A nation of fliers: German aviation and the popular imagination 9780674037380, 9780674601222, 9780674601215

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A NATION OF FLIERS

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 1992

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Copyright © 1992 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America

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This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding materials have been chosen for strength and durability. Library of Congress cataloging information is on last page of book.

For my parents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is impossible for me to look at this book without thinking of the collective efforts, private silences, and unexpected encouragements that shaped its completion. Karen Hewitt and Andy Markovits prompted me to turn funny ideas into grant proposals, and the generous support of the Wiener Library in ‘Tel Aviv allowed me the time to read books and the intellectual

companionship to sort out ideas. Saul Friedlander, Shulamit Volkov, George Mosse, Gordon Horowitz, Mario Sznajder, and Elisabeth took my ideas seriously and returned them much improved, | think. Support from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Research Board and the Program for Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security at the University of Illinois enabled me to travel to Germany and conduct archival research in 1989 and 1ggo. Librarians and archivists helped me in all sorts of ways; my thanks to Herr Werner Bittner of Lufthansa’s Firmenarchiv, Herr Buschmann of the Duisburger Stadtarchiv, Dr. Flamme of the Staatsarchiv in Hamburg, Manfred Sauter of Metallbau Zeppelin, Dr. Schneider of the Stadtarchiv in Frankfurt, Dr. Wustrack and John Provan of the Luftfahrthistorische Sammlung at Frankfurt airport, and the staff of the Staatsarchiv in Bremen. Great efforts were also made by the genial staff of the interlibrary loan office at Illinois. It would have been much more difficult to write this book had it not been for a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Illinois in 1ggo. I am also very grateful to Chip Burkhardt, ‘Tom Childers, Gerald Feldman, Jonathan Huener, Rolf Italiaander, Mark Leff, John Lynn, Walter McDougall, Maria Makela, Henry Cord Meyer, Wolfgang Natter, John Provan, Werner Strumann, Frank Trommler, Bill Widenor, and Robert Wohl for all their help. Additional thanks to Victor Libet, Harry Liebersohn, and David Prochaska for early readings. Victor Libet, in particular, enhanced the book in all sorts of important ways, and I am very much in

his debt. Aida Donald and Camille Smith of Harvard University Press were extremely helpful and encouraging; authors and books need editors and publishers who care. Around Monticello, at the Embassy, and elsewhere, Karen discussed this project with me, put me in a glider, showed me things that I did not see, and recalled to me one reason for creating things, which is love. That history cannot be written without judgment and partisanship I know from my father and mother, Hellmut and Sybille Fritzsche, to whom this book is dedicated.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1 1 GIANT AIRSHIPS AND WORLD POLITICS 9 The Miracle at Echterdingen 17 The Meaning of the Zeppelin Craze 22 Popular Nationalism and the Zeppelin 3o

Toa Placeinthe Sun 35 The Zeppelin in Combat 43

2 THE IMAGE OF THE WAR ACE 59 Building the Ace 64 The Folklore of the Ace 74 Chevalier of the Skies? 52

3 GLIDING AND THE REVIVAL OF NATIONALISM 103 Origins 103 The Discovery of Thermals 113 Small Nationalist Republics 79

4 MODERNIST VISIONS, NATIONAL DREAMS 133 The Spectacle 135 The Century’s New Person 153 Germany Reenvisioned 162 A Nature Subordinate? 170 The Geopolitical Eye 173

5 THE NAZI DISCIPLINE OF AIRMINDEDNESS 185 Airmindedness and Community go Educating an Airminded Generation 200 Civilian Mobilization and Civil Defense 203 ABBREVIATIONS 222 BIBLIOGRAPHY 263

NOTES 223 INDEX 279

ILLUSTRATIONS page

10 ©The zeppelin over Lake Constance. From a book entitled Das Zeppelin Werk (1913).

1g Crowds around the zeppelin. From Das Zeppelin Werk.

21 Berliners greet the LZ 6 in 1gog. Ullstein photograph. 26 The zeppelin races a train. From Das Zeppelin Werk.

28 Photograph emphasizing the length of the zeppelin. From Das Zeppelin Werk.

39 The zeppelin’s shadow over England. Simplicissimus, 16 November 1908.

42 The kaiser inspects his zeppelins. From U/k, 18 June 1909. Staatsund Universitatsbibliothek Hamburg. 45 “Barbarian girls.” Simplicissimus, 1 June 1915.

47 ‘The zeppelin hovers over wartime London. Staats- und Universitatsbibliothek Hamburg. 52 Zenith advertisement: air raids sell carburetors. Deutsche Luftfahrer Zeitschrift, 15 March 1917.

54 The Deutschland wrecked near Dusseldorf in 1911. Suddeutscher Verlag.

68 Fokker advertisement: the ace as killing machine. Deutsche Luftfahrer Zeitschrift, 22 October 1917. 77 Boelcke. Die Gartenlaube, no. 45 (1916). &1 Boelcke’s death. Simplicissimus, 11 July 1916.

83 Richthofen. Die Gartenlaube, no. 16 (1917). &4 An evening with Richthofen. Bundes-Militararchiv.

g5 “Burned!” gg Richthofen’s death. Simplicissimus, 14 May 1918.

105 “Versailles 1919.” 106 War planes being dismantled. Staatsarchiv Hamburg. 110 Consecration of the Ring of German Fliers memorial. 112 The glider as guardian of German national dreams.

Xil Illustrations 116 ‘Thermals over the Wasserkuppe. 117. Thermals at the edge of a forest. 11g Glider flights across Germany. Flugsport, 1938.

121 Gliding at its height. 128 ‘The group pulls a glider into the air. 129 The communal spirit of gliding. 740 The ZR III. Photograph by Lazlo Moholy-Nagy. Lu/fifahrt, 20 October 1924. 146 A warning against transocean flights. Simplicissimus, 16 April 1928. 159 Marga von Etzdorf. Munchner Illustrierte Presse, 13 September 1931. Photo Deutsches Museum Munich.

160 ‘The new air person depicted in a 1932 advertisement for the flying club Fliegerhorst Nordmark in Hamburg. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 371-11, A40/6. 167 ‘The zeppelin over the city. Die Woche, 13 October 1928. 168 ‘The airplane symbolizes modernity. Reclams Universum, 20 June 1935.

150 Luft Hansa’s 1937 route map. Die Lufireise, October 1937. 182. The zeppelin over the South Atlantic. 188 ‘The Hindenburg under construction in the Third Reich.

192. he Nazi sun over the Wasserkuppe. Flugsport, 10 January 1934. 194 ‘The militarization of gliding. 201 Maps show Germany’s supposed vulnerability to air attacks. Lufifahrt und Schule, no. 1 (1935). Photo Deutsches Museum Munich. 209 Schoolchildren during an air-raid drill. Die Gasmaske, May-June 1937. Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.

210 An incendiary bomb on public display. 216 Airminded vigilance. Die Gasmaske, February 1931.

A NATION OF FLIERS

INTRODUCTION Of the newfangled machines that heaved and whirled across the long and prosperous industrial century after Waterloo, the airplane enjoyed special favor. Its qualities were deeply spiritual, as well as obviously practical, because it seemed to make possible a previously unknown freedom from earthly limits. Aviators took giant leaps that cleared physical confines, social labyrinths, and emotional prisons, motions of transcendence that myth-makers had imagined in the flight of birds since antiquity. Modern flying machines realized age-old dreams about power and freedom in the unbounded airspace. In Greek legend, Icarus desired to fly unhindered among the gods but was cast down for his hubris; he flew too close to the sun, his wax and feather wings melted, and he tumbled into the sea. In the newspaper copy and sentimental poetry of a more contemporary generation, however, Wilbur and Orville Wright, Louis Blériot, and Charles Lindbergh all accomplished what had eluded Icarus. Motoring in the air, twentieth-century aviators avenged the legendary aeronaut and thereby

redeemed what had been the sin of human pride in the spectacular triumph of Western technology. Machine flight restored a Promethean dimension to the individual. Lifting off from the face of the earth, flying over mountain ranges, traversing vast oceans, and thereby upending conventional notions of distance and time, airplanes expressed the very consequence of the modern age. [his technological capacity reafirmed what so many turn-of-thecentury Europeans cherished: confidence in their singular ability to remake the world. That aviation’s red-letter dates clustered around the century’s turn (the first glider flight by Otto Lilienthal took place in 1891,

Graf Zeppelin’s motorized lighter-than-air tours began in 1900, the Wright brothers’ heavier-than-air takeoff at Kitty Hawk occurred in 1903, and Louis Blériot crossed the English Channel in 1909) seemed to underscore the future promise of technology. Airplanes announced that the new century would be a century of plenty and its mechanical sons

2 A NATION OF FLIERS and daughters the most capable masters of the natural world. Beginning in 1908, airshows broadcast this gospel across Europe, from the Irish Sea

to the Sea of Marmara, featuring a colorful international fraternity of aviators, including the American Orville Wright, the Peruvian Geo Chavez, and the Frenchmen Louis Blériot and Adolphe Pégoud. But the banners and parades of the aeronautical millennium were diverted into nationalism. Competition and contest quickly came to regulate the advance of aviation. Against the background of European disputes in the Balkans and growing tensions between France and Germany after the 1911 Moroccan crisis, airshows became increasingly patriotic affairs. Performances by foreign stunt fliers such as Pégoud, perhaps prewar Europe’s most able pilot, were harshly criticized in Germany, for example. More ominous were the first steps European powers took toward

arming their air forces. In the name of national defense, Germany, France, and Russia launched public subscriptions to purchase airplanes and train military pilots. In Germany, the massive Nationale Flugspende or

National Air Subscription, headed by Prince Heinrich, the kaiser’s brother, collected more than 7 million marks in six months during 1912, invoking as it did the menacing aerial threat allegedly posed by France. Even though airplanes played only very subordinate parts at the outset of the Great War—their tactical and strategic roles were improvised and enlarged only as the war dragged on—aviation had become a matter of obsessive national interest by 1914. From behind the figure of Icarus, the solitary dreamer, emerges that of his father, Daedalus, the master builder, who designed weapons for King Minos of Crete before he fell out of royal favor and constructed wings to flee to Sicily. Daedalus serves to remind us that aviation is not simply an inspiring story about the release from earthly bounds. It is also a rough chronicle about state building and nationalist ambition. This was particularly so in Germany, where Graf Zeppelin’s marvelous airships were quickly depicted as the Wilhelmine Empire’s “wonder weapons”; where chivalrous aces ended the First World War as ruthless killing machines;

and where even the youthful and unpretentious gliding and soaring movement of the 1920s eventually served as an appealing model for Nazism.’

