THE ARMY SAYS "NO"!

At the end of July 1917, the Colonial Office submitted its Africa plan to the Army Air Force and with this nearlv aborted its cherished project. The army like the navy operated its own, separate air force which also included an airship division. The Colonial Office chose to approach the Army Airforce just as it was dismantling its airship service. The army's decision to give up the airship was widely known but perhaps the officers of the Colonial Office were so far in the military back waters of the times that they had not heard of it. It may be that they turned to the army because the Ministry of the Navy had previously reacted negatively to its suggestion; perhaps it thought that the army now could spare an airship for the Africa venture. Whatever the reason was, the Colonial Office ignored not only the awkwardness of its timing but also the hostility which many Army Airforce officers had developed towards the airship and which had led them to abandon their airship service.

For the army to get rid of its zeppelins seemed almost unpatriotic. These grey giants were uniquely German weapons. No other nation had built them successfully. England's "R 1", unofficially but, in view of its life span, appropriately called the "Mayfly", had broken apart as it had been brought out of its hangar for its first flight. France's "Spiess" was made obsolete by German progress in the construction of rigid airships before the French could complete their ship. The French had a unique opportunity to update their airship technology when the German army ship "Z IV" made a forced landing at Lunéville in 1913 and French engineers carefully examined it while its crew was being entertained at dinner. However, the unplanned zeppelin visit did not engender any further interest in rigid airships among the French military authorities and they stuck with their small, nonrigid airships.

The Germans believed that in the rigid airship they possessed a decisive super-weapon. Its gigantic size, its great bomb carrying capacity and its range, compared to the existing, flimsy heavier-than-air machines, appeared to give substance to this belief. They took great pride in their airships and Count Zeppelin was a great hero to them.

Giving voice to the prevailing expectations, German children sang a ditty to the tune of an old nursery rhyme:

"Zeppelin flieg.
Hilf uns im Krieg.
Fliege nach England,
England wird abgebrannt.
Zeppelin flieg."

(Zeppelin fly.
Our side you must stand by.
To England you are bound.
Burn England to the ground.
Zeppelin fly.)*

To the parents of these children, the dirigibles had a more substantial meaning. The newspaper editorials explained it all very clearly: Let all airships be massed over London and let the British be summoned to surrender on pain of seeing their city wiped from the face of the earth if they refuse! If such a notion now seems absurd, it was quite in line with the sensational phantasies conjured up by H.G. Wells in his "War in the Air" and by others not too long before So powerful was the hold which the zeppelin had on the German imagination that in 1917, when the airship had long defaulted in producing those decisive victories everyone had expected of it, a German doctor still warned an English acquaintance: "I hope you have no friends within the flying radius of our Zeppelins for the time has come when we are going to punish England, as Sodom and Gomorrah were punished with a hail of fire from heaven, for this war of starvation she is waging against our women and children".⁸

When war came in 1914, the army had seven "frontline" airships. They were untried weapons; nobody knew what they could do or how to operate them under wartime conditions. The army sent airship "Z IX"⁹ on a raid on which it was to attack Antwerp, Zeebrugge, Dunkerque, Calais and Lille in turn. For this purpose it carried ten eight inch shells instead of bombs which were not yet available. The shells were dropped without the aid of a bombsight on targets of which all but one were fortified. That an attack which dispersed so few "bombs" among so many targets could accomplish nothing seems not to have occured to anyone. The belief evidently was that the aerial leviathan could by terror accomplish what was otherwise beyond its technical capacity. Zeppelin crews crossed the enemy lines in broad daylight and at low altitude since airships were not yet able to climb very high, disdainfully ignoring the heavy rifle that met them from the ground. The disdain did not last long. Crude as the early anti-aircraft defenses were, four airships were shot down in the first month of the war. "Z IX", less than three months old, met its doom soon afterwards at its base at Düsseldorf when an enterprising English naval aviator destroyed it in a divebombing attack. By fall, the proud German airship fleet in the west was reduced to one zeppelin.

The performance of the zeppelins in 1914 should have led to a reconsideration of their use for military purposes but the rush of events in that year probably did not permit such a sober reappraisal. The airplane was not yet a suitable vehicle for most purposes and certainly, the airship battallions were not readily going give up their part in the great fight that was under way. So with the momentum that events tend to acquire by themselves, the continued need for airships was taken for granted. It was just a question of building better ones. Larger and faster ships were built and production facilities were enlarged. By 1917 a zeppelin was produced every two weeks.

