Copyright © 2020 by Alexander Rose All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. R ANDOM H OUSE and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Names: Rose, Alexander, author. Title: Empires of the sky: zeppelins, airplanes, and two men’s epic duel to rule the world / Alexander Rose. Description: First edition. | New York: Random House, [2020] Identifiers: LCCN 2019024115 (print) | LCCN 2019024116 (ebook) | ISBN 9780812989977 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780812989991 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH : Aeronautics—Biography. | Zeppelin, Ferdinand, Graf von, 1838– 1917. | Eckener, Hugo, 1868–1954. | Trippe, J. T. (Juan Terry), 1899-1981. | Airships—History—20th century. | Airplanes—History—20th century. | Aeronautics, Commercial—History—20th century. Classification: LCC TL 539 . R 635 2020 (print) | LCC TL 539 (ebook) | DDC 387.7092/2—dc23 LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/ 2019024115 LC ebook record available at lccn.loc.gov/ 2019024116 Ebook ISBN 9780812989991 randomhousebooks.com Book design by Simon M. Sullivan, adapted for ebook Cover design: Pete Garceau Cover photograph: Imagno/Getty Images ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0 Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Epigraph Prologue: October 9, 1936 1. The Aeronaut 2. The Fever Dream 3. The Government of the Air 4. Aerial Navigation 5. The System 6. The Pivot 7. A Wonderfully Ingenious Toy 8. The Folly 9. The Surprise 10. The Equestrian 11. Up into the Empyrean 12. Conquerors of the Celestial Ocean 13. The Flames of Hell 14. The Miracle 15. Kings of the Sky 16. Zeppelin City 17. The Wonder Weapons 18. The Lucky Ship 19. The High Priests 20. Z-Ships 21. Pirates of the Air 22. China Show 23. The Beginning or the End? 24. Bringing Back the Dead 25. The Visionary 26. The Stolen Horse 27. One Card 28. Queen of the Air 29. Annus Horribilis 30. The Fox 31. The Trap 32. The Boom 33. Terra Incognita 34. El Dorado 35. The Emissary 36. Survival of the Fittest 37. Around the World 38. The Monster 39. Engage the Enemy More Closely 40. The Duelists 41. The Great Circle 42. Master of Ocean Aircraft 43. The Hooked Cross 44. The Ledgers 45. The Medusa 46. The Labyrinth 47. Here Be Dragons 48. Master and Commander 49. Mr. and Mrs. Brown 50. Es Ist Das Ende 51. The Infernal Device 52. Resurrection 53. King Across the Water Epilogue Photo Insert Dedication Acknowledgments Bibliography Notes By Alexander Rose About the Author The students of the problem are divided into two camps or schools, each of which expects flight to be compassed by somewhat different apparatus. These are: 1: AERONAUTS , who believe that success is to come through some sort of balloon, and that the apparatus must be lighter than the air which it displaces. 2: AVIATORS , who point to the birds, believe that the apparatus must be heavier than the air, and hope for success by purely mechanical means. Curiously enough, there seems to be very little concert of study between these two schools. Each believes the other so wrong as to have no chance of ultimate success. O CTAVE C HANUTE , Aerial Navigation (1891) A Prologue October 9, 1936 PENCIL BALANCES UPRIGHT on its unsharpened end. A glass of water, its contents motionless, waits nearby. A tower of playing cards looms. A steward bumps the table as he shimmers past. The pencil falls. The water ripples. The cards tumble. He offers his sincere apologies and hurriedly tidies up. There are scores of guests aboard today, most dressed immaculately in dark suits and sober ties, the uniform of the prewar American elite class. According to the newspapers, their cumulative net worth is more than a billion dollars—that’s in 1936 dollars, when a billion was real money. With so much cash in human form walking around, their hosts have gone to great lengths to ensure a perfect day. The list of the Great and the Good seems endless on this, the so- called Millionaires’ Flight. As John B. Kennedy, the NBC radio announcer broadcasting live from this midday summit, quips for his listeners: “We’ve got enough notables...to make the Who’s Who say what’s what.” Among the grandees present is Winthrop Aldrich, chairman of Chase National Bank, the mightiest bank in the world. His nephew Nelson Rockefeller works, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, for Chase, and he’s also here today. On the business side, among many others there are Paul Litchfield (president of Goodyear Tire & Rubber), Medley Whelpley (president of the American Express Bank), and John Hertz (owner of Hertz Drive- Ur-Self System). The airline industry, in particular, has shown up in force. Colorful Jack Frye is president of