THE TRUE END to the era of the wartime Zeppelin was not, however, Strasser’s death but Count von Zeppelin’s, in March 1917.
Eckener had known that Zeppelin was faltering for some time, though for much of 1916 the count had kept up a busy schedule visiting hangars, workshops, and factories; he even took a trip on the maiden voyage of the first of a new class of Zeppelin and toured army headquarters at Pless, where he was hosted by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, the de facto commander-in-chief of the German armed forces and, like Zeppelin, the subject of a cult of personality.1 The count had lost weight, recalled a friend, Rudolph Stratz, and had turned into “a very old man…with an aloof expression in his eyes—the fanaticism of a discoverer of new worlds. A sacred fanaticism. Otherwise he looked like the typical old, reckless hussar.”2
The “touching simplicity” to his manner that Hindenburg would later mention in his memoirs as well as, possibly, the aloof, fanatical look in his eyes may have been due to the onset of dementia, and he certainly seemed to suffer from a failing memory. In February 1917, Stratz bumped into him at an aeronautical exhibition in Berlin. The count, looking lost, shook Stratz’s hand. “I am sure I know you well,” Zeppelin said softly to his old friend. “But I do not recognize you. Who are you?”3
At the end of the month, the count was taken violently ill and rushed to the Sanatorium des Westens, where he was diagnosed with an obstruction of the intestines. An operation was successful, but he soon contracted pneumonia. His daughter, Hella, hurried to Berlin, but doctors had advised his wife, the countess, that he would probably recover and she arrived, too late, a couple of days later. He had died on March 8.
When the sad news was announced, all the houses in Friedrichshafen hung out black-bordered flags, and a special train was hired to take hundreds of employees to Stuttgart, where the count was to be buried.
The funeral on March 12 was a stately affair, befitting a Hero of Germany. Ten thousand mourners were present, including his family, the kaiser, the king and queen of Württemberg, a bemedaled gaggle of field marshals, generals, and admirals, and a consort of leading scientists. As the funeral procession, headed by a military band and trailed by a column of his old regiment, marched toward the family vault along roads adorned with black-draped stone columns topped by urns aflame, bells solemnly pealed and twenty-four guns fired in salute. His casket was borne by twelve cavalrymen, while up above, two giant Zeppelins, their hulls draped in black crepe, paid homage to the master of the air. They dropped wreaths as the casket was lowered into the grave.4
Most foreign observers, notwithstanding their hatred for what his creations had become, generously remembered Zeppelin for the man he once was. He was ranked, in The New York Times, as equal to the Wright brothers as a “very great inventor” and in other places praised “for the unfaltering courage with which he pursued his vision of a practical dirigible through disappointment to ultimate success.”5
There was, however, no disguising the fact that the airship had been a total loss in war, with some outlets’ obituaries alleging that Zeppelin’s death had been hastened by his realization that his namesakes had so signally failed to deliver on their initial promise.6
The passing of the Old Gentleman, as Eckener and Colsman called him, finally released, or perhaps liberated, them from his deadweight, his heavy hand, his long shadow. Eckener had loved the count but, all too aware of the challenges of dealing with Zeppelin before and during the war, was relieved that he had finally departed. Even a year after the count’s death, when Eckener was asked to write an official obituary for him, he refused, “as a kind of horror still grips me when I think I’m supposed to sing a hymn in his honor. An objective appraisal—yes, that would be a different matter. But he’s still too alive in the people’s love to allow that. He was certainly a fine person, but we shouldn’t overdo it with the praise.”7
ZEPPELIN’S DEATH ALLOWED Eckener at last to think about the future—the future of the airship in a postwar world. He wanted to pick up where the DELAG had been so abruptly terminated at the outbreak of war, but on a grander scale.8 If nothing else, the war had accelerated airship development to an unprecedented degree—the most modern Zeppelins were about as similar to the prewar ones as a new passenger jet is to its 1950s ancestor—and bitter experience had offered valuable lessons about flying in a matter of years as opposed to decades.
