`OH, THE HUMANITY' * On May 6, 1937, world's largest aircraft burst into flames at Lakehurst, killing 36

Abstract

Even in its brief career during 1936 to spring 1937, the Hindenburg evoked mixed reactions - wonder at the technical achievement of it all, mixed with dread at the sight of huge swastikas on its tail, symbol of the Nazi regime that Zeppelin company chief Hugo Eckner had accepted as his new financial patrons. In the 1890s, designer Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin created the concept of a light, strong, truss framework, carrying internal gas cells, all wrapped in a streamlined envelope.

IT WAS an afternoon of unsettled weather, storm clouds seething on the horizon as a spring cold front pushed its way to the Atlantic Ocean. In the control car of the airship Hindenburg, captain Max Pruss decided he would wait out the gusty winds, and give his guests a few more hours of sightseeing after two boring days of staring down at the sea.

In the hours that followed, the Hindenburg rumbled over New Jersey, a scene that 65 years later is still crystalline in many memories. The sight of the aircraft, its well-heeled passengers waving gaily from the promenade, would become a searing experience when news came later of 36 dead and the biggest aircraft ever built lying in ashes at Lakehurst.

"People ask, `How did you feel?' ... Everybody was stunned. In a state of shock. It was such a big ship, a beautiful thing to see," recalled Stanley Truax, a Spring Lake First Aid Squad member who transported Pruss and a fatally burned officer to the hospital, then spent the night pulling bodies out of the wreckage.

"You thought, `How could this happen?' It was just like the World Trade Center."

The Hindenburg disaster ended a golden era of commercial airship travel, and to this day hobbles lighter-than-air aviation with a negative public image. Even in its brief career during 1936 to spring 1937, the Hindenburg evoked mixed reactions - wonder at the technical achievement of it all, mixed with dread at the sight of huge swastikas on its tail, symbol of the Nazi regime that Zeppelin company chief Hugo Eckner had accepted as his new financial patrons.

The Hindenburg was designed to use nonflammable helium gas, available only from the United States, and Eckner propounded his plans for a global fleet of 40 or 50 zeppelins by 1945. But with Adolf Hitler in Berlin, and the Nazi regime persecuting Jews and menacing its neighbors, the U.S. government worried airships would be turned to military use.

"If there had been a different political climate, everything would have worked out differently," said Rick Zitarosa, president of the Navy Lakehurst Historical Society. Ten months after the Hindenburg's last voyage, Hitler seized Austria, and "I don't think after 1938 we could have allowed a German airship to land at Lakehurst," he said.

Launched at Fredrichshafen, Germany, in April 1936, the Hindenburg was 804 feet long - almost as big as the Titanic and other great ocean liners of the early 20th century.

Within its hull, lighter-than-air hydrogen gas in 16 separate cells provided the flotation that enabled the Hindenburg to lift 21 tons of people and cargo, in addition to its own 215 tons of duralumin alloy framework and machinery. Diesel-driven propellers pushed the cigar-shaped craft at a 78-mph cruising speed, and a top speed of more than 80 mph.

It was slow compared with airplanes of the 1930s, which could fly 150 mph or faster. Trans-Atlantic airliners were still a few years away, and for the moment Germany's airship establishment was the master of long-range, high-endurance flight.

In the 1890s, designer Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin created the concept of a light, strong, truss framework, carrying internal gas cells, all wrapped in a streamlined envelope. His airship concept became the world's first strategic bomber, enabling Germany to strike British soil during World War I. After the war ended in 1918, the victorious Allies forced Germany to surrender its airships.

In 1928, Germany got back into the game with the Graf Zeppelin, which began trans-Atlantic passenger service and would make more than 100 ocean crossings in its career.

With its first 10 round trips between Germany and America, the Hindenburg carried a total of more than 1,000 passengers. They could spend the day in lounges with picture windows, watching land and sea unfurl below them. On its first trips there was a piano, built of aluminum like all the furniture and weighing in at just 337 pounds.