TWA, and Eddie Rickenbacker, legendary World War I fighter ace, captains Eastern Air. Lucius Manning is there, representing the secretive Errett Lobban Cord, the transport tycoon who owns American Airlines. Federal officials are there, too, nearly all from the Department of Commerce’s aeronautics branch, a body dedicated to overseeing America’s development of civil aviation. Complementing them is a contingent from the navy, including Admiral William Standley, the chief of naval operations, and Rear Admiral Arthur Cook, who heads its Bureau of Aeronautics. Luncheon is served. In this dining room, furnished in hyper- modern style, barely a corner can be seen; all is graceful curves and vibrant colors. The sleek tables and chairs are made of chromed aluminum tubing, the fittings of futuristic plastic. There is none of the heavy wood and garish brass, the old-fashioned bric-a-brac and busy chintz so characteristic of the passé Edwardian era. Indian Swallow Nest soup, cold Rhine salmon, and potato salad precede the main course of tenderloin steak in goose liver sauce, Chateau potatoes, and Beans à la Princesse (accompanied by a cheeky 1934 Piesporter Goldtröpfchen—a Riesling), followed by a Carmen salad and iced California melon, washed down with a sparkling Feist Brut (1928). Strong Turkish coffee, light Austrian pastries, and fine French liqueurs finish off the meal. As the staff clear the tables, the guests walk over to a slanted bank of picture windows running the length of the room. About six hundred feet below spreads a delightful panorama of coastal New England in the fall. To one side, a cobalt sea peppered with yachts; to the other, an emerald coastline edged by endless reddening forest, interrupted only by the occasional town. It is a grand view even for such exalted company. But there is hardly time to fix one’s gaze. The passing cavalcade is changing every moment, after all. Soon they’re over Boston. In the streets, darkened by a great shadow, the cars stop and the thronging crowds pause in awe and astonishment at the strange object passing directly overhead. Then they wave and cheer. The men sailing above return the compliment, casting off blue- blooded reserve to exult in the adulation and envy of their audience. Watching over everyone is Herr Hitler, as the newspapers politely refer to him, whose portrait presides sternly over the room. Few find it overbearing: He did an admirable job, after all, hosting the Berlin Olympics a few months ago. Apart from the brief unpleasantness of 1917–18, Germany and America are friends, always will be, and there is every reason to believe, especially once this clubby, boozy afternoon is over, that Berlin and Washington will deepen their relationship. Playing gracious hosts are the Germans. They have sent no less a personage than Hans Luther, currently their ambassador to Washington and the former chancellor of Germany and president of the Reichsbank. He’s accompanied by a couple of army and navy attachés, who chat about military matters with the American admirals. But the exclusive focus of attention, the real reason why all are gathered here today, is one German in particular—Dr. Hugo Eckener. In his late sixties, he is buzzcutted and goateed, and as German as one can be. He also happens to be one of the most famous men in the world. Eckener lacks the privilege, wealth, or station of the others assembled, but his ambition and audacity are legendary. He is the greatest airshipman of all time. With more flying hours under his belt than anyone else alive or dead, he is master of the aery realm. He is the anointed heir of the father of the airship, Count von Zeppelin, and just as it was Joshua, not Moses, who led the Israelites into the Promised Land, it is Eckener who has surpassed his late mentor’s achievements by conceiving the greatest and grandest airship of them all, the most marvelous technological and aeronautical wonder of the age—the very vessel, in fact, in which the titans are soaring. Hindenburg The ultimate transoceanic cruiser. Painted a metallic silver to better glint in the sun, the Hindenburg can fly at 84 miles per hour and is capable, or so it is said, of traveling ten thousand miles—enough to go from New York to Berlin and back with a couple of thousand to spare — in a single hop. It is beyond safe. Since 1912, Eckener’s civilian airships have flown 48,778 passengers 1,193,501 miles, over 20,877 hours of flight time, with neither a fatality nor even a serious injury. Considering that in this same year of 1936 alone, 36,126 Americans will die in car crashes and 305 airplane passengers in 1,739 accidents, the Zeppelins’ record is second to none. From a passenger standpoint, the Hindenburg is