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Establishing an Air Station

The village of Lakehurst, New Jersey, was founded in 1841. Tucked away in the lonely Pine Barrens, it remained a small and isolated community. The Central Railroad of New Jersey defined the character of the place for half a century. It seemed that everyone in town either worked on the line or was dependent on someone who did. By 1900, however, Lakehurst had achieved some celebrity as a health resort. The Pine Tree Inn, a rambling hotel opened in 1898, attracted tourists for a few decades until it was razed in 1937.

The association of Lakehurst with the military began during the First World War. Early in 1915, representatives from the British government opened negotiations with American manufacturers for the production of shells for the imperial Russian government. The Baldwin Locomotive Works of Philadelphia agreed to make artillery ammunition. On 10 June 1915, a new company was organized—The Eddystone Ammunition Corporation—to execute the contract. Since their ammunition and that from other firms would require field testing, a proving ground was established fifty miles away near Lakehurst. A site was selected north of the village on high ground between Manapaqua Brook and the Ridgeway Branch. The test site consisted of little more than a long firing range cleared through the scrub oak and pine, with an unpaved road and observation structures spaced along its length.

Ultimately, Eddystone tested lots representing some 7,600,000 shrapnel and high-explosive shells for the Russian regime. A subsidiary was also organized in September 1917, the Eddystone Munitions Company, to manufacture a variety of munitions for the U.S. government.

The United States entered the European war in April 1917. The U.S. Army acquired the proving ground area later that year and began to develop the site as an experimental ground for gas warfare. This decision was reached in September, but work on the site was not started until late March 1918. Firing trials by the Chemical Warfare Service (Proving Division) began that April. The camp was a large one. As well as having firing ranges, the facility was equipped with permanent gun positions, batteries of several caliber, magazines, rail sidings for delivery of ordnance, laboratories, barracks, and related structures. Security was exceedingly tight and both officers and enlisted personnel were selected with great care. The purpose of the camp: “to test, in actual large-scale field trials, new gases, which from laboratory tests look promising.”¹ Two lines of trenches equipped for gas sampling were constructed near the impact areas to simulate those on the European battlefield. Cloud-gas attacks and other experiments with mustard gas were conducted. The camp’s artillery detachment fired shells into the trenches and nearby terrain to note the concentration of gas and its effects on animals in the test areas. This activity increased in intensity up to the armistice, when all such work was abruptly terminated.

The war demonstrated a need for officers trained in gas warfare, so, in 1918, a training camp for the Chemical Warfare Service was established southeast of the proving ground. Construction began in August. Intended to accommodate 1,300 officers and men, the 733-acre camp was located on part of the proving ground reservation one mile north of Lakehurst. The Army designated the facility Camp Kendrick, in honor of a former West Point professor. Barracks and officers quarters, mess halls, administration buildings, an infirmary, power house, and other structures were quickly erected. The first complement of 10 officers and 283 men arrived at the incomplete camp in September. But training for gas warfare and the work of the nearby proving ground had yet to reach their fullest potential before the armistice was signed in November 1918. As America demobilized, the new camp was used briefly to muster out troops returning from France. But in 1919 the site was closed pending sale. It is at this point that the U.S. Navy entered the Lakehurst story.

One week before the notice of sale, two U.S. Navy representatives arrived at Camp Kendrick to evaluate the site as a possible airship base. Cdr. Lewis H. Maxfield, USN, an early advocate of naval airships, and Starr Truscott, chief engineer for the Navy’s design staff, visited the Lakehurst site on 7 April. The two men were impressed with the availability of rail lines and water, the camp’s location with respect to New York and the coast, and its accessibility to Philadelphia and the Naval Aircraft Factory. The factory was now relatively idle and already being considered for the fabrication of America’s first fleet airship; a hangar on the Lakehurst site would be used for assembly of the aircraft and general outfitting. The flat, sandy expanse available at Lakehurst seemed ideal for construction and for flight operations.

Camp Kendrick. In 1917 the Chemical Warfare Service, Proving Division, United States Army, developed a site near Lakehurst, NJ, to test—in large-scale field trials—new gases for war. Here a high-explosive burst rises over an impact area. With cessation of hostilities, Proving Division work was terminated. By January 1919, three-fourths of the commissioned and enlisted personnel had been demobilized. Note the observation tower. R. F. Burd Jr.