Metropolitan newspapers in imperial Berlin worried about dazzling flying performances by Pégoud because they took aviation to be an index of national vitality and thus national destiny. Nationalism and technology

Introduction 3 reinforced each other; progress was widely perceived as a great scramble among states in which there were unmistakable winners and losers. The various aeronautical world records—height, speed, endurance, distance,

load—which Germans strained to capture from the French in the pre1914 period, provided an exact tally of national performance. If machines

were the measure of men in the modern era, as Michael Adas argues, airplanes and airships were the measure of nations at the beginning of the twentieth century, distinguishing not only European genius from an African or Asian mean, but also the truly great powers among the European nation-states.’ The histories of modern nationalism and modern technology are inexorably intertwined. Far from diluting nationalist passions, once thought to be ancient and mean, industrial prosperity and rational purpose gave them shape and sturdiness. Aviation, perhaps better than any other field of technology, clarifies the links between national dreams and modernist visions. And Germany, the least satisfied among the great powers and the most dynamic capitalist state in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth

century, is the most suitable ground on which to explore this troubled intersection. To account for the unexpected afhnities between technology and nationalism we must understand how the belief in universal progress remained qualified and distorted after the Enlightenment. Confidence in Western progress rested on the conviction that the world could be shaped according to the industrial arts. ‘his was the heritage of Francis Bacon, whose seventeenth-century science, in the words of one scholar, marked “the death of nature.” Bacon’s mechanistic worldview overlooked nature’s

nurturing aspects, undertook the subordination of its threatening obstacles and storms and uncertainties, and prepared for the domination and alteration of the earth by design.? Enlightened Europeans busied themselves with projects and ventures of all kinds. Sure that their efforts

served the general cause of improvement, they dug mines, dammed streams, drained swamps, cleared forests, and surveyed wilderness. But this confidence could easily give way to unease. ‘To recognize the plasticity of the material world or the historicity of circumstance was, at the same time, to ascertain the enduring instability of all things—material edifices, market relations, moral persuasions, national security. The constructive optimism of Bacon did not seal off the darker, more nihilistic realism of Charles Baudelaire. Nineteenth-century Europeans worried

4 A NATION OF FLIERS obsessively about the imminence of revolution, the breakability of the social order, the disease and poverty of the new cities, and the degeneration of the individual as much as they loudly celebrated the application of scientific laws or cheered the exploitation of nature. The eye that identified improvement also discerned destruction. For this reason, the acknowledgment of instability—Karl Marx’s sobering vision, “all that is solid melts into air’—rather than belief in the march of progress—“up and up and up and on and on and on,” in the words of Ramsay MacDonald—is the more accurate hallmark of modernity.* Instability did not preclude reform or improvement, however; on the contrary, it gave those projects their impulse and sense of urgency. In the face of cholera epidemics, social upheaval, and military challenge, the modern experience added up to a relentless struggle to regulate and to renovate civil society. According to the nineteenth-century reformist agenda, cities had to be cleaned up and redesigned, populations educated into virtuous citizens, and hinterland empires won. At the end of the nineteenth century, forward-looking statesmen envisioned society as a factory in which all hands worked together for the common good. They accordingly propounded ambitious programs of national efficiency, protectionist economics, political enfranchisement, and social hygiene. Not to embark on liberal reform was to renounce economic prosperity and even to risk social disintegration. Insofar as technological change was seen in terms of struggle it seemed to validate the contest among nationstates. [here is even reason to believe that states were the most economical units to carry out reforms.° Thus it was the dangerous future which bound technology and nationalism together. Nation-states were invigorated not so much by the accountable benefits of machines as by the apprehension of their costs. This ceaseless activity of renovation and dis-

mantling—the operations of the architect, the engineer, the social reformer, and the geopolitician—properly belongs to the modernist tradition, alongside the more well-known representations of painters, novelists, and poets. What distinguishes Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the technocratic imagination, the impulse to work on and tinker with society in order to forestall disaster and to meet opportunity. Aviation made this venture more imperative. The coming twentieth-century “air age” was regarded as at once prosperous and perilous. The precision and power of the engine, the sophisticated instrumentation in the cockpit, and

Introduction 5 the durable yet lightweight streamlined metal frame all described the vast potential of the second industrial revolution. Transocean flights anticipated a new era in global communication and transportation. But, at the same time, the reach and load of multiengined bombers foreshadowed unknown wartime horrors. Aviation introduced a previously unimagined sense of vulnerability and hopelessness to the age. Those nations which did not meet its harsh demands, by putting in place extensive air defense measures, building deterrent air forces, and teaching technical compe-

tence, would miss the imperial opportunities that global aviation extended and would play merely subordinate roles in the world order. Not to have an air capacity was to lapse into passivity and dependency. A host of new “scientific” nouns and classifications, which mixed Darwinian imperatives with technological positivism, described this brave new world. National survival in the twentieth century seemed to be a matter of accepting the novel terms of the “air age,” preparing for the prosperous “air future,” fashioning a new generation of clear-thinking “airmen,” and adhering to the tough prescriptions of “airmindedness.” Seen in this way, aviation is a crucial part of the modernist experience. Because of the fearsome dangers it posed and also the unexpected opportunities it presented, the “air future” was inscribed with all kinds of reforms, plans, and projects. What Detlev Peukert has termed Machbarkeits-

wahn, that heady sense of possibility at the turn of the century, spurred

the technocratic impulse. One hundred years of rapid technological change made the nation-state the subject of its own renovation and of its own ambition. National history became a matter of self-construction, and technological achievements, in turn, upheld a durable sense of common national purpose. The doctrines of the air age found a particularly fertile ground in Germany. lhe Nazi slogan “We must become a nation of fliers,” broadcast repeatedly by Air Minister Hermann Goering to generate public support for the Third Reich’s military buildup, suggests the way Germans talked about aviation from the beginning of the century. Aviation suited the bold ambitions of the recently unified German Reich. Rather than a disadvantaged latecomer to the exclusive club of great powers, Germany, once outfitted with technologically audacious machines, belonged more properly to the “young” nations, an emerging generation of world leaders better able to fashion themselves as prosperous states than an “older” Great Britain or France. For this reason, the colossal zeppelins that began to

6 A NATION OF FLIERS make their appearance in the southwest German skies in 1900 generated immense patriotic fanfare. In the most fantastic visions of Wilhelmine nationalists, battleships would give way to airships, naval powers to air

powers, the established British Empire to its insurgent German challenger. Even after Germany’s defeat in the First World War, the promise of aviation continued to preview the grand technological future by which Germany would spite the Allies. Gliding, an immensely popular movement in the 1920s, came to symbolize Germany’s resistance to the Treaty of Versailles. And once Allied restrictions on German civil aviation were lifted in 1926, a new generation of technically superlative airplanes and airships charted the revival of Germany’s national fortunes. “Airmindedness, that buzzword of the interwar years, was based on the premise that

Germany could prosper in a dangerous world if it accepted the harsh strictures of the technological age. Both the diagnosis of the modern age—instability and malleability—and the therapy applied—restless technical renovation—served to legitimize and spur German ambitions. A study of German aviation suggests how broad the intersection of nationalism and technology was both before and after World War I. A new breed of German nationalists recognized that world power required embracing a modernist vision, as the well-researched example of the importance of Admiral Tirpitz’s oceangoing navy shows for the pre-1914 period.® Indeed, in the last twenty years, more and more historians have

rejected the notion that Wilhelmine Germany was exceptional for its preindustrial political and social structure and have emphasized the modernity of the empire. Given its achievements in science and technology and its experiments in municipal reform, social welfare, and state administration, Wilhelmine Germany was considered by many European con-

temporaries to be the most modern state in the world.’ That national unification and industrialization came only at the end of the nineteenth century gave Germany the additional advantage of building itself anew more easily.

The Germany which Zeppelin’s airships and Junkers’s airplanes surveyed was not a Biedermeier patchwork of farms, heath, and forest—the bucolic landscape of Blut und Boden has been overworked by historians— but a vast Faustian workshop of machines and masses. In a fundamental,

if still largely overlooked, shift, twentieth-century German nationalism became more and more compatible with industrialism and more and more popular in scope and temperament. It outlined vast imperial ambi-

Introduction 7 tions, to be sure, but it also rejected the social hierarchies of the Hohenzollern monarchy or the Prussian conservatives, celebrated the efforts of workers and artisans, and foresaw a more inclusive community of patriots based on a stern order of loyalty and discipline. ‘To become a nation of fliers was to move toward this German future. The story of German aviation begins in 1891, the year Otto Lilienthal first launched a primitive rigid-wing glider that he and his brother had

constructed in Lichterfelde, near Berlin. Lilienthal’s flying machine eased his free-fall descent and thereby carried him forward in the airstream. It was the first controlled glider flight. Lilienthal, who died from injuries suffered in a crash in August 1896, is all but forgotten today, although aeronautical pioneers such as Orville and Wilbur Wright and Octave Chanute carefully studied his essays and acknowledged their considerable debt to him. Even at the time, Germans paid little attention to the careful but undramatic experiments of the Lilienthal brothers. Like so many other inventors, Lilienthal kept his passion for flight private; he did not seek public support and did not try to fit his endeavors into the larger purposes of the state. The sport of gliding, which was Lilienthal’s legacy to aeronautics, became popular only in the context of the spirited revival of German nationalism after World War I. It was not until the first airship flights after 1900 that aviation caught the interest of the German public, and then only gradually. After a decade of technical preparations, Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin, a retired Wurttemberg officer in his sixties, successfully flew a long cigar-shaped rigid-

hulled dirigible on 2 July 1900. The flight lasted twenty minutes and barely made progress against a light headwind. Before the year was out, Zeppelin undertook a second and a third flight. A stringer for the Frankfurter Zeitung observed the last launch on 18 October and described the event as a nonevent, a diverting provincial comedy but not a practical invention:®

To be sure: the “airship” proved dirigible. It ascended majestically and quietly over the hurrahs of Friedrichshafen, which had assembled it-

self along the shore. It hovered purposefully and nicely in the air, made little twists on its vertical axis, perhaps even small turns. It also

executed small turns on its horizontal axis, but pretty much stayed happily in the same place. There was no evidence of real movement back and forth or of ascents and descents to higher and lower altitudes. | had the sense that the airship was delighted to balance so

8 A NATION OF FLIERS nicely up in the air; and the spectators shared this enthusiasm, for the nice balancing act was the only successful part of the whole affair.