Over the course of the war, the Naval Airship Division alone built 68 airships that flew 325 raid missions, 1,205 scouting flights, and 2,984 other flights, for a total of 1,491,600 miles.9 This trove of experience otherwise unobtainable during the limited runs of peacetime was analyzed carefully at the company. For instance, instead of trying to fly above thunderstorms as per previous guidelines, read one instruction, commanders should ride through them and reel in their radio antennae (to avoid electrical charges).10
Thanks to Eckener’s training before and during the war, Zeppelins were manned by a large number of veterans—some seventy crews of twenty apiece.11 Granted, several hundred had died in the fighting, but afterward many, especially officers, would form the core of a resurrected airship empire.12
Of these, the greatest was Ernst Lehmann. A native of Ludwigshafen, Lehmann, blessed with “unfailing courtesy and [a] charming personality,” was the son of a chemist and had studied at the Technical University at Charlottenburg before joining the DELAG. He flew dozens of missions during the war and was a favorite of the count’s.
Lehmann and Eckener, though, had a prickly relationship, Lehmann’s ego equaling Eckener’s own when it came to confidence in, or perhaps arrogance about, his own airship expertise. Their personal brushes later turned into bitter divisions over the direction and future of the Zeppelin Company, though in Machiavellian fashion they occasionally joined forces against a mutual enemy. Eckener, husky, gruff, and bluff, with prominent jowls and eyebags, presented a stark contrast to the wiry, sharp-featured smaller man (Eckener stood a full head taller) whose deviousness and conceit he often found intolerable, even as Lehmann loathed Eckener’s grandstanding and envied his prominence. During the war, they avoided each other as much as possible, Lehmann opting to fly army airships simply so as not to fall under Eckener’s oversight at the Naval Airship Division. In their respective memoirs each referred to the other as infrequently as they could respectably manage, and when they did, it was invariably in the stiffest manner.
Lehmann was known as the count’s most hawkish acolyte, and Eckener’s alienation from Zeppelin’s bloodthirstiness inevitably put them at odds. Eckener, once a liberal, was, like Colsman, a business-minded centrist of moderate views, while Lehmann moved in ever more extreme right-wing nationalist circles. To Lehmann, Eckener by 1917–18 was a treacherous snake willing to sell out sacred Germany in search of a humiliating peace; to Eckener, Lehmann was a militarist lunatic digging Germany’s own grave with his fanatical desire to fight until there was nothing left to save.13
But the root cause of their enmity lay, ironically, in their total agreement on the Zeppelin’s potential as a long-haul vehicle. For Eckener, the road ahead was lit clear as day even in the darkness cast by war: He would turn the dream of passenger and commercial travel across the Atlantic, and perhaps even around the world, into reality.
Lehmann, however, was keener on creating the mortal threat of a global bomber that could, if push came to shove, punish New York. To that end, he creatively claimed that in 1915 Zeppelins had carried out thirty reconnaissance missions along the U.S. coastline (simply an impossible feat) and would later brag that he would have carried out the first transatlantic bombing mission himself had the war continued into 1919, which he dearly wished it had.14
Self-interest brought them together during the war to strike a deal: Eckener and Lehmann would send an airship to Africa to determine whether such distant voyages were even possible.
THE ADVENTURE BEGAN in 1916 when Dr. Max Zupitza, the chief staff surgeon to the German colonial troops fighting in Africa, was captured in Togo. After his release, he suggested to the Colonial Ministry in May 1917 that they send a Zeppelin to support General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, known as the “Lion of Africa.” The general was then commanding an astounding guerrilla campaign in which fourteen thousand German and African soldiers were fighting up to three hundred thousand British, Portuguese, and Belgian troops, and he desperately needed emergency supplies and medical aid. The Colonial Ministry thought the idea crazy but passed it on to Eckener, who didn’t.
