PROFESSOR ZUPITZA'S IDEA

Late in 1916, Professor Maximillian Zupitza, a retired major in the colonial medical service, presented himself at the Colonial Office in Berlin. He had been taken a prisoner of war by the British when they occupied German Togoland in 1914. The British had turned him over to the French who had permitted him to return to Germany in 1916 on his word of honor that he would not again engage in hostilities against the Allies during the war.

Zupitza had had a long and distinguished career in Africa. He had served his tour of duty as an army physician and in 1897 had joined the German colonial forces. Most of his initial service had been in East Africa and had involved mainly the investigation of the bubonic plague. From 1905 on, he had worked on the eradication of the sleeping sickness in the Cameroons and in Togoland until he had been taken prisoner of war. He had received a number of decorations for his work.

The Colonial Office made it a practice to talk to those returning from Africa to fill in the gaps in the information it had about conditions there. Zupitza did not have much to add; he had been a prisoner too long. He in turn was curious about what had happened in the colonies while he had been imprisoned. The officers of the itd tary Department were glad to fill him in.

At the moment everything was quiet. The rainy season would begin any day now and neither army would be able to move in the fields of mud into which the torrential rains would turn the African soil. The Germans were holding an area which was bordered on the north by the Rufiji river and its tributary, the Kilombero and the tributary of the latter, the Ruhudje. In the west, German control stopped at a line roughly 80 miles east of Lake Nyasa and in the south it ended at the Rovuma river, the border between German East Africa and Portugese Mozambique. Germany had declared war on Portugal in 1916, but the Rovuma border had remained quiet. The Indian Ocean shore in the east, on the other hand, was now under the control of the British navy and the main ports, including the southern ports of Lindi and Kilwa, had been occupied by the enemy.

There was little doubt, however, that the war would be resumed when the rainy season ended next April. So far the German troops had been able to keep the field. Although cut off from Germany by the British blockade, they met many of their needs by making some of the supplies locally and two blockade runners had succeeded in reaching Bast Africa while stretches of the coast were still in German hands. A 1,600 ton freighter, the "Rubens" had arrived in Manza Bay in 1915. Before she could unload her cargo, she was discovered by a British gunboat which shelled her until she was in flames. Thinking its mission accomplished and troubled by pesky machine gun fire from shore, the British gun boat had left. The Germans, however, had set to work at once and had been able to salvage most of the "Rubens'" cargo.

Early in 1916, a visitor of neutral nationality, coming from German East Africa, had stopped off in the Colonial office in Berlin. He had been able to leave the beleaguered colony through Mozambique which then was still neutral. While he had been in German East Africa, Governor Schnee had given him some warehouse inventories and had asked him to deliver them to the Colonial Office when he got to Berlin. The inventories were an ingenious deception. The supplies listed on the "inventories" were entirely imaginary but the numbers purportedly showing how much of each category was on hand represented code words of a German signal code and spelled out the supplies the African troops needed - rifles, medicine, four small mountain guns and artillery ammunition. Fortunately, the Allies had not bothered the innocent traveller about the inventories. The "Marie" sailed soon afterwards and successfully landed the supplies which Schnee had requested in Sudi Bay.

Now that the coast of the colony was in British hands, however, it was no longer snmmetinies tx send more supply ships there but, as Berlin saw it, the German troops were probably adequately provided with military equipment. Weapons and ammunition were regularly captured on the battlefield, keeping the troops supplied in a makeshift way. This was not the case with medical supplies. There was a shortage of medicines of every kind, particularly quinine. Interviews with Germans who had been taken prisoner in Africa and later sent back to Germany confirmed this.

Nobody had to tell Zupitza how important quinine was to the Europeans in Africa. It was the proven antidote for malaria, the disease which had already decimated the South African army. Without regular use of quinine, the white soldiers would quickly succumb and without their leadership, the colonial troops would fall apart. The native soldiers by themselves had neither the incentive nor the ability to continue the fight. They knew little about Germany; that was an abstract concept to them. Their loyalty was to the person of their commander. None of the askaris had been trained as officers. They had not even been taught how to handle a machine gun. If collapse of the war effort in East Africa was to be avoided, the directing and cohesive force of the white officers and non-commissioned officers was essential.

Since ships could no longer get through, why wen we not fly medical supplies there with zeppelins, Zupitza asked.

Zupitza had not been the first to suggest this, but for its day, the idea seemed almost unreal. Few could see aircraft as anything more than an adjunct of ground and naval forces. The air was but a vertical extension of the surface below. If planes and airships crossed the frontlines for raids into enemy territory, they were nevertheless obliged to return to their base behind the lines as if some invisible umbilical cord bound them to that patch of ground.

What Zupitza had perceived was that the air was an element independent of land and sea. It was, in fact, a bridge across these elements. What he envisioned was warfare in three dimensions - the use of airborne vehicles to effect distant military intervention across terrestial obstacles that might be interposed between the attacker and his target. His idea was in a sense a precursor of the Israeli rescue Operation at Entebbe in 1976.

But what equipment was available to carry out this idea? Airplanes were out of the question. Even the "Riesenflugzeuge (Giant Airplanes), the "Gotha" bombers, were completely inadequate to the task. Under the most favorable conditions, they could carry a bombload of 1,300 pounds for 520 miles. The airline distance to German East Africa was about 3,600 miles and to make the flight worthwhile, much more than the 1,300 pounds the "Gotha" was capable of carrying would be needed.