wondrous. It typically makes the transatlantic run between Germany and New York in just over two days, whereas the world’s fastest cruise ships need five, and the slower ones up to ten. The Hindenburg is so light that it can be docked with two ropes, so nimble that it can revolve on its own axis, and so stable that the passengers can entertain one another with little party tricks involving pencils, water, and cards. Unlike on aircraft, where stomach-churning yaws and pitches are common, no one ever feels nauseous aboard the Hindenburg . During liftoff, there is simply no sense of acceleration, motion, or vibration, and while on airplanes the noise level from the engines can be deafening, on an airship all that can be heard is a dull hum. They’re quieter than an unbusy office. The sheer immensity of the Hindenburg astounds. At 805 feet, it is significantly longer than the Golden Gate Bridge’s towers are tall, and one could stand a thirteen-story building within its cathedral of elvish latticework delicately lacing together fourteen miles of girders with eighty of steel wire. Eckener knows his guests are impressed. He needs them to be. Every single one of them has been invited for a reason. Each man represents a potential interest that needs placating, persuading, seducing, so that Eckener can at last fulfill the grand dream behind today’s congress: forging an international partnership that will create an airship armada covering Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Without their participation, the Hindenburg may be the last of its kind to roam the skies. Eckener would never admit it, of course, but the airship is falling ever further behind. The airplane may be a beast that guzzles fuel and carries a relative handful of passengers, and it is far from achieving the Holy Grail of transport—a nonstop transatlantic trip—but sheer quantity has its own quality. In the United States, just in 1936, the airlines transported 931,683 passengers, and its factories produced 3,010 civilian aircraft. There is only one Hindenburg, built at colossal expense, and it carries around fifty passengers. Success today will nevertheless turn the tide against the airplane. To win, Eckener needs to beat one man. For years they have been bitter rivals, but today is the first time they have met. So far they’ve said little to each other, but each is watching the other carefully, scanning for weakness. This other man, young, pudgy, jowly, is the head of the only American airline with major international routes—and lethal when it comes to getting his own way. Juan Terry Trippe controls Pan American Airways, the greatest airline in the world. While his airplanes can’t get across the moat of the Atlantic, they soon will, and Trippe is determined to consign the Hindenburg and its like to the dustbin of history. He shall not rest until Pan American’s silvery squadrons radiate outward to the very ends of the earth. Such is the setting on this day of the Millionaires’ Flight, as the Hindenburg has long since rounded Boston and is moving like a speeding cloud toward its final destination, the naval air base at Lakehurst, New Jersey. At 5:17 P.M., the Hindenburg settles into its quiet, motionless hover as its four mighty Daimler engines cut thrust. From the control car, Captain Ernst Lehmann dumps water ballast and valves hydrogen to ease the airship gently down. Crewmen release two ropes, each four hundred feet long and two inches thick, which snake down through the air. Below, the ground crew pick them up and heave the Hindenburg toward the mooring mast. Ever so slowly, the airship is winched down to the ground. Its giant body subsides and the groundsmen bind the airship down with ropes, hooks, and stakes, as the Lilliputians did Gulliver. Inside, the tipsy guests lament the finale of their worthy expedition, what Kennedy calls “the end of a perfect day in the air.” And then, just like that, it’s over. The gangway is lowered, and the millionaires, grasping their hats in the wind, descend the steps. Yet another flawless performance by the world’s most majestic flying machine. Trippe, for his part, remains tight-lipped. Eckener’s coup is his humiliation. He suspects the deal is done: America will soon be in the airship business and Zeppelin will duel with Pan American for mastery of the coming air empire. This evening, Dr. Hugo Eckener will soar home in triumph aboard the Hindenburg , its future secured, amid the parting fog and clearing skies. 