CHAPTER II

British Airships in the First War

Germany entered the first World War with high expectations as to one, perhaps two of its new weapons of war. Its submarines might offset Britain’s superiority at sea, and certainly the Zeppelins, which had proved themselves in four years of commercial flying, would be able to cross the English Channel and carry the war to the island which had seen no invasion since William the Conqueror.

No nation except Germany had Zeppelins. And as the German people began to feel the pinch of the blockade, cutting their life line of food and supplies, they brought increasing public pressure on High Command to use these weapons to punish England.

Later commentators have speculated as to whether, if Germany had held its fire, waited till it could assemble an overpowering force of Zeppelins and submarines and stage a joint attack, it might not have been able to force a quick decision.

But the Zeppelins were sent over a few at a time, as fast as they could be built, and England was given time to devise defenses. These were chiefly higher altitude airplanes, farther ranging anti-aircraft guns, sky piercing searchlights, which combined to force the invaders to fly continuously higher as the war wore on, as high as 25,000 feet at times, with corresponding sacrifice of bombing accuracy. And when machine guns, synchronized with the propellers, were mounted in airplane cockpits, and began to spit inflammable bullets into the hydrogen filled bags and send them down in flames, the duel took on more even terms.

Less spectacularly the Zeppelins were used on a wide scale as reconnaissance and scouting craft, which flying fast and far were given credit on more than one occasion for saving German Naval squadrons from being cut off by superior Allied forces, were acknowledged even by the British to have played an important part in the Battle of Jutland.

It is a little hard to realize today that whatever air battles were waged over water in the last war were conducted chiefly by lighter-than-air craft. Planes staged spectacular battles along the Allied lines in France, but lack of range and carrying capacity forced them to leave sea battles to the airship. As a measure of that situation, the great hangars at Friedrichshafen, spawning ground of the Zeppelins, one of the outstanding targets in all Europe if England were to draw the dirigible’s fangs, lay hardly more than a hundred miles from the French borders, but even that distance was too great for effective attack.

While these greater events were taking place, British airships, smaller in size, less spectacular, were playing no small part in repelling Germany’s other threat, the submarine.

Blimps Used to Search for U-Boats

Navy opinion around the world was skeptical at the beginning of the War as to whether submarines would ever be practical. There were mechanical troubles, accidents, usually costly. Even Germany, prior to 1914, used to send an escort of warships along to convoy its subs to their station—then send out for them afterward to bring them home again.

But the war was only a few weeks old when the captain of the U-9, cruising down the Dutch coast, discovered that his gyro compass was off, and when he got his bearings saw that he was 50 miles off course. He wasted no breath, however, on many-syllabled German swear words, for off on his southern horizon were the masts of three British ships. He dived, came up alongside, and in 30 minutes, single handed, with well directed torpedoes, had sunk in turn HMS Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy.

The morning of September 22, 1914, marked the beginning of a new era in Naval warfare. The warring nations grew furiously busy building their own U-boats and devising defenses against the enemy’s. Among these defenses was the non-rigid airship.

These two vehicles, so widely different, have much in common. If we may be technical for a minute we may say that the airship and the submarine are both buoyant bodies, completely immersed and floating in a medium—air and water respectively—of changing pressures, that each uses dual sets of steering gear and rudders to control direction and altitude. And further, that the airship in 1941 faces the same division of opinion as the submarine faced in 1914, as to whether, particularly with rigid airships, it will ever be widely used and accepted.

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

Indicator nets and high explosive mines might give some protection to harbors, might be stretched across steamship lanes and planted around the hiding places of the submarines, if those could be discovered. But troop ships and munition ships and food ships must be dispatched without interruption across the tricky waters of the English Channel to France, and for this purpose convoy escorts were devised, with camouflaged warships zigzagging alongside, while high aloft in lookout stations men with binoculars strained their eyes, searching the waters, ahead, astern, alongside, their search lingering long over every bit of floating wreckage—and there was a lot of it—to make sure it was not a periscope.

These lookouts aboard ship quickly had a new ally in the air. As the submarine menace grew, binoculars began to flash too from the fuselages of bobbing blimps overhead. At a few hundred or perhaps a thousand feet elevation they could see deep below the surface, and quickly learned to recognize at considerable distance the tell-tale trail of bubbles or feathered waters or smear of oil which denoted the enemy’s presence, might even pick out the shadowy form of the submerged craft itself.

The value of the airship in convoy was that it could fly slowly, could throttle down its motors and march in step with its charges, cruise ahead, alongside, behind. The very speed of its sister craft, the airplane, handicapped its use in this field.

This characteristic of the blimp was even more useful in hunting U-boat nests. The blimp could head into the wind, with its motors barely turning over, hover for hours at zero speed over suspect areas. It could fly at low altitudes, follow even slender clues. Seagulls following a periscope sometimes gave highly useful information. An orange crate moving against the tide attracted the attention of one alert pilot, for the crate concealed a periscope, and the blimp dropped bombs—successfully.

When a blimp discovered a submarine, it would give chase. With its 50 knots of reserve speed it was faster than any warship, much faster than the poky wartime submarine, which could do only 10 or 12 knots on the surface, much less than half that when submerged. If it was lucky the airship might drop a bomb alongside before the sub got away.

And run for cover the submarine always did. It wanted no argument with a ship which could see it under water, could out-run it, and might plunk a bomb alongside before its presence was even suspected.

Airships did get their subs during the war. The records, always incomplete in the case of submarines, whose casualties were invisible, show that British blimps sighted 49 U-boats, led to the destruction of 27. But their greater usefulness lay in the fact that their mere presence sent the underseas craft scuttling for submerged safety.

Between June, 1917, and the end of the war British blimps flew 1,500,000 miles, nearly as many as the Zeppelins. A French Commission made an exhaustive study of dirigible operations after the war, and the late Rear Admiral W. A. Moffett quoted from its reports in summarizing lighter-than-air lessons taken from the war, when he told the Naval Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives that “as far as they could learn, no steamer was ever molested by submarines when escorted by a non-rigid airship.”

France and Italy had long coast lines, used the blimps extensively along the Bay of Biscay, the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, but England found still greater use for them because it was an island. So blimp scouts played a singularly useful role from Land’s End to the Orkneys, stood watch at the mouth of the Firth of Forth, the Solway, the Humber, and the Thames.