The airship experts of the "Reichsmarineamt", the Ministry of the Navy, thought that zeppelins could not do the job either. What little was known about meteorological conditions in Africa suggested that they were very unfavorable for airship travel. Baron Max von Gemmingen, an associate of Count Zeppelin, had stated the problem in 1914. "Too little is known of the meterological conditions in the [German colonies in Africa] to permit a reasonably accurate estimate of the factors relevant to aerial travel there at this time. The high temperatures reduce the lift of the airship and strong sunlight leads to considerable loss of gas; that is to say, in just those regions which require the highest performance of the airships, they lag behind their performance in our latitudes... [Airship travel to the colonies] requires detailed preparations for several years or more, particularly meteorological observations. Fortunately, the Colonial Office has made the only possible start for airship travel to the colonies by initiating such observations. Any attempt to send airships to the protectorates before the completion of such preliminary work must be considered premature". The war had brought the weather studies of the Colonial Office to a quick end and little more was known about the weather conditions in Africa and how they would affect the airship than was known when Baron von Gemmingen wrote his assessment of airship travel to the colonies.

There were other problems - lack of ground support and vague and inaccurate maps. Equally important was that nobody knew whether an airship crew could withstand the rigors of such a long flight and whether the engines would hold up that long. No airship had ever been aloft continuously for four days and this is how long it would take to reach East Africa. The typical German airship operation involved a twenty to twenty four hour reconaissance or bombing flight. Moreover, the airship would be a total loss. It was unlikely that the ship, in addition to the cargo it was to deliver, could also carry enough fuel to return to its starting point and there was no way it could be refuelled in Africa. Even if there was enough gasoline left in the small area still held by the Germans to refuel the ship, it could never be gotten to the zeppelin's landing place before it was discovered by the British. Nor was there any way of replacing the hydrogen gas the dirigible would lose during the long journey there, The ship would have to be sacrificed. The judgment of the Ministry of the Navy that an airship could not successfully carry out the proposed flight to Africa lacked daring but it was consistent with what was known at the time.

Yet, the idea of making a flight to Africa with an airship had a tremendous appeal to those with a more vivid imagination. Dirigibles were now available which were almost equal to the challenge. On May 28, 1916, a young lieutenant with the mouthfilling name of Horst Freiherr (Baron) Treusch von Buttlar-Brandenfels had ferried airship "L 30" from its construction yard at Friedrichshafen to its operational base at Nordholz. It was the first of the new "Super zeppelins", and was almost two and one half times larger and over thirty percent faster than the class of zeppelins with which the navy had started the war. Count Zeppelin had been on board; it had been the last flight which fate would allow him. A photo taken of the old count shows him in military uniform, his walrus mustache turned white, seated at a window of the command car of the 1,949,600 cubic foot giant, chatting animatedly with an aide. Closed gondolas had been anathema to Zeppelin. An airship commander should always have the feel of the wind in his face, he had insisted. Closed cabin or not, Zeppelin must have been impressed by this newest version of his idea. In the plains of the Main river, between Darmstadt and Frankfurt, where the great international Rhein-Main airport is now located, Lieutenant Buttlar took "L 30" down to 100 feet altitude and staged an impromptu race with a northbound express train. With a maximum speed of 74 m.p.h., Buttlar won easily. The theoretical range of the new super-zeppelins was 4,600 miles, enough to reach Africa without a cargo.

Intercontinental airship flight had been talked about for some time already. At the time the war broke out, Zeppelin had been at work on a plan to fly across the Atlantic. Major von Parseval, the leading German designer of non-rigid airships, had also considered the possible use of airships in future transatlantic travel and had concluded "[{The] present performance of the [airship] is not too far removed from the task and it seems possible from the technical point of view".

Zupitza became aware of the practical potential of airships in the summer of 1917 when he was visiting the eastern front as a consultant on hygiene. Glancing through the "Wilnaer Zeitung", a paper published for the German armed forces on the eastern front, his eye was caught by a small item in the June 20th issue entitled "How Long Does A Flight Across The Atlantic Take?" It was a summary of an article published in a science magazine, "Prometheus", which had described the possibilities of reaching the world beyond the Atlantic by air. To fly the distance of 3,700 miles at 37 m.p.h. would take about four days. To carry sufficient fuel for such a flight together with a payload of 22,000 pounds would require a ship of 1,765,500 displacement "Since for some time already, the larger zeppelins have attained half this size or more, the technical possibilities of an America airship may be taken for granted", the article concluded. Zupitza thought of his suggestion to use a zeppelin to fly medicine to Africa. If it was now possible to build zeppelins which could fly to America, why could one not be built to fly to Africa? Zupitza clipped the item out of the paper and sent it to the Staff of the Protectorate Troops of the Colonial Office together with a short letter requesting that it be examined to determine whether this means could not be used to supply the Schutztruppe with rifles, ammunition, medical and other vital supplies. He suggested that the ship start in the Balkans or in Syria. If the ship took advantage of northern trade winds, he added optimistically, enough gasoline could be saved to make a number of flights against the enemy in Africa. He probably did not know about "L 30" and the ships that had followed it which were already larger than the airship the newspaper article had postulated.

Concerned with the fate of the colonial forces in East Africa, the Colonial Office once more started to look for military sponsorship of its aerial relief plans. On July 24, it sent Zupitza's letter together with his newspaper clipping to the Army's Inspector of Airship Troops of the Army Airforce and asked for his comments.