Accommodations were in modest, railroad-style staterooms with bunk beds and sinks. But the cuisine was four-star hotel quality: brook trout and Rhine salmon, duckling and venison done Black Forest style, Turkish coffee. An air-locked smoking room isolated tobacco users from the 7.6 million cubic feet of hydrogen over their heads.

Hydrogen precautions were excruciating. To walk inside the hull, passengers and crew donned special sneakers to minimize the risk of static electricity. There were more sinister threats as well.

On the Hindenburg's first spring 1937 trip to America, captains Pruss and Ernst Lehmann, an elder among Zeppelin pilots, were accompanied by Col. Fritz Erdmann, a top air force intelligence officer. Erdmann told them there had been threats to destroy the airship on this trip.

Unsettled weather

It was a long, stormy ocean crossing, but at 3 p.m. on May 6 Pruss was turning his ship in lazy circles over New York City. From the promenade deck, passengers exchanged waves with tourists on the observation platform atop the Empire State Building.

In the control car, crewman Eduard Boetius helped with navigation and controls as Pruss turned the Hindenburg south toward New Jersey. Radio messages from Lakehurst Naval Air Station, the major East Coast airship port, warned the weather was still unsettled. After reaching Lakehurst around 4 p.m., the Hindenburg started a leisurely 21/2-hour cruise over the Shore, waiting for the weather to settle.

Stan Truax was pitching horseshoes with a friend when the airship roared low over Spring Lake. The teen-agers ran into the street. "It was a magnificent sight to see that silvery Hindenburg going by," Truax recalled.

In downtown Toms River, Fred J. Cook, 24-year-old editor of the New Jersey Courier newspaper, was a nervous man.

"It was a very anxious time because our weekly paper came out Friday, and the Hindenburg was due to arrive early Thursday morning," said Cook, who later went on to a career in investigative journalism and lives in Interlaken.

But storms and head winds over the North Atlantic had already pushed the estimated time of arrival back 10 hours or more. "I was sitting in my cubbyhole chewing my nails, wondering what we should do," Cook said.

Cook kept calling Lakehurst for updates, and finally got word the Hindenburg was on its way.

"They were going to laze around a while to let the winds die down," Cook said. "We heard motors and went out to look. And there was the Hindenburg, floating right over Main Street in Toms River, headed south."

Cook and the other newspaper people returned the waves of passengers, and went back inside. "They told me at Lakehurst that it would be a fast turnaround, with her new passengers and cargo and takeoff around noon Friday," Cook said. "I sat down and wrote the story of what was going to happen. Then I locked up the office, went home and had supper with my wife."

Conditions improve

A cold front swinging east out of Pennsylvania was moving at between 12 and 15 mph and passed over Lakehurst around 4:30 p.m.; passage of the front set off a thunderstorm around 6 p.m.

Winds gusted up to 20 mph even after the storm ended, so Pruss bided his time, waiting for the wind to die down. Finally, Cmdr. Charles E. Rosendahl, commander of the Lakehurst base, had his radiomen send the last message to Hindenburg:

"Conditions definitely improved, recommend earliest possible landing."

Pruss called his more experienced men to the control car, and Boetius took over at the elevator wheel - a ring of steel and wood, like a ship's wheel, that controlled the airship's angle. The man Boetius replaced at the wheel went with other crewmen to the bow of the ship, where their body weight would help trim the ship. Other officers took positions at the similar steering wheel and engine telegraph that sent commands to the ship's four diesels.

Three-quarters of a mile from the mooring, the Hindenburg crew was releasing water ballast in plumes from the hull, and releasing hydrogen from key cells to make the descent.

"It was a huge, big thing. I couldn't imagine it flying over the ocean," said Marion L. Smith Snowden, then a 16-year-old Freehold High School student who had come for her first view of the Hindenburg.

Trailing lines for the ground crew, the ship made a sharp turn and lumbered forward - a little fast at first, some Navy men thought - before settling about 180 feet over the ground.