Dismissive assessments like this one and mounting financial worries forced Graf Zeppelin to dismantle the airship in the spring of Igor. It took Zeppelin another three years to persuade the king of Wurttemberg and several industrial sponsors to fund further trials. Once again the airship, the Luftschiff Zeppelin or simply LZ 2, featured a rigid 128-meter duraluminum hull inside which sixteen smaller internal gas cells were hung, a contrast to the single semirigid or nonrigid gas bag that consti-

tuted French dirigibles at the time and anticipated the present-day Goodyear blimps in the United States. The rigid frame was Graf Zeppelin’s singular contribution. He believed it was what made the airship easier to control and more durable in inclement weather. Yet heavy winds forced the new zeppelin down near Kiesslegg, in Bavaria, on only its second flight on 17 January 1906, and later that night destroyed the crippled ship completely. Fragile construction and persistent mechanical breakdowns plagued the zeppelin project from its inception. That Graf Zeppelin eventually built two more airships, the LZ 3 and LZ 4, is testimony to his perseverance. Still zeppelins were not taken seriously by most competent observers until the long-range trial flights of the LZ 4 in the summer of 1908. Only in August 1908, when the LZ 4 attempted a twentyfour-hour circuit of southwestern Germany, the successful completion of which was the condition for military purchases, did Germans conversing about technological progress and national prowess energetically take up airships and airplanes. It is in 1908, then, that this book about how and

why Germans found aviation so good to think—to paraphrase LéviStrauss—properly begins.

GIANT AIRSHIPS AND WORLD POLITICS

1 Tuesday, 4 August 1908: the German nation was putting on a production on a scale seldom seen before. Old-timers compared the patriotic hoopla to the excitement that had accompanied the declaration of war against France in the summer of 1870. The two, three, and even four daily editions put out by metropolitan newspapers at the time narrated the unfolding drama in the breathless prose that suited the brash new century. lelegraph reports on the front page of the Wiesbadener Tage-

blatt tracked the progress of a giant gas-filled airship as it made its way north. Accumulating “like a brush fire,” telegrams were posted outside the newspaper building as soon as editors received them, giving passersby almost instantaneous coverage of the historic flight. After leaving Friedrichshafen, on Lake Constance, Luftschiff Zeppelin or LZ 4 passed over Basel, Mulhausen, and Colmar, then over the small towns of Lahr and Markotshain, and finally over the Alsatian capital, Strassburg. Wiesbaden’s burghers, who lived just beyond the northern end of the zeppelin’s twenty-four-hour circuit around southwestern Germany, devoured news accounts that told about thousands of onlookers who crowded Strassburg’s streets and clambered onto the city’s roofs. Touches of detail drew attention to the tumultuous activity: apparently “even chimneys had been scaled” by excited sightseers. Wiesbadeners wealthy enough to own a telephone but not patient enough to wait for the evening edition harassed newspaper editors with their calls, asking for the latest news, busying the lines almost uninterruptedly.! As the zeppelin approached—appearing over jubilant crowds in Mannheim, Worms, Darmstadt, and, “just now,” in neighboring Nierstein, on the Main River—as many as a quarter of a million Germans streamed into Mainz, where city officials expected a sighting between four and five o’clock in the afternoon. In Bieberich, a Wiesbaden suburb across the Rhine from Mainz, thousands of curious onlookers formed a compact “wall of people.” Toward Mainz “the crowds became denser.” Ludwig

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10 A NATION OF FLIERS

Flying over Lake Constance, the zeppelin was a strange and immense addition to German machinery.

Anders, a Wiesbaden reporter, stood on the Rhine bridge and “took in

the huge parade of people, trolleys (all full! all full! all full!), cars, vehicles of all sorts.” A happy carnival mood prevailed. Sadly, the zeppelin never arrived. A defective motor and the loss of hydrogen forced the airship to land near Oppenheim, about fifteen kilometers upriver. But for Anders,

standing on the bridge at Bieberich, this day, even though it had passed without a view of the zeppelin, had not been a disappointment. In automobiles and on streetcars, the faces in the crowd looked familiar, but they also expressed something uncharacteristic and unusual. As Anders put it, “all materialistic sensations” had been overwhelmed by a prevailing “spiritual enthusiasm.” 2 Publicists, politicians, and academics repeatedly returned to this imag-

ined moment of idealism. For them, the zeppelin became a national treasure that was far more appealing and better suited to Germany’s indus-

Giant Airships and World Politics 11 trious burghers than the Hohenzollern crown or the Prussian army. The immense public excitement in Bieberich and Strassburg and even beside the damaged airship in Oppenheim, where burghers rallied throughout the evening singing the national anthem, “Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles,” celebrated not only the imposing technical accomplishments of the zeppelin but also the construction of a heart-felt and popular na-

tionalism. Zeppelin enthusiasm served the grand idea of a nation in which all social classes were reconciled. Just as the Eiffel Tower stood as

a monument to French republican virtue and the Brooklyn Bridge attested to the excellent industry of ordinary Americans, the great duraluminum dirigibles displayed the technical virtuosity and material achieve-

ments of the German people, not the German state. At the same time, the people’s zeppelin was an affirmation of German prowess and overseas expansion. For Wilhelmine Germany’s middle-class nationalists, empire went hand in hand with reform at home. Even as it was stranded near the village of Oppenheim, surrounded by marveling sightseers, the zeppelin

was a proud restatement of the thirty-odd prosperous years since unification and also a boisterous statement of intentions and ambitions to come.

The Miracle at Echterdingen The next day, Wednesday, 5 August, with the ship’s motors repaired and its gas cells refilled, the festive scenes of the previous day repeated themselves as the LZ 4 finally passed over Mainz and then returned south. A triumphant flight was planned over Stuttgart, the capital of Wirttemberg,

whose king had steadfastly and often alone supported Graf Zeppelin’s aspirations for more than a decade. “The streets filled” with people, reported Stuttgart’s leading newspaper, the Schwabischer Merkur. By now a zeppelin story without prominent reference to crowds and crowding was unthinkable:? The streets filled up, people clambered onto rooftops. And one waits, patiently waits for another hour! And then after the long silence, the crowd cries out. Above the hilltops, just to the right of the Bismarck Tower, a silver, glimmering, wondrous entity appears. At first it seems

to stand still, but then pushes itself slowly but steadily against the fresh morning breeze. One feels its power; we are overcome by a nervous trembling as we follow the flight of the ship in the air. As only

12 A NATION OF FLIERS with the greatest artistic experiences, we feel ourselves uplifted. Some people rejoice, others weep.

But the crowds were not simply composed of passive onlookers and sightseers. By their own testimony, Germans were also changed by the zeppelin, as Wiesbaden’s Gustav Anders had suggested at the Rhine bridge in Bieberich. Seen from the air, the crowds below assumed an active, even leading role in this national drama. In city after city, Germans seemed to be revealing themselves as an indivisible, patriotic whole. The story unfolding below, frame by frame, must have appeared extraordinary to the LZ 4’s crew: farmers stopped and waved from their fields; villagers

greeted the passing zeppelin from paths and lanes in the rural countryside; townspeople crowded onto market squares and gabled roofs. Georg Hacker, an airshipman, remembered: “At 12:08 we glided past the tower,

just below the spire, on our port side ... The tower and spire were adorned with flags, to the very top. People crowded on top of the tower. Handkerchiefs, parasols, hats, and flashing sabers were waved to and

fro... The entire city was filled with people.” Despite the hammering noise made by the LZ 4’s two 105-horsepower Daimler engines, the dull explosion of mortars and the shrill whistles of steamers and factories were clearly audible. “Rows and rows of white dots illuminated the streets . . . as people turned their faces up to greet us.” Lines from a poem by Alfred Wolfenstein caught the same image: “Airship over the city, covered with hot faces.”* The view from the zeppelin as it passed overhead showed Germans coming together in common purpose. Both Hacker and journalists such as Anders saw all this excited activity as the spontaneous expression of national unity. After an hour of motoring above Stuttgart on the morning of 5 August, the LZ 4 disappeared behind the Degerlocher hills to return southeastward to Friedrichshafen. As soon as the ship passed from sight, journalists scrambled to file their stories. “Not without first looking through the available extra editions for specifics on the trip so far,” the reporter for the Schwabischer Merkur worked quickly to meet the deadline for the noon edition.» Noon editions, extra editions: newspapers provided an almost uninterrupted narration, which wove a single flyover into an emerging and larger story of national achievement. Another glance at extra editions, as the reporter walked to lunch, revealed the airship’s forced landing just south of Stuttgart, near the village

Giant Airships and World Politics 13 of Echterdingen. In a single motion, “all of Stuttgart” seemed to be on its feet to reach the crippled ship: At 2 o'clock a train departs. So off to Echterdingen! With a little bit of shoving | still manage to get a seat on the crowded steetcar... At the train station, everything is jam-packed as well, but | get one of the last tickets and just then the train pulls in. | am the last one to be shoved

onto the running board... In Degerloch more agitation; with pushing and shoving, and almost coming to blows, | reach the train to Mohringen. In Mdohringen the same scene: the quickest way to get to the train to Echterdingen on the next track is right through the win-

dows ... Echterdingen! You don’t have to ask where the airship is stranded, a stream of humanity clearly shows the way. It is difficult to move ahead in this unbelievable confusion of people and cars. At the church square, the masses make for the country road. We march along a lane, across fields and meadows, always in the same direction.

The stream of curious sightseers making their way to Echterdingen that afternoon recalled the thousands who had taken extra trains to Oppenheim the night before to examine the disabled ship. Indeed, it was really only on the ground that the monumental size of the ship—the LZ 4 was 136 meters long—could awe observers; Wurttemberg’s congenial policemen allowed visitors, perhaps as many as 50,000 at Echterdingen, to approach the ship quite closely.° As Stuttgart’s reporter walked through Echterdingen’s cabbage fields to the landing site, a “not inconsiderable wind” suddenly kicked up dust and dirt, which irritated his eyes and ears. A kilometer away, the same wind ripped the anchored LZ 4 from its moorings. Spectators watched in horror as soldiers gripping the anchor ropes were lifted up into the air before they jumped to safety at the last moment. The huge airship rose higher and higher and raked its anchor through the crowd. At the same time, it began to keel over, stern over bow. After a few moments the dangerously inclined ship slipped to the ground. A dull thud sounded and

then “flames shot up from the hull, a second, a third detonation ... a column of fire rose to the sky, immense, horrible, as if the earth had opened up releasing the flames from hell. Huge flames ate their way up the balloon, piece by piece . . .an enormous cloud of black smoke marked the spot where the elements had sacrificed the creation of man. It was all over in three minutes.”’ Fortunately, only one airshipman was slightly hurt.