Although the army and navy airships had fared poorly during the summer of 1914, a new task was assigned to them in October, the bombardment of England.

The rules promulgated by the Hague Convention were no obstacle to bombing attacks on England. The convention merely prohibited the bombardment of open town and villages. England was full of military targets, some truly military, many others not so. Originally, the Hague Convention of 1907 had decided to ban the launching of projectiles from balloons entirely. The saner judgment of the American delegation finally prevailed. The airship was yet untried; might it not soon become a weapon which by its terrible effectiveness could well serve to shorten a war? That was always a desirable goal. Until more experience with this new weapon and its potential for curtailing a war was available, the question whether balloons should be taken out of the armory of lawful arms should be deferred. In 1914, the belligerents were therefore legally free to attack military targets from the air. When aerial weapons finally demonstrated what destruction they could wreak, it was too late to enact laws and conventions to ban them.

When the proposal to bomb English targets was put before Emperor Wilhelm II, he was reluctant to give his consent. He did not wish to visit personal injury upon his mngrian cousins or damage their palaces or museums. Ultimately, he was persuaded that precision bombing could avoid such damage and he authorized the attacks. Buttlar - Brandenfels laughed: "As if, at attack altitude, I could make out whether a museum or a palace belonged to the English king!" In January 1915 the first zeppelin appeared over England. Soon London became a target and the attacks multiplied. Sir Alfred Ewing, a resident of London, left us a description of one of. these early airship raids. As a zeppelin cruised over London one evening in September 1915, he left his office to join the throng in the streets and parks of the government quarters along Whitehall Street. Ewing had not expected that the German raids would have much effect. He had already confided to his diary: "I have no faith in a serious zeppelin raid, though they may do a bit of scaring that way". Fear of German airships and particularly heavy bombers was to grow later, but that night the crowd was in a jolly mood. It was grand entertainment! There was a faint, deep throated hum. Search lights stabbed into the night and at last caught the zeppelin. Anti-aircraft guns began to blast away, shrapnel exploded in the sky while the enemy continued his stately progress through the sky undisturbed. "The spectacle was stirring and rather beautiful", Ewing said. London got off easy that night. Two of the three zeppelins that had started for England did no reached it at all; the third was taken under fire the moment it broke through the cloud cover over the city. A shell pierced two of its gas cells and it was forced to jettison its bombs and ballast to get away. There were were no casualties.

Four weeks later the zeppelins raided London again. Lt. Commander Breithaupt, commanding one of the German ships, carried away somewhat the same impression that Ewing» reported - a grand, beautiful adventure, divorced from death and suffering: "London lay darkly under us, only a few lights showing. Suddenly, from all sides searchlights leaped out towards us, and as we flew over Tottenham a wild cannonade from aiet~a ewe stations began... The picture was indescribably beautiful - shrapnel bursting around (though rather uncomfortably near us), our bombs bursting, and the flashes of the anti-aircraft batteries below... And over us the starlit sky!"

Ewing saw Breithaupt as he was coming over the city at about 10:30 p.m. and watched the anti-aircraft guns drive nim off. The raid seems to have impressed him less than the September attacks, it rates little space in his diary. Nevertheless, seventeen persons were killed that night.

The anti-aircraft defenses of 1914 and 1915 were highly improvised affairs. Alfred Krupp, with a fine nose for new business opportunities, had already built a "balloon gun" in 1871 to thwart the French balloons which were escaping the German siege lines around Paris but the armies which took the field in the hot summer of 1914 possessed no organized anti-aircraft units. The infantry, of course, used their rifles and the huge ship passing slowly by presented a target which the rawest recruit was bound to hit. Don't worry about leading the target, the soldier was told, just aim for the nose. By the time your bullet reaches the zeppelin's altitude, there is still plenty of it coming by to be hit. Machine gunners were aodle to join as soon as they found the means of raising the muzzles of their wean high een « The artillery dug special gunpits for their light pieces or placed them on ramps to point their barrels skywards and the redoubtable French 75 mm. gun was placed on all sorts of fixed and mobile mounts to become the first modern antiaircraft gun.

