To Kiel in the 'Hercules'

by Lewis R. Freeman

I have written in a previous chapter of the great contrast observed between the morale of the men at Norderney, and the other seaplane stations visited by parties from the Allied Naval Commission, and that of those in the remaining German warships, accounting for the difference by the fact that the former had been kept busier than the latter, and that they had not suffered the shame of the "Great Surrender" which has cast a black, unlifting shadow upon the dregs of the High Sea Fleet. Whether the airships were kept as busy as the seaplanes right up to the end it would be difficult to say, but, whatever may be the reason for it, we found the morale of the great Zeppelin stations suffered very little if at all in comparison with that of the working bases of the naval heavier-than-air machines.

For all the barbarity of many of their raids, there was splendid stuff in the officers and crews of the Zeppelins which engaged in the campaign of "frightfulness" against England, and it is idle to deny it. In a better cause, or even in worthier work for an indifferent cause, the skill and courage repeatedly displayed would have been epic. Considering what these airships faced on every one of their later raids—what their commanders and crews must have known were the odds against them after the night when the destruction of the first Zeppelin over Cuffley, in September, 1916, proved that the British had effectually solved the problem of igniting the hydrogen of the inner ballonettes—one cannot but conclude that the morale of the whole personnel must have been very high during even this trying period. If it had not been high, there would undoubtedly have been mutinies at the airship stations, such as are known to have occurred on so many occasions among the submarine crews. Even in the light of present knowledge, there is nothing to indicate that there had ever been serious trouble in getting Zeppelin crews for the most hazardous of raids. So far as could be gathered from our visits to the great airship stations of the North Sea littoral, this very excellent morale prevailed to the last; indeed, practically everything seen indicated that it still prevails.

Of the several German naval airship stations visited by parties from the Allied Commission, the most important were Althorn, Nordholz, and Tondern. The interest in the latter was largely sentimental, due to the fact that it was practically wiped out last summer as the result of a bombing raid by aeroplanes launched from the Furious. It was known that little had been done to rehabilitate it as a service station since that time, and the Commission's airship experts' desire to visit what was left of the sheds was actuated by a wish to see what damage had been done rather than by any feeling that the station really counted any longer as a base of Germany's naval air service. Our visit to the ruins of Tondern, and what we learned there of the way it was destroyed, is a story by itself, and I will tell it in a separate chapter.

Germany had very ambitious plans for the development of the Althorn station, and it is probable at one time that it was intended that it should supersede even the mighty Nordholz as the premier home of naval Zeppelins. If such were really the intention, however, there is no doubt that it was effectually put an end to by a great fire and explosion which occurred there about the middle of last year, the material destruction from which—in sheds and Zeppelins—was vastly greater even than that from the British raid on Tondern. The Germans speak of this disaster with a good deal of bitterness, usually alluding to the cause as "mysterious," but rather giving the impression that they believe it to have been the work of "Allied agents." If this is true, the job will stand as a fair offset against any single piece of work of the same character that German agents perpetrated in France, Britain, or America. Only the blowing up of the great Russian national arsenal in the second year of the war is comparable to it for the amount of material damage wrought. Althorn remained a station of some importance down to the end of the war, however, and that the Germans still expected to do important work from there was indicated by the fact that one of its new sheds housed the great "L-71," the largest airship in the world at the present time.

But it was in the great Nordholz station that the airship sub-commission was principally interested, not only for what it was at the moment—incomparably the greatest and most modern of German Zeppelin aerodromes—but also for what had been accomplished from there in the past, and even for what might conceivably be done from there in the future. Nordholz is a name that would have been burned deep into the memories of South and East Coast Britons had it been known three years ago, as it is now, that practically all of the Zeppelin raids over England were launched from there. The popular idea at the time—which even appears to have persisted with most Londoners down to the present—was that airship stations had been constructed in Belgium, and that these alternated with those of Germany in dispatching raiders across the North Sea to England. A single glimpse of such a station as Nordholz is enough to show that the huge amount of labour and expense involved in building even a comparatively temporary aerodrome fit for regular Zeppelin work would have been fatal to the idea of establishing such installations in Belgium, or anywhere else where Germany did not feel certain of remaining in fairly permanent control. The station at Jamboli, in Bulgaria, for instance, is known to have been able only to dispose of one or two Zeppelins, and considerable intervals between flights were imperative for keeping them in trim. It would never have been equal to the strain of steady raiding.

