Naval Airships:
Publisher’s Preview
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
August 2026

I love writing about Zeppelins, including airships that are not, strictly speaking, Zeppelins. We published a Historical Study about them (Zeppelin Tales) and a Golden Journal about the ones that carried airplanes (Flying Carriers). Researching those two projects, I kept wanting a handy guide to German naval airships and their careers. When they flew, what they achieved, what happened to them. Their class, and how Zeppelin design evolved throughout the war.

I couldn’t find that book, so I decided to write it.

Golden Journal No. 62: Naval Airships describes every airship that served in the German Naval Airship Service. It’s the book I sought, with the service record of every Zeppelin, its ultimate fate, and any other important details. The book also covers all the airships sent aloft by the Imperial Army’s separate airship service, and those built by non-Zeppelin firms like Schütte-Lanz. That adds up to 130 airships; a handful of them served both the Army and the Navy so they just get one listing. One hundred thirty stories take up a lot of space, so Naval Airships is a double-sized Golden Journal to accommodate all of that airship lore.

The Zeppelin became an iconic symbol of German power during the First World War. Armies had terrorized civilian populations since the dawn of warfare, but the Zeppelin was the first terror weapon to strike non-combatants hundreds of miles behind the front lines. The bombing campaign against Britain dominates both the historiography and popular imagination, but that’s deeply misleading. Zeppelins began their reign of terror in the war’s first days, dropping artillery shells with blankets attached to make them fall nose-downwards, killing children in Liège, Belgium. Zeppelin terror raids hit Warsaw, Calais, Paris and Antwerp long before the first bomb fell on English soil.

The story weight falls on the campaign over England in part because the Germans put it there. The Kaiser himself showed marked reluctance to drop bombs on the English, though he didn’t mind blowing up Polish, Belgian, or French civilians. Many within the German military leadership, especially Navy Captain Peter Strasser, the head of the Naval Airship Division, saw the bombing campaign as justifiable retribution for the Royal Navy blockades that was starving German civilians.

It’s the campaign against England that’s responsible for the relatively huge number of airships produced during the war. As fixed-wing aircraft became more capable, fighter planes could rise to the same heights as Zeppelins, and shoot them down (once the explosive bullet had been developed). The Zeppelin Company’s design team, led by Ludwig Dürr and happily deploying the patented technologies the Imperial government had seized from Schütte-Lanz using wartime emergency powers, built new airships that could fly still higher. The British then cranked out better fighter planes. The Germans, in turn, built airships that could go where men could not breathe without oxygen.

Pre-war Zeppelin L2, moments before she exploded.

High-altitude weather had not been studied, let alone understood, before German airships started venturing to greater heights. Meteorology, still in its infancy, could not provide forecasts for the winds over England (and Germany could not access the needed data from over the North Atlantic, even if this had been possible). And so, most of the airships setting out to bomb England failed to reach their target. Their captains often reported success, their superiors believed them (because they wanted to believe), and the campaign continued, as did the demand for better and better airships.

The other primary mission of the airships, naval reconnaissance, did not require such rapid technological advances. The problem there lay on the ground and aboard the fleet flagship: intelligence procedures had not yet been developed to analyze such a wealth of raw data. Airship reports went directly to the fleet commander, who then had to weigh their accuracy himself. The new century had brought a myriad of new technologies to the scouting function (airships, submarines, airplanes, and the radios to connect them to the commander), but in terms of data management, nothing had changed since the days of sailing frigates signaling an enemy contact with flags. With the bombing campaign absorbing so many airships, the only way to provide enough of them to scout for the High Seas Fleet was to simply build more airships.

And that’s why we have so many airship careers to describe. No airship survived the entire war, even if they avoided enemy action, hazardous weather, or human error. Airships became outdated within months of commissioning, and were scrapped for their valuable duralumin frames and the “goldbeater’s skin” (a fabric made from cattle intestines) used for their gas cells. For the largest zeppelins, up to 80,000 cattle gave up their guts to provide enough skins.

We cover all of them from the pre-war ships conscripted for military service, like the passenger ships Sachsen and Hansa, on through the never-completed super-zeppelins of the L100 class, still under construction at the war’s end. Even with chronic shortages of food and labor crushing the German war economy, the airship program continued to receive priority.

Chief of Airships Peter Strasser has his reasons for disliking Schütte-Lanz airships.

And then we have the pieces. First off, there’s a matching download, All The Zeppelins, that gives you 132 pieces for, well, all the Zeppelins (some of the zeppelins appear twice, once in Imperial Navy colors and once in the Imperial Army scheme). It’s sold separately, and you’ll have to put them together yourself, via the magic of cutting and pasting.

But you don’t need skill at arts and crafts! The full option with pieces gives you 88 wonderful, huge airship pieces: 52 German Navy, five German Army, nine Italian, 11 British, three U.S. Navy, one U.S. Army, one Russian, five Austro-Hungarian, and one French. You can use them with any Great War at Sea game, to replace the smaller pieces in Jutland or War Plan Gold (you should do this, because the bigger pieces are more fun to play with).

Or you can just pick up the book, without pieces. Naval Airships is written and arranged so that you don’t need to know anything about the game to enjoy it. It’s a natural companion to our Zeppelin Tales Historical Study.

Order Naval Airships Here.
Use coupon code DANA for 20 percent off. Please allow an extra six weeks for delivery.

Order Naval Airships (book only) Here.
Use coupon code DANA for 20 percent off. Please allow an extra six weeks for delivery.

Order Zeppelin Tales Here.

Download All The Zeppelins Here.
It’s $7.99, but if you’re a Gold Club member, you can download for $5.59 using your private Gold Club link (That’s the only way to claim your Gold Club discount).

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and three children.

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