At the time of Breithaupt's attack on London, there were only 26 anti-aircraft guns in the entire London area and those stationed at Woolwich Arsenal lacked the range to join in the defense of the city proper. This changed rapidly. Anti-aircraft guns and searchlights multiplied and were soon supported by a web of observation posts and audio and radio direction finders. Anti-aircraft gun became more effective. Special shells and gunsights were designed for them. On one raid, Buttlar's ship was hit at 16,000 feet, a great altitude for its day. As his ship became unbalanced and threatened to break apart, Buttlar's Executive Officer tried to relieve the tension by inquiring whether the captain preferred to take charge of the bow or stern section in case the worst happened but it took Buttlar a while to recover his sense of humor. At the same time, Allied fighter planes steadily improved in performance and increased in numbers. The airplane of 1914 was no threat to the airship. It carried no armament and if a few of the more aggressive aviators tried to shoot their colleagues on the other side with pistols and carbines, these weapons could not have downed a zeppelin even if the limited speed and climbing ability of their machines had permitted them to intercept the German sky cruisers. But even as the combattants began to arm their aircraft, Count Zeppelin confidently predicted in 1915 that in aerial combat, the airship would have the upper hand as it was a more stable gun platform than the airplane. He chose to overlook the obvious - that the airship was also the bigger target.

Even then, it was not a simple matter for an airplane to shoot down a zeppelin. The airplane could carry only a limited amount of machine gun ammunition. The small holes which these made in the cover and gas cells of the airship let the gas escape only slowly and subdividing the ship into numerous seperate gas cells limited the leakage to the cells actually hit. In fact, the first airship destroyed in aerial combat was dispatched by six 20 pound bombs dropped on it from above by a plane of the Royal Navy.

However, in 1916, when the British perfected the explosive and incendiary machinegun bullet, the balance irretrievably tipped in favor of the Allied aviators. Both types of ammunition were used in combination, the explosive bullet tore open the airship's gascells and the incendiaries ignited the escaping hydrogen gas. Hydrogen gas is highly inflammable and the resulting blaze was likely to transform the ship into a roaring furnace in a matter of seconds. Every airplane carrying the new ammunition became a deadly enemy of the airship. The Allied aviators also had learned to operate their planes at night and darkness no longer offered the airship portection. The army took various counter-measures to improve the operational capabilities of its ships. Their performance was constantly improved. Defensive armament was strengthened until, at the end, some ships mounted ten machineguns.¹⁰ An attempt was made to permit airships to operate hidden in the clouds by equipping them with a teardrop shaped, fin stabilized "Spähkorb", an observation gondola which the ship lowered beneath the cloud cover. From there, an officer telephoned navigation and bombing instructions to the commander. It is said that service in the Spahkorb was popular because it was the only place on a zeppelin where smoking was permitted. The observer on "LZ 107", however, may have changgondola when the winch from which it was suspended jammed, leaving him dangling 900 feet beneath the ship for seven hours.

The turning point in the airwar came in September 1916. The month began with the spectacular destruction of the army's "SL 11" over London during the night of September 2nd. The victim of fighter planes, the ship plunged nose first into the ground in a huge mass of flame, a lightening bolt of awesome dimensions. With the ship died its commander, Captain Wilhelm Schramm, who had been born in London and who had come back to destroy it. Six more army and navy ships were destroyed in September, to be followed by what must have been to Strasser the most painful loss of all, the death in combat of Lt. Commander Mathy, a close friend of Strasser and the navy's most successful airship captain. In August, Strasser had thought that the new "L 30" type "Super zeppelins" would lead to the defeat of England. By the beginning of October, four of them hd been shot down. Attacks on London had to be abandoned altogether and while the navy continued to attacks on central England, they had to confine to nights when the weather was particularly favorable.

By 1917, the gap between the airplane and the airship had widened even further. Allied fighter planes had twice the speed of the latest German airships and while they could not climb to high altitudes as fast as the dirigibles, the increase in the operating ceiling of the airplane forced the German airships to fly higher and higher with the consequent loss of operating efficiency.

None of the defensive measures which the army had adopted helped. By the Germans own count, only 188 of a total of 288 army bombing and reconnaissance missions flown were successful and on bombing raids, the accuracy of the aim generally was poor. The cost of this, by 1917, was 20 out of 30 army combat zeppelins destroyed by enemy action or operational accident.¹¹ Moreover, by 1917, the reconnaissance and bombing missions allotted to the army airships could be carried out more eheaaly and efficiently by new types of airplanes which the Germans had built. By a curious twist of fate, it was Count Zeppelin who was in a large measure responsible for the construction of these new planes. In 1914, the Count's restless mind had turned to the development of large airplanes.

