Zeppelin Tales
Publisher’s Preview
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
July 2026

For such a peaceful-looking vessel, gliding quietly through the skies, the zeppelin quickly became a symbol of death and horror. Roughly 1,000 people died, and another 3,000 were wounded, by bombs dropped from German airships during the First World War. Along with air raids, zeppelins (and airships from other manufacturers) also conducted deep reconnaissance missions, usually over the North Sea or the Baltic.

German success prompted imitators. Russia, Britain, and Italy operated their own airship arms during the Great War, with varying degrees of success. The United States, France, and Japan all attempted to do the same immediately afterwards.

Those stories are the theme of Zeppelin Tales, our Historical Study about airships: many of them zeppelins, but some made by other German firms, too. Plus, the American, Japanese, and British lighter-than-air programs. It’s filled with essays and stories by me, and from noted author John R. Phythyon Jr. (of Wolf Dasher fame).

Any tale of zeppelins starts with the original Zeppelin, Ferdinand. A Württemberg cavalry general, cashiered after his brigade’s poor performance in the Imperial Army’s annual maneuvers, Zeppelin drew on his experience as an observer during the American Civil War. The hot-air balloons used for observation by the U.S. Army would be far more effective if self-propelled. Other inventors had also tried their hand at airship design, but Zeppelin’s creations struck the popular imagination and, very briefly, took over the German skies as well.

They might have remained an oddity, without the designs of Johann Schütte. He introduced the streamline form, the internal keel, the cruciform tail (you know, with four fins), but stubbornly clung to wooden frames. His innovations, when applied to the Zeppelin Works’ metal framed-ships, made the airship truly the instrument of war that Ferdinand had envisioned.

Capturing the imagination.

Two missions suited the airship in 1914: long-range reconnaissance, and strategic bombing. In the first years of the Great War, the airship couldn’t yet deliver on the promise of either of those. Fighter planes and anti-aircraft batteries made operations over enemy-held territory extremely hazardous. Efforts to bomb London usually went awry thanks to weather (the Germans had no reliable way to forecast, and no one yet understood high-altitude wind patterns before the zeppelins tried it) and the need to bomb in darkness.

Zeppelin scouting over the North Sea would be marked more by missed opportunities than significant success. Military culture had not yet caught up to the opportunities offered by new technologies: scouting reports went straight to the fleet commander as raw intelligence, without a well-developed staff process to analyze and weigh them.

By the second half of the war, the new zeppelins became technological marvels, as the Imperial government seized Schütte’s patents and turned them over to the Zeppelin Works. The airships became far larger, capable of greater payloads, greater speeds, and much greater heights. But they could not overcome some basic shortcomings in the use of the airship as a weapon of war. Hydrogen-filled gasbags proved terribly vulnerable to the explosive bullet, introduced in 1916. The zeppelin, as much as it became a symbol, did not bring Germany any closer to winning the war as a bomber or a recon platform.

The Schütte-Lanz airship SL.20.

That didn’t stop other nations from trying, following Germany’s defeat in late 1918. Airship technology passed to the victorious Allied Powers. France and Italy operated zeppelins taken as reparations, Japan attempted to build its own zeppelin-inspired craft based on their own share of the loot, while Britain built a whole series of rigid airships based on captured technology and looked to create a world-wide network of airship passenger lines. But it would be the United States that carried forwards Zeppelin’s vision of the airship as a weapon. His name became interchangeable with that of his invention. Johann Schütte, possibly the most unlikeable man in all of Germany, never did get paid for his appropriated patents and ended up as a lecturer in Danzig.

Schütte had projected another purpose for the large rigid airship: a flying aircraft carrier, operating its own small group of airplanes. The U.S. Navy brought Schütte’s vision to reality with the flying carriers Akron and Macon, built by Goodyear-Zeppelin Corp. with no credit, much less compensation, for Schütte.

Akron and Macon were technological marvels. They each carried a small squadron of five fighter planes, which could defend the ship or be spread out to give it a recon capability over a front of hundreds of miles. In an age before satellites or long-range heavier-than-air airplanes, this was an unheard-of capability. But the flying carriers both fell victim to the incomplete understanding of weather patterns. Akron flew into a storm front that proved to be far worse than expected, and crashed into the Atlantic. Macon, her structure weakened by rough air over Texas, fell victim to heavy weather and crashed into the Pacific. Despite the efforts of Rear Admiral Ernest J. King, then in charge of U.S. Navy aviation, they would not be replaced.

Flying carrier Macon coming in for a landing. Sunnyvale, California.

Hugo Eckener, head of the Zeppelin Works after the Great War, had a much different vision than his mentor, Ferdinand von Zeppelin. He foresaw a world-wide network of airship passenger lines, knitting together the continents in a spirit of peace, and profit. He worked tirelessly to free Germany of the Versailles Treaty’s restrictions on airship development, to build the ships and make them symbols of a new age, and to establish passenger service across the Atlantic. What he could not do, was obtain a secure supply of helium, and so the majestic Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg used explosive hydrogen as their lifting gas. When Hindenburg fell victim to a spectacular fire over Lakehurst, New Jersey, the Golden Age of Airship Flight came to a bitter end.

And that’s where our tales end as well. Zeppelin Tales is a companion book for the Great War at Sea game series, but it’s not about the games. It’s meant to give a little insight into the airship’s military role, and to tell a story about a technology that might have filled the skies of a gentler, less hectic world.

Order Zeppelin Tales Here.