Returning doughboys being celebrated in Lakewood, a few miles from Lakehurst, a naval nowhere. In 1919 the Navy Department received authorization for two rigid airships and for a naval air station. That May, about 1,700 acres of the Camp Kendrick site were purchased “for use as a dirigible field,” what would become the Navy’s main LTA base on the Atlantic coast. R. F. Burd Jr.

The topography for many miles around is undisturbed by heights of any kind. Thus the station is not only visible at great distances in clear weather, but there is also the advantage that in thick weather, there is no additional danger in flying low to locate it. Also no local eddies due to high obstacles are formed.²

The unfavorable location of Lakehurst with regard to storm paths was overlooked. This would be unwittingly compounded when the hangar was not constructed with its long axis parallel to the predominant wind direction. The frequent cross-hangar winds would bedevil flight operations from the beginning. Moreover, Lakehurst’s location with respect to the Atlantic Fleet and its command structure in Norfolk, and its remove from fleet exercise areas, would, in the ensuing decades, artificially isolate lighter-than-air from the rest of the service. Removed as it was from major centers of population and from the mainstream Navy of the interwar years, Naval Air Station (NAS) Lakehurst tended to be an isolated and rather lonely command.

The sale of Camp Kendrick was postponed, and the Lakehurst site was recommended. On 16 May 1919, Acting Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the purchase of about seventeen hundred acres “for use as a naval dirigible field.” The secretary of war concurred in the transfer that June. The purchase price was $13,088, or about $8 to $10 an acre.

Three million dollars had been appropriated for a hangar to house two rigid airships, or ZRs. The design work for this unique structure fell to the Navy. Based on plans prepared by the old Joint Army and Navy Airship Board, the Bureau of Yards and Docks drew up specifications for a dirigible hangar on the Lakehurst site. In July 1919, thirty-one pages of general specifications were distributed by the bureau, calling for a dirigible hangar having concrete footings, reinforced concrete floors, steel frame, steel sash and doors, steel rolling doors, asbestos siding, gypsum roof, built-up roofing, copper skylights, gutters, downspouts and ventilators, wood-block floors, terra-cotta partitions, metal stairs, elevators, railroad tracks, docking rails, kitchen equipment, plumbing, heating, lighting, and electrical equipment.³

Britain’s R-34 at Roosevelt Field, NY, 6–9 July 1919. R-34 made the first transatlantic leap by airship and was the third aircraft of any kind to cross. Its round-trip transit underscored the commercial potential of rigid airships. Observer: Lt. Cdr. Zachary Lansdowne, USN, the first American to cross by air. In 1919 the concept of practicable transoceanic air transport—aircraft plus payload—meant airships, not airplanes. Note the hydrogen cylinders. B. J. Countryman

The final design was a structure 943 feet long, 350 feet wide, and 200 feet high overall. The hangar space would be, for some years, the largest single room in the world: an 804-by-264-foot room having a 193-foot clearance at the centerline. Structurally, the hangar was comparatively simple. Ten steel arches (the world’s largest) were supported on towers tied together with longitudinal girders, the entire assembly covered with corrugated asbestos sheathing bolted to the framework. The four 1,350-ton doors were an engineering challenge, however. The two leaves on each end were mounted on eight-wheel trucks, which rolled sideways on standard gauge tracks. Each door was freestanding, counterweighted with concrete, and operated by a twenty-horsepower electric motor, which opened each leaf in thirteen minutes. Three sets of railroad tracks were built through the hangar and fifteen hundred feet beyond each end. These would receive taxiing cars for the centerline gondolas of each airship. Mechanical assistance was augmented further by three docking rails or trolley slots; bow and stern handling lines would be made fast by tackles to mobile trolleys during the docking evolution.

The Lakehurst hangar, known as Hangar No. 1, was intended to be largely self-contained. Living as well as office and shop spaces were provided along both sides of the berthing space in a two-deck arrangement. But the barracks, cafeteria, medical dispensary, and other accommodations were little used and were converted quickly to other purposes. The hangar’s work spaces included offices and shops essential to the operation of a large military airship: a wire shop, joiner shop, fabric shop, motor repair shop, machine shop, offices for administration, a gas-cell storage and repair space, blueprint and drafting rooms, instrument repair shop, and others.

