The Story of the Airship 3

The Story of the Airship 3

The patrol areas assigned to the blimps would have their flanks exposed,

but airship patrol would be co-ordinated with that of airplanes and

surface craft, guarding the areas farther out.

 

That this conclusion is reasonable is indicated by the fact that from

1939 on, Lakehurst Naval Air Station, under command of Commander G. H.

Mills had been doing just this, patroling areas all the way from

Nantucket to Cape Hatteras.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER II

British Airships in the First War

 

 

[Illustration: Airship over water]

 

Germany entered the first World War with high expectations as to one,

perhaps two of its new weapons of war. Its submarines might offset

Britain’s superiority at sea, and certainly the Zeppelins, which had

proved themselves in four years of commercial flying, would be able to

cross the English Channel and carry the war to the island which had seen

no invasion since William the Conqueror.

 

No nation except Germany had Zeppelins. And as the German people began

to feel the pinch of the blockade, cutting their life line of food and

supplies, they brought increasing public pressure on High Command to use

these weapons to punish England.

 

Later commentators have speculated as to whether, if Germany had held

its fire, waited till it could assemble an overpowering force of

Zeppelins and submarines and stage a joint attack, it might not have

been able to force a quick decision.

 

But the Zeppelins were sent over a few at a time, as fast as they could

be built, and England was given time to devise defenses. These were

chiefly higher altitude airplanes, farther ranging anti-aircraft guns,

sky piercing searchlights, which combined to force the invaders to fly

continuously higher as the war wore on, as high as 25,000 feet at times,

with corresponding sacrifice of bombing accuracy. And when machine guns,

synchronized with the propellers, were mounted in airplane cockpits, and

began to spit inflammable bullets into the hydrogen filled bags and send

them down in flames, the duel took on more even terms.

 

Less spectacularly the Zeppelins were used on a wide scale as

reconnaissance and scouting craft, which flying fast and far were given

credit on more than one occasion for saving German Naval squadrons from

being cut off by superior Allied forces, were acknowledged even by the

British to have played an important part in the Battle of Jutland.

 

It is a little hard to realize today that whatever air battles were

waged over water in the last war were conducted chiefly by

lighter-than-air craft. Planes staged spectacular battles along the

Allied lines in France, but lack of range and carrying capacity forced

them to leave sea battles to the airship. As a measure of that

situation, the great hangars at Friedrichshafen, spawning ground of the

Zeppelins, one of the outstanding targets in all Europe if England were

to draw the dirigible’s fangs, lay hardly more than a hundred miles from

the French borders, but even that distance was too great for effective

attack.

 

While these greater events were taking place, British airships, smaller

in size, less spectacular, were playing no small part in repelling

Germany’s other threat, the submarine.

 

 

Blimps Used to Search for U-Boats

 

Navy opinion around the world was skeptical at the beginning of the War

as to whether submarines would ever be practical. There were mechanical

troubles, accidents, usually costly. Even Germany, prior to 1914, used

to send an escort of warships along to convoy its subs to their

station—then send out for them afterward to bring them home again.

 

But the war was only a few weeks old when the captain of the U-9,

cruising down the Dutch coast, discovered that his gyro compass was off,

and when he got his bearings saw that he was 50 miles off course. He

wasted no breath, however, on many-syllabled German swear words, for off

on his southern horizon were the masts of three British ships. He dived,

came up alongside, and in 30 minutes, single handed, with well directed

torpedoes, had sunk in turn HMS Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy.

 

The morning of September 22, 1914, marked the beginning of a new era in

Naval warfare. The warring nations grew furiously busy building their

own U-boats and devising defenses against the enemy’s. Among these

defenses was the non-rigid airship.

 

These two vehicles, so widely different, have much in common. If we may

be technical for a minute we may say that the airship and the submarine

are both buoyant bodies, completely immersed and floating in a

medium—air and water respectively—of changing pressures, that each uses

dual sets of steering gear and rudders to control direction and

altitude. And further, that the airship in 1941 faces the same division

of opinion as the submarine faced in 1914, as to whether, particularly

with rigid airships, it will ever be widely used and accepted.

 

In any event in 1914 there was an urgent and immediate job to be done.

