in the January 1925 issue of National Geographic. (In that story, the magazine also noted, with what would later seem irony, “Lansdowne is one of the types who foresees difficulties and does not get excited, but deftly and quick avoids them.”)
The Shenandoah’s helium feature separated the American wonder from the many stately but dangerous European dirigibles. Out of an estimated 190 dirigibles built from the early 1900s through 1937, 110 had gone down, usually in flames. In the public’s mind, the Shenandoah was not supposed to end in disaster. The public believed that since it could not suffer the usual flaming fate of other dirigibles, it was unbreakable. A month after the Shenandoah first took flight, the French dirigible Dixmude exploded and crashed off the coast of Sicily. Yet Americans remained confident: their dirigible would not burn.
A monument to Zachary Lansdowne stands behind the spacious Garst Museum, operated by the Darke County Historical Society at 205 North Broadway in Greenville. Indoors, curators devote a corner to him and the Shenandoah crash. The exhibit features newspapers that reported on the disaster; the old National Geographic story about a previous flight of the airship; books on the airship disaster; a letter from Lansdowne written on Shenandoah stationary; two china plates commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the crash; photos of the airship and of the captain; the captain’s hat and epaulettes, watch, and buttons; pieces of the airship’s wood and fabric; and a part of its hull.
The display also features a black 78-rpm Victor phonograph record—“The Wreck of the Shenandoah” by singing star Vernon Dalhart, and the sheet music with fancy letters and photographs of the Shenandoah in flight and in its wrecked state. In the 1920s, nationally known accident victims whom newspapers had made unfortunately famous, often became the subjects of Dahlhart’s recordings. In “The Wreck of the Shenandoah,” songwriter Maggie Andrew told the tragedy in rhyme:
In the little town of Greenville
a mother’s watchful eye
was waiting for the airship
to see her son go by.
But alas, her boy lay sleeping
his last great flight was o’er.
A piano roll and a Victor record of the song are also on display.
Newspaper headlines inside a glass case tell the story. The Greenville Daily News-Tribune said residents went wild when they saw the big airship flying over the town on Saturday morning, October 25, 1924. As the ship hovered over his mother’s house, Lansdowne spoke with her briefly by shortwave radio. The newspaper reported, “America’s first dirigible, under the command of noted son Zach Lansdowne, arrived over Greenville this morning, just as the courthouse clock was striking ten, causing all local citizens to rejoice.”
Another headline read: “Shenandoah Flies over Greenville, Zach Lansdowne Signals to Mother.” He talked to her over a radio and then dropped a weighted bag bearing this message: “Hello, mother! Hello, mother! Greetings and best wishes to the old town from the Shenandoah. We are making fifty knots per hour on our trip from Fort Worth to Lakehurst and hope to maintain same speed.” Commander Lansdowne “never made a trip west in the Shenandoah without soaring over Greenville,” the local Daily Advocate reminded its readers, “entirely encircling the city in salute to his mother.”
In these displays of civic pride, the slim, dapper officer—whom many knew as a continental man—showed he was still a Greenville boy at heart. His career may have been international, but he never forgot where he grew up.
The Shenandoah caught the public’s attention because newspapers wrote about it and supported its use. The navy, in turn, used the Shenandoah to boost its reputation as an innovator. Naval leaders wanted the airship to represent a new American military pride, much as the new powerful fleet of warships did just before the Spanish-American War. But mostly, naval leaders wanted the new airship to become a scouting vessel.
On February 12, 1924, the navy turned the Shenandoah’s command over to Lansdowne, the most experienced and advanced officer involved with dirigibles, and the only one with real dirigible flying experience. First, he docked it at sea, and then he flew it on some goodwill trips. Then the navy planned a nine-thousand-mile trip throughout the country. In the fall of 1924, he took the ship down the east coast, across the South, over the Rockies, out to California, and then to Seattle. On that flight, Lansdowne carefully guided the airship through the Rocky Mountains instead of flying over them, to save helium. He worried about crashing, not about exploding.
People pointed when they saw the sleek ship gliding across the sky. On the way back, Lansdowne left Fort Worth and headed to Ohio—specifically to Greenville. Then he headed to Dayton and went off to the dirigible docking stations in Lakehurst, New Jersey. By now, people from all over the nation were clamoring for Lieutenant Commander Lansdowne to fly the Shenandoah over their towns. The navy realized it had a public relations gimmick like no other, albeit an expensive one.