14 A NATION OF FLIERS The LZ 4 was a total wreck. Rips of twisted aluminum recalled a prehistoric dinosaur, unfit, oversized, incommensurate with the cabbage patch. The zeppelin’s intended military purchasers, whose main condition, an uninterrupted twenty-four-hour flight, had not been met, agreed

that the disaster revealed the rigid airship’s unsuitability to adverse weather.’ Surrounded by confused well-wishers in holiday dress, Graf Zeppelin’s airship venture had come to a pitiful end. The fiery destruction of LZ 4 was the Graf’s third disaster in as many years. All of Zeppelin’s hopes and confidences had been invested in the destroyed LZ 4. At Echterdingen, the trajectory of government commissions, military evaluations, and preliminary funding had finally come to an end. As he inspected the wreckage, there was no reason for the seventy-year-old Graf to expect to continue his life’s work.

Tentative motors and delicate construction made the zeppelin flights always uncertain adventures, as the forced landings in Oppenheim and Echterdingen testified. ‘The ships’ vulnerability to storms and high winds

was apparent as well. But the crowds gathered on the Echterdingen meadow did not regard the explosion as the logical conclusion of faulty design, as did military calculators in Berlin. On the contrary, witnesses to the “misfortune”’ cried out in “wild frustration”; “curses, sobs, tears, threats” followed.'° Stuttgart’s reporter, arriving at the scene late, ob-

served “teary eyes” and a quiet, broken demeanor. The disaster at Echterdingen was a tragedy because it was at odds with the airship’s dazzling performance, first across Switzerland on 1 July in a trial flight and then over southwest Germany on 4 and 5 August to meet the army’s conditions; thus “frustration,” “curses,” “threats.” At a time when the very first airplanes had only just begun taking off from European soil (Henri Farman had won 10,000 francs for staying in the air a mere twenty minutes in early July) and when the pretensions of the rickety Drachenflieger or dragon fliers were widely mocked (it would be several years before this term gave way completely to the more trustworthy Flugzeug or Aeroplan), the leisurely, self-assured flight of the lighter-than-air dirigible over hundreds of kilometers made a powerful impression. Even before the explosion, the authoritative voice of the Frankfurter Zeitung credited Graf Zeppelin with solving “the problem of airship travel.” '! “Friend, brother... do you completely understand,” the Schwabischer Merkur buttonholed its readers, human flight, “the dream of millenia!” had been realized.’ As news of the catastrophe spread, the first sense of desolation gave

Giant Airships and World Politics 15 way to unprecedented public commitment to sustain Graf Zeppelin’s air-

ship project after all. A spontaneous and popular subscription was launched virtually overnight, a massive patriotic effort that put the zeppelin works in Friedrichshafen on a firm financial foundation. After nearly a century, the scope of public reaction still seems remarkable, “improbable,” in the words of one historian.'? According to the sober Frankfurter Zeitung, “to a man, the nation stood behind the inventor.” + What quickly came to be called the “miracle at Echterdingen” disclosed not only broad public confidence in zeppelin technology and its “conquest of the air” but also a vigorous public spirit at the grass roots which few observers had previously identified. Without the encouragement of the state, stepping in when the Reichstag and the War Ministry had been reluctant to do so, the German people proved to be at once self-reliant and patriotic. According to inflated press reports and popular histories, it was at Echterdingen that a broad, grass-roots nationalism revealed itself. Ernst Heinkel, a twenty-year-old witness to the Echterdingen disaster who later, after war and revolution, became one of Germany’s foremost aviation designers, recalled in his memoirs that as Graf Zeppelin inspected the wrecked airship a workingman shouted “courage, courage” and threw a purse of money into the open car. This small act set off a flood of contributions: “This word ‘collection’ rang in my ears all the way

to the train that took me back to Stuttgart,’ Heinkel remembered.'° Within twenty-four hours enough money had accumulated to replace the LZ 4. Heinkel’s story is probably apocryphal; local newspapers in their reports from Echterdingen do not mention collections taken up at the disaster site itself. But the fictional incident is instructive. The accent on the workingman and his spontaneous gesture points to the effort to cast the spirit of Echterdingen as an embracing people’s nationalism that included all social classes. Stuttgart’s Schwabischer Merkur took the lead in sponsoring the “Zep-

pelin-Spende” and the morning after the disaster reported that it had already collected 5,359 marks.'® Although the influential Frankfurter Zei-

tung at first hoped to prod Reich authorities to provide Graf Zeppelin with the necessary funds to rebuild, the paper changed its mind and no longer addressed the state so as not to obstruct the “beautiful efforts” of the German people. The paper quickly launched a municipal fund drive, to which it contributed 2,000 marks and its publisher Leopold Sonnemann another 3,000 marks. Businesses and individuals added donations,

16 A NATION OF FLIERS swelling the fund to over 62,000 marks in four days.'’ At the same time, the Wiesbadener Tageblatt, which two days earlier had reported the Mainz flyover so enthusiastically, opened a collection with 500 marks. Whoever had “all-Germany” as a friend need not despair, the editors boasted, because “town and village” stood faithfully behind the Graf.!® Newspapers

organized collections across Germany: in Cologne, Munich, Braunschweig, Leipzig, Osnabruck, Pforzheim, and Plauen. Elsewhere, municipal representatives took the lead, offering thousands of taxpayer marks to Graf Zeppelin. Dozens of cities throughout southern and western Germany and beyond sponsored civic collections. Even the tiny Hessian village of Haigen earmarked 50 marks for Graf Zeppelin.'® At first glance the airship appears as iconic of Wilhelmine manners as the infantryman’s Pickelhaube, but at the time zeppelin enthusiasm registered how bourgeois and metropolitan Wilhelmine public life had in fact become. By all accounts, Germans gave readily. In Cologne, for example, more than 33,000 marks had been collected by the liberal Kolnische Zeitung at the end of the first day, 6 August. This total had increased to over 80,000 marks three days later. Twenty thousand marks were collected in Osnabriick, a smaller city of only 60,000 inhabitants. Long lists published in the newspapers reported daily totals, named patriotic contributors, and narrated touching /faits divers: a Wiesbaden bowling club, for example, made do without its annual summer outing and turned 150 marks over to

the Graf; a “woman and child” in Bremen gave 7 marks; employees at Bremen’s Old German Bierstube collected 2 marks; the weekly Stammtisch Schlagseite in the same city added 56 marks; a hastily organized “Zeppelin-Konzert” raised funds in Darmstadt on 10 August. In Hessian Friedberg, children collected 2 marks simply by playacting on the local

schoolyard. A poor boy from a proletarian district in northeast Berlin contributed 10 pfennigs, a newspaper reported. Indeed, it was not the thousand-mark contributions but the small pfennig donations to which newspaper editors happily drew Graf Zeppelin’s attention.*° Ambitious in

scope but attentive to detail, the entire campaign was cast by patriotic boosters as an appealing display of civic spirit and national unity. Within six weeks, the German public had contributed 5 million marks, twice as much as the army had initially offered Graf Zeppelin and many times more than the paltry 8,000 marks collected in an earlier subscrip-

tion effort in 1905. Work began almost immediately to repair the drydocked LZ 3, which had been badly damaged in a storm in December

Giant Airships and World Politics 17 1907, and to construct a new ship, the LZ 5. Thanks to the public subscription, the zeppelin works in Friedrichshafen were reorganized and incorporated. The financial future of the zeppelin venture looked secure for the first time. Graf Zeppelin received not only money but an outpouring of everyday supplies and neighborly cheer that any disaster victim might expect. According to Alfred Colsman, business manager of the zeppelin enterprise,

sundry sausages, hams, liqueurs, and even woolen socks piled up at Friedrichshafen. Bremen’s Ratskeller delivered a selection of its finest wines. Ordinary Germans also sent hundreds of poems and songs, a cultural side of the Volksspende that anticipated the immense literary production generated by the onset of war in August 1914. A favorite subject in the people’s prose and on ten-pfennig postcards, Graf Zeppelin emerged as one of the most recognizable faces in Wilhelmine Germany. The kaiser himself, on a November 1908 visit to Friedrichshafen, where he awarded

Graf Zeppelin Germany’s highest civilian decoration, the Order of the Black Eagle, referred to Zeppelin as the “greatest German of the twentieth century.” In the eighth year of the new century, this declaration illustrated typical Wilhelmine overconfidence, but Zeppelin was certainly the most popular personality in Germany at the time, possibly rivaling the late chancellor, Bismarck, and surely overwhelming Kaiser Wilhelm II in the public’s affection. With his bald head and walrus moustache, Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin cut an agreeable figure that invited private admiration and public commercialization.

Almost overnight, quick-witted entrepreneurs marketed Zeppelin postcards, Zeppelin medallions, and other Zeppeliniana. Graf Zeppelin himself strenuously resisted commercialization. He refused to permit the manufacture of Zeppelin cookies, Zeppelin perfume, or Zeppelin beer. Nevertheless, in marketplaces and carnival fairs, hundreds of cigars, pencils, spoons, suspenders, firecrackers, cheeses, cleaning agents, and even cans of boot polish bearing Zeppelin’s name and displaying Zeppelin’s face were hawked and sold. At Christmastime of 1908, one Berlin baker manufactured an edible airship out of gingerbread, wafers, and chocolate, confidently linking his own culinary arts with Zeppelin’s technical achievements. An amusement park featured an “airship carousel” with rides in the familiar cigar shape. Zeppelin became an all-purpose adjective denoting “grand,” “superlative,” and “reliable.” It was to this sort of zeppelin kitsch that one appalled art critic pointed to indict Wilhelmine

18 A NATION OF FLIERS Germany for its bad taste, but Germans—street hawkers, trinket buyers, and carnivalgoers—claimed the airship as their own. Graf Zeppelin and his dirigibles had literally become Volksgut.*! ‘The Graf had become that recognizable modern figure: a celebrity. By summer’s end of 1909, two new airships, the LZ 5 and the LZ 6, had been completed. In the years before the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, twenty more zeppelins were built. Most of these were delivered to either the army or the navy, but six were built solely for commercial purposes and sold to the newly founded German Airship Company, which booked leisurely day journeys from major cities. More than 17,000 wealthy but otherwise ordinary Germans flew in zeppelins before the war. Like the first models, the new zeppelins remained fragile titans and required frequent repairs. ‘Three ships were lost in just three years, IQ10—-1912, but thereafter the fortunes of the company revived.” On national tours, the zeppelins often limped along at 20 kilometers per hour, a far cry from the 120 or more kilometers per hour achieved by airships later in the 1920s. Even so, huge crowds collected to watch the zeppelin’s progress and tens of thousands assembled wherever it landed. The first big airship display after the Echterdingen disaster took place in early April 1909, when Graf Zeppelin flew the newly repaired LZ 3 to Munich. Both the size and the behavior of the crowds were remarkable. On 2 April 1909, thousands of Bavarians gathered and waited for hours to view the giant ship. Infantry and cavalry units cordoned off the landing site, but as the airship descended and the prince regent moved forward to greet Graf Zeppelin, anxious sightseers broke through the barriers.

