Oh, Shenandoah . . .
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
March 2006

German use of the zeppelin as a naval scout greatly impressed the U.S. Navy, which saw the First World War as a diversion from its true destiny: a fight with the Imperial Japanese Navy for control of the Pacific Ocean. The vast distances of the Pacific made scouting very difficult and surprise attacks likely. The airship could help solve this problem, with its ability to search huge tracts of ocean quickly.

When the war ended, all of the Allied nations demanded reparations from Germany — compensation for damage caused by a war for which Germany now had to accept the blame. The U.S. Navy persuaded American diplomats to make sure they included two modern zeppelins in the U.S. share of the loot. But vengeful German crews wrecked many of the airships, and the survivors quickly were snatched away by the British, French and Japanese.

Shenandoah over New York City.

The British then offered to sell the Americans their most modern airship, the R38, built by Vickers. Vickers claimed its ship was superior to the German models, and offered a good price in hopes of gaining repeat business. The Navy took the offer and also ordered a second ship built at the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst, New Jersey.

When R38 began its trial flight in 1921, but American observers reported dissatisfaction with the ship. They did not believe she could cross the Atlantic due to a weak structure, and did not think she handled very well. Vickers insisted there were no problems and scheduled a full-power test. Over the city of Hull in eastern England, R38's keel snapped. The airship began to bend, and fuel from her engines spilled out and caught fire. The hydrogen in the forward half of the ship caught alight as well, and she exploded. Forty-four of 49 aboard died, including 16 American observers and crew trainees. We looked at British airships in an earlier installment.

Moored to the oiler Patoka.

Construction on the Lakehurst ship began in April 1922. The Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia turned out the pre-fabricated aluminum structure, which was sent to Lakehurst for assembly. A series of rings formed the “sausage” shape, with a triangular keel running along the bottom of the ship to provide strength. The ship’s heavier components like fuel and ballast were secured to the keel. The frame held 20 gas cells, designed for hydrogen gas. In February 1923 the hull was complete and covered with a cotton skin, itself coated by many layers of thick “dope” to shrink it tightly to the frame and make it weatherproof. Mixed with aluminum powder, this gave Shenandoah a silvery sheen to reflect heat from the gas cells (German airships had usually carried some form of camouflage coloring).

Christened Shenandoah when she finally came out of her hangar in September 1923 for her first flight, the ship had six engines (later reduced to five). In design, she was a near-copy of the German L49, forced down in northern France during the war by bad weather and captured more or less intact. Like the Germans ships, she was designed to use hydrogen as her lifting gas. But a series of accidents had created alarm about filling airships with flammable gas: In addition to the R38 disaster, three Navy blimps had burned in a hangar fire in 1921, and the Army semi-rigid airship Roma burned in February 1922, causing 34 deaths. Shenandoah would be filled with helium.

Shenandoah under construction.

Helium does not provide nearly as much lift as hydrogen, and thus Shenandoah never truly met her design specifications, especially regarding range. The Navy wanted a heavy schedule of training flights to gain experience with the machine, but instead found themselves sending the ship on publicity flights her crew soon labeled “County Fair Runs.” While these provided some useful experience, they took place far from the eyes of the fleet and senior officers did not take airships seriously. But the Navy’s airship supporters, in particular Admiral William A. Moffett, considered them crucial to gaining public acceptance and therefore increased funding.

During a storm in January 1924 the ship broke free of her moorings and drifted away out of control. Her commander had full warning of the approaching storm with its 60-mile-per-hour winds, but welcomed the opportunity to conduct bad weather testing and thereby quell fears about a proposed polar trip. A gust at 78 miles per hour tore off the ship’s top fin and ripped her away from her mooring mast, destroying the nose cone and deflating the two forward gas cells in the process. The crew immediately dumped her ballast and ran aft to try to balance the ship.

“Fortunately the controls were intact,” Lt. Comdr. C. E. Rosendahl wrote later. “Slowly the personnel gained the upper hand. Up in the bow, the keel crew struggled frantically to seal the open end, to prevent the rush of air from destroying cell after cell like a row of dominoes. Weights had to be shifted, fuel pumped about, to restore the crippled craft to an even keel.”

Shenandoah’s storm damage.

By the time her crew managed to restore order, they found themselves over Newark, where commercial radio station WOR relayed messages back to Lakehurst. Slowly the crew nursed the flying cigar back to base, needing five and a half hours to cover 60 miles.

After major repairs, the ship finally conducted some actual military training flights. Tests showed that Shenandoah could easily rendezvous with a converted Navy oiler, Patoka, used as an airship tender. But continued demands for County Fair Runs kept her from exercising with the fleet, and the Navy began to hatch plans to send her to the North Pole as a publicity stunt. Apparently tipped off by nervous airshipmen, President Calvin Coolidge stepped in personally to quash the polar flight.

In September 1925, Shenandoah set out on a barnstorming tour of the Midwest, to visit St. Louis, Minneapolis and Detroit in answer to requests from powerful members of Congress. Over eastern Ohio, she ran into a line of thunderstorms. Without warning, she became caught in what later investigators would probably call wind shear: sharp columns of vertically-moving air smashed into the ship. After repeated rises and falls the aluminum structure could take no more and Shenandoah's hull snapped. The aft section crashed to the ground, while the forward part lifted up again and drifted before finally coming to rest. Fourteen of 43 aboard were killed — a stunning survival rate, but at the time the 14 dead represented the worst disaster in the history of American aviation.

Wreck of the Shenandoah.

Shenandoah makes one appearance in the Great War at Sea series, in U.S. Navy Plan Black. She’s an important scouting asset, given the short range of all aircraft in the game.

Click here to purchase this great game!