waiting to receive us as we stepped out on the ground. Ranged up
alongside this row of heel-clicking, frock-coated, be-medalled and
be-sworded Zeppelin officers was an ancient individual of a type
which seemed to recall the fatherly old Jehus of the piping days
of Oberammergau. Every time the officers saluted, he raised his
hat, bowed low from the waist, and exclaimed, "Good morning to you,
gentlemen." When the last of us had been thus greeted, he called out a
comprehensive, "This way to the carriages, gentlemen," and trotted off
ahead, bell-wether fashion, through the gate.
Here we found waiting four small brakes and a diminutive automobile, the
sum total of the station's resources in rapid transit, according to the
commander. Getting into the motor to precede us as pilot, he asked the
party to dispose itself as best it could in the horse-drawn vehicles.
Then, with old "Jehu" holding the reins of the first vehicle and men in
air-service uniform--utter strangers to horses they were, too--tooling
the other three, we started off along a well-paved road.
A long row of very attractive red brick-and-tile houses of agreeably
varied design were apparently the homes of married officers. Our way led
past only the first five or six of them, but a stirring of lace curtains
in every one of these told that we were running the gauntlet of hostile
glances all the way. One glowering Frau--though in the semi-negligée
of a "Made-in-Germany" _kimono_ of pale mauve, her Brunhildian brow
was crowned with a "permanently Marcelled" _coiffure_ of the kind one
sees in hairdressers' windows--disdained all cover, and so stepped out
upon her veranda just in time to see the elder of her blonde-braided
offspring in the act of waving a Teddy Bear--or it may have been a
woolly lamb or a dachshund--at the tail of the procession of invading
_Engländers_. She was swooping--a mauve-tailed comet with a Gorgon
head--on the luckless "fraternisatress" as my brake turned a corner and
the loom of a block of barracks shut "The Row" from sight, but a series
of shrill squeals, piercing through the raucous grind of steel tyres
on asphalt pavement, told that punishment swift and terrible was being
meted out.
"More activity there than I saw in all of Bremerhaven," laconically
observed the Yankee Ensign sitting next me. "Who said the German woman
was lacking in temperament?"
Driving through the barracks area--where all the men in sight invariably
saluted or stood at attention as we passed--and down an avenue between
small but thickly set pines, the road debouched into the open, and
for the first time we saw all the sheds of the great station at
comparatively close range. Then we were in a position to understand with
what care the site had been chosen and laid out. Occupying the only
rising ground near the coast south of the Kiel Canal, it is quite free
from the constant inundations which threaten the alluvial plain along
the sea. The sheds are visible from a great distance, but it is only
when one draws near them that their truly gigantic size becomes evident.
Of modern buildings of utility, such as factories and exhibition
structures, I do not recall one that is so impressive as these in sheer
immensity. Yet the proportions of the sheds are so good that constant
comparison with some familiar object of known size, such as a man, alone
puts them in their proper perspective.
The sheds are built in pairs, standing side by side, and on a plan which
has brought each pair on the circumference of a circle two kilometres
in diameter. The chord of the arc drawn from one pair of sheds to the
next in sequence is a kilometre in length, while the same distance
separates each pair on the circumference from the huge revolving shed
in the centre of the circle. The whole plan has something of the mystic
symmetry of an ancient temple of the sun. Of the half-dozen pairs of
sheds necessary to complete the circle, four had been constructed and
were in use. Each shed was built to house two airships, or four for the
pair. This gave a capacity of sixteen Zeppelins for the four pairs of
sheds, while the two housed in the revolving shed in the centre brought
the total capacity of the station up to eighteen--a larger number, I
believe, than were ever over England at one time.
