Untitled Document

08 May 2004

Zeppelins

I really enjoy the Cadillac car commercials that use the old Led Zepellin songs as the background. They make me quiver, just like in the old days, and I applaud whoever came up with the campaign to replace the old-fogy image of the marque. My son thinks they are pretty hip cars.

The tunes still roar with energy. I remember when I first heard the name of the band. It was the punch-line to a an old joke, like "that's as practical as a screen door in a submarine."

Or, "that went over like a lead balloon."

Well, therein lies a tale. In 1968 ex-Yardbirds guitarist James Patrick Page was looking for a new vehicle. Something loud and profound. He had applied for a copyright on the name "New Yardbirds." That was going to go over like a lead balloon. He was a hard charging 24-year old. When he found singer Robert Anthony Plant he found a kindred soul. Bassist John Paul Jones was very talented and could handle keyboards, too. When they added the manic drummer John Henry Bonham, Jimmy page had the sound he wanted.

Heavy, in the terms of the day. Not the "New" anything, that sounded like a folk band, like The New Christie Minstrels. The name had to go. They thought up a new one.

Their music was going to be as heavy as a zeppelin made of lead.

The band played a deafeningly loud interpretation of the American blues, and threw in mythology, mysticism, and British folk. Jimmy Page refused to release songs from their albums as singles, so the album was the key.

We shook and swayed at high school parties to the music that at once pummeled our bodies and got into our heads. Their first album featured songs like: Good Times/Bad Times, Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You and Dazed And Confused. We were, too, and going to get a lot more so. The album cover featured a dramatic picture of the Hindenburg going down in flames at Lakehurst Naval Air Station.

Heavy. The Hindenburg disaster was the first and only time that paying civilian passengers lost their lives. There is still controversy about the sabotage angle. There is a conspiracy theory that holds that the tragedy was caused indirectly by the U.S. government's refusal to permit the sale of helium to Nazi Germany. We had a monopoly on helium production then. But it might just have been static electricity that caused it.

Led Zeppelin caused a lot of static. The second album was just as intense as the first. Whole Lotta Love, Heartbreaker and Ramble On echoed in our addled heads for years after. The second album cover continued the Zepplin theme. The band was edited into a squadron picture of one of the German crews that flew over London and bombed it in the first installment of the World War.

It was interesting, and I talked to my Uncle about it. He was the paragon of aircraft designers, coming to the trade in the years between Part One and Part Two of the mini-series. He knew a guy who was a Zeppelin crewman in the First War. The Goodyear Zeppelin Corporation of Akron had hired a number of Germans to come over and help start an American airship program.

The Navy operated four rigid Airships, thinking there might be applications for them to be flying aircraft carriers. Only one of them was a domestic product. USS Shenandoah (ZR-1) was built to fly on helium gas, which did not burn but also did not provide as much lift as hydrogen. Her sisters USS Los Angeles, Akron and Macon were Zeppelins, properly capitalized.

Los Angeles was built by Luftschiffbau Zeppelin under the reparations terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty and once landed on the sea-going aircraft carrier Saratoga. The other two were constructed by the Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation in Ohio. Macon and Akron were both equipped with hanagrs from which to launch and recover Curtis F9C-2 "Sparrowhawk" fighters.

That is the connection to my Uncle, who as you might imagine, was a stickler for detail.

He told me the rigid airship was perfected by a former Wurttenberg army cavalry officer, Ferdinand Adolf August Heinrich Graf von Zeppelin. His craft were naturally , known as Zeppelins. Hence, my Uncle explained to me, "Zeppelin" is a trade, name just like Kodak, and it should always be capitalized, and by inference, I concluded, not to be used in irreverant rock and roll promotions.

I'm not sure he approved of the Jimmy Page's appropriation of the name. Like I said, my Uncle was stickler for detail. He had a million of them, too. He remembered the German was not in the best of health in the early 1930s.

The German He had served with Ernst Lehmann, who would later command the Hindenburg. He had served on several airships during the War, operating over the Polish Theater. Later he participated in the large raids on London in late 1916, when as many as sixteen airships set out to attack the city. He had some stories about the operational attack dirigible fleet that curled the hair.

My Uncle began precise recitation of the stories he had been told forty years before. Imagine cruising west, silent above the clouds, and then lowering a gondola with a single crewman down through the cloud deck to perform the final target solution.

Imagine what happens when the Captain releases the bomb payload...the great airship would leap upward with the loss of ballast. Imagine that the wire to the targeting capsule does not survive the sudden violent maneuver…

The British countered the Zeppelin threat with incendiary bullets that were supposed to ignite the hydrogen bags inside the rigid hulls. The Germans countered this with a new type of airship known as a height-climber. They stripped down the airships to the bare minimum in weight. The new ships were capable of reaching altitudes in excess of 20,000 feet.

The cold was bitter way up there, and the crew needed bottled oxygen. The crews were miserable and it was not uncommon for them to pass out at their stations. Parachutes were considered excess weight and, therefore, not carried. This was unfortunate since the lightened frame was exposed to more severe atmospheric conditions and caused the breakup of several ships.

Turning east for the return voyage to Germany, they should have proceeded in a stately fashion at perhaps ninety miles an hour (with tailwind.) But imagine getting a ride on a fluke jet stream and finding the first light coming up over the endless blue of the Mediterranean, lost at sea.

All in all, the German airships conducted 159 sorties over Britain. They succeeded in killing 557 people and inflicting around $7,500,000 in property damage.

My Uncle concluded that from a military perspective, it was hardly worth the effort. And as to the music, that part wasn't accurate either.

Zeppelins were not heavy, he said. They were lighter than air.