About this time, the nation’s second rigid airship, the USS Los Angeles, also known as the ZR-3, arrived from Germany. The navy planned to send the Los Angeles on trial runs, but insufficient helium supplies forced a transfer of the Shenandoah’s reserves to the Los Angeles. When the new ship had an accident and needed repairs, the navy moved the gas back into the Shenandoah and sent it on a six-day flight over five states. It chose September, because many midwestern state fairs would then be in progress.
The risky voyage pitted Lansdowne against two powerful forces—the weather and Curtis Dwight Wilbur, Californian secretary of the navy. Wilbur was new to the job, President Coolidge having appointed him on March 19, 1924. Coolidge still wanted the Shenandoah to take an arctic voyage someday, but that trip was delayed while Wilbur enticed the public with the airship showing up above their fairs. He either didn’t read or ignored Lansdowne’s letters about autumn bringing bad weather for flying in the Great Lakes region. Lansdowne also told his wife and his friends in the service about his concerns. He wrote a second letter about it to the navy, and then he put everything he had written in a file and gave it to her.
With trepidation, Lansdowne flew the airship out of Lakehurst at 3:00 P.M. on Wednesday, September 2. While flying over Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, crewman G. W. Armstrong wrote in the ship’s log, “Below it looks like a picture under a Christmas tree, and we think of the kiddies at home and wonder if they are all asleep.” Factories blew their whistles as the dirigible flew over Wheeling, West Virginia.
As Lansdowne and the airship entered Ohio about 5:00 A.M. on Thursday, September 3, the Shenandoah entered a storm over Noble County. Lightning flashed, and the ship suddenly rose six thousand feet, which it was not designed to do. Lansdowne tried to change course, but he could not. The squall swallowed the Shenandoah and tore it into three pieces. As eyewitness Eva McCoy told the Associated Press fifty years later: “It was if one of Jupiter’s arrows had entered her vulnerable point and had stilled forever the beating of the great heart. In a last spasm of effort, she turned entirely over, and pointed straight downward, plunging a head weight, down down.”
Greenville residents were shocked to read in the Daily Advocate the next day, on September 4, 1925: “Wind Crashes Shenandoah; Commander Lansdowne, 12 Men Killed; Greenville Bows with Grief for Her Noted Son; Citizens Were Shocked beyond Measure by the Terrible Tragedy That Robbed Them of Their Noted Son.” After this article was printed, the death count rose by one.
Immediately after the crash, some officials started blaming Lansdowne, as he had made some changes to the airship’s initial design, eliminating a sixth motor, mounted in the rear, and modifying other originally designed parts. But army air colonel William “Billy” Mitchell spoke out in defense of his friend and against the government, which brought him a court-martial on a charge of breach of discipline for public criticism of the army, navy, and the administration. Mitchell also called for a better-equipped air defense. Later, his legal troubles and exit from the army were recounted in a movie, The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, in which Lansdowne’s character featured prominently.
Mitchell’s risky defense of his friend helped call more attention to the Shenandoah safety issue, and Congress finally determined that Zachary Lansdowne did not cause the crash; rather, he did everything in his power to prevent it. The navy never got over the criticism from Mitchell and Betsy Lansdowne. Betsy, a writer who would become the first women’s editor of the Washington Star, told her story in the January 9, 1926, issue of Collier’s, the popular national magazine. As if losing her husband weren’t enough, she had to hear him criticized by officials of his own government. “I have seen people double-cross the dead and humiliate and harass the living in order to shake off the stigma of personal criticisms for themselves,” she wrote.
On the morning of the crash, at the Lansdowne home in Lakewood, New Jersey, Betsy was awakened at 5:30 A.M. by their bulldog, Barney, who was very close to Zach. The Shenandoah had just crashed in Ohio, although she didn’t know it then. The only other time Betsy remembered the dog having barked so loudly and for so long was when the Shenandoah encountered serious trouble a year earlier—though then it had landed safely.
She told an Associated Press reporter on the day of the crash: “He [her husband] said to me yesterday before he left: ‘I know we’ll hit thunderstorms in Ohio, and I hope we’ll get through all right.’ He was very nervous about this trip, and has been protesting to [Navy Secretary] Wilbur since it [the flight] was ordered last June, but it was no use. They insisted he should make it for the political effect. It may sound strange but I think several of the men had a feeling of impending disaster before the trip started… . He said he wanted to go on this trip because he wanted to die when the ship crashed.” Lansdowne told his mother that when he finished this voyage, he would be reassigned to sea duty. He also predicted to her and his wife that this would be his last flight—period. He asked his mother to raise a flag in his honor when the Shenandoah lifted off on its last voyage. She did so and then died only two weeks later, it is said, from the stress of her son’s death.