1 His airship has exactly seven months left to live, but it was born some seventy-three years earlier, when a young German count visiting America asked for a room for the night. O 1. The Aeronaut N A UGUST 17, 1863, America was engulfed in civil war. The battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg had been fought just six weeks earlier, but Mr. Belote, the manager of the International Hotel, the finest in the city of Saint Paul, Minnesota, didn’t care about the Blue and the Gray. That night, he was more concerned about the brown— the brown mud, that is—being tracked into his establishment by the hollow-cheeked, rough-whiskered frontiersman claiming to be a “Graf von Zeppelin.” He certainly didn’t look like one of the fancy European aristocrats Mr. Belote had read about. Yet he sounded courtly, even if he spoke English, haltingly, with a strong German accent. Upon closer inspection, his clothes, too, were tailored, though torn and ragged and not altogether suited to the backwoods; he was evidently a man who purchased rather than shot what he wore. Still, at the International Hotel, they didn’t let rooms to riff-raff or charlatans. 1 The man, sensing the manager’s reluctance, explained that he had spent the last three weeks roaming the wilderness. 2 Fueled by the romantic fantasies of deerslayers exploring primeval American forests he had picked up from reading too many James Fenimore Cooper novels, he had elected to travel along an abandoned fur-trade trail. It was a wonder he hadn’t died. Having quickly run out of food and ammunition and beset by mosquitoes and heat, he had been saved by some Chippewa Indians who showed him how to hunt ducks, build a shelter, and gather eggs. 3 It had been quite an adventure, but he was ready for a comfortable bed, a bath, and a hearty dinner—and had the money at hand. Once he saw the dollars, Mr. Belote relented: He’d be only too pleased to offer such a distinguished gentleman his best accommodations. Due to return east on the next day’s train, the man paid for a single night’s stay. The following morning, August 18, woken by a commotion outside, Zeppelin drew the curtains and surveyed the open lot across the street. And there he spied a large silken balloon, gaily painted and patchworked, and fitted with a small wicker basket. He’d heard of these legendary, magical things, of course—everyone knew of them— but never had he encountered one. Right there and then, Zeppelin decided to postpone his trip back home. — Z EPPELIN WAS INDEED a fancy European aristocrat and not a charlatan, but how he ended up in Saint Paul, Minnesota, is something of a roundabout story. He could trace his ancestry back to a minor thirteenth-century baron named Heynrikus de Zepelin from Mecklenburg in northern Germany whose kinsmen served as mercenaries in the Swedish, Danish, and Prussian armies that occupied their time ravaging and ravishing their way across Europe. For the next five hundred years, successive Zepelins did little other than demonstrate a prodigious talent for drunkenly gambling away the family’s estates, ultimately obliging an impecunious, teenaged Ferdinand Ludwig to roam far south and enter the military service of Duke Frederick of Württemberg in the late eighteenth century. When all-conquering Napoleon upgraded the duchy of Württemberg into a kingdom in 1806, Ferdinand was promoted to count and changed his name to “Zeppelin” (the Württembergers preferred a double p ). In 1834, his son Friedrich did very well, marrying Amélie Macaire d’Hogguer, the daughter of a wealthy Franco-Swiss cotton manufacturer, and Ferdinand—our count—came along four years later. He was born into a world of international nobility, where a title served as passport to the elites in Saint Petersburg, Vienna, London, and Paris—or even, in a pinch, Berlin, a backwater. Following the family’s martial tradition, Zeppelin entered the Royal Army College at Ludwigsburg in October 1855 and emerged as a lieutenant with one of Württemberg’s most swagger regiments, the 8th, based in Stuttgart, the kingdom’s capital, in September 1858. During the Franco-Austrian War of 1859 (Württemberg was an Austrian ally), he saw no action while serving on the staff of the quartermaster-general as a specialist in topography and logistics. That Zeppelin, a curious mix of the unconventional and the traditional, was even in the quartermaster-general’s office rather than serving on the higher-status front lines marked him as quirky. Since boyhood, Zeppelin had been fascinated by mechanics, by making machinery work, by practical invention. Before being admitted to the Royal Army College, Zeppelin had attended the prestigious polytechnic school in Stuttgart. Such institutions were in the vanguard of imparting a technical, scientific, and engineering education to smart middle-class boys and ambitious working-class lads. Rich young nobles like Zeppelin were few and far between. Still stranger, during his time with