U.S. Navy Plan Black:
Imperial Germany’s Last Zeppelins
In U.S.
Navy Plan Black, we presented a number of warships
that did not exist but could have. Germany receives battleships
and battle cruisers designed in the last years of the war
that had no prayer of ever being built, a planned but never
begun aircraft carrier conversion, and some cruisers that
might have seen action had the First World War continued.
The German order of battle also includes six airships that
were designed but never built, the hydrogen-filled equivalents
of the giant battleships. But while we gave a very brief summary
of the warship designs, the six airships are simply tossed
into the game with no background in the design notes.
A mid-war Navy zeppelin.
Lack of steel and labor doomed the German surface ship programs,
and no capital ship laid down after the outbreak of hostilities
was ever completed. To be fair, the British record isn’t
that much better, with only five lightly-built battle cruisers
both started and finished during the war years.
Airships were a different story. The German Naval Airship
Division had two major tasks by the later years of the war:
scout for the battle fleet in the North Sea, and launch nighttime
terror strikes against British cities. Britain rushed to improve
her aircraft technology, producing fighters that could climb
to ever-greater heights and battle the giant flying cigars.
The Germans countered by improving their airship engines,
controls and especially lightweight metal frames. While the
shipyards lost their priority for materials and skilled labor,
the Zeppelin works in Friedrichshaven and Staaken continued
to produce new airships until the very last months of the
war.
The construction shed at Friedrichshaven.
Korvettenkapitan Peter Strasser flung his Naval Airship Division against England
throughout 1917, but in October the 11-ship “Silent
Raid” turned into a disaster when the zeppelins became
caught in a north-east gale. Five of them were destroyed.
After some months of recriminations, in April 1918 the Navy
ordered a new class of four much larger airships. Thee would
have seven engines compared to five in the previous L53 class,
yielding much greater speed and range. She carried 8,000 pounds
of bombs on terror raids, and a crew of 25.
The first of these splendid ships, L.70, joined the division
on 8 July 1918. Strasser declared her to be the ultimate airship,
and gave command to his best friend, Johann von Lossnitzer.
Rear Admiral Starke, the navy’s chief of construction,
disagreed, and on the 28th argued with Strasser over future
airship development. The admiral said he still beleived L.70
to be vulnerable to enemy planes, and would be ordering an
even larger ship that could out-climb even the newest British
fighters. Strasser flung every objection he could find at
Starke, claiming the new ship could not be used since she
would be larger than the big revolving hangar at the Nordholz
zeppelin base.
Eager to prove the admiral wrong, Strasser selected L.70 as
his flagship for the next raid on England. A British DH.4
piloted by Maj. Egbert Cadbury pumped a stream of explosive
bullets into the gasbag off the Norfolk coast, and she went
down in flames, killing all aboard.
Airship production slowed with Strasser’s death, and
the new ship, named L.100, did not meets its 1 November 1918
delivery date. In September, an Admiralty conference ordered
her design re-cast. The new L.100 was designed to the maximum
possible size that could be accomodated in the double-sized
airship hangars at Nordholz and Ahlhorn. The revolving hanagr
that Strasser had used as justification for not building huge
airships would be dismantled.
A bad day for airshipmen.
Compared to L.70 and even the first L.100 design, the new
L.100 represented a great leap forward in technology. She
would have a gas capacity of 3.8 million cubic feet, compared
to 2.2 million for the L.70 as originally built and 1.9 million
for the L.53 class. At 780 feet long and 96 feet in diameter,
she was by far the largest airship ever ordered, roughly the
same size as the famous passenger airship Graf Zeppelin
of the 1920s. She had twice the useful lift of L.70,
and could have carried six to eight tons of bombs, depending
on how much water ballast was carried (to reach great heights,
airships had to carry large amounts of ballast). As a transport,
a mission Great War zeppelins never undertook, she could have
accommodated a company of infantrymen.
Her designers believed she would be invulnerable to current
fighters with her ceiling of 29,000 feet. But materials and
labor were running short even for the airship program, and
on 6 October she was cancelled. Construction continued on
L.72, which was just finishing fitting out, and L.73 and L.74
were also ordered to continue but were not complete when the
Armistice ended both the war and the first German airship
program. The Naval Airship Division made its last combat flight
on 12 October. 
In Plan Black, all six of the airships included
in the game are of the L.100 class. They have great speed
for an airship and an air-to-air armament of 2: her intended
defensive armament is unclear but she would have carried a
number of machine guns and some experiments had been carried
out with small cannon mounted on the top of the gasbag. L.100
definitely had the lift capacity to carry many weapons. As
a hydrogen-filled ship, she also would have exloded easily
if set alight.
They receive the same endurance as airships in other games
(60 turns), and this is probably too low. The German airships
in Plan Black (only) should have an enudrance of
100 turns; they could easily have flown the Atlantic and back.
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