Taps for Blimps

At Lakehurst, N.J., last week Captain Marion H. Eppes, commander of the naval air station, received orders to suspend the U.S. Navy's blimp program. By next December, all but two of the Navy blimps still in service--on shore patrol and early-warning defense missions--will be deflated and folded away; within another few months, the last of the Navy's "bloopy bags" will disappear from the skies. And so will end an often disastrous, but sometimes glorious saga of the nation's military history.

In the U.S., that saga goes back to 1793, when a debonair Frenchman named Jean Pierre Blanchard ascended from the yard of Philadelphia's Walnut Street prison in a balloon, accompanied by a small, whimpering dog. While President George Washington and hundreds of Philadelphians craned their necks in amazement, Blanchard panicked a squadron of pigeons and drifted nonchalantly out of sight. After 46 minutes in the air, he plopped down in a woodland 15 miles away and placated the scared natives with wine.

The military possibilities were obvious --or so they seemed. During the Civil War, Thaddeus S. C. Lowe, a daring airman, sailed out near Manassas in a balloon and located the victorious Confederates. Later, balloons were used successfully at the battle of Chancellorsville. But General George McClellan finally abandoned his air force because of the difficulty of transporting the big gasbags.

Around the Skeleton. An interested spectator at the Civil War balloon experiments was a young German officer, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. After he retired from the Kaiser's army, in 1891, Zeppelin dedicated his life to perfecting giant rigid dirigibles--built around a metal skeleton--that would retain their shape and could be guided. About the same time, a wealthy Brazilian, Alberto Santos-Dumont, developed the nonrigid dirigible and pleased girls by taking them on flights around Paris.

During World War I, German Zeppelins bombed London from the safe altitude of 20,000 ft., far above the ceilings of primitive fighter planes. But by 1916, air defense techniques had improved so much that five Zeppelins were shot down over Britain. Also during World War I, the "blimp," as such, was born. The term came from a British designation of "Limps" for nonvertebrate dirigibles; there were two classes, "A-Limps" and "B-Limps." A British dirigible, the R-34, made the first transatlantic flight in 1919, eight years before Lindbergh's, and between the two World Wars, the skies were filled with flying sausages. The great Graf Zeppelin cruised over the Arctic Circle and around the world, traveling more than a million miles before it was decommissioned in 1937. But after three disasters, when the U.S. Navy's dirigibles Shenandoah, Akron and Macon were wrecked with a total loss of 83 lives, the U.S. abandoned its rigid-airship program. The spectacular explosion of the Hindenburg at Lakehurst in 1937 put a final end to the dream of Zeppelin.

Balloonatics. The nonrigid blimps seemed doomed to the same fate. At the outset of World War II, the Navy had only six bloopy bags in service, and the few enthusiasts who manned them were called "balloonatics." But it was during World War II that the blimp had its finest hours. In a crash program, the Navy commissioned 168 blimps, sent them soaring sedately around the world to chase submarines and escort troopships. In all, the blimps convoyed 89,000 merchant ships and troopships overseas, often through areas infested by wolf packs of Nazi subs, without losing a single ship. Despite their elephantine silhouettes, only one blimp was destroyed by enemy action: in 1943, off the Florida coast, the Navy blimp K74 made a point-blank run over a German submarine. When the blimp's bomb-release mechanism failed, the sub surfaced and shot it down. The blimps and their lesser sisters, the barrage balloons, were a familiar and important part of the wartime skyscape.

Since the war, the blimps have become outmoded. They are costly--running to some $5,000,000 apiece. Nearly all the blimp's old and invaluable functions are now being performed either by helicopters or standard aircraft. Next year, when the last Navy bloopy bag has gone, only three commercial blimps--two German, one U.S., all used for aerial advertising--and a few balloons owned by sportsmen will continue to wallow through the skies on the trail of Phileas Fogg.

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