The prince suddenly found himself closely surrounded by an excited populous, which pushed cavalrymen so far forward that their lances threatened to poke the ship’s hull. The unseemly incident unsettled authorities. Police reports condemned Bavarians for showing a “loss of discipline” and displaying the “psyche of the masses.” A number of specta-

tors had been trampled; bicycle riders, it seems, were especially reckless.2> Against these indictments, however, city editors, championing the civic enthusiasm rather than criticizing the lack of social deference of

their readers, pointed out that it had been the German people, not the German monarchs, who had rehabilitated the airship project. Ordinary Germans had a justifiable “right to the streets” to see “their zeppelin,” the newspapers concluded.2* Munich’s Neueste Nachrichten reported seeing only “joyous appreciation” and “upstanding enthusiasm” among

Giant Airships and World Politics 19 the crowds, and applauded the social mixing that the zeppelin landing had unwittingly created.”°

The rough zeppelin enthusiasm witnessed in Munich contrasted with the usual order of Wilhelmine festivity that prevailed on the Reich’s Founding Day or the kaiser’s January birthday. So when Graf Zeppelin announced a visit to Berlin, Prussian officials were especially careful. Millions of Berliners were misled when police officials remained purposefully evasive as to where the LZ 6 would land on 28 August 19009. Many chroniclers still have the zeppelin landing at Tempelhof, where immense crowds viewed the LZ 6, which passed over the site several times, but the ship actually landed near Tegel, where the imperial party and a select group of dignitaries waited. At Tempelhof the mood was festive: “what all creeps and crawls, huffs and puffs” was on its way to the

meadow; “what life!” The “huge expanse” of Tegel, on the other hand, was occupied by “only a small group of the privileged, journalists and people with good connections.” And whereas there had been very little military presence at Tempelhof—only a few guards directing traffic—at

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Germans crowd to see “their” zeppelin, stranded here in Gdppingen in 1909.

20 A NATION OF FLIERS Tegel “Prussianism was apparent... The military surrounds [the kaiser] like a fortress.” The newspaperman’s point was obvious: the people’s nationalism was not the same as Wilhelmine patriotism, but rather more populist, more spontaneous, more valuable; and Graf Zeppelin was not a stand-in for the kaiser, but a popular figure in his own right. Indeed Wilhelm II never attracted the crowds that greeted Zeppelin and was reportedly disturbed by the Graf’s sudden stardom.”° On Berlin’s main thoroughfares, Zeppelin pictures and Zeppelin busts peered out of shop windows. Toy stores stocked hundreds of miniature airships; one department store even featured a replica of the LZ 3 fifteen meters long! Street peddlers sold Zeppelin hats and Zeppelin ties, as well as pocket watches with a portrait of the Graf, commemorative scarves that were “too colorful,” and cheap cigars, in which one witty biographer imagined “lots of air.” A songwriter composed a zeppelin song, which sold briskly. Perhaps Berlin’s municipal band included the new arrangement as musicians played their brass instruments on top of the Rathaus tower to greet the airship. Zeppelin Day was a holiday, a time for marketplace hucksters and Sunday outings and brass bands and, as the Berlin police warned, an international gang of pickpockets that allegedly followed the zeppelin to ply their trade among the crowds that invariably gathered.?’

Zeppelin Days punctuated the summer of 1909. The LZ 5 visited the International Aviation Rally in Frankfurt at the end of July and made a triumphant landing in Cologne on 5 August. But it was not only big cities that saw popular enthusiasm spill unregulated into the streets. Across Germany, schoolchildren quit school when the zeppelin flew by, taking

their own “Zeppelinfrei.”’® One humorless legislator in Hamborn wanted to prohibit the zeppelin from passing overhead; local industrialists had lost thousands of marks when workers walked out of factories to view the airship.?’ A series of postcards entitled “Zeppelin kommt!” depicted the hilarious tumult that supposedly ensued whenever the airship flew by; burghers appeared on the streets half-dressed to witness nighttime flights; daytime traffic snarled; and on weekends, overawed grooms had to be forcibly returned to their wedding ceremonies.*° “Zeppelin liber Plauen... bringt alles aus dem Gleise,” went one poem:?! the soup is getting cold, the dumplings are hard the roast is burnt to a crisp!

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Giant Airships and World Politics 21

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the housewife runs, the cook jumps, the milk spills into the fire, that great disrupter, Graf Zeppelin, it’s all quite unbelievable! Perhaps a cheerful and frivolous mood prevailed at zeppelin mishaps because the unexpected landing allowed people a happy opportunity to in-

spect their airship in unrestricted intimacy, without police cordons or civic fanfare. After the LZ 5 made a forced landing in Godppingen on 30 May 1909, for example, the local paper remarked that the “workday had turned into a holiday,” but one dominated by “colorful carnival bustle” rather than “Sabbath quiet.” *

Had Graf Zeppelin’s public demonstrations taken place only a few years later it is not certain that his airships would have commanded the attention they did. By the end of 1908, a year often called the annus mir-

22 A NATION OF FLIERS abilis of flight, heavier-than-air craft were taking Europe by storm. The Kitty Hawk flight, which had been initially dismissed on the continent as a tall American tale, had long since been superseded by hugely successful airshows near Washington, D.C., and by roo-kilometer flights across France, accomplished not only by Wilbur Wright himself but also by the French pilots Henri Farman and Louis Blériot. Only a year later, on 25 July 1909, Blériot crossed the English Channel to immense public acclaim. By the time the Brescia airshow was held in September 1909, with Gabrielle D’Annunzio, Max Brod, and Franz Kafka among the spectators, airplanes had captured the imagination of European intellectuals. These aeronautical accomplishments, however, did not completely overshadow the airships in Germany, which over the same period ferried dozens of passengers, imperiously visited one metropolis after another, and could stay aloft for a day or more at a time. Given this superior record, German observers could be excused for seeing zeppelins as the most technically expert means to conquer the air, an achievement “inscribed in the guest book of eternity,” although most scientific commentators, unwilling to be partisans of either airplanes or airships, temporized and agreed that both heavier- and lighter-than-air craft had vital roles to play in the mechanical future.*? That German pilots and German airplanes performed poorly at Frankfurt’s 1gog international air rally only reinforced the German public’s preference for airships over airplanes and for Germany’s aeronautical Sondermeg over other ways.

The Meaning of the Zeppelin Craze The zeppelin craze was as interesting to contemporaries as the giant airship itself. Standing along the Rhine, Ludwig Anders made the excited spectators the subject of his dispatches to the Wiesbadener Tageblatt. Stuttgart’s reporters could not keep their eyes off the rushing crowds. And just a month after the disaster at Echterdingen, the first “mass psychological study” on “zeppelin enthusiasm” appeared.3* Most observers agreed that some combination of awe at the immense size of the ship, satisfaction that the air had been conquered, and pride in Germany’s achievement drew people to the zeppelin’s side. The sheer physical impact of the gargantuan airship was noted again and again. Its “marvel” drew out and seized the crowds. As it appeared over the heights above Stuttgart on 5 August 1908, the cries of spectators were followed by a “powerful still-

Giant Airships and World Politics 23 ness.” >> The zeppelin’s languorous speed—five to ten seconds passed before it made up its own length—did not detract from but enhanced the sense of its power. It glided overhead “slowly, as becomes a ruler who reveals himself to his people.”°° Unchecked, purposeful pace seemed naturally to accompany dominion. Hugo Eckener, in 1900 a skeptical reporter of the first airship ascents for the Frankfurter Zeitung but by 1908 a close advisor to Graf Zeppelin, remembered the queer fascination with the zeppelin:%”

It was not, as generally described, a “silver bird soaring in majestic flight,” but rather a fabulous silvery fish, floating quietly in the ocean of air and captivating the eye just like a fantastic, exotic fish seen in an aquarium. And this fairylike apparition, which seemed to melt into the silver blue background of sky, when it appeared far away, lighted by the sun, seemed to be coming from another world and to be returning there like a dream—an emissary from the “Island of the Blest” in which so many humans still believe in the inmost recesses of their souls.

For Eckener, the zeppelin acquired its force by suggesting the supernatural and otherworldly. The ship was singular, as exotic to humankind as it was to nature. Yet these descriptions of earthbound spectators, awed by the airship’s dimensions and enchanted by the appearance of something completely foreign, obscure the immediacy with which Germans seemed to recognize the zeppelin, as if they followed common scripts that revealed basic turn-of-the-century dispositions about the power of humans against nature and also about the power and ambition of the German nation. Eyewitnesses habitually referred to the zeppelin flights as elements of a great “drama” in which humankind was locked in battle with nature.

The terms of engagement were often physical and strenuous. But the ultimate decision, which was the victory of the human spirit over unruly natural elements, was not in dispute. The first decade of the twentieth century was a time when Europeans still happily attached active, heroic verbs to technological undertakings such as the opening of the Panama Canal, the journeys to the North and South Poles, and the electrification of the cities. In this regard, German celebration of the zeppelin was thoroughly conventional. Without any sense of foreboding about the mingling of technology and power, the populace quickly came to see zeppelins as familiar extensions of the sovereignty of culture over nature. Just twelve

24 A NATION OF FLIERS hours aloft in the zeppelin on a summer’s day in July 1908 was enough to convince Emil Sandt that the biblical notion “you shall subdue the earth” had been largely realized. The flight was one in a series of cultural accomplishments that gradually empowered humans: “To crawl along the earth was the beginning. To crawl into the depths of the earth was only an extension of this. But now we are on our way to achieve the greatest: to fly in the air.” As a result of this advance, nature lost its terror and its

awesomeness. In the coming air age, “impassable expanses, desolate plains, inaccessible plateaus” would disappear; humans would “come to feel at home on earth.” In very much the same vein, Kurd Lasswitz, Imperial Germany’s most popular science fiction writer, pointed to the August 1908 flight as “the most longed-for advance” in the “domination of nature.” Lasswitz depicted a future in which nature would become entirely familiar. What previously had been blind forces would be transformed by technology into humankind’s purposeful creation.*® The prospect of a completely humanized nature gave Lasswitz “a giddy sensation of power.’ *? Repeatedly, Lasswitz and other observers testified to feeling empowered and enfranchised by the zeppelin. The literary image of the landscape giving way to human advance, “unfolding” below the passing airship, now commonplace, must have seemed audacious at the time.*° Machine-making people were striding over a previously inaccessible landscape with a new swagger. “Sonn’ auf,” by Casar Flaischlen, put this confidence to popular music:*! Laugh, laugh if you want! It doesn't bother me! lam doing it, and will do it, If it doesn't bend, then it breaks, but | bend it. | get it. | am flying after all! | say: it flies! it flies to the right and it flies to the left! | wager my last money and persevere and make it work.