From the ground, it was like standing under a 12-story building floating in the air and stretching for a sixth of a mile. The handlers got one bow line secured to the winch and were getting ready for the next one.

High on the port side of the Hindenburg, outside its gas cell 5, a flutter in the skin fabric caught the eye of a ground-crew foreman. The ship had stopped moving forward, its engines idling. He wondered if there was a gas leak. It was 7:25 p.m.

A faint glow

In the tail of the airship, crewmen Helmut Lau and Rudolf Sauter were at their landing stations, near the lower rudder about 200 feet forward of the tail. Their attention was suddenly caught by a faint glow - Lau later recalled it reminded him of "a Japanese lantern" - high in an internal shaft that separated gas cells 4 and 5.

Then came a dull thump, like the sound of a gas stove lighting, Lau told investigators. In the control car, officers first thought a mooring line had parted, before a shock ran through the airship.

On the ground, Navy petty officer John Iannacone and four sailors stood near the airship's lower tail fin. Iannacone saw "a big red glow" in front of the top tail fin burst out into a jet of flame.

"I saw people blown out the windows," Snowden said. "Then it started falling, very slowly. Pieces were coming down like snow."

Iannacone ran toward the Hindenburg's passenger decks, figuring they would descend and the fire go out as the hydrogen flared out of the gas cells.

As the airship sank stern first, the fire roared up the hull and out the nose, incinerating crewmen who had gone there to trim the ship. When the control car bounced once off the ground, Boetius and other officers jumped and ran from the flames. They heard screams from the passenger deck, and ran back to help.

"It took 34 seconds to burn, that's why so many people got out," Iannacone said. "Most of the guys who were burned were crew in the landing positions, in the nose and tail.

"I saw one guy jump from the nose, but it was too high and he got killed," Iannacone said. When the nose hit the ground, "I saw a second guy, he walked out of the nose, without a stitch of clothing on him except for his shoes. All burned off. He died right there."

The Spring Lake First Aid Squad sped to the airfield in 18 minutes, Truax said. His ambulance took Pruss and Lehmann to Paul Kimball Hospital in Lakewood.

"Pruss asked, `Where are you taking me to?' He was all swelled up with burns and we made him as comfortable as we could," Truax said. "He didn't even feel pain. Of course, when you're burned like that ... Probably all his nerve endings were gone.

"I thought Lehmann was already gone. They said he died in the hospital."

Back at the airfield that night, the 18-year-old first-aider helped lift bodies from the wreck. His white jumpsuit was filthy with soot and blood. Before he left, Truax picked up a burned metal ring with German lettering - one of the engine controls.

The death toll was 36, including a Navy ground crewman from Lakehurst, Allen Hagaman, who was struck by the falling wreckage; 62 survived.

Learning of tragedy

"Well, that changed the story," Fred Cook recalled.

It was Fred Cook's wife, Julia, who insisted they go see the Hindenburg after dinner. Now, with the ship collapsed in flames on the ground, they ran to the base press room and told their friend Bob Okin, an Associated Press reporter.

Cook tried to get back to the wreck, but a Marine officer with a drawn pistol rebuffed him. The couple raced back to Toms River, and Fred got to work while Julia telephoned the pressmen to come back and make over the newspaper.

Instead of a forest fire in Barnegat, the new top story was 34 DIE IN HINDENBURG DISASTER. There were cameras and radio recorders at the disaster, but no live broadcasts, and the morning papers would be where most people learned of the tragedy.

A few hundred copies of the earlier edition, with the wrong story, were already on their way to newsstands, "so I knew I had to collar them and get them back," Cook said.

At Cook's last stop in Lakewood, the newsstand owner didn't know about the fire, and argued as Cook tried to exchange his new edition for the wrong ones. "This one has the Hindenburg story," Cook said.

"People don't want to read about the Hindenburg," the Jewish store owner said dismissively.

"Believe me," Cook told the man, "people will want to read about it."

Kirk Moore: [phone]