Scarcely less impressive than the immensity of the sheds and the broad
conception of the general plan of the station was the solidity of
construction. Everything, from the quarters of the men and the officers
to the hangars themselves, seemed built for all time, and to play its
part in the fulfilment of some far-reaching plan. Costly and scarce as
asphalt must have been in Germany, the many miles of roads connecting
the various sheds were laid deep with it, and, as I had a chance to see
where repairs were going on, on a heavy base of concrete. The sheds
were steel-framed, concrete-floored, and with pressed asbestos sheet
figuring extensively in their sides. All the daylight admitted (as we
saw presently) filtered through great panes of yellow glass in the roof,
shutting out the ultra-violet rays of the sun, which had been found to
cause airship fabric to deteriorate rapidly.
The barracks of the men were of brick and concrete, and were built with
no less regard for appearance than utility. So, too, the officers'
quarters and the Casino, and the large and comfortable-looking houses
for married officers I have already mentioned. All had been built very
recently, many in the by no means uneffective "New Art" style, to the
simple solidity of which the Germans seemed to have turned in reaction
from the Gothic. Beyond all doubt Germany was planning years ahead with
Nordholz, both as to war and peace service. They were quite frank in
speaking of the ambitions they still have in respect of the latter, and
(from casual remarks dropped once or twice by officers) I should be very
much surprised if their plans for developing the Zeppelin as a super-war
machine have been entirely shelved.
The road along which we drove to reach the first pair of sheds to be
visited ran through extensive plantations of scraggly screw-pine,
which appear to have been set--before the site was chosen for an
air station--for the purpose of binding together the loose soil and
preventing its shifting in the heavy winds. Wherever the trees had
encroached too closely upon the hangars, the plantations had been
burned off. Over one considerable area the accumulations of ash in the
depressions showed the destruction to have been comparatively recent,
and this I learned had been burned over, in the panic which followed the
blowing up of the Tondern sheds by British bombing machines last summer,
in order to minimize the risk from the raid which Nordholz itself never
ceased to expect right down to the day of the armistice.
The staggering size of the great sheds became more and more impressive
as we drew nearer, and when the procession finally turned and went
clattering down the roadway between one of the pairs, the towering walls
to left and right blotted out the sky like the cliffs of a rocky cañon.
Halfway through this great defile the officers of the station were
waiting to receive and conduct us round. A hard, fit, capable-looking
lot of chaps they were. Every one of them had at least one decoration,
most of them many, and among these were two or three Orders _Pour de
Mérite_, the German V.C. One at least of them--the great long-distance
pilot, Von Butlar--was famous internationally, and few among the senior
of them (as I was assured shortly) but had been over England more than
once. They were the best of Germany's surviving Zeppelin pilots, and
one was interested to compare the type with that of the pick of her
sea-pilots as we had seen them at Norderney.
Running my eye round their faces as the mingled parties began moving
slowly toward the side door of the first shed to be inspected, I
recognized at once in these Zeppelin officers the same hard, cold,
steady eyes, the same aggressive jaw, and the same wide, thin-lipped
mouth that had predominated right through the officers we had met at
Norderney. These, I should say, are characteristic of the great majority
of the outstanding men of both of Germany's air services. The steady
eye and the firm jaw are, indeed, characteristic of most successful
flying men, but it is the "hardness," not to say cruelty, of the mouth
which differentiates the German from the high-spirited, devil-may-care
air-warrior of England and America.
These Zeppelin pilots seemed to me to run nearer to the German naval
officer type than did the seaplane officers. The latter were nearly
always slender of body, wiry and light of foot, where (though there were
several exceptions, including the great Von Butlar) the former were
mainly of generous girth, with the typical German bull neck corrugating
into rolls of fat above the backs of their collars. A Major of the
R.A.F., who had been walking at my side and doing a bit of "sizing up"
on his own account, put the difference rather well when he said, as we
waited our turn to pass in through the small side door of the great
grey wall of the shed: "If I was taking temporary refuge in a hospital,
convent, or orphan asylum during a German air raid, I'd feel a lot
better about it if I knew that it was some of those seaplane chaps
flying overhead rather than some of this batch. That thick-set one
there, with the cast in his eye and the corded neck, has a face that
wouldn't need much make-up for the Hun villain in a Lyceum melodrama.
