Zeppelins: German Airships 1900 - 1940 (New Vanguard, 101)

Rating:
Summary: Inadequate Data, Spotty Narrative
Review: Osprey's New Vanguard #101, Zeppelins: German Airships 1900-1940 by Charles Stephenson, covers the development and operational role of German airships in the First World War. Although with the benefit of hindsight it seems pretty clear today that the zeppelins were a technological blind alley for the Germans, these craft still represent an interesting aspect of early aviation history. Unfortunately, readers will quickly realize that this volume fails to deliver the zeppelin story in a number of important areas, including basic data. There are a number of longer, more expensive volumes on zeppelins in the First World War and readers interested in serious study should not view this volume as a cheaper substitute.

Stephenson begins with seven pages on the background to the development of airships in Germany in 1900-1914; although brief, this section is adequate. The rest of the volume focuses on airship operations in the First World War, with a brief section on German airships in the inter-war period. The author has included numerous excellent photographs from the Zeppelin Museum. The color plates include a dozen side profiles of different model zeppelins, a cross section diagram of LZ104, an airship with an observer's car, the destruction of SL 11, and the experimental launch of an Albatross fighter from LZ 80. The author also provides five pages of data on the airships and a bibliography which fails to even mention some of the excellent German websites available.

The author concludes that the zeppelins were "fundamentally ill suited for war." This seems pretty obvious, given a hydrogen-filled airship that could explode from a burst of incendiary bullets, but I wish the author had actually attempted a little analysis. Indeed, the author does not even make the effort to inform the reader how many zeppelins were built during the war and how many were lost - although the reader can do it for himself. Apparently, somewhere between 80-115 zeppelins were built during 1914-1918 (I've seen many different figures), of which about 35 were lost to enemy action and 39 to accidents (I say about, since the comments in the author's table about the fate of each airship are often vague); this is a loss rate of about 70%. Curiously, the loss rate for all German standard aircraft from all causes in the war was about 57%; this means that the zeppelin losses were high, but not unusual for experimental weaponry.

In fact, the data tables seem to lack a lot of basic information about the airships, such as crew size, cost, bomb load and defensive armament. The author provides "payload in tons" but this is deceptive; for example, he lists LZ 112 as having a payload of 43.5 tons, but the actual bomb load was only 4 tons - the rest was fuel and other consumables (possibly including crew weight). It would have been great if the author could at least have mentioned something about the costs of the zeppelin program, since it is obvious that Imperial Germany put large resources into this effort. The Hindenberg, built in 1935, cost about $2 million - money that might have been better spent on four-engine bombers. Other statistics and information, like the number of crewmen lost in the raids over England (he lists 528 civilians killed by zeppelins) would have put the strategic raids in better perspective. The whole issue of zeppelin construction, training and modification during the war are virtually ignored.

The author's operational narrative is also a bit spotty, including missing the fact that it was a zeppelin that dropped the first 1,000-kilogram bomb over England. How were zeppelins organized ...in squadrons? Nor does the author even allude to the role of wireless radio in coordinating multi-ship raids and their use as scouts for the German High Seas Fleet in the North Sea. Amazingly, the author does not even mention what types of bombs were dropped from zeppelins - fragmentation, incendiary or high explosive? Furthermore, the inclusion of material on post-war zeppelins only served to detract from the space available to cover the core of this subject.



Rating:
Summary: ZEPPELINS In WWI, etc.
Review: The Introduction briefly reviews the German rigid airship (often referred to as Zeppelins) designations used by the manufacturers, and the different designations used by each the German navy and army. While this resulted in each airship possessing two different designations for the navy this was straightforward but was somewhat inconsistent for the army. After the Introduction, six pages are devoted to a history of the development by Count Zeppelin of the rigid airship, 1900-1914. After the fiery loss of the Count's fourth airship, zeppelin-fever swept the German population who admired the perseverance of the old count, but the military remained lukewarm.

In order to demonstrate his concept, Count Zeppelin founded the German Airship Transportation Company, known by its acronym DELAG. The text erroneously calls DELAG "the first commercial airline." It was not an airline in the true sense as there were no scheduled intercity operations, but rather a cruise operation. Zeppelins traveled to various German cities conducting short-haul air tours of the German countryside (1). These flights were quite popular. The success of DELAG forced the navy and army to send their crews on DELAG airships for training and to place orders for military zeppelins (2).

The book devotes fourteen pages of text to a narration of zeppelins in WWI. The German navy envisaged the role of rigid airship as reconnaissance. When the German fleet limited its fleet's battle actions there was little call for reconnaissance; and with the receipt of improved airships by the fleet, the zeppelin's role was primarily moved to strategic bombing. The book provides a brief account of zeppelin air raids. With the development of incendiary bullets for aircraft machine guns in 1916, the new "Height-Climber" rigid airships were developed to fly at high altitudes to try to avoid destruction. Each rigid airship improvement was countered by a corresponding improvement in defensive aircraft. After the army ceased to use rigid airships, in spite of heavy losses for strategic bombing the German navy continued to use rigid airship for bombing with the last bombing mission resulting in the fiery downing of L-70 in August 1918.

Curiously, zeppelin naval scouts prompted the British to begin the development of the aircraft carrier with a zeppelin scout, LZ 100, in 1918 being destroyed by a Sopwith Camel launched from a lighter towed behind a navy destroyer. An interesting account is given of the attempted rescue mission to German East Africa by LZ-104. When a German military force had surrendered and couldn't receive the supplies being carried to Sudan, LZ-104 returned to its base in Bulgaria after a nonstop flight of 95 hours covering 6,800 km.

Interestingly, Dr. Eckener, Count Zeppelin's collaborator and successor, immediately after WWI reactivated DELAG and built LZ 120, named BODENSEE. Unlike pre-WWI DELAG, BODENSEE, until taken over by the allies, flew scheduled passenger flights from Friedrichshafen to Berlin. The text concludes with a brief narration of the rigid airship after WWI until its demise following the Hindenburg's tragic 1937 crash.

The author concludes that basically the rigid airship technology was a blind alley both militarily and commercially. This conclusion ignores the fact that the Graf Zeppelin, LZ-127, during its long career safely carried 13,000 passengers and in 1928 initiated regular passenger service to Brazil. In addition, transatlantic airplane passenger flights didn't begin until 1939 with large flying boats making numerous enroute-refueling stops. Before it's 1937 demise, in 1936 the zeppelin Hindenburg had a successful season making several nonstop North Atlantic round trip passenger flights. Not until 1957, twenty-one years after the Hindenburg's 1936 nonstop North Atlantic passenger flights, did scheduled direct nonstop service begin with DC-7s from New York to London. Today with stealth fighters and bombers, Concorde supersonic airliners and jumbo-jets, few people realize that from 1928 to May 1937 German airships dominated transoceanic passenger air travel. The Germans had mastered rigid airship technology and flight, but hydrogen was the German zeppelin's Achilles heel. Before WWII, the United States wouldn't sell Germany non-flammable helium for use in their zeppelins.

The book's best features are its many photographs and colored illustrations. The cut-away illustration of LZ-104 (L-59), the African Airship, is most useful to those unfamiliar with a late-WWI rigid airship design. The text on WWI airship history is at best limited. For a comprehensive work on German zeppelins in WWI, the serious reader/student should read Dr. Douglas Robinson's book The Zeppelin in Combat.

1 Douglas Botting, Dr. Eckener's Dream Machine (Henry Holt and Company, LLC) p58
2 Ibid, p 59