Why Airships Never Took Off. Part 9: Ashes of War and New Opportunities

In November 1918, the German Empire was the last of the Central Powers bloc to sign an armistice, thereby recognizing its defeat in the First World War. Britain and other Entente countries, having experienced the destructiveness of night bombings from Zeppelins, decided to prohibit the Germans from building and operating rigid airships. All vehicles that survived to the end of the war were to be transferred to the victorious powers. It would seem that this was where the history of German airship construction in general and the Zeppelin Luftschiffbau company should have ended. However, its new leader, who replaced the deceased Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, Dr. Hugo Eckener, was determined to prevent this from happening under any circumstances.

• Part 1: from hot air balloon to bomber for Borodino

• Part 2: the birth and death of French airship construction

• Part 3: the birth of the German Zeppelins

• Part 4: The Kaiser's skyships go to war

• Part 5: Shadows over Britain

• Part 6: London under the bombs

• Part 7: Fire in the Sky

• Part 8. finale of military zeppelins

• Part 9: ashes of war and new opportunities ← you are here

The signing of the armistice in Compiegne ended the fighting of the First World War - and at the same time became the end of German military aeronautics. The victorious powers had suffered a fair amount from Zeppelin raids and were not going to give the defeated Reich a chance to rebuild a fleet of airships even for purely civilian purposes. All surviving vehicles by November 1918 were supposed to be either transferred as reparations to the Entente countries. In response to this demand, L-41, L-42, L-52, L-56, L-63, L-65, as well as the old, “luckiest” L-14, were burned by their own crews when it became clear that the zeppelins should be given to the winners. This happened almost simultaneously with the massive sinking of German warships by crews instead of surrendering at the British base of Scapa Flow. 

However, not all the crews were so irreconcilable - and the Entente allies still received several surviving Zeppelins at their disposal. 2 were transferred to Great Britain, 2 to France, 2 to Italy - and the Italians, as in the joke, soon broke one in a boathouse and lost the other in an accident. One each went to Belgium and Japan, where they were immediately dismantled into components - primarily for the sake of valuable duralumin. We will talk about the fate of the captured zeppelins in the sections about the corresponding countries, but for now we remain in the lost Germany - no longer an empire, but a republic, which later received the name Weimar from historians. 

By this time, the Zeppelin Luftschiffbau was headed by Dr. Hugo Eckener after the death of Count von Zeppelin. The former psychologist and journalist, who was once assigned to cover the flights of the first Zeppelins, fell in love with airships before making a radical career change. At first he joined the count's company as, as they would say now, a PR man, but already in 1911 he stood on the bridge of the passenger LZ-8 Deutschland II. True, on his first flight he crashed into the wall of the boathouse, and the airship required repairs, but by the beginning of the First World War, Eckener managed to make about 1000 (!) flights and established himself not only as a very smart commander, but also as the best instructor. For this reason, he spent the entire war training new Zeppelin crews. However, unlike Count von Zeppelin, Hugo Eckener held rather pacifist views, and after the first patriotic impulses in 1914, he did not particularly insist on being transferred to the front line. 

When the end of the war in 1918 became obvious, Hugo Eckener decided to do everything to preserve the German airship industry - transfer it to civilian rails and focus on passenger transportation of the revived DELAG company. At the same time, it was clear that the Entente really wanted to ban airship construction in Germany in any form, and Eckener had to part with part of the top management from among von Zeppelin’s associates, who proposed to save the company completely abandon airship construction and start producing something less triggering for the victorious powers. Deciding to take a risk and start building passenger zeppelins before the peace treaty was signed, Eckener gave carte blanche to one of the company's leading engineers, who had long dreamed of his own project - before that, almost all types of zeppelins were created under the leadership of general designer Ludwig Duerr.

