CHAPTER V

Effect on Aeronautics of Post-War Reaction

Development of non-rigid airships slowed down after the impetus of the war had spent itself, as was the case in aeronautics generally and in all defense efforts.

With the Armistice of November, 1918, the world was through with war. Men relaxed and reaction set in. There would not be another major war in a hundred years. Well-meaning people everywhere grasped at the straw of universal peace, of negotiated settlement of difficulties between nations, of disarmament of military forces to the point of being little more than an international police force. Germany, the trouble-maker, had been disarmed and handcuffed, would make no more trouble. The world, breathing freely after four years, wanted only to be left alone.

Today with major countries striving feverishly to build guns and navies, it is hard to believe that naïve nations were scrapping ships only a few years ago and pledging themselves to limit future building. No one in the immediate post-war era could believe that men must prepare for another war, an all-out war more terrible and ruthless than men had known,—one which would send flame-spitting machines down from the air and through woods and fields, against which conventional foot soldiers would be as helpless as if they carried bows and arrows. Wishing only to live at peace with other nations, we could conceive no need to make defense preparation against frightfulness.

Congress was divided between “big navy men” and “little navy men,” and generals and admirals who brought in programs for expansion or even reasonable maintenance were shouted down. The public was in no mood to listen.

If the usefulness of the Army and Navy was discounted during this period, more so was the rising new Air Force. Few were interested in airplanes, and these chiefly wartime pilots, who sought to keep aviation alive, made a precarious living flying wartime “Jennies” and “Standards” out of cow pastures, carrying passengers at a dollar a head, or how much have you. The word “haywire” came into the language, as they made open-air repairs to wings and fuselage with baling wire.

Lighter-than-air had no Rickenbackers or Richthofens to point to, but got some advantage during this period from the activities of the Shenandoah, completed in 1923, and the Los Angeles, delivered in 1924. These ships could not be regarded as military craft, carried no arms. The Shenandoah was experimental, based on a 1916 design. The Los Angeles was technically a commercial ship, with passenger accommodations built in, could be used only for training.

This grew out of the fact that the Allies planned to order the Zeppelin works at Friedrichshafen torn down but had held up the order long enough for it to turn out one more ship. This last ship would be given to United States in lieu of the Zeppelin this country would have received from Germany, if the airship crews, like those of the surface fleet, had not scuttled their craft after the Armistice, to keep them from falling into enemy hands. The Allies stipulated that the Los Angeles should carry no armament. It took a specific waiver from them for the ship to take part several years later in fleet maneuvers.

Other airship activities in this country were at a minimum. The blimps, little heard of in this country during War I, remained in the background. A joint board of the two services gave the Navy responsibility for developing rigid airships, the Army to take non-rigids and semi-rigids. The Navy maintained a few post-war blimps for training, had little funds except for maintenance.

The Army, having Wright Field to do its engineering and experimental work, fared somewhat better, carried on a training and something of a development program. It built bases at Scott Field, Ill., and Langley Field, Va., ordered one or two non-rigid ships a year, purchased a semi-rigid ship from Italy, ordered another, the RS-1, from Goodyear, operated it successfully.

The Army’s non-rigids, however, were overshadowed by the Navy’s rigids and even more by its own airplanes, with the result finally that the Chief of the Air Corps, Major General O. O. Westover, a believer in lighter-than-air, an airship as well as airplane pilot, and a former winner of the James Gordon Bennett cup in international balloon racing, told Congress bluntly that there was no point in dragging along, that unless funds were appropriated for a real airship program the Army might as well close up shop. And this step Congress, in the end, took, and the Army blimps and equipment were transferred to the Navy, and the experimental program started by the one service was carried on by the other.

The rigid ships were in more favorable position because they seemed to have commercial possibilities, and it was the long-range policy of the government to aid transportation. Government support to commercial airships could be justified under the policy by which the government gave land grants to the railways, built highways for the automobile, deepened harbors and built lighthouses for the steamships, laid out airports for planes, gave airmail contracts to keep the U. S. merchant flag floating on the high seas and air routes open over land.

On this theory Navy airships, even though semi-military, got some support during the reaction period, because they might blaze a trail later for commercial lines—which, with ships and crews and terminals, would be available in emergency as a secondary line of defense, like the merchant marine.

The little non-rigid blimps remained the neglected Cinderellas of post-war days.

The Goodyear Company at Akron, which had built 1000 balloons of all types and 100 airships during and after the war, stepped into the picture during this period with a modest program of its own. The first of the Goodyear fleet, the pioneer, helium-inflated Pilgrim, now in the Smithsonian Institute, was built in 1925.

In building this ship, Mr. Litchfield and his company indicated their belief in the value of big airships for trans-oceanic travel, for which the blimps would provide inexpensive training for pilots, and experience in operating under varying weather conditions.

The Pilgrim, the Puritan, the Vigilant, the Mayflower and the rest of the Goodyear fleet which followed—named after cup defenders in international yacht racing—would also uncover during the course of day-after-day operations, improvements in ships and operating technique, which would be available to its customers, the Army and Navy.

In building its own ships, Goodyear was following the tradition of American industry, which does not sit back and merely build goods to order, but has sought by developing better goods to anticipate and stimulate customer demand. In the automobile industry, for example, self-starters, closed cars, steel bodies, balloon tires, streamlining, and the rest were initiated by industry to increase public acceptance and further popularize the automobile. By building its own airships and flying them, Goodyear hoped to expand the market for military and commercial airships.

The doldrum period, which made progress difficult, came to an end with dramatic suddenness. In the year 1927 a youthful pilot flew an airplane, alone, across the Atlantic ocean, and in the following year a middle-aged scientist made a round trip from Europe to America by airship, with 24 people aboard. The imagination of America and the world took fire. Aeronautics started anew.

Perhaps no events in years have appealed so fully to the public consciousness or had such dynamic effects. Almost from the day of Lindbergh’s flight and the Graf Zeppelin’s arrival at Lakehurst, aeronautical engineers found themselves with money to spend in research and machinery. Airports unrolled across the carpet of America, night lighting came in, pilots became business men, appropriations were rushed through Congress, state assemblies, and city councils, and aeronautics became Big Business almost over night. The period of inaction and of reaction was over.