Bending nature to human design, people had finally become the properly realized subject of history. This heady sovereignty found its epigram in

Sophocles—“There are many powerful living things, but nothing so powerful as man” —and did so without a trace of irony that might indicate

Giant Airships and World Politics 25 how far the empire of human folly extended into the realm of technological achievement.

To be sure, some narratives lingered at the site of battle between people and nature, describing the disaster at Echterdingen as an incident in “the ceaseless alternation of wild offensives and bitter defeats.” *? The popular designation of the zeppelin as “Bezwinger der Luft,” or subduer of the air, evoked the physical effort necessary to restrain nature. It struck a more ominous and embattled note, but at the same time drew attention to the muscular, almost visible subordination of the elements. In the end, however, the result was invariably the same: the “happy end” of progress saw nature conquered and a new quality of power delivered to humankind. Once this narrative was learned, then catastrophes such as the explosion at Echterdingen could easily be accounted as the price of progress. This was acknowledged quite explicitly by the Viennese writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who recognized Echterdingen as a necessary dramatic device:* A completely unblemished success could never have crowned the genius of this man in the same way as this stranger-than-fiction combi-

nation of triumph and catastrophe. Only the half-minute burst of flame was able to impress millions with the heroic figure of this brave,

old man and the pathos of his struggle. The material, over which he triumphed, knew how to honor him: there is no other way to describe it.

Of course, Hofmannsthal beheld the dramatic suitability of Echterdingen

in hindsight, after the airship had been destroyed and the public subscription launched. But he drew attention to the ways in which accidents were comprehended and invested with meaning. Echterdingen was not only seen as part of a strenuous struggle that would eventually be won; the disaster itself identified the (difficult) road to progress. A monument

erected at Echterdingen soon after the explosion served as a signpost along this road. It quickly became a popular destination for Sunday outings. Two years later, when the Deutschland (the LZ 7) crashed at Bad Iburg, local civic leaders knew exactly what to do. They marked the site with a small stone and the confident inscription “Forward, despite all.” It

is not surprising that one child, asked to draw the stranded LZ 5 ina Goppingen art class, depicted the damaged zeppelin in commemorative postcard form.**

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46 A NATION OF FLIERS the Rhine, ended in demoralized grumbling about Germany’s disproportionate share of the domestic horror of the war? It is impossible to know, but domestic propaganda, composed at once to stiffen homefront patriotism and to pressure the General Staff, contained a veiled threat. Zeppelins were vital weapons of war, explained Gottlob Mayer, not simply because of the blows they inflicted on the enemy but also because the German people believed in them and made “the continuation of patriotic enthusiasm and willingness to sacrifice dependent on their ruthless deployment against England.” '°° Raids on England sold the war. One airshipman imagined the boost to morale after a successful raid:'©!

“Bucharest successfully bombed,” and the response “message received” returned from the reception station. Lieutenant R. composed and coded the telegram with joy and extra

care. He imagined the news in big letters headlined in the German morning papers. How pleased the German fatherland will be with us.

Zeppelins were widely regarded as Volksgut, and the popular confidence and enthusiasm they inspired on the home front were vital factors in the formation of Germany’s zeppelin strategy. “You just have to listen to the common people—what kind of zeppelin miracles they report and anticipate, noted Adolf Saager in his wartime biography of Graf Zeppelin. !°?

Zeppelin himself justified the raids against England because their magnitude and horror would bring the war to a more timely end. This was the reasoning he provided in the famous 1915 interview with Hearst correspondent Karl von Wiegand.'® But the popular appeal of the bombing missions lay elsewhere. Patriotic Germans badly wanted to bring the war home to England. For “the first time in England’s thousand-year history, English blood will flow on English soil . . . that is the main accomplishment of the zeppelins in the world war!” wrote one enthusiast.!° Naval strategists agreed that airship raids would destroy vital war matériel, undermine the morale of the English people, and, most important, force Great Britain to maintain large numbers of troops at home.!® All the components of total war already figured in the calculation of air raids, particularly the psychological and propaganda aspects which were intended to assuage German patriots as much as to terrorize English civillans. One of the first big raids against England was carried out on 8 Septem-

ber 1915, under the command of Heinrich Mathy. Carrying thousands

Giant Airships and World Politics 47 of kilograms of bombs, the navy zeppelin L 13 scored direct hits in the warehouse district north of St. Paul’s and elsewhere in the City. Although Mathy, who had visited London for a week in 1909 and recognized the geography below him, missed his targets (the Bank of England and other financial houses), the damage toll was the largest of any of the wartime raid and added up to one-sixth of the financial cost inflicted by zeppelin air strikes during the entire war. As the German press quickly learned,

mostly through neutral sources in Sweden and Holland, Londoners reacted to these first attacks with shock and anger. Substantial damage

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In a picture postcard, the zeppelin appears to be a creature from another planet as it hovers over wartime London.

48 A NATION OF FLIERS had been inflicted by just a single airship. Presumably the toll of a concerted attack would be even greater. German strategists were jubilant and imagined for subsequent raids the singular success of the L 13.1% Germans took what had been panicky responses to an unprecedented attack to be revealing displays of civilian vulnerability and what had been lucky hits to be the result of precision bombing. Since then considerable scholarship has established that the overall damage inflicted by the zeppelins was light (about £3 million) and that the attacks boosted rather than diminished civilian morale. But German proponents of air power misled themselves and committed scarce wartime resources to build more and more ships, each class larger, more powerful, and better able to reach the extraordinarily high altitudes necessary to evade pursuing enemy fighter planes. A raid in April 1916 earned a special report prepared for the kaiser:

At Grimsby, in addition to the post office and several other houses, a battleship in the roadstead was heavily damaged by a bomb, and had to be beached. At Kensington an aeroplane hangar was wrecked, near Tower Bridge a transport ship damaged, in Great Tower Street a factory wrecked, and north of the Tower a bomb fell in George Street only 100 meters away from two anti-aircraft guns. It was reported that a big fire had broken out at West India Docks, and that at Tilbury Docks a munition boat exploded (400 killed). At first glance, the fiery destruction was impressive. However, according

to Douglas Robinson, an expert on zeppelin attacks, the report was a complete misrepresentation. No such damage was ever inflicted. “But the fact that it was believed,” Robinson comments, “not only by the deluded populace, but also by the Supreme War Lord and his responsible advisors, underlines the role of wishful thinking in determining national policy. Count Zeppelin and his giant creations still held the adoration and devotion of the German people.” !° After more than a year of raids, Peter Strasser, the commander of the naval airships, was only strengthened in his “conviction that England can be overcome by means of airships, inasmuch as the country will be deprived of the means of existence through increasingly extensive destruction of cities, factory complexes, dockyards

... 08 Strasser’s sober military reports soon came to resemble wishful propaganda tracts. In this war of machines, zeppelins were depicted as Germany’s wonder

Giant Airships and World Politics 49 weapon. For seaman Richard Stumpf, the turnip winter of 1917 was bleak. As he was putting his thoughts to paper on 8 February, one of our zeppelins flew over with a thunderous noise. It blew away all my sad thoughts and worries. Its proud shape refreshed my heart and renewed my courage. Let the enemy copy this plane (if he can)! ... our factories have excelled themselves in producing something so grand and overwhelmingly powerful . . . | fluctuated between two extremes. My imagination and the power of suggestion changed what had earlier seemed so difficult and depressing into dreams of victory. O Zeppelin, please come more often to banish my sadness!

Seamen like Stumpf often saw zeppelins on their way to England and, standing along the rails of their battle cruisers, regarded them as most valuable helpmates. “The enemy is as good as defenseless” against zeppelins and submarines, averred a confident Gottlob Mayer.'° “Wind raging—waves crashing—motors thundering—machines stamping”: the rendezvous of these two killing machines at sea was a favorite image to convey the technological face of the war and the awesome power assembled by the German Reich.'!° Deeper, farther, faster, higher, “tiber alles in der Welt,” Germany’s arsenal of machines declared German superiority. Pictorial counterparts to already colorful prose, paintings by war artists such as Zeno Diemer depicted zeppelins as virtually invincible weapons. Reproductions in ///ustrirte Zeitung, the popular Leipzig weekly, or //lustrierte Geschichte des Weltkrieges, the annual editions of which accompanied

the progress of the war, showed the distinctive zeppelin shape looming, hovering over the field of battle. In one Diemer painting, the zeppelin completely dominates the foreground. It is an immense floating platform from which machine gunners easily shoot down attacking biplanes as if simply swatting dragonflies. ‘The town visible below appears utterly helpless. That the streamlined zeppelin itself seemed inaccessible, closed, without showing even a trace of the crew, added to the sense of unknowable, possibly extraterrestrial power. Its path of destruction lit up by glaring one-eyed searchlights, a zeppelin on the cover of Lufiwaffe appeared to German readers otherworldly, all-seeing, all-powerful.!!