There were other German airship stations within cruising distance of England, but Nordholz was so much the best equipped, especially in the first years of the war when Zeppelin raiding was the most active, that the most of the work, and by long odds the most effective of it, was done from there. There were grim tales to be told by that band of hard-eyed, straight-mouthed, bull-necked pilots—all that survived some scores of raids over England and some hundreds of reconnaissance flights over the North Sea—who received and conducted round the Naval Commission party, though, unfortunately, we did not meet upon a footing that made it possible more than to listen to the account of an occasional incident suggested by something we were seeing at the moment.

The route which our party traversed from Wilhelmshaven to the Nordholz airship station—the latter lies six or eight miles south of the Elbe estuary in the vicinity of Cuxhaven—was a different one from any followed on our previous visits, all of which had taken us more to the south or east. It was through the same low-lying, dyked-in country, however, where the water difficulty, unlike most other parts of the world, was one of drainage rather than of irrigation. Great Dutch windmills turned ponderously under the impulse of the light sea-breeze, as they pumped the water off the flooded land. Cultivation, as in the region traversed to the south, was at a standstill, but overflowing barns—great capacious structures they were, with brick walls and lofty thatched roofs—proved that the harvest had been a generous one.

Instead of routing our two-car special over the all-rail route viâ Bremen, distance and time were saved by leaving it at a small terminus opposite Bremerhaven, crossing to the latter by tug, and proceeding north in more or less direct line to our destination. Little time was lost in getting from one train to the other. The tug, which had been held in readiness for our arrival, cast off as soon as the last of the party had clambered over its side, and the short run across the grey-green tide of the estuary was made in less than a quarter of an hour. Four powerful army cars—far better machines, these, than the dirigible junk heaps we had been compelled to use at Wilhelmshaven—were waiting beside the slip, and another ten minutes of what struck me as very fast and reckless driving, considering it was through the main streets of a good-sized city, brought us to the station and another two-car special. Both going and returning, it was the best "clicking" lot of connections any of the parties made in the course of the whole visit, showing illuminatingly what our "hosts" could do in that line when they were minded to.

Swift as was our passage through the streets of Bremerhaven, there was still opportunity to observe many evidences of the vigorous growth it had made the decade preceding the outbreak of the war, and of the plans that had been made in expectation of a continuation of that growth. Blocks and blocks of imposing new buildings—now but half-tenanted—and the nuclei of what had been budding suburbs were more suggestive of the appearance of a Western American mushroom metropolis after the collapse of a boom than a town of Europe. The railway station—a fine example of Germany's so-called "New Art" architecture—in its spacious waiting-rooms, broad subways, and commodious train sheds looked capable of serving the city of half a million or so which it had confidently been expected the empire's second port would become at the end of another few years. As things have turned out, Bremerhaven will at least have the consolation of knowing that it is not likely to be troubled with "station crushes" for some decades to come.

The astonishingly well-dressed and orderly crowd of a thousand or more waiting outside the portal of the station in expectation of the arrival of a train-load of returning soldiers made no unfriendly demonstration of any character. On the contrary, indeed, as at Wilhelmshaven, a number of children waved their hands as our cars drove up, and a goodly number of men solemnly bared their heads as we filed past. The special which awaited us at a platform reached after walking through a long vaulted subway running beneath the tracks consisted, like the one we had left on the other side of the river, of an engine and two cars. The rolling stock of this one was in better shape than that of the other, however, and with a better maintained road-bed to run over, the last leg of our journey was covered at an average speed of over thirty miles an hour, quite the fastest we travelled by train anywhere in Germany.