This engineer was Paul Jarai, a native of a respectable Jewish-Hungarian family from Vienna, a man fanatically passionate about aerodynamics. Later, his projects and developments would become one of the foundations of the streamline style, popular from the early 30s to the late 50s, which gradually moved from aerial and automotive technology to construction and design. It was he who achieved the creation of a wind tunnel at the main Zeppelin Luftschiffbau plant to determine the most efficient body contours. The result of his developments were two almost identical passenger airships LZ-120 "Bodensee" and LZ-21 "Nordstern". These were small machines compared to the monster super-zeppelins of the war, 130 meters long and with a carrying gas volume of just over 20 thousand cubic meters. The streamlined shapes, carefully calculated and tested in the pipe, made it possible to reach speeds of more than 130 km/h. This was also facilitated by the main gondola, for the first time not suspended under the hull on beams, but slightly “recessed” into its bow curve. 

LZ-120 "Bodensee" was laid down in February 1919 and made its first flight on August 20 of the same year. It was originally intended to carry 20 passengers in a luxuriously decorated cabin, but for cost reasons, an additional 10 wicker seats were added. A small luxury cabin was made near the bridge, and on the bridge itself, next to the captain’s, another chair was placed - for media VIPs or for a special fee. Electric lighting and electrical equipment were provided by wind generators, there was a buffet with stewards to serve passengers during the voyage, and for the first time the captain could address everyone on board via speakerphone. 

From August to December, the LZ-120 Bodensee made 103 passenger flights between Friedrichshafen, Berlin and Munich, and in October, as an experiment, flew to Stockholm, Sweden. Despite the post-war devastation and the very high cost of tickets, the cabin was almost always completely full: travel by rail in Germany in 1919 was unpredictable in time and not always safe, and wealthy citizens, whenever possible, preferred a guaranteed fast and reliable airship. Moreover, even with imperfect pre-war machines, DELAG managed to not lose a single passenger to death during thousands of flights, and now the development of technology and the accumulated enormous operating experience have made passenger airships much more reliable machines. In addition to passengers, the zeppelin regularly took on board especially valuable cargo. The only emergency landing after being caught in a snowstorm near Berlin - something that would have inevitably destroyed some of the early machines - turned out to be so soft that after sending passengers by called buses and minor repairs, the zeppelin took off and flew to the airfield under its own power. 

However, in December 1919, the Entente powers urgently demanded that Germany give up both the LZ-120 Bodensee and the almost completed LZ-121 Nordstern as reparations in return for those burned by the crews. Negotiations in attempts to change the decision were unsuccessful - and in June 1921, the LZ-121 Nordstern, after a single test flight, set off with a German crew, accompanied by French officers, heading west. Having paraded over Paris as a trophy, the zeppelin landed on the territory of the Saint-Cyr Military Academy. In 1922, it will be introduced into the French fleet under the new name “Méditerranée”, and we will tell about its further fate in the corresponding section. Then, in July 1921, the LZ-120 “Bodensee” was personally led to Italy by the head of the company Hugo Eckener - the zeppelin circled the Alps from the west, passed over the Cote d'Azur and landed at the base of Italian military airships in Ciampino near Rome. As part of the Italian royal army, the machine was named “Esperia” - we will talk about its fate, as well as about Italian airship construction, which even before the war followed a special “branch” of semi-rigid construction machines. 

As a result, in the summer of 1921, the Zeppelin Luftschiffbau company was left without airships at all - and partly by this time it was still forced to start producing “conversion” products like aluminum cookware for survival. However, Hugo Eckener was already in full swing with a new plan for restoring airship construction. The fact is that it is very opportune that the command of the American Navy thought about introducing naval airships of a rigid design into service. There they studied the experience of the war in Europe and the adjacent seas, which the Americans themselves entered only in the finale, and became very interested in the successes of German naval Zeppelins in the field of maritime patrol. Let us recall: according to German naval commanders, the reconnaissance value of one zeppelin over the sea was comparable to three light cruisers - and this is a lot.

The British used small soft airships for similar purposes, and for the North Sea they were generally quite sufficient, while huge zeppelins were somewhat redundant. But the United States was in a completely different situation: it was separated from potentially hostile shores not by straits and relatively small seas, but by two huge oceans. Large reconnaissance boats already had the potential for intercontinental flights, but a large airship of rigid construction could spend whole days in long-distance searches, flying thousands of kilometers over the ocean expanses. At first, the Americans were going to receive two German zeppelins as trophies, but the airships intended for them were among those burned by the crews. Then it was decided to build them independently based on the study of Entente trophies, or to buy them from the British, who had already created their own designs based on German motives. However, Hugo Eckener found out about the program and did everything to convince the US Navy command to turn to real professionals. 