Sealed proposals from private bidders were accepted in Washington until 6 August 1919, when the competition officially closed. The Lord Construction Company was selected as the general contractor with a successful bid of $2,900,000. The Bethlehem Steel and Bridge Company would erect the steel framework. The contract was signed on 8 September 1919, and work on the site started two weeks later. A force of eight hundred men set about clearing a site and laying a branch line to the main railway, which had to be done before the hangar itself could be started. Foundation work for the huge structure was completed over the winter months of 1919–20, and the first truss was hoisted into position on 17 May. The remaining nine arches were erected one a week thereafter. The east doors were the last part of the structure to be completed. By late 1920 general outfitting and application of the asbestos siding was under way. These panels were arranged in alternating strips of gray and two shades of brown to ease the monotony of a solid color and, according to Aviation magazine, to break up the outline of the building and thus “make it difficult for a hostile observer to locate it from the air.”⁴

Proposed layouts for the new base had been prepared as early as October 1919 by Cdr. Ralph D. Weyerbacher, Bureau of Construction and Repair (Construction Corps, CC), who was later named manager of the station when it was ready for occupancy and assembly of the airship. These early plans included the hangar and landing field, as well as an administration building, garage, mess hall, barracks, chief petty officer (CPO) quarters, a recreation building, hospital, a bachelor officers quarters (BOQ) and quarters for married officers, a “Wireless and Meteorology Station,” a power plant, a hydrogen plant and gas storage, rail lines and roads, water supply, sewage disposal, and miscellaneous storage spaces and shops. Conspicuously absent from the list was a mooring mast.⁵

A permanent coal-fired power house was an early priority. As work progressed on the hangar, the power house was completed near the Ridgeway Branch. The plant would furnish electricity for operating the massive hangar doors and for lighting, as well as supplying steam for heat. It was intended to heat the 36-million-cubic-foot berthing space, so the necessary equipment was built into the shed. But early tests showed this was impractical, and the attempt was abandoned.⁶

Lakehurst’s hangar under construction, January 1921. The steelwork arches and the west door leafs are nearly complete, with application of asbestos siding under way. Note the branch railway to the main line and, at left, the barrack from Camp Kendrick. On 28 June 1921 the (incomplete) base was commissioned as the Naval Airship and Construction and Experiment Station. Complement: 17 seventeen officers and 230 enlisted men. NARA

Hangar No. 1. As fireproof as possible, it was intended originally for hydrogen-inflated rigid airships. Its berthing space was for a time the largest single room in the world. The siding pattern was an attempt at camouflage. Mrs. F. J. Tobin

The decision to inflate America’s airships with helium was still two years in the future. Thus, a hydrogen generation plant was constructed for the station. The plant was capable of generating seventy-five thousand cubic feet daily. A one-million-cubic-foot gasometer, two small holders, and space for five thousand cylinders were provided as storage. A sixteen-inch main would conduct the inflammable gas to the nearby hangar. Inside, this line fed to outlets along each side of the berthing space. These could be connected by flexible tubing to an airship’s inflation manifold to replenish her cells. A deflation line beneath the roof was provided for exhausting gas. (After the decision was made for helium, a repurification plant was completed in 1924. The deflation piping exhausted the impure [mixed with air] gas to the plant, after which the repurified helium was routed into storage or returned to the ship under overhaul.)

But the new shed was designed for hydrogen, so a great deal of attention was paid to ventilation and to the prevention of sparks. All electricity was brought in through gastight transformer rooms cut off from the hangar interior. All inside floodlights were behind heavy gastight covers, and, where possible, wiring was on the outside of the building. Fire protection was extensive.

The hangar’s unique berthing space was designed for the assembly, repair, and maintenance of rigid airships. Consequently, the two-ship room was elaborately equipped.