The reality of the airship venture was much more prosaic than the colorful images of wartime propaganda suggested. Bombing raids were separated by long stretches of inaction while zeppelin crews watched for

50 A NATION OF FLIERS better weather. Airshipmen mostly waited. All the German navy’s bombing missions against England, France, and Belgium over the course of the entire war took place on just forty days.!!* ‘The huge expense of maintain-

ing mostly grounded ships fed growing doubts in the army as to their overall efficiency. Losses at sea due to inclement weather mounted as well. And even at 4,000 meters, zeppelins remained vulnerable to the night-flying pilots of the Royal Air Force. On the night of 1 October 1916, for example, Mathy’s high-altitude L 31 was shot down over London and the famous commander and his crew killed, a particularly demoralizing blow. By the end of the year, the army wisely decided to cut its losses, and eventually it discontinued zeppelin attacks entirely. The navy, however, embarked on an ambitious program of outfitting the zeppelins

for even higher, more extreme altitudes, up to 5,500 and finally 7,000 meters. More vulnerable to the vagaries of storms and temperature, the colossal “height climbers” inflicted a horrible toll on their shivering, oxygen-starved crews, but did little damage to Britain. Moreover, planes still reached the airship’s dizzying altitudes. At 5,500 meters, a twoseater De Haviland 4 shot down the monstrous L 70 at twilight on 5 August 1918; Strasser was aboard and among the 22 men killed.!!> When the war ended, the navy had lost 389 men and 53 of 73 airships, the army 52 men and 26 of 52 ships. About 1,000 men served on airships during the war. The death rate was therefore closer to one-half than one-third; almost as many airshipmen were killed as English men, women, and children (556, according to the London Times of 13 January 1919).!'* Given

these death rates, which were worse than those among submariners or airplane crews, and the minimal damage inflicted on the enemy, the balance sheet for Germany’s airship service was dismal. Few military observers in the 1920s gave the effort high marks; Ernst Lehmann was an exception, arguing that damage to Allied railroads alone justified wartime expenditures on zeppelins. He added an ominous note: “had Germany been set on the wholesale extinction of the British people, had she concentrated her energy upon more zeppelins and submarines, she would have .. . very nearly accomplished that purpose.” !!* The suggestion was that the overly cautious Bethmann-Hollweg or an irresponsibly temperate Reichstag had blocked an all-out offensive against Allied supply lines and industrial centers. Although a series of concerted surprise attacks might very well have caused considerable damage in 1915, when English defensive measures were limited and the service ceilings of

Giant Airships and World Politics 51 airplanes still quite low, the potential impact of bombing on a city was greatly exaggerated in the First as in the Second World War. As a strategic

air weapon, especially in northern Europe, the zeppelins were not so much the “aerial leviathans” of Lehmann’s assessment as fragile, oversized giants, vulnerable to puny “dragon fliers” and North Sea storms, useful only at the beginning of the war as long-range scouts. Most scholars are in substantial agreement with General Ernst von Hoeppner, who

was appointed commander of Germany’s air force in mid-1916 and quickly dismantled the army’s airship service, and suggest that Strasser should have done the same. Perhaps the most ambitious postwar survey was written by Georg Paul Neumann in 1920. Though Neumann was careful to honor the strenuous efforts of airshipmen, he underscored “the vast waste of matériel and personnel” which stood “in no relation to the success that could have been achieved” after 1917. Zeppelin bombing added up to a heedless and wasteful campaign. But Neumann refused to State this explicitly. In his conclusion, he expressed the hope that the tragic story of the zeppelins would show “what German courage and will,

German strength, German endurance and German ability” had achieved. For Neumann and many other postwar commemorators of the

airship venture after 1914, virtue gathered only where technology failed.'!°

The war years badly frayed the image of the zeppelins as technically perfect (vollkommen) instruments of control. A brave front was maintained. Patriotic sketches rehearsed the confident lines of the prewar years: “This mass! This size! This power! This security! This invincibility!” !!7 And as before the war, manufacturers anxiously linked themselves

to the technical accomplishments of the zeppelin. “During the most audacious air raids, the absolute reliability of the Zenith carburetor leaves you feeling completely calm and secure,” the Zenith Carburetor Company promised in 1917.'!® But the actual record of the airships led more and more experts to doubt their military usefulness and technical versatility. Not only were the zeppelins vulnerable to bad weather and high winds over the North Sea or the English Channel and even over landing fields at home, but they offered easy targets to high-flying combat planes. Dissenting voices, easily overlooked in the chorus of enthusiasm for the giant airships, had already expressed doubts about the safety and sturdiness of the zeppelins before the outbreak of war in 1914. Two fatal naval airship disasters in the fall of 1913 should have alerted authorities.

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The Image of the War Ace 69 from escort missions in ones and twos, stalking Allied bombers and observation planes, and drilling them with machine-gun fire from behind. It was these victories that made Boelcke and Immelmann popular heroes before the year was out. Deadly only because the Allies had not yet discovered the secret of the synchronizing gear, the Fokkers gained a menacing reputation out of proportion with their numbers or technical virtu-

osity. [his unhappy state of affairs led one Member of Parliament to describe British airmen as “Fokker Fodder.” For the rest of 1915 and the first months of 1916, as long as they monopolized the forward-firing gun, the Germans enjoyed superiority in the air.!® Despite the best of precautions to keep the Fokkers behind German lines lest they crash and fall into Allied hands, early in 1916 a Fokker stumbled westward across the front in heavy fog and landed undamaged on a French airfield. ‘Twenty-four hours later the plane was in Paris. In a matter of months, a new series of Allied biplanes, the highly maneuvera-

ble Sopwith 1’ Strutter and the Nieuport, both vastly superior to the Fokker monoplane, featured synchronized machine guns. Their appearance in the spring and Immelmann’s death in a Fokker that broke up in the air on 18 June 1916 ended the almost year-long ascendancy of the slow, unstable monoplane. Although the Germans quickly constructed maneuverable biplanes, the Halberstadt D-2 and later the sleek Albatros D-1, which was perhaps the best one-seater of the war, industrial output

lagged, and by the summer of 1916 the more numerous British and French machines easily regained air superiority. The dramatic reversal of German fortunes was confirmed during the Battle of the Somme. In July and August 1916, hundreds of Allied planes

strafed German trenches and bombed munition dumps and transportation networks in the rear. German morale frayed badly. “One hardly dares

to be seen in the trench, owing to the English aeroplanes,” wrote one German infantryman at the Somme. “They fly so low that it is a wonder they do not pull men right out of the trenches.” The infantry felt under constant observation and grew panicky and nervous. Wild rumors spread through the trenches. Artillery gunners regarded Allied planes as invincible and gave up shooting at them altogether. All the while, the soldier continued in a voice heavy with sarcasm, “nothing is to be seen of our German hero airmen.” !° Every plane that passed overhead was identified as hostile. Men ran for cover even when the plane had German markings, which were taken to be an Allied ruse. What most worried German military observers was not the material destruction Allied aircraft caused be-

70 A NATION OF FLIERS hind the lines, but the demoralization their flyovers generated in the ranks of the infantry.”° In the words of Hans Ritter, a historian of air power in the 1920s, the

Battle of the Somme was a crucial turning point. It “hammered the importance of air superiority” into the considerations of the German General Staff. Without a capable air force, friendly artillery could not be properly directed, hostile artillery positions were left undetected, and the infantry was exposed to grueling rounds of enemy strafing. Under these conditions, Ritter argued, the “crisis of nerves” among the troops had been “unavoidable.”?! Accordingly, the General Staff moved quickly to bolster Germany’s air forces. On 8 October 1916 it appointed Ernst Wilhelm von Hoeppner, formerly the army’s Chief of Field Aviation, as General in Command of the Air Forces, responsible only to the General Staff. Hoeppner’s promotion was the culmination of the development of an independent air arm, to the consternation of both the army and the navy. At the same time, Chief of Staff Hindenburg committed Germany to a massive buildup of the air forces. The General Staff, convinced that superiority in the air was vital to victory on the ground, approved production plans to increase the air force by half, to some 2,322 planes, with emphasis on the manufacture of new one-seater fighters and heavier bombers. Factory capacity expanded dramatically, reaching goo deliveries in December 1916, but slipped to 400 in January 1917 as a result of persistent shortages of coal, raw materials, and skilled workers. Although the Hindenburg Program fell short of its goals, it delivered the Albatros biplane D-5, Germany’s new standard fighter, in sufficient numbers to maul the British air force in “Bloody April” 1917. Poor planning and material shortages kept Germany from fighting a total war in the air, but these inadequacies should not obscure the fact that Germany had largely achieved strategic parity with the numerically superior Allied forces in

Igi7.” The restoration of parity was not simply a matter of building more machines, but also of deploying them properly. Already during the Battle of the Somme, Oswald Boelcke, the Reich’s most famous ace, argued that the only way to throw back the hundreds of Allied planes making their way in ones and twos across German lines was to bunch five or six fighter planes into hunting squadrons or Jagdstaffeln (Jastas). Not chained to a particular area or reconnaissance mission, a highly mobile fighter squadron could achieve local air supremacy, moving from one airfield to an-

other as circumstances demanded. Such mobile groups of one-seater

The Image of the War Ace 71 fighters, Boelcke believed, could counter the superior Allied numbers. His arguments persuaded Hoeppner, and by the end of 1916 33 Jastas along the western front had contained the Allied air barrage. The responsibility of Jasta fighters was exclusively offensive. Their purpose was to seek out and destroy enemy aircraft. Whereas Boelcke and Immelmann had hung about in the skies in 1915 and early 1916, waiting for British or French planes to pass, Jastas patrolled particular areas or remained on the ground until observers on the front lines identified hostile aircraft and telephoned in their bearings. Air superiority was no longer a matter of coincidence and luck, but the result of careful calculation.*? ‘The creation of Jastas in the late summer of 1916 marked the beginning of classic aerial warfare. The business of fighting, now distinguished from that of bombing or reconnaissance, quickly developed characteristic weaponry, the one-seater biplane outfitted with two synchronized forward-firing maching guns, and a specialized combatant, the fighter ace. The Jastas bred a new kind of airman. Rudolf Stark remembered being

transferred into a Jasta. Stark had previously flown heavy two-seaters: “The battles we fought were defensive ones, thrust on us by necessity.” For a fighter scout, however, “battle is the main objective. He rejoices in battle.” ** Boelcke hammered the tactics of aggressive aerial warfare into his squadron again and again. The primary responsibility of the Jastas was to destroy observation planes and bombers as well as the scouts that accompanied them. Attacks were best carried out from above and behind enemy aircraft. ‘Io shoot down an artillery spotter or observation plane was not difficult. The Albatros biplanes which made up most Jastas by the second half of 1916 were faster than any two-seater, especially in

diving and climbing. Encounters with enemy one-seater scouts demanded more skill, however. Since the fixed machine guns on fighter planes faced forward, airmen always attempted to attack the rear and, at the same time, took care not to expose their own defenseless tails. To adjust the line of fire or evade a pursuer, scouts would dive and turn and climb in an attempt to get behind their attacker. Aerial combat frequently turned into a classic duel between two pilots who circled, looped, and climbed around each other. Richthofen described a dramatic confrontation with the British ace Lanoe Hawker: It did not take long before one dove for me, trying to catch me from behind. After a burst of five shots the sky fellow had to stop, for | was already in a sharp left curve. The Englishman attempted to get behind