In Greenville today, Florence Magoto recalls seeing the Shenandoah flying over her house. “I remember, barely, where I was standing in the yard when I saw it coming,” she said. “I was only three years old, but I still have that memory of where I stood. It flew down Broadway and somebody on board took pictures of the town. I told Mom and Dad, ‘It looks like a silver pickle!’”
At ninety-two and blessed with excellent recall, she strives to obtain recognition for her hometown hero. She has never forgotten the airship or its commander, and all her life she has appealed to individuals and organizations to look at his record. That has often been a difficult job: “He isn’t given the credit he deserves,” she said. “Here is a guy who gave his life, but he can’t get mentioned.”
She is often called the Lansdowne family historian, for she has collected information for four decades. “When the family moved out of his home here in Greenville, my folks bought the place. My younger sister was born there. I have been close to the family for years.” She has donated Lansdowne and Shenandoah relics to the Garst Museum and to a museum in Noble County. She owns pieces of the airship, letters from survivors, and even a piece of rope used in the ship on its final voyage.
She has also collected information about Lansdowne from books and personal conversations. “Zach Lansdowne said on his final trip that it wasn’t fit weather for flying, but the navy wanted a show and tell show,” she said. “It got a lot more. When the trouble started on board the Shenandoah, he remained calm and he told the crew, ‘We will all go through this together.’ We know this because survivors have told us.”
Lansdowne was “a good, kind man,” she said. “He came back to Greenville often through the years. He brought his son … home and had their picture taken at a photography studio here in town. And after his historic nine-thousand-mile flight around the country, he came back home. The town gave him a big reception at our Memorial Hall. He stayed until the end, greeting fellow classmates and townspeople… . The town presented him with a watch in appreciation for his accomplishments. The town was so proud of him. Recently, the town was to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the building, and people in town were asked to write in and give important events that occurred there over the years. I wrote in and told about Zach’s reception. Later, when a history was published, he wasn’t even mentioned. This is what I mean when I say he is so unfairly forgotten.”
Magoto and other lighter-than-air enthusiasts nominated him for membership in the Aviation Hall of Fame, she said, “but we have never heard boo in thirty-some years. Zach was important. He designed flight suits, made improvements to the ship, and did many different things. But politics is politics. Who is left to remember him?”
She said Lansdowne always felt close to his hometown, even when he was overseas or in Washington, D.C. “Get this—he joined our American Legion!” Magoto said. “He transferred his membership from Wisconsin, where his wife was originally from, to Greenville, so he could be with his boys.” She paused, thinking it over, and added, “He was always thinking of his men, you know. I can’t understand why he is so ignored around here today.”
The crash of the Shenandoah did not end the world’s fascination with dirigibles. The United States began to build more airships, making them stronger, to withstand stronger winds. The USS Akron, built in its namesake city, was the second zeppelin the United States built. High winds caused it to crash on the New Jersey coast in 1933, killing seventy-three. Winds also crashed the USS Macon, another Akron product, off the California coast in 1935, killing thirty-six. Finally, in 1937 the German Hindenburg blew up at Lakehurst, with thirty-six dying in one of the most hideous explosions in the dirigible’s fiery history.
The navy still remembered the Shenandoah crash, for it smashed so many hopes and came about so quickly—and with the experienced Lansdowne in command. It let everyone know that dirigible flight had major safety drawbacks.
The start of World War II effectively ended the flight of all rigid, lighter-than-air ships, and by the war’s end they were gone from the world’s skies. The public had turned against them, calling them “monsters of the purple twilight,” “murder machines,” and other such violent names. People associated them closely with the flammable hydrogen gas and massive flames and explosions. Although dirigibles were effective in surveillance and travel, they had too much baggage for the public.
The Santa Fe New Mexican unintentionally issued one of the dirigible’s worst epitaphs when on the day of the Shenandoah disaster it ran a headline mislabeling the ship: “Commanding Officer Killed in Crash of Big Navy Blimp.”
One can only imagine how Zachary Lansdowne would have responded.