the quartermaster-general, Zeppelin took temporary leave to enroll at the University of Tübingen to study (though he did not take a degree) mechanical sciences—again, a field rather déclassé for a man of his pedigree. It was a fashion of the era for young officers to tour the armies of foreign nations and report on their armaments and tactics; for those of Zeppelin’s breeding, of course, these semi-official visits also allowed them to forge connections with their upper-class counterparts. In 1861–62, the young count visited Vienna, where he was introduced to the Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph I and watched army exercises. Then he was off to Trieste, to visit the fleet, and then the well-known fleshpots of Genoa, Marseille, and Paris, to visit the girls (as he explained to his morally upright, purse-strings-holding father, “In order to know the different people better, I have had to devote some of my time to women”). At Compiègne in northern France he was a guest of Emperor Napoleon III, whose mother had, small world, once been the Zeppelins’ neighbor. Later he traveled to Belgium and Denmark before going to England, where he hobnobbed at the Army and Navy Club and the Athenaeum before being invited to watch the Grenadier Guards go through their paces. 4 America, then enduring its Civil War, beckoned. How could one miss the clash of those gargantuan armies clanking through the Virginia hinterland? Needing permission from his king for yet another furlough, Zeppelin explained that “the Americans are especially inventive in the adaptation of technical developments for military purposes” and pledged to seek information useful for the Württemberg army. 5 That was pro forma, of course. His real hope, as he confided to his sister, was that, as he had missed all the fun during the Franco- Austrian War, combat “might be revealed to me in its bloody truth and that the phantom [of experiencing real fighting], before which I had hitherto quailed, might become a living reality.” To his father, who was unenthusiastic about the idea, he laid out a rather more elevated motive. He wished to discover the extraordinary vibrancy of American democracy, he said, but Zeppelin senior nevertheless forbade him, saying that the existence of slavery and the fact that commoners could vote—he was unclear as to which was worse —“exclude[d] them from playing a worthy part in civilization.” His son persisted, and in the end the paterfamilias gave way, as Zeppelin knew he would. In April 1863, Zeppelin boarded the Cunard ship Australasia for the long voyage to America. 6 After docking in New York on May 6, Zeppelin traveled to Washington, D.C., checking in to the posh Willard Hotel near the White House. His title, as usual, opened doors—even in the great republic. (Zeppelin noticed that “America is definitely a land of contrasts. Everything aristocratic is in opposition to its fundamental ideas, yet nowhere is so much fuss made about a simple traveling count.”) The Prussian ambassador, Baron von Gerolt, introduced him to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, who in turn arranged an audience with President Abraham Lincoln, who took time out of a busy day running a war to meet with an obscure junior officer from a small faraway kingdom. Lincoln was unlike anyone else Zeppelin had ever met in his limited social circle. When the count turned up, dressed to the nines in the traditional frock coat and top hat, he was surprised by the president’s utter absence of pretense. When Zeppelin entered the room, “a very tall spare figure with a large head and long untidy hair and beard, exceptionally prominent cheek-bones, but wise and kindly eyes” rose like a specter from behind the desk. When Zeppelin asked for a pass allowing him to travel freely among the Northern armies as an observer, pompously adding that his military credentials included being descended from half a millennium’s worth of knights and counts, Lincoln, a commoner born penniless and landless, remarked that he certainly wouldn’t hold that against him. A puzzled Zeppelin got his pass. 7 On May 28, Zeppelin attached himself to the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac, where a friendly German-speaking officer named Captain Frederick Rosencrantz steered him through the inevitable culture clashes. After being mistaken for a major general several times, for instance, Zeppelin cut off his lieutenant’s heavy epaulettes and gold-trimmed velvet collar, which so distinguished him from the tousled, down-home look affected by American officers in the field. One night he attended the mess of General Carl Schurz, commanding the XI Corps, and he couldn’t believe his ears when Schurz outlined a