`Here it comes, ladies and gentlemen…and what a sight it is, a thrilling one, just a marvelous sight…It’s burst into flames!…Oh my, this is terrible…It’s burning, bursting into flames and is falling… This is one of the worst catastrophes of the world.’
Herbert Morrison, WLS radio
Imagine being there at that muddy airfield in New Jersey on May 6, 1937, exactly 60 years ago now, and witnessing one of those moments that has become forever fixed in the collective memory of this country, a human tragedy and the fiery, fatal end of an unusual and dangerous and expensive form of air travel.
You would never forget that day or that scene, of course. The suddenness of it, the fireball, the blast of heat, the eerie sight of that incredibly massive airship, burning so fast and seeming to fall so slowly, as if it were a flaming fragment of silvery tissue paper. You would always remember the confusion, the terror, the overwhelming sadness.
Only a few minutes earlier, however, as the great Hindenburg approached at dusk on that Thursday, you likely would have felt only awe and expectation.
And as you watched, people back in Chicago who had tuned in to radio station WLS would hear it all happen from reporter Herbert Morrison. (And who can ever forget his breaking, anguished voice in the final seconds of his report?)
Morrison had been dispatched to the Lakehurst Naval Air Station, which was 40 miles south of Manhattan, to cover the wealthy Chicagoans who would be departing on the Hindenburg for Europe to attend the coronation of King George VI, scheduled for the next Wednesday.
It was to be a quick turnaround at the Lakehurst landing site. As soon as the gigantic German airship touched down from its flight across the Atlantic and unloaded its passengers, the next group would climb aboard for the return trip to Frankfurt, which was to begin almost immediately.
To read a transcript of Morrison’s broadcast of the Hindenburg’s arrival and to know what was about to unfold gives an odd poignancy to his words:
“Here it comes, ladies and gentlemen. And what a sight it is, a thrilling one, just a marvelous sight! It’s coming down out of the sky pointed to us, and towards the mooring mast. The mighty diesel motors roar, the propellers biting into the air and throwing it back into galelike whirlpools . . . No one wonders that this great floating palace can travel through the air at such a speed with these powerful motors behind it. The sun is striking the windows of the observation deck and sparkling like glittering jewels against a background of black velvet.”
The Hindenburg carried 36 passengers and a crew of 61 on its last flight. Four passengers were men from Chicago; three would survive. The 36 who died that day included 13 passengers, 22 crew members and a sailor on the ground who manned the docking lines.
The exact cause of the explosion has never been determined, but in looking back from today’s vantage point, it’s easy to be puzzled about why anyone would want to ride in what seems now to have been a death trap and to be struck by the geopolitical circumstances that contributed to the catastrophe.
In effect, the Hindenburg was an aluminum-ribbed gas balloon that was ready to burst into fire. It was filled with one of the most explosive and flammable gases in the universe, hydrogen, which also was wonderfully buoyant.
An earlier disaster
An explosion and crash of an airship in Chicago’s Loop in 1919 had already awakened this country to the perils of hydrogen.
It happened on July 21, in the afternoon. The Wingfoot Express, one of the first Goodyear airships, had soared over the city, set down in late afternoon in Grant Park, then taken off to return to its South Side hangar.
Above La Salle Street and Jackson Boulevard, a fire erupted, and the balloon plunged through the skylight of the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank; in addition to three persons aboard the Wingfoot, 10 bank employees were killed.
The outcry resulted in a ban on hydrogen in American airships, to be replaced by the less buoyant but non-flammable helium. But helium was not available to the Hindenburg because of the international tensions that shortly would lead to World War II.
The United States was the source of the world’s supply of helium, and concerns about the threat to peace of the Hitler government in Germany prompted President Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare helium a war material and prohibit its export to Germany–or, for that matter, to other European nations.
The Hindenburg’s passengers were unfailingly informed of the hazards of fire from hydrogen. Upon boarding, they were required to turn over their matches and cigarette lighters, although they were permitted to smoke in a special, air-locked smoking room entered through a system of double doors.
Cigarettes, cigars and pipes were lighted in this room by an electric coil, like a car’s lighter, that glowed but did not flame.
The airship’s galley also was protected by double doors, and the Hindenburg’s crew wore rubber-soled shoes to prevent the generation of sparks from static electricity.
To try to understand why anyone would choose to fly by hydrogen-filled airship, it may be helpful to imagine yourself in the shoes of someone from that time, whether their soles are rubber or leather.
Imagine also that you are a Chicagoan, and a well-heeled one at that, rich enough to be immune to the ravages of the Depression, which still was raging in 1937.
On a lark, you have decided to go to London for the coronation.
And because you pride yourself on being adventurous and open to the latest technology, you decide to travel on the Hindenburg.
You have done your homework and know a bit of the history of airships and, more important, their pluses and minuses.
You learn that the Hindenburg was built and operated by the Zeppelin Airship Co. of Friedrichshafen, Germany, near Frankfurt; that the company was named for Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, a pioneer in rigid-frame airships; and that the second largest airship was the Graf Zeppelin, named for the count (Graf is German for count) and in service from 1928 until 1936, when it was replaced by the largest of the breed, the Hindenburg.