Yes, I'm sure these Zepp. drivers will average a jolly lot 'Hunnier'
than the run of their seaplane men."
Up to that moment my experience of German airships had been limited to
the view of them as slender silver pencils of light gliding swiftly
across the searchlight-slashed skies of London, and three or four
inspections of the tangled masses of aluminium and charred wood which
remained when ill-starred raiders had paid the supreme penalty. I was
indebted to the Zeppelins for a number of thrills, but only two or
three of them (and one was in the form of a bomb which gave me a shower
bath of plate glass in Kingsway) were comparable to the sheer wave of
amazement which swept over me when, having passed from the cold grey
light of the winter morning into the warm golden glow of the interior of
the big shed to which we had come, I looked up and beheld the towering
loom of the starboard side of "L-68," with the sweeping lines of her,
fining to points at both ends, exaggerating monstrously a length which
was sufficiently startling even when expressed in figures. The secret of
the hold which the Zeppelin had for so long on the imagination of the
German people was not hard for me to understand after that. It was easy
to see how they could have been led to believe that it could lay Paris
and London in ruins, and that the very sight of it would in time cause
the enemies of their country to sue for peace. One saw, too, how hard it
must have been for them finally to believe that the Zeppelin had been
mastered by the aeroplane, and that the high hopes they had built upon
it had really crashed with the fallen raiders.
There were two Zeppelins in the shed we had entered--"L-68" and
another monster of practically the same size. The former, with great
irregularly shaped strips of fabric dangling all along its under side,
suggested a gigantic shark in process of being ripped up the belly for
skinning. Being deflated, the weight of its frame was supported by
a number of heavy wooden props evenly distributed along either side
from end to end. Its mate, on the other hand, being full of hydrogen
and practically ready for flight, had to be prevented from rising and
bumping against the yellow skylights by a series of light cables, the
upper ends of which were attached at regular intervals along both
sides of the framework, while below they were made fast to heavy steel
shoes which ran in grooves set in the concrete floor. The latter
contrivance--especially an arrangement for the instant slipping of
the cable--was very cleverly devised and greatly interested the Allied
experts.
There were two or three things the popular mind had credited the modern
Zeppelin with embodying which we did not find in these latest examples
of German airship development. One of these was an "anti-bomb protector"
on the top, something after the style of the steel nets erected over
London banks and theatres for the purpose of detonating dropped
explosives before they penetrated the roof. The fact that attempts to
destroy Zeppelins by bomb had invariably--with the exception of the
one brought down by Warneford in Belgium in 1915--resulted in failure,
was doubtless largely responsible for this belief in the existence of
a protecting net, whereas the reason for those failures is probably to
be found in the fact that only about one bomb in a hundred will find
enough resistance in striking an airship to detonate. At any rate,
there were no indications that either the earlier or later Zeppelins we
saw had ever been protected in this way. Indeed, we did not even see a
single one of the machine-guns, which every one had taken for granted
were mounted on top of all Zeppelins to resist aeroplane attack, though
these, of course, with their platforms, may well have been removed in
the course of the disarmament imposed by the armistice terms.
Nor had these late airships the bright golden colour of those that one
saw over London in the earlier raids. That the refulgent tawniness of
them was not due entirely to the reflected beams of the searchlights was
proved by the uncharred fragments of fabric one had picked up at Cuffley
and Potters' Bar. But the German designers had been giving a good deal
of study to invisibility, since that time, with the result that these
new airships were coloured over all their exposed surfaces a dull slaty
black that would hardly reflect a beam of bright sunshine.