In September, Lehmann returned to Friedrichshafen to work with Eckener to outfit a new airship, L-57, for the mission. Back in July, Lehmann had achieved the world record for flight duration by staying airborne in LZ-120 for 101 hours, so he assumed he would captain the Africa expedition.15 Eckener had other ideas, not least of which was preventing his rival from hogging the glory, and managed to block the appointment by arguing that Germany needed to keep its best men on the job—at home.
Korvettenkapitän Ludwig Bockholt, a compromise candidate Eckener suggested, was instead offered the command. Bockholt had a decent if not spectacular record, and, similarly, the crew chosen was experienced but not considered the elite of the Naval Airship Division. Eckener had decided that the Africa voyage was to be a one-way trip: The men aboard L-57 would stay and fight alongside Lettow-Vorbeck, which meant they had to be, in the nicest possible sense, disposable. None of them was aware of this, unfortunately, as to maintain secrecy they were told they were being dispatched for service in the Balkans, a cushier posting than the frigid North Sea or the deadly skies above London.
Bockholt did not start well. On October 7, during a trial run, L-57 was wrecked shortly after taking off when a sudden high wind dashed it into a metal fence. No one was hurt, but the airship was unsalvageable.
Eckener arranged for its replacement, L-59, to be significantly modified. Dürr stretched the airship to measure almost 750 feet, but the biggest changes concerned its adaptation for one-time use. Once L-59 landed in Africa, it would be cannibalized, its every part repurposed for military use. The soft gas-cell covering was intended to be cut up and turned into bandages and sleeping bags, the outer fabric into waterproof tents and clothing, and some of its duralumin skeleton into radio masts, with the rest of the longitudinals and girders repurposed as building materials. The internal catwalks were covered in leather, which would be ripped up and used to make belts and shoes.
Once the outfitting was done, L-59 was loaded to maximum capacity. It carried no fewer than 311,100 rounds of rifle ammunition, 230 machine-gun belts containing 57,500 cartridges, 54 machine-gun ammunition boxes with an additional 13,500 cartridges, 30 machine guns, 22 rifles for the crew (including the hardy Dr. Zupitza), 9 spare machine-gun barrels, 61 sacks of medical supplies (including enough antimalarial quinine to last a year), rifle bolts, binoculars, bush knives, spare radio parts, mail from home, sewing kits for new uniforms, and a case of wine for the crew to celebrate their arrival.
On November 3, 1917, L-59 set off for its European departure point at Yambol in Bulgaria, a German ally. It was only then that the crew were informed of their real mission. Eckener, in the meantime, traveled there by train. When dawn arrived on November 21, everyone gathered in the hangar as L-59 waited, bathed in the pale glow of the arc lights. All shook hands, and the crew embarked on their grand adventure.
By 9:45 A.M. L-59 overflew Adrianople in Turkey and that evening left the Turkish coast and headed for Crete (8:30 P.M.), where it adhered to protocol by winding in its trailing radio antennae before combating a storm. At 5:15 A.M., L-59 crossed into Africa over Libya.
L-59 flew in complete radio silence. As it happened, the Colonial Ministry had recently received intelligence indicating that the British had advanced upon Lettow-Vorbeck’s position and that he would surely be forced to surrender. The ministry informed Admiral von Holtzendorff, who decided to call off the mission. Eckener and the station staff at Yambol urgently tried to contact L-59, but between their weak radio transmitter and the airship’s reeled-in antennae, it was too late. Eckener informed naval headquarters that “L-59 can no longer be reached from here, request recall through Nauen,” home of the most powerful transmitter in Germany. Nauen broadcast all night long, with nary a reply from Bockholt.
L-59 continued on through the desert. On the afternoon of November 22 it became the first airship to cross the Tropic of Cancer. Trained in northern Europe, the crew experienced strange and unexpected weather phenomena in the unfamiliar environment. During the day, the sun beating down on the airship super-heated the gas, which had to be valved off gently to maintain a stable cruising altitude. Powerful thermal currents rose from the shimmering sands and threw the ship this way and that. Crewmen experienced nauseating airsickness as L-59 bobbed up and down like a roller coaster. Lacking sunglasses, many of them had to endure violent headaches, hallucinations, and half-blinded eyes.