The Americans did not put all their eggs in one basket; they had enough money - and in the end they decided to try all three options. A dedicated US Navy air station was established in Lakehurst, New Jersey for the construction, storage and operation of airships. The ZR-1 USS “Shenandoah”, based on captured German materials, was almost immediately laid down on it, similar in parameters to the later high-altitude Zeppelins of 1917-1918. Even before that, in October 1919, the Americans bought the unfinished R-38 from the British - an attempt by the British to copy German Zeppelins for long-range maritime patrol. The construction of it and three sisterships was stopped after the signing of the truce in Compiegne, and they were going to dismantle it, but the Americans decided that they would need it, and took the financing of the completion of the future ZR-2 into their own hands. Well, after long negotiations, Zeppelin Luftschiffbau received the right to create the ZR-3 - and free of charge for the Americans, at the expense of the republican budget to offset part of the reparations due to the United States. 

The contract was awarded in June 1922, by which time general inexperience in the construction and operation of rigid airships had led to the disaster of the R-38/ZR-2, which literally cracked in the air from too sudden maneuvers with a hull that was too weak and too poorly maintained. Of the 49 Anglo-American crew and testers, only five survived. During the investigation, it turned out that the British developers simply “forgotten” a number of important structural and aerodynamic calculations, but in the end no one was even punished for this. This greatly influenced the decision of the US Navy command to turn to the much more experienced Germans, yesterday's enemies, to the great displeasure of the British. Due to the restrictions imposed by the Entente, the Americans and Germans even had to resort to a trick: at first it was publicly stated that the ordered airship would be used strictly for passenger transportation, and the car made its first flights with a full-fledged passenger cabin with 30 seats. 

By this time, Paul Jarai had already left the company, and Ludwig Duerr again took over the design, combining all the developments available at that time in a new development. The car had the dimensions of a super-Zeppelin with a length of 200 meters, but the new LZ-126 inherited the sleek aerodynamic contours and the gondola recessed into the body from Yarai’s projects. To reduce the heating of the body and the carrier gas inside the cylinders in the sun, a coating containing aluminum was first used - this machine became the first “silver” airship, which later became the canon of dieselpunk.

After a series of tests, Hugo Eckener personally took the car into the air on October 12, 1924, in front of a large gathering of people and the press - two journalists were even found on board as stowaways. The crew, composed entirely of the most experienced German balloonists, was accompanied by four US Navy and Army officers. They had to make a transatlantic flight from Friedrichshafen to Lakehurst - before that, only the British R-34 crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1919 specifically to set a record.

After passing over southern France and Spanish Galicia, the zeppelin reached the Azores and moved further into the open ocean. We had to fight the Atlantic winds for some time, changing course, until the shores of Newfoundland appeared on the horizon. Zeppelin moved along the coast, passing over Boston and making several circles over New York, where it was greeted with delight by the residents. On October 15, after 81 hours and 8,050 kilometers traveled, LZ-126 landed at Lakehurst in front of a large crowd. Everything went as expected, only the water supply on board ran out ahead of time. Already in November, the airship was officially renamed ZR-3 USS “Los Angeles” and introduced into the US Navy.

Already in 1925, the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles were relaxed, and Zeppelin Luftschiffbau again received the right to build airships. Hugo Eckener immediately launched a public campaign for the construction of a new passenger airship, capable of even flying around the world. Fundraising managed to collect 2.4 million Reichmarks (the currency retained its old name after the overthrow of the monarchy), another 1.1 million was provided by the republican budget, and Zeppelin Luftschiffbau invested 0.8 million from its own funds. The project of the new airship was a development of the LZ-126, but in size and volume of carrying gas it exceeded any super-high-altitude zeppelin during the war.

On July 8, 1928, in honor of the 90th anniversary of the birth of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, the LZ-127 was given the official name “Graf Zeppelin” - under which it will go down in history as the most famous, famous for record-breaking flights and the most reliable of all airships ever built.

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