The cars, which were both smaller and lighter than those from the
airships brought down in England, were all underslung, and none of them
was enclosed in the framework, as had often been stated. Even these were
not built entirely of metal, heavy fabric being used to close up all
spaces where strength was not required. The bomb-dropping devices had
been removed, but the numbered "switchboard" in the rearmost car, from
which they could be released, still remained. The cars, free from every
kind of protuberance that could meet the resistance of the air, were
effectively and gracefully "stream-lined." The framework and bodies of
the cars were made of the light but strong "duraluminum" alloy, which
the Germans have spent many years in perfecting for this purpose. A
small fragment of strut which I picked up under "L-68" has proved, on
comparison, considerably lighter in specific gravity than similar pieces
from three of the Zeppelins brought down early in the war. Indeed, in
spite of its admixture of heavier metals for "stiffening," the latest
alloy seems scarcely heavier than aluminum itself.
The inspection of an airship to see that it had been disarmed according
to the provisions of the armistice was, as may be imagined, rather
more of a job than a similar inspection of even a "giant" seaplane. In
a Zeppelin that is more or less the same size as the _Mauretania_ the
distances are magnificent, and while most of the inspection was confined
to the cars, that of the wireless, with a search for possible concealed
machine-gun mountings, involved not a little climbing and clambering.
One's first sight of the interior of a deflated Zeppelin--in an inflated
one the bulging ballonettes obstruct the view considerably--is quite as
impressive in its way as the premier survey of it from the outside. No
'tween decks prospect in the largest ship afloat, cut down as it is by
bulkheads, offers a fifth of the unbroken sweep of vision that one finds
opened before him as he climbs up inside the tail of a modern airship.
Although airy ladders and soaring lengths of framework intervene, they
are no more than lace-work fretting the vast space, and the eye roams
free to where the side-braces of the narrow "walk" seem to run together
in the nose. Only, so consummate the illusion wrought on the eye and
brain by the strange perspective, that "meeting point" seems more like
six hundred miles away than six hundred feet. The effect is more like
looking to the end of the universe than to the end of a Zeppelin.
No illusion ever devised on the stage to give "distance" to a scene
could be half so convincing. All that was "cosmic" in you vibrated in
sympathy, and it took but a shake of the reins of the imagination to
fancy yourself tripping off down that unending "Road to Anywhere" to the
music of the Spheres. You--
"Gee, but ain't that a peach of a little 'Gyro'?" filtering up through
the fabric beneath my feet awakened me to the fact that the inspection
of "L-68" having reached the rearmost car, was near its finish.
Clambering back to earth, I found the party just reassembling to go to
the carriages for the drive to the great revolving shed, which was the
next to be visited.
Its central revolving shed is perhaps the most arresting feature of
the Nordholz station. It is built on the lines of a "twin" engine
turntable, with each track housed over, and with every dimension
multiplied twenty-five or thirty-fold. The turning track is laid in a
bowl-shaped depression about ten feet deep and seven hundred feet in
diameter. The floors of both sheds (which stand side by side, with only
a few feet between) are flush with the level of the ground, so that the
airships they house may be run out and in without a jolt. The turning
mechanism, which is in the rear of the sheds and revolves with them, is
entirely driven by electricity. The shifting of a lever sets the whole
great mass in motion, and stops it to a millimetre of the point desired,
the latter being indicated on a dial by a needle showing the direction
of the wind.
The Germans assured us--and on this point the British and American
airship experts were in full agreement with them--that the revolving
shed is absolutely the ideal installation, as it makes it possible to
launch or house a ship directly _into_ the wind, and so allows them to
be used on days when it would be out of the question to launch them
from, or return them to, an ordinary hangar. The one point against it
seems to be its almost prohibitive cost. This central shed at Nordholz
was designed some time before the war, and was completed a year or so
after its outbreak. The Germans did not tell what it had cost, but
they did say that the latter was so great--both in money and in steel
deflected from other uses--that they had not contemplated the building
of another during the continuance of the war.