When the Graf Zeppelin flew over Chicago at the World’s Fair of 1933, it bore a Nazi swastika on the port side of its tail section, but because of opposition to Hitler by Zeppelin Co. officials and Chicago sponsors, the airship circled in a clockwise direction, thus hiding the Nazi symbol.
Swastikas would be displayed on both sides of the Hindenburg’s tail, however, assuring that they would be visible to all.
Larger than life
Both airships were immense, and at more than 800 feet in length–almost three football fields–the Hindenburg was only 25 yards shorter than the famous, ill-fated Titanic.
It was said that to see the Graf Zeppelin or the Hindenburg aloft was like seeing an airborne ocean liner.
Speed and comfort were their main attractions. Because there were no commercial airplane flights between the United States and Europe in that day, the Hindenburg, pushed by four diesel engines at a cruising speed of 80 m.p.h., was the fastest way to get from here to there.
To go by ocean liner took from five to seven days, but the Hindenburg, on its first westward crossing from Germany to Lakehurst on May 9, 1936, had broken the previous record– held by an American airship, the Los Angeles– by completing the passage in 61 hours 38 minutes.
Two months later, on an eastward crossing, it set a new record of 45 hours 43 minutes.
But speed was pricey. A one-way ticket was $400, whereas to go first-class on the Queen Mary, then the finest ocean liner, cost $280.
In today’s dollars, the Hindenburg fare would be $4,320, compared with $2,999 for a one-way ticket on the Concorde, or $3,235 for a first-class seat on American Airlines from New York City to Frankfurt. (Most accommodations range from $1,195 to $7,700 for today’s six-day ocean-liner journey on the Queen Elizabeth II.)
As might be expected–or demanded–at these prices, the appointments were top-of-the-line, if of a more lean-and-clean Art Deco design than the plush, regal atmosphere of the ocean liner.
The Hindenburg contained 50 luxury passenger cabins, a dining room and a parlor–and that smoking room.
David V. Wendell, an authority on lighter-than-air aviation who held a commemorative seminar on Sunday at Chicago’s Rosehill Cemetery, where he is archivist/historian, has two stories about how amazingly smooth the flight on the two German airships could be:
– “In the dining rooms of the Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg, passengers would take part in a contest to see who could stand a fountain pen on end the longest. The captains had ordered that the ship should never list at an angle greater than 5 degrees. At 10 degrees, wine could spill from a goblet. The Zeppelin company boasted that not a drop of wine had ever been spilled.”
– “Weather delayed the liftoff of the Hindenburg in its debut flight in 1936, and at midnight a woman passenger approached the captain to inquire when they were to launch. `Madam,’ he said, `we’ve been airborne for two hours.’ “
Ah, yes–weather.
In addition to the peril of hydrogen, airships also were vulnerable to high winds and fierce storms. The Hindenburg’s 10 flights across the Atlantic in 1936 were limited to between May and July to avoid the more punishing gales common in other months.
Because the Hindenburg’s top altitude was 5,000 feet, it could never escape nature’s worst punches, which modern jetliners are able to rise above. Rather, the Hindenburg sought to fly under turbulence, moving over the Atlantic mostly at a 600-foot altitude.
Despite the exemplary standards of the Hindenburg, you would be hard-pressed to ignore the 18 major disasters from 1912 to 1935 that involved dirigibles (from the Latin verb for “to guide or steer”).
Three of the craft that were lost were U.S. Navy airships–the Shenandoah, wrecked in a 1925 storm in Ohio, 14 dead; the Akron, crashed in 1933 in an electrical storm off New Jersey, 73 killed; and the Macon, destroyed in a storm off the California coast in 1935, killing two.
On that fateful day in 1937, bad weather had delayed the Hindenburg’s arrival by more than 12 hours.
“There were thunderstorms south of us, at Lakehurst,” recalls Rev. Kevin Shanley, who was 5 years old when he saw the airship pass over his home in Jersey City, N.J., which was in the landing pattern for the Hindenburg.
“It was big as a city block and moved so slowly and majestically,” says Shanley, now a Roman Catholic priest at the Carmelite Spiritual Center in southwest suburban Darien. “You could keep up with its shadow on a sunny day.”
When he heard about the disaster, he was devastated. “The world seemed in such turmoil then,” he says. “But the zeppelins seemed reliable and stable. When it crashed, we felt as though there was nothing we could ever count on.”
Perhaps an echo of that disillusionment can be heard in the recorded voice of a weeping Herbert Morrison as he grappled with what he was seeing:
“It burst into flames! Get this, Charlie (his soundman, Charles Nehlson), get this. Get out of the way (to the scores of people running toward the crash)! Oh, my, this is terrible, get out of the way, please. It is burning, bursting into flames and is falling on the mooring mast and all the folks we — (he stops, starts again). This is one of the worst catastrophes in the world. Oh, it’s 400 or 500 feet into the sky, it’s a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. Oh, the humanity and all the passengers . . .”
Last month, the Zeppelin Co. of Friedrichshafen, Germany, announced that it would build its first new airship since the Hindenburg crash. It will be held aloft, the company said, by helium.