Still, L-59 dutifully continued, eventually reaching the Dakhla Oasis, where the appearance of this wondrous sky god astounded the local bedouin. (In December 1933, when a pilot had to make a forced landing at Dakhla, he found outlines of a Zeppelin scratched on the wooden huts. The bedouin chief told him that they paid homage to “a mighty sign which, as many years ago as there are fingers on both hands and toes on one foot, appeared in the heavens above the desert.”)
Bockholt headed for the Nile, intending to follow its course to Sudan. At 4:20 P.M., an engine gave out, but the other four Maybachs continued working perfectly. The night, however, brought another unpleasant surprise: As the temperature plummeted it super-cooled the hydrogen, forcing Bockholt to dump ballast just to stay airborne. At 3 A.M., after descending from 3,100 feet to 1,300 feet, he came close to hitting the side of a mountain that loomed up from out of nowhere, and nearly the last of the ballast was desperately thrown overboard. L-59, much to the crew’s relief, slowly righted itself and rose to a safer altitude.
Bockholt was just 125 miles west of Khartoum and two-thirds of the way to relieving Lettow-Vorbeck when, at 12:45 A.M., he received a curious, crackly, coded message on L-59’s prearranged wavelength. Nauen had finally managed to contact him: “Break off operation, return. Enemy has seized greater part of Makonde Highlands, already holds Kitangari. Portuguese are attacking remainder of Protectorate Forces from south.” Lettow-Vorbeck was finished, or at least so it seemed.
Or more accurately, that is how the British wanted it to seem. At the Admiralty in London, Room 40 was home to naval intelligence, whose cipher experts had cracked the German naval code. Room 40 had also been dimly aware that the Germans were planning something for many months before L-59 set out, thanks in part to an obscure British agent (code-named Mortimer) who had parachuted into Austria to meet an anonymous American of Bulgarian ancestry working for the Secret Service.
The latter said that he’d heard rumors of an airship that was due to go to Yambol, for reasons unknown. The operation was called China Show. British intelligence later picked up Naval Airship Division radio chatter mentioning China Show, but the pieces couldn’t be fitted together until L-59 was reported to be heading for Lettow-Vorbeck’s location in Africa.
To prepare a surprise welcome party, London instructed the East African Royal Flying Squadron to keep its fighters on standby to shoot down L-59 and at the same time sent a coded message, purportedly from Lettow-Vorbeck, telling of his encirclement. This was, as intended, picked up in Nauen and thence transmitted to Bockholt. Ultimately, the fighters were not needed as the message did its work all too well.
On board L-59, Bockholt received the transmission and paused. What should he do? He was so close to Lettow-Vorbeck, yet this was a clear order from an unimpeachable source to break off the mission. He put the decision to the crew and for the next two hours they debated it, with one faction agreeing with Bockholt that they must turn back and another arguing that to depart now would abandon the Lion of Africa to his dreadful fate. Discipline won. At 2:30 A.M., Bockholt ordered L-59 to turn and go home. At 7:30 in the morning on November 25, L-59 arrived in Europe only to discover that that same day, Lettow-Vorbeck had actually put the enemy to flight.
In a strictly military sense, then, the L-59 flight was a failure, but privately Eckener was jubilant. The airship, because it had never landed in Africa, had completed a nonstop voyage of 4,225 miles—about the same distance as between Friedrichshafen and New York—in 95 hours at an average speed of 45 mph over troublesome terrain and in harsh conditions where the temperature had oscillated between 23 degrees and 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Bockholt still had fuel enough for another sixty-four hours of flight, translating into an extra 3,750 miles.16 L-59 had also borne cargo and passengers—of a military nature, true, but a valuable payload nonetheless—making it evident to Eckener that once the damned war was over the Zeppelin Company had a clear path to developing, at long last, large-scale intercontinental commercial travel.
The only problem was, would there even be a Zeppelin Company?