Overhead trussed purlins provide for suspension of airships. Catwalks and hinged gangways at different levels provide access to different parts and to the tops of ships in their docking position. A generous supply of traveling platforms and extension ladders afford workmen proper stances. Elevators provide access to all levels.⁷

The concrete floor was covered with asphalt blocks to prevent sparks from falling tools. Tie-down ring bolts were countersunk into the deck for ships’ handling lines. Overhead, skylights of special amber-colored glass reduced ultraviolet rays and their destructive effects on airship fabrics. A battery of outside floodlights was installed on each corner to illuminate the field and “also to search the skies for enemy aircraft in case of hostilities.”⁸

A large landing field was laboriously cleared and graded, especially to the south and west of the shed. Men were detailed to cut down the ubiquitous scrub oak and pine and clear away undergrowth while tractor tanks pulled stumps. By August 1921 about five hundred acres had been prepared. By 1927 the Lakehurst field was one of the largest in the world. The airfield was seeded in grass and fertilized in a frustrated attempt to grow “almost anything” to provide firm footing for ground crews and to reduce blowing sand from wind and whirling propellers. Officers and enlisted men quarters were permanently established, and barracks and mess halls for five hundred personnel were provided by fitting out the Army barracks already on site.

One early problem was the lack of quarters for married officers. Except for the commanding officer and the medical officer, the station’s complement of married officers was obliged to live off-station until late 1923, when four new “bungalows” were completed. The availability of housing off-station for airship workers was another concern.

The myriad details regarding the new base were approved and executed. A branch to the main rail line had been built; now separate spurs were graded into the hangar and to the power house and hydrogen-plant area for delivery of coal, gas cylinders, and stores. Wells were drilled, a sewage system installed. Roads were graded, the existing entrance road improved, and a Marine sentry box built at the southeast corner of the hangar. Distribution systems for water, hydrogen, steam, electricity, and compressed air were completed. Reliable weather information was essential to air operations, so an aerological building was constructed on the perimeter of the landing field. A dispensary, CPO club, headquarters building, pigeon house, fire engine house, several garages and storehouses, in short, all the accommodations and facilities attendant to a shore-side naval base were included.⁹

Radio was an integral component of the new air station. The original wireless operator’s house was placed in an isolated clearing to the northwest, well removed from the main complex. Little more than a small wooden shed, this station would be used until about 1928, when the transmitter and receiver equipment were reestablished in the Aerological Building. An antenna was erected for the vacuum transmitting set in 1922—“the latest and best radio equipment capable of development.” Designed and built by the Naval Aircraft Radio Laboratory, the new aerial was long and low to the ground in order to eliminate high towers and aerials near the field. This antenna was supported on poles only 60 feet high that together formed a rectangular network nearly 800 feet long and 120 feet wide.¹⁰ A radio compass station also was built in the pine woods but soon moved to the roof of the hangar. Its goniometer, or direction finder, was intended to help airships determine their position within a radius of about two hundred miles from base and to locate the field in poor visibility. But the system was little used, perhaps because no other sets were then available for triangulation and computing a “fix.” The “tuning house” was converted to a shortwave station about 1924.

The finishing touches were applied to the new station. By June 1921, total expenditures amounted to some $4–5 million.

On 6 June 1921, Lt. Cdr. Joseph P. Norfleet, USN, reported on board and assumed temporary command from the naval engineers. He was accompanied by a handful of officers and men. Three weeks later, on 28 June, Capt. Franck T. Evans, USN, became the naval air station’s first commanding officer (CO). And in July Evans and the Fourth Naval District were notified officially that the designation of their new base was U.S. Naval Air Station, Lakehurst.

The United States’ first base for ZRs was operational. A sense of urgency had been building since spring. The British-built rigid authorized in 1919 had flown in late June. At the conclusion of her trials, R-38 (American ZR-2) would be turned over to an eager American crew. The timing of the transatlantic delivery had to await completion of the Lakehurst hangar. Finally, in mid-August, the Bureau of Yards and Docks advised the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) that it was ready for arrival of the ship. This did not include a permanent mooring mast. The American officers in England had been deeply impressed by the operational flexibility a mast seemed to offer their British colleagues, the inventors of the system. This led to a mooring mast at Lakehurst. Plans were initiated in April 1921, but the necessary drawings were not completed in time. Consequently, since delivery of ZR-2 appeared imminent, a temporary British-style three-point mooring system was erected that August on the field west of the hangar.

On temporary duty, the prospective crew for the new ship had been training in England since early 1920. Commander Maxfield, the commanding officer of the training detachment and prospective CO for ZR-2, had been dispatched first on 20 February. Four reserve officers followed in March, then eighteen enlisted personnel of the first draft. Despite the prospect of overseas duty and the chance to fly the largest airship in the world, the Navy Department experienced some difficulty assembling a crew for ZR-2. Many qualified aviators had left the service following the war, and those on duty were attached to the few coastal air stations still in commission. But after soliciting for “excellent men,” a second group arrived in England in June.

