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1 The Great Airship

One August night in 1935 my mother said to me as she was putting me to bed, “I’ll wake you early in the morning and get you dressed —” something she did for the next twenty years “— and we’ll go outside for a big surprise.”

Needless to say, she didn’t have to wake me in the morning. I lay listening to the robins chirp at the sunrise. I heard Pop drive off to work at Scott Shoe before seven. Mom didn’t give me a clue while we ate breakfast, but she kept looking out the window at the sky.

“A lot of little airplanes circling up there,” she said. “They must be waiting for it.”

It!

I was soon outside with Mom and sister Shirley looking up at the little planes, standing with all our neighbours in the middle of Lowrey Avenue in Galt, Ontario. Someone hollered, “Here it comes!” The buzz of little airplanes faded beneath the drum of heavier engines. Everyone turned towards the treetops to the west and gasped. An enormous silver airship the size of an ocean liner slid directly overhead. It was the Graf Zeppelin.

The famous German dirigible had been touring the United States, and this morning its flight from the Chicago World’s Fair to Toronto’s Canadian National Exhibition carried it right over our town. Sunlight glinted off its upper ridge and flickered off the long propeller blades of diesel engines slung below. A long gondola snug against the underside near the nose conveyed seventy notables of the Third Reich who peered down at us. I didn’t know this at the time but read it years later.

When you are five, you totter in circles while staring up at the sky and tend to fall down. I remember doing this while holding on to my sister’s hand. The zeppelin’s huge tail fins stay in my mind. They were bright red and centred by white circles framing strange black hooked crosses. Swastikas. I didn’t want the airship to pass. I couldn’t see enough of it. But in two minutes it was gone, followed by the little airplanes. Then all was quiet and we stood and gazed at the empty sky for a long time.

Up on Highway 8, just north of the delta (Hunter’s Corner), Helen Patterson of Preston rode in her father’s car as he drove Aunt Jessie from Clyde to Kitchener to catch a train for Port Huron, Michigan, where she worked as a nurse. The zeppelin, a mile to the south, caught their eyes. They didn’t know it was coming or even what it was. It was unworldly, and they had to stop to watch it pass. They forgot all about the train and missed it.

Strangely, few people here today remember this great spectacle. Even my sister, Shirley, forgot it, and until her memory revived I began to wonder if I might have simply dreamt it. However, Jim Rintoul remembered it, too, and phoned me.

The great zeppelin flew 590 flights, more than one million miles without a mishap, all the time captained by Dr. Hugo Ecker, then in his seventies. The airship was 776 feet long, 113 feet thick, and was held aloft by 3,945,720 cubic feet of hydrogen gas … more than that released by our House of Commons during a Depression-year debate. Five 530-horsepower diesel engines enabled the ship to cruise at seventy miles per hour in still air. In 1936 the Graf Zeppelin was dismantled and replaced by the Hindenburg, which exploded at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937.

A second Graf Zeppelin was built in 1938 and dispatched on a goodwill tour around the coastline of Britain. It was loaded with electronic gear to check out Britain’s radar defence system. British spies learned of this and had the system turned off. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain hailed the goodwill tour as evidence of Adolf Hitler’s peaceful intentions.