Others had already started along this path. In 1914, a young Russian by the name of Igor Sikorsky, who later. became one of the great American airplane builders, had constructed a four engine transport, the "Ilya Muromets" which on one of its early flights carried 16 passengers for five hours, reaching an altitude of 6,500 feet. In Italy, Caproni was working on heavy bombers. Zeppelin organized a division within his company which was to design and build large land and seaplanes. He encouraged his long time engineering aide, Theodor Kober, to undertake the design of large planes and took a financial interest in an airplane factory which was being established in Gotha to build "Riesenflugzeuge", giant airplanes. In April 1915, Zeppelin watched the first "Gotha", a twin engined biplane, struggle into the air. It was a great new weapon, superior to any Allied bomber then in existence. However, the German army was slow to put these planes into operation. IOt was not until June 13, 1917, "Gotha" bomber planes attacked London for the first time but then they killed more Londoners than had lost their lives in all the airship raids on that city up to that time. The "Gothas" were soon joined by the "Friedrichshafen G III" and the even larger, four engined "Zeppelin R Iv", carrying twice the bomb load of the "Gothas".

Because of their vulnerability to Anglo-French airdefense on the western front, the commander of the Army Airforces, gaunt old General Ernst von Hoeppner, had already halved the army zeppelin strength in 1916 and had sent the remaining ships to the southern and eastern fronts. In the Spring of 1917, Hoeppner ordered the army zeppelin service disbanded altogether. Dismantling of the airship bases was begun, five ships were transferred to the navy and the rest were broken up.

Hoeppner's chief, General Ludendorff, if had not in fact originated the idea of disbanding the army airship division, heartily approved of it and in 1917, what General Ludendorff wanted was law in the army and most of Germany.

In the summer of 1917, General Erich Ludendorff had by virtue of his position as First Quartermaster General of the army, his prestige and the force of his personality become the dominant figure in Germany. His powers were second only to those of the Emperor when the monarch, who was gradully tiring of the war, chose to exercise them.

The son of a bankrupt East Prussian landowner who had been reduced to selling insurance, the army was for Ludendorff the road back to the respectability and status of which his family faa on deprived. Though he lacked those qualifications which counted for so much in the army, noble blood and family name, he had by 1908, through sheer ability and energy, become the head of Department II of the General Staff. Its responsibilities included planning the deployment of the German army in case of war, a vital assignment which tagged Ludendorff as the Chief of Operations once hostilities broke out. Yet Ludendorff's aggressiveness in pushing his views on military policy and his meddling in the complicated politics of the army had at one point threatened to cut short his career. In 1913 he was transferred to the 39th Infantry Regiment in Düsseldorf, not a step upwards for a department head of the General Staff. The fortunes of war presented him with a second chance in 1914. When the commander of the 14th Infantry Brigade was killed in Belgium, Ludendorff assumed command of the unit and led it in a surpise attack past the forts guarding Liege. Inside the town, he imperiously pounded on the gate of the old citadel and demanded the surrender of the astonished and frightened Belgians within. Liege was a major fortification astride the German route of advance inte France and the capture of this key point gave new impetus to Ludendorff's career.

During this time, the eastern boundary of Germany was only lightly defended in keeping with the overall plan drawn up before the war. The western front was to be the point of endeavor. A gigantic sweep through Belgium and northern France, around Paris, into the rear of the French armies facing Germany was to destroy the enemy in one vast aaetee dag bacele. The seater front could be deair with afterwards. However, as the Russians began to advance into Fast Prussia, German resolve to follow this plan faltered. An army to relieve Fast Prussia was organized and to command it, General Paul von Hindenburg was called out of retirement and Ludendorff was appointed his Chief of Staff. The disasterous defeat which they soon inflicted on the Russians elevated both into the pantheon of German wargods.