The U.S. Navy Rigid Airship Detachment (or Howden Detachment) was formed and began its course of instruction. This included ground school lectures on operational doctrine, hangar inspections of British rigids, and observer flights. The Americans had little choice but to rely on the British standard of performance. The Americans were novices to the intricacies of the airship arts. German operational experience was as yet largely unknown.

British R-38 (ZR-2) at Bedford, England. Large airships required a weaving of young sciences, notably aerodynamics and aerology—including the “structure” of gusts and wind shifts so as to compute the forces imposed. The first ZR intended for Lakehurst, R-38 failed structurally during its fourth performance trial, 24 August 1921—56.5 hours logged. The Navy Department’s fledgling program lost one aircraft and the talent and experience of personnel on board for training. Progress on large airships was set back two years. U.S. Naval Institute photo archive

Meanwhile, the engineering staff in Washington was developing misgivings about British design methods for large airships, particularly the calculation of aerostatic and aerodynamic forces acting on the hull. Nonetheless, construction of ZR-2, which had begun in February 1919, proceeded apace; the new ship was completed in the spring of 1921. R-38 made her maiden flight 23–24 June with four American observers on board. A second flight was made five days later and a third trial flown 17–18 July. The ship’s performance was far from satisfactory: she handled poorly and suffered, moreover, significant structural damage on the third flight under less than full power. Doubts about the aircraft and the upcoming transatlantic attempt deepened. Yet the ship’s trials were being rushed, and the crossing was scheduled to occur after about fifty hours of experience with the new ship.

At 0710, 23 August, R-38 lifted off the field at Howden on her fourth and final flight. On board were a British crew of twenty-five, five military and civilian passengers, six American officers, including Maxfield, and eleven American enlisted men. The ship lingered overnight out to sea. The next day a full-speed run was made and then high-speed rudder maneuvers. Over the city of Hull, rudder hard-over, R-38 failed structurally and broke her back. A mix of hydrogen, air, and fuel exploded. Forty-four of the forty-nine crewmen were killed; only one of the seventeen Americans on board for training survived.

The U.S. Navy’s fledgling program had lost one aircraft and the talent and experience of sixteen officers and men. Progress with large airships, moreover, had been set back two years. Newspaper editorials quickly protested the LTA program’s cost in lives and dollars, a litany that would be repeated in the decades to follow. The death of Commander Maxfield so early in the experiment was a tragic irony since “it was due to his enthusiasm and energy that the Navy Department (and the General Board) agreed to approve a rigid airship program and the Lakehurst station.”¹¹

One historian summarized the harsh lessons of the ZR-2 episode and their influence on the future of the rigid airship in the United States.

The U.S. Navy learned a great deal from the mistakes made in the ZR-2 program. The ship had been accepted on faith as a product of superior design knowledge and technology; the disaster had proved that the forebodings of the design staff in Washington were justified, and henceforth the Americans placed full trust and confidence in their own experts. . . . In the future the U.S. Navy would lay down its own specifications, and ensure that they be met by private contractors of its choice. [Rear Admiral] Moffett [the first chief of the new Bureau of Aeronautics] was not about to deal with foreign governments for expensive craft not built to his requirements, whose design history he was not familiar with, regardless of giveaway prices. . . . Henceforth the foreign influence in American airship design and operations would be German.¹²

Survivors of the Howden Detachment returned in October 1921 to a gloomy air station. NAS Lakehurst had reverted for the time being to the status of a construction and experiment station for rigid airships, with its energies focused on the erection of ZR-1. A reduction in both personnel and operating expenses was ordered; those men attached to the station for instruction in rigid airships were incorporated into the workforce assembling the first large airship of American design. Aviation magazine summarized the “rigid airship situation”:

Orders have gone out for a sharp reduction of the personnel at Lakehurst, N.J., the Naval Air Station for airships, as a result of the destruction of the ZR-2. In anticipation of the arrival of the ill-fated dirigible a crew in excess of 500 was being maintained to assist in getting the craft in and out of the hangar. It is expected to maintain about 100 men at the station, the remainder being transferred to other air stations or to ships of the fleet.¹³

NAS Lakehