God Bless the Buffs, for where would aviation history be without them? For the past fifty years, the nucleus of aviation history has been preserved not so much by the academic community, although this has changed for the better, but rather by small groups of men and women who cherish aviation history and pursue it with a purity of purpose and an attention to detail that comes from the heart. These include the American Aviation History Association, the late lamented U.S. Cross & Cockade, the League of World War I Historians and many others.
The three volumes under review here are the product of exactly that kind of devoted scholarship — the world of lighter-than-air craft, viewed from the perspective of the men who designed, built, flew, and sometimes died in these extraordinary machines.
The Airship Experience
This is the first volume of what promises to be a comprehensive series on the full history of lighter-than-air craft, and it establishes the series' distinguishing characteristic immediately: it views airships from the viewpoint of the men who operated them. This is not a technical manual or an institutional history — it is the lived experience of airship crews, and the result is a book filled with incredible anecdotes of airship life.
Von Schiller and his co-authors have assembled accounts that range from the mundane to the extraordinary, capturing the peculiar rhythms of life aboard giant dirigibles that no longer exist. The reader comes away with a genuine sense of what it was like to be part of these crews — the cold, the noise, the mechanical anxieties, and above all the profound sense that they were part of something unprecedented in aviation history.
Hindenburg: The Wrong Paint; Hydrogen, the Right Fuel
This is the most compelling analysis of the Hindenburg disaster yet published. The core of the book is Dr. Addison Bain's PhD thesis, which marshals scientific evidence for the controversial but persuasive argument that the cause of the Hindenburg fire was not hydrogen — the lifting gas that has been blamed for more than 70 years — but the highly flammable doping compound used on the outer skin of the airship.
Van Treuren complements Bain's scientific analysis with a broader section examining the use of hydrogen as a fuel. This is not mere historical curiosity: in a world increasingly focused on alternative energy, the safety record of hydrogen (properly understood) is far better than its reputation suggests, and this book makes that case carefully and with evidence.
The combination of rigorous scientific analysis and historical context makes this one of the most intellectually satisfying books on the Hindenburg yet published. Readers who have long accepted the conventional hydrogen-explosion narrative will find their assumptions challenged — and the evidence presented here is difficult to dismiss.
SNAFU: The Strange Story of the American Airship
Rosendahl was the great airship advocate of the American Navy — a better airshipman than author, it must be said, but one whose passion for the subject shines through every page of this compilation of his writings. The result is a document of genuine historical importance, even if it is not always easy reading.
Rosendahl survived the loss of the Shenandoah and was intimately involved in the subsequent inquiries into the loss of the Macon, the Akron, and the Hindenburg. His accounts of these disasters provide details and perspectives unavailable elsewhere, and his fury at the political forces that throttled American airship development is palpable and compelling. He places the blame squarely on Harold Ickes — Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior — for using his bureaucratic influence to halt what Rosendahl believed was a genuinely promising program.
The most striking section of the book is the tables comparing the Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg with trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific flying boat service. The comparisons are devastating, showing the Zeppelins to be fantastically more efficient in terms of payload, range, and passenger comfort. On purely technical grounds, the case is nearly unanswerable.
The book's principal flaw is one of timing: Rosendahl wrote much of this material in 1958, but he doesn't recognize that by that date the battle is no longer between airships and flying boats. Both have been rendered obsolete by the coming jet airliner. His argument, however valid it may have been in 1935, was already moot when he committed it to paper. This does not diminish the value of his historical testimony, but it does limit the book's usefulness as an argument for airship revival.
You can feel the passion of the true airshipman stifled by political ineptitude. That passion is this book's greatest strength — and also its greatest limitation.
These three are all valuable books to anyone with the least interest in airships, and would be a good addition to the library of the general aviation historian because they contain facts and anecdotes rarely seen elsewhere. For the serious student of lighter-than-air history, they are essential.
For further resources on airship history, see www.airshiphistory.com.