NAVY: Blimps for Subs

After long, nearly fruitless years of laboring among the heathen, the Navy’s No. 1 apostle of lighter-than-aircraft, Captain Charles Emery Rosendahl, last week had hope of a new U.S. air fleet. At the Navy’s LTA station at Lakehurst, N.J., he had a new 400,000-cu.-ft. blimp* called K3. It was the first new nonrigid airship Lakehurst had had in many a moon. After trial flights, K-3 will be ready for coastal patrol, the first of 48 blimps authorized by Congress, in a sudden appreciation of LTA. It was high time, thought Captain Rosendahl. In Lakehurst’s dwindling complement were three aging tactical blimps (including two Army castoffs), one experimental ship and four others good only for training airship crews.

To get his promised new equipment, plus two great airship bases to be built in South Weymouth, Mass, and Elizabeth City, N.C., earnest, articulate Captain

Rosendahl had had to labor long & hard. An eloquent defense of LTA (What About the Airship?), countless speeches and articles had affirmed his unshaken faith in the craft that had often shaken the faith of U.S. airmen.

Rosy Rosendahl’s airborne creed is: that the U.S. needs good offshore patrol and needs it badly. As evidence he presented the 1918 raids by U-boats on commerce in U.S. waters, a piece he knew by heart. That summer six U-boats left Kiel to see what kind of trouble they could stir up on the U.S. Atlantic coast.

Before that summer was over, the U-boats had sunk 100 ships (200,000 tons) by gun, bombs, mine and torpedo. Cruising within sight of the lights of Staten Island, one sub hove to on three different nights and cut transatlantic and Central American telegraph cables. The Germans mined the mouths of the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays, laid other fields off Barnegat and Long Island. One of the mines smashed a hole in the battleship Minnesota, which limped into port, was laid up for the duration. Another mine sank the U.S. cruiser San Diego a few miles off Long Island.

Captain Rosendahl did not neglect to point out that the Germans had only 140 U-boats left when they made this audacious raid. This time the Axis has better than 500, is said to have 250 more abuilding. But this time, says Rosendahl, the U.S. has its answer: airships.

Although many Navy men still doubt its value, the airship can do some things an airplane can’t. It can run at low speed, or stop dead, hover over a suspected subsea object, take dead aim with bomb or depth charge from a stationary platform. From its car, in clear weather, the eight-man crew of a modern blimp once spotted a submarine 90 feet below the surface. Crews from Lakehurst daily practice following sharks and whales, occasionally give them a practice bomb. Other blimp virtues: they can stay in the air about 50 hours, can follow a sub without having to circle, as an airplane must, can fly below the ceiling in all but the worst kind of weather. In patrols and practice with surface ships off the coast, Lakehurst’s men daily demonstrate these capabilities.

Rosy Rosendahl has a gleam in his eye that spells more than blimps. In the future he hopes to see a great rigid (Zeppelin-type) airship, half again as big as the 7,000,000-cu.-ft. Hindenburg, heavily armed and carrier-mother to a brood of twelve airplanes. With such a craft, he thinks, he could not only run down Nazi surface raiders and make an end of them but give the U.S. fleet better reconnaissance than it has ever had before.

* Capacity of the Goodyear sightseeing blimps: 123,000 cu. ft.