 

Indicator nets and high explosive mines might give some protection to

harbors, might be stretched across steamship lanes and planted around

the hiding places of the submarines, if those could be discovered. But

troop ships and munition ships and food ships must be dispatched without

interruption across the tricky waters of the English Channel to France,

and for this purpose convoy escorts were devised, with camouflaged

warships zigzagging alongside, while high aloft in lookout stations men

with binoculars strained their eyes, searching the waters, ahead,

astern, alongside, their search lingering long over every bit of

floating wreckage—and there was a lot of it—to make sure it was not a

periscope.

 

These lookouts aboard ship quickly had a new ally in the air. As the

submarine menace grew, binoculars began to flash too from the fuselages

of bobbing blimps overhead. At a few hundred or perhaps a thousand feet

elevation they could see deep below the surface, and quickly learned to

recognize at considerable distance the tell-tale trail of bubbles or

feathered waters or smear of oil which denoted the enemy’s presence,

might even pick out the shadowy form of the submerged craft itself.

 

The value of the airship in convoy was that it could fly slowly, could

throttle down its motors and march in step with its charges, cruise

ahead, alongside, behind. The very speed of its sister craft, the

airplane, handicapped its use in this field.

 

This characteristic of the blimp was even more useful in hunting U-boat

nests. The blimp could head into the wind, with its motors barely

turning over, hover for hours at zero speed over suspect areas. It could

fly at low altitudes, follow even slender clues. Seagulls following a

periscope sometimes gave highly useful information. An orange crate

moving against the tide attracted the attention of one alert pilot, for

the crate concealed a periscope, and the blimp dropped

bombs—successfully.

 

When a blimp discovered a submarine, it would give chase. With its 50

knots of reserve speed it was faster than any warship, much faster than

the poky wartime submarine, which could do only 10 or 12 knots on the

surface, much less than half that when submerged. If it was lucky the

airship might drop a bomb alongside before the sub got away.

 

And run for cover the submarine always did. It wanted no argument with a

ship which could see it under water, could out-run it, and might plunk a

bomb alongside before its presence was even suspected.

 

Airships did get their subs during the war. The records, always

incomplete in the case of submarines, whose casualties were invisible,

show that British blimps sighted 49 U-boats, led to the destruction of

27. But their greater usefulness lay in the fact that their mere

presence sent the underseas craft scuttling for submerged safety.

 

Between June, 1917, and the end of the war British blimps flew 1,500,000

miles, nearly as many as the Zeppelins. A French Commission made an

exhaustive study of dirigible operations after the war, and the late

Rear Admiral W. A. Moffett quoted from its reports in summarizing

lighter-than-air lessons taken from the war, when he told the Naval

Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives that “as far as they

could learn, no steamer was ever molested by submarines when escorted by

a non-rigid airship.”

 

France and Italy had long coast lines, used the blimps extensively along

the Bay of Biscay, the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, but England found

still greater use for them because it was an island. So blimp scouts

played a singularly useful role from Land’s End to the Orkneys, stood

watch at the mouth of the Firth of Forth, the Solway, the Humber, and

the Thames.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER III

American Airships in Two Wars

 

 

[Illustration: Airship and hangar]

 

Compared to British and French airships, American dirigibles made a less

impressive record during the first war.

 

This for the reasons that there were few enemy activities in our waters

until the very end, and that there were few American airships to oppose

them. Virtually the entire airship organization had to be created after

we got into the war.

 

Naval attachés abroad had been watching blimp operations over the

English channel, and on the basis of rather meager information which

they furnished, Navy designers were working on plans, when the Secretary

of the Navy, in February 1917, 60 days before the declaration of war,

ordered 16 blimps started at once.

 

Nine of these were to be built by Goodyear which had at least given some

study to the principles, had built a few balloons, one of which, flown

by its engineers out of Paris, had won the James Gordon Bennett Cup

Race.

 

No one in this country, however, knew much about building airships, and

less about flying them after they were built. Operating bases would have

to be built and the very construction plants as well. The first Goodyear

airship under the Navy order was completed before the airship dock

(hangar) at Wingfoot Lake was ready, and the ship had to be erected in

Chicago and flown in.

 

The engineers who built it, Upson and Preston, made their first airship

flight in delivering the ship to Akron, using theoretical principles

applied in the international balloon race the year before, to make up for their lack of practical experience.