Another interesting admission of a Zeppelin officer at Nordholz was to
the effect that one of their greatest difficulties had arisen through
the fact that it had been found practicable and desirable to increase
the size of airships far more rapidly than had been contemplated when
most of the existing sheds were designed. Thus many hangars--even at
Nordholz, where practice was most advanced--had become almost useless
for housing the latest Zeppelins. The proof of this was seen at one
of the older sheds which we visited, where both of the airships it
contained had been cut off fore and aft to reduce their lengths
sufficiently to allow them inside. Thirty or forty feet of the framework
of the bows and sterns of each, stripped of their covering fabric, were
standing in the corners. They assured us that while an airship thus
"bobbed" at both ends was not necessarily considered out of commission,
it would take several days of rush work to get it ready for flight,
and that during most of this time sixty to eighty feet of it--the
combined length of the nose and tail which had to be cut off to bring it
inside--would have to remain sticking out, exposed to the weather.
To any one who, like myself, was not an airship expert, but had been
"among those present" at a number of the earlier raids on London, the
last shed visited was the most interesting of all, for it contained
what is in many respects Germany's most historic Zeppelin, the famous
"L-14." Twenty-four bombing flights over England were claimed for this
remarkable veteran, besides many scores of reconnaissance voyages.
All of the surviving pilots appeared to have an abiding belief in
her invulnerability--a not unnatural attitude of the fatalist toward
an instrument which has succeeded in defying fate. This is the way
one of them expressed it, who came and stood by my side during the
quarter-hour in which the inspecting officers were climbing about inside
the glistening yellow shell of the historic raider in an endeavour to
satisfy themselves, that she was, temporarily at least, incapable of
further activities:--
"It will sound strange to you to hear me say it," he said, "but it is a
fact that all of the officers and men at Nordholz firmly believed that
L-14 could not be destroyed. Always we gave her the place of honour in
starting first away for England, and most times she was the last to
come back--of those that did come back. After a while, no matter how
long she was late, we always said, 'Oh, but it is old L-14; no use to
worry about her; she will come home at her own time.' And come home
she always did. All of our greatest pilots flew in her at one time or
another and came back safe. Then they were given newer and faster ships,
and sometimes they came home, and sometimes they did not. ----, who was
experimenting with one of the smaller swift types of half-rigids when
it was brought down north of London--the first to be destroyed over
England--had flown L-14 many times, and come home safe, and so had,
----, our greatest pilot, who was also lost north of London, very near
where the other was brought down, and where we think you had some kind
of trap. L-14 saw these and many other Zeppelins fall in flames and the
more times she came home the more was our belief in her strength. The
pilot who flew her was supposed to take more chances (because she really
ran no risks, you see), and if you have ever read of how one Zeppelin
in each raid always swooped low to drop her bombs, you now know that
she was that one. Because we had this superstitious feeling about her
we were very careful that, in rebuilding and repairing her, much of her
original material should be left, so that whatever gave her her charmed
life should not be removed. Although our duraluminum of the present is
much lighter and stronger than the first we made, L-14 still has most
of her original framework; and, although improved technical instruments
have been installed, all her cars are much as when she was built. You
will see how much clumsier and heavier they are than those of the newer
types. And now, for some months, we have used L-14 as a 'school' ship,
in which to train our young pilots. You see, her great traditions must
prove a wonderful inspiration to them."
A few minutes later I had a hint of one type of this "inspiration,"
when a pilot (who had fallen into step with me as we took a turn across
the fields on foot to see the hangars of the "protecting flight" of
aeroplanes) mentioned that he had taken part in a number of the 1916
raids over the Midland industrial centres. Knowing the Stygian blackness
in which this region was wrapped during all of the Zeppelin raiding
time, I asked him if he had not found it difficult to locate his
objectives in a country which was plunged in complete darkness.
"Not so difficult as you might think," was the reply. "There were always
the rivers and canals, which we knew perfectly from careful study.
Besides, a town is a very large mark, and you seem to 'sense' the
nearness of great masses of people, anyhow. Perhaps the great anxiety
they are in establishes a sort of mental contact with you, whose brain
is very tense and receptive. Effective bombing is very largely a matter
of psychology, you see."
I saw. Indeed, I think I saw rather more than he intended to convey.