The loss of the Hindenburg by hydrogen fire (which American helium would have prevented), coming on the heels of tragic setbacks in this country was enough to dismay anyone except Commander C. E. Rosendahl and his stouthearted associates at Lakehurst Naval Air Station.
They didn’t give up. Setbacks were inevitable to progress. Count Zeppelin had built and lost five rigid airships prior to 1909, but he went on to build ships which were flown successfully in war and peace. If the Germans, using hydrogen, could do this, Americans, with helium, should not find it impossible, Lakehurst reasoned. And if they had no rigid airships to fly and no immediate likelihood of getting any they would use blimps.
The Navy was more familiar than the public with what the British and French airships had accomplished in the first war. Studying, as all Navy officers were doing in that period, the various possibilities of attack and defense, in case the war then threatening Europe should sweep across the Atlantic, they came to the conclusion that the coast line of America was no more remote from German submarines in 1938 than the coast of England was in 1914.
The airplane had improved vastly in speed, range, and striking power, and their very multiplicity had ruled out the blimps over the English channel, even if helium was available, but those conclusions did not hold along the American coast.
The heroic part played by Allied blimps was a part of the legend of the airship service. Nothing new developed in war had subtracted anything from the ability of American airships to do in this war what British non-rigids had done in the last. Commander J. L. Kenworthy and after him Commander G. H. Mills as commanding officer at Lakehurst turned to non-rigids.
Under Mills was instituted, quietly, unostentatiously, with what ships he had, a series of practice patrols to determine the usefulness of airships in this field, to discover and perfect technique, and to train officers and men.
Lakehurst had a curious conglomeration of airships to start with. There were two J ships of immediate post-war type, with open cockpits, 210,000 cubic feet capacity; two TC ships, inherited from the Army, of more modern design, and larger size; the ZMC2, an experimental job built to study the use of a metal cover, and about to be scrapped after nine years of existence; the L-1, the same size as the Goodyear ships, 123,000 cubic feet, the first modern training ship, which would be joined later by the L-2 and L-3; the G-1, a larger trainer of Goodyear Defender size, useful for group instruction, and the 320,000 cubic foot K-1, which had been built for experiments in the use of fuel gas. Only the K-2, prototype of the 416,000 cubic foot patrol ships later ordered could be called a modern airship, though the Army dirigibles also had good cruising radius.
Yet with this curious assortment of airships of various sizes, types and ages, the Navy carried on practice patrols covering the areas between Montauk and the Virginia Capes, flying day after day, built an impressive accumulation of flight data, missed very few days on account of weather, made it a point not to miss a rendezvous with the surface fleet. More than any one thing it was this demonstration, over an 18-month period, which led to the revival of an airship program in this country, the ordering of ships and land bases.
Let us see what a blimp patrol is like. The airship can fly up to 65 knots or better, but this is no speed flight. The motors are throttled down to 40 knots, so that the crew may see clearly, take its time, study the moving surface underneath, scrutinize every trace of oil smear on the surface, alert for the tell-tale “feather” of the submarine’s wake, air bubbles, a phosphorescent glow at night, for even a bit of debris which might conceal a periscope.
A school of whales, a lone hammerhead shark on the surface or submerged stirs the interest of the patrol, offers a tempting live target for the bombs,—light charges with little more powder than a shot gun shell uses. Now a ship records a direct hit on a shark’s back 500 feet below. He shakes his head, dives to escape this unseen enemy aloft. The airship gives chase, follows the moving shadow below, so strikingly resembling a submarine, finds the practice useful.