August 1916 brought Ludendorff to the apogee of his career. The Germans had commenced the Battle of Verdun to break the stalemate which had prevailed in the west after their advance into France in 1914 had been halted at the the Imperial German constitution. The Chancellor, Bethmann- Hollweg, deferred to the army on military matters and in July 1917, Ludendorff arranged to have him replaced by an even more pliable man. The Minister of War was always a general and by tradition did everything the army wanted. The army had always seen to it that outstanding officers did not go into the Ministry of War, thus keeping it weak and ineffective. The Ministry had the unpleasant task of battling Parliament over appropriations but it was allowed to do little else. The Emperor's Military Cabinet, which had been intended to control the officer corps, had never regained its original stature after that regrettable incident in 1908 when its chief, General Count Hülsen-Haeseler, had danced for the Kaiser and some fellow officers in a pink ballerina's tutu - danced "divinely" as everyone agreed —- and had fallen dead of a heart attack at the conclusion of his performance. It was a great embarrassment to all concerned.

Thus largely unencumbered by any restraints upon his will, Ludendorff sat down in the Spring of 1917 to draw up plans for a grand campaign which was finally to bring victory to Germany. To this task he brought his customary energy and single minded devotion to duty. They were indeed needed. Time was pressing. Morale in the armed forces and at home was beginning to deteriorate. The British naval blockade of Germany was seriously hampering the German war effort. Shortages of critical raw materials and food were mounting. The United Marne. The unprecedented carnage of Verdun had brought no decision; the frontline remained unchanged and both the German and French armies had suffered tremendous losses. At the same time, the Austrian army in Galicia collapsed and Romania entered the war on the side of the Allies. In the this crisis, the Kaiser decided to give the army a new commander. On August 26, 1916, Hindenburg was apvpointed Chief of Staff of the German army. Ludendorff was offered the position of Second Chief of Staff. He declined the title - there are no second chiefs he said - and created the new title of First Quartermaster General.¹² As First Quartermaster General, Ludendorff held sway over the army. The position made him deputy of the commander of the army, Fieldmarshall won Hindenburg. The Field maxenal iy physically imposing but aging and unimaginative, recognized Ludendorff's gifts and was content to rely on him in most matters. He signed nearly everything that Ludendorff's aides placed before him and rarely interferred. Ludendorff's prestige was such that the. threat that he and Hindenburg would resign was sufficient to overcome any opposition, at least until the end of the war. The structure of the German government left it ill equipped to stand up to a resolute military leader. The notion that the civil branches of the government should control the armed forces was unknown to States had declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917 and victory had to be won before America could bring its powerful industrial machine and great manpower potential to bear upon the European battlefield.

If it was to be victorious, Germany would have to mobilize all of its remaining resources, concentrating them on the goal of final victory. There had to be "Totaler Krieg" — total war. Whatever did not serve this purpose had to be diverted to something that served the cause of victory more decisively. In the Spring of 1917, the German army still operated about fifteen airships. They represented more than 300 tons of scarce aluminum, cotton, rubber, high performance engines and other valuable materials. Zeppelins required a handling crew of from 300 to 400 men to maneuver the cumbersome craft on the ground before take off and after landing, a host of radio and communications technicians, meteorologists, men to run the hydrogen generating plants, mechanics, armorers, antiaircraft crews to defend the airfields, guards and all the supporting personnel from cooks to doctors which such an establishment requires.

Ludendorff decided that the raw material and sl Lic manpower which the airships required could be used more effectively in the airforce which he was striving to enlarge. Grandiose though they were and however much they kindled patriotic pride, airships had no place in Ludendorff's scheme of things; they had to go.

Consistent with the conclusions he had drawn about the usefulness of the army airshins, Ludendorff saw no further reason why the navy should continue its costly zeppelin fleet. On July 27th, Ludendorff wrote a letter to the Naval Command and suggested that it also abandon its Airship Division.

It was in this setting that the Colonial Office's proposal to send an airship to Africa came across the desk of General Hoeppner's Chief of Staff, Lt. Colonel Hermann von der Lieth-Thomsen. The colonel was a bald, pudgy faced man with a smudge of a mustache. His uniform jacket strained a little around his middle. Despite his unmilitary appearence, Thomsen was the driving force behind General Hoeppner and the true organizer of the German Army Airforce. His accomplishments were to be recognized with a "Pour le Mérite" and, in 1919, in a more covert form, by his appointment to chief of the Central Aviation Department of the Defense Ministry. This department was charged with the secret rebuilding of the German airforces in violation of the Treaty of Versailles which had just been signed.

Colonel Thomsen gave short shrift to the Colonial Office's mad cap scheme. This was no time to encourage further zeppelin adventures. Besides, it was clear to him that the undertaking was unlikely to succeed. He turned down the plan. The Colonial Office and its Africa plan had made a powerful enemy.