72 A NATION OF FLIERS me while | attempted to get behind him. So it went, both of us flying

like madmen in a circle, with engines running fullout at threethousand-meter altitude. First left, then right, each intent on getting above and behind the other... He had a very maneuverable crate, but mine climbed better, and | finally succeeded in coming in above and behind him. In the end, Richthofen forced Hawker down to his death, about fifty meters behind German lines.”° For Jasta pilots, the sky took on new meaning as a realm of ambition and destruction. Above the western front stretched an immense hunting ground, “a real El Dorado” for fighter pilots, marveled Boelcke.?° The autumn of 1916 was an exuberant time, recalled Richthofen, who joined Boelcke’s Jasta 2 that August: “the first Englishmen came very early in

the morning, and the last disappeared long after the sun had gone down.”?7 Even clouds were viewed from a fighter’s perspective. Recon-

naissance pilots, who flew direction to a particular destination, hated clouds. For Georg Haupt-Heydemarck, “flying through thick clouds is the most fearsome business I can imagine. After a little while one loses all sense of equilibrium.”?8 More mobile scouts, on the other hand, sought refuge along the edges of cloud formations, using them as cover for surprise attacks. Once assigned to a Jasta, Heydemarck described clouds as a fighter pilot would see them—as friendly “pads” or “formations” and “veils” to hide behind: “When we had climbed above the belt of haze I had a good view of the cloud ceiling that was forming. The wisps were thickening into soft veils, but the wind tore them apart again and pounded their fragments into loose balls. These . . . could not retain their forms, but coalesced into huge pads.” ”° To stay alive, pilots required not only considerable skill and a fightingman’s eye but also a reliable machine that could maintain speed and stability in tight maneuvers. Pilots had to know the capacities of their machines: how fast the plane could be pushed in a variety of dives before a wing or tail broke off; how fast it climbed; or how well it handled in controlled spins and sideslips. Airmen also had to know how to quickly repair jammed machine guns, even in the heat of battle with heavy clothing and gloves. Squadron leaders such as Boelcke tried to reproduce the conditions of battle on the ground and trained their men repeatedly. It was not surprising that scouts quickly developed an almost personal relation to

their machines. Io Erwin Bohme one-seaters seemed “alive, sentient

The Image of the War Ace 73 beings, who understand what the pilot wants.” “One no longer has the feeling that one is sitting at the controls of a plane,” he added; “rather it is as if there is spiritual contact.” °° Again and again, fighter pilots were defined by their intimacy with the

one-seater that had given them such a distinctive role. Richthofen acquired his nom de guerre, the Red Baron, after he painted his Albatros D-3 bright red. Boelcke regarded his Albatros as like a “brother,” wrote panegyrist Rudolf Gottschalk. Man and machine merged into one, each lending qualities to the other. One journalist described Boelcke as half terrifying machine, half warm-hearted German. The eyes of the ace drew

his attention first: “Two clear blue eyes fastened themselves on me .. . examining me ... like searchlights.” “hen Boelcke’s face unlocked and he became a recognizable German: “The handsome, brave, and proud face suddenly breaks into a smile . . . he shakes off all the honors and the praise I want to bestow with a little movement of his head, with a slight shrug of his shoulders, with a wonderful, graceful motion of his hands.” *! As for Richthofen, he was described by one poet as “half knight and half scythe.” *? Air war in 1916 had created a single weapon out of pilot and machine, the modern furor teutonicus.*3 ‘The bold, simple lines of a Fokker advertisement illustrated the complete realization of the World War I ace, in which the machine enhanced the man.**

Jasta tactics made the pilot a self-reliant fighter and turned the skies into a hunter’s paradise. Almost every mission ended in an air fight; for a time, in September 1916, Boelcke was shooting down one or two English planes every day. In the five weeks between the formation of Jasta 2 and his death on 28 October 1916, Boelcke brought the number of his victories from twenty to an astonishing forty. Bohme, Richthofen, and other Staffel members swelled their totals as well, though not nearly as rapidly as their squadron leader. Once again, the morale of the Allied air forces buckled. In September, for example, the British and French lost 123 aircraft over the battlefields of the Somme, while the Germans lost only 27. The next month, the figures remained lopsided: 88 Allied planes to 12 German. Given the greater than two-to-one numerical superiority of the

Allies, the Germans did indeed seem to fight quantity with quality, as Richthofen boasted.*> Writing just three years after the war, Ernst von Hoeppner concluded of the Battle of the Somme: “If the Entente was not able to drive us from the air . . . it was due to the devoted and heroic spirit

of our aviators.” Air war demanded self-reliance and skill, but also

74 A NATION OF FLIERS “nerves of steel and youth’s scorn of danger, together with a deep sense of responsibility.” °° It was this notion of quality, not simply better Jasta machines and Jasta tactics, but superior character somehow inhering in the new airmen themselves, that lent itself to war propaganda and provided the building blocks to construct the mythical figure of the ace.

The Folklore of the Ace The ace was the product of the changing terms of air war, in which a single airman flew a one-seater scout as an airborne gun. There was no such thing as an “ace” until 1915, the year when the forward-mounted machine gun permitted one-seaters to play an offensive role and a single individual to assume the roles of both pilot and gunner-observer. And it was not until the fall of 1916, after Boelcke laid out the specialized tactics

of aerial warfare, that the classic duels between recognizable, highscoring aces took place. Once the ace emerged, however, he became one of the most popular figures in wartime Germany. With three, four, then five victories in April 1915, Roland Garros was the first airman the public claimed as a hero. And although the term “ace” was not used in Germany until after the war, Max Immelmann, the “Eagle of Lille,” was already an acknowledged “flying hero” with five victories in October 1915. “It is incredible how much I am honored,” he reflected, “I simply cannot describe it. My mail has swollen vastly since | have become a famous man.” Georg Queri, a war correspondent from Munich, quipped that the army would soon have to assign orderlies to open Immelmann’s mail, decipher the hand-written poems composed in his honor, and reproduce his signature in reply. On leave in Leipzig in late November, Immelmann was shouldered by enthusiastic crowds upon arrival at the local airfield and mobbed on the streets in town.?” Immelmann had become a celebrity, that distinctive twentieth-century type. The army quickly exploited Immelmann’s popularity to sell war bonds and to advertise the success of the war. Reenacted in short films, which were distributed to field theaters along the front and metropolitan cinemas at home, his aerial victories served as instantly recognizable demonstrations of German prowess and German superiority. Aces previewed victory and thereby sold the war.** Before long, the Deutscher Lufiflottenverein or German Air Fleet League assisted the government by rallying supporters to promote Germany’s new air arm and to raise money to aid

The Image of the War Ace 75 wounded flyers and their families. The Luftflottenverein’s park concerts, plays, and patriotic evenings were held throughout the Reich. An afternoon charity event in Hamburg in July 1918, for example, featured a “flyin” and lecture by a military pilot, the delivery of “air mail,” and a grand

ballet in which 139 dancers depicted an epic air battle between the French ace Pégoud, who was portrayed as the better fighter, and Richthofen, who eventually emerged victorious after receiving help from the elements: lightning, thunder, and storm.*? The message was clear: Germany would overcome the massive material advantage the Allies enjoyed after the entry of the United States into the war because God stood at its side.

Oswald Boelcke quickly matched Immelmann’s skills. By Christmas 1915 the two aces were locked in a friendly competition that captured the

public eye. Throughout December 1915, Boelcke and Immelmann bested each other, running up their Fokker monoplanes and shooting down their fifth, sixth, and seventh Allied planes. Berlin’s newspapers made the most of the contest and published clever poems lauding one or the other ace. Finally on 13 January 1916, the kaiser awarded both pilots, each with eight kills, the Pour le Mérite, Germany’s highest award for individual gallantry, which a total of 83 airmen, the great majority of them fighter pilots, eventually received. A day later, Boelcke won his ninth victory, “his answer” to the medal; the show of German invincibility continued, to the delight of the nation’s poets:*° Record

The record in that daring sport Our airman play in heaven Was held by Immelmann, who fought And vanquished victims seven.

But Boelcke was a valiant wight, Who did not sit down sighing; He quickly put the balance right, As so one should in flying.

But who'd be first with number eight? That left us all surmising. The answer “Both,” I'm bound to state, Was really most surprising. They dished up two on one same board— ‘Twas quite an innovation—

76 A NATION OF FLIERS And each received as his reward A noble decoration.

Then one day later—you'll avow It's rather hard to swallow— Friend Boelcke shouted “Nine! How now! I've nine, I've licked you hollow!” And thus these busy airmen climb, Each day new laurels storing, The ladder of fame to heights sublime— And business still is roaring! “With looks to kill, young and handsome. You wouldn't believe how good

the Pour le Mérite looks on him... And dancing, he dances like an angel.” *! Boelcke was perhaps the most beloved German airman during the

war, though today he is almost forgotten, overshadowed by his pupil Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, whose legacy was glorified by the Nazis, reappropriated by the West German Air Force, and fixed for Americans by the cartoonist Charles Schulz. But in 1916 it was hard not to hear about Boelcke, as the young ace won victory after victory, mostly

against French opponents. Small-town newspapers and metropolitan weeklies such as Die Woche, Die Gartenlaube, and the Berliner Illustrirte gave him prominent coverage. Dozens of books appeared, recounting the exploits of Boelcke, Immelmann, and other aces in a popular style.*? Wilhelm Kranzler, for example, promised a volkstumlich depiction of Germany’s aerial triumphs.*

Like Immelmann, Boelcke was accorded all the honors of celebrity status. Deluged with mail, “attacked” by autograph hunters, the air heroes more resembled the movie stars of the 1920s than the medieval knights or Napoleonic generals with whom they were often compared. In Frankfurt to attend a meeting between officials of the Inspectorate of Flying Troops and Oberursel engineers, Boelcke felt as if a warrant had been issued for his arrest: people “stared at me all the time in the streets.” Attending a performance of E. ‘IT. A. Hoffmann’s Undine at the Frankfurt

Opera, Boelcke was besieged by spectators during intermissions—“it was terrible.” At the end of the second act, an opera singer stepped forward and sang a hastily written song for Boelcke. “I could hardly believe my ears,” Boelcke remarked. “But then you should have seen the audience going raving mad; they clapped, shouted, and tramped their feet. . . I saved myself from further ovations by speedy flight.” * Similar incidents

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