plan of attack and a mere captain declared, “Surely, General, you won’t do anything as stupid as that.” While everyone laughed, including Schurz, Zeppelin was incredulous that such insolence was tolerated, even encouraged, in any army. He did get to see the “phantom” of combat, though. Zeppelin volunteered to accompany a detachment to map General Robert E. Lee’s positions, only for some Confederate cavalry to hotly pursue them for a short time. Zeppelin found the experience thrilling, but ultimately he wasn’t impressed with American soldiering. As he reported, there was “no systematic cooperation, no local patrol work, no enemy intelligence, no general staff, no maps, no corps combining all the different arms, no tactics adapted to local topography—all these shortcomings continue even after several years of war.” There was nothing, as far as he could see, that the Yankees could teach Germans about fighting. And that was why he missed Gettysburg, instead embarking on an arduous trip west to see the famously vast frontier for himself. Like many foreign visitors, he would be amazed by the sheer size of his host country. “After traveling so long [three days] at the speed of an American locomotive over a level countryside,” he wrote to his father, “one cannot but feel that this can go on and on and that there is no end to it.” 8 His airships would later sail placidly across such colossal distances, but for the time being he satisfied himself with walking across the street to see the balloonist. — P ROFESSOR J OHN S TEINER (he sometimes preferred “Captain,” an honorary military rank, as his scholarly one was invented) was having another hard day. His first flight had been scheduled the day before for 4 P.M. , but at the last minute local gas company officials had informed him that they were rationing his household coal gas because customers were complaining about his monopolizing their supply. Unable to fill the balloon bag, he’d had to cancel the scheduled flights, and today he faced the prospect of disappointing yet more thrill- seekers, if not for lack of gas then for the winds that were picking up. Worse, tomorrow’s forecast called for heavy rain in the morning. Saint Paul was looking worryingly like an expensive write-off, a disaster in the making for itinerant aeronauts like Steiner who subsisted hand to mouth. 9 Steiner’s balloon, heroically christened Hercules —though the only Herculean thing about it was the effort it took to get it aloft—was a forlorn thing. Normally, by now he’d be astounding crowds eager to accompany him on rides several hundred feet up. On these safe “captive” or “Army” ascensions, as they were known, the balloon would be tied to the ground by rope so as to prevent a “free flight”—the type of untethered flying reserved for professionals like Steiner. Free flights were inherently risky. It was impossible to judge when, how, and where you would come down. Six years earlier, for instance, Steiner had made his name as a daredevil by attempting to fly across Lake Erie into Canada. Upon encountering a fierce storm, his balloon hit the water and bounced along like a skipping stone. Steiner survived only by jumping out. His balloon, the third he’d wrecked, wasn’t so fortunate. 10 So, when Zeppelin strode toward Steiner on that morning of August 18, the despondent aeronaut only perked up when he realized that here was a fellow German, though at the time “Germany” was merely a convenient geographical expression for a place, jigsawed into dozens of minor kingdoms, grand duchies, princely states, principalities, and free cities, that wouldn’t exist until united in 1871. Steiner, it transpired, was from Bavaria, adjacent to Zeppelin’s Württemberg. Aside from this coincidence, Zeppelin and Steiner had little else in common. Steiner had emigrated to America in 1853 at the age of seventeen, and his background was shadowy. He preferred it that way. Even his name was studiedly innocuous. He was a man with no past, but one who had forged, in a manner of speaking, his own future in the New World. A single clear photograph exists of him, taken sometime during the Civil War: Steiner, with the bushy mustache and manly muttonchop whiskers popular at the time, wears a brand-new officer’s coat nattily outfitted with store-bought gold epaulettes and brass buttons. He had volunteered for a civilian position in the Union’s nascent Balloon Corps and, experienced aeronauts being few and far between, was given command of the Eagle in Cairo, Illinois. Later, he was sent west and in April 1862 was using his miniature tethered balloon to observe Confederate positions and to direct artillery fire. That December, he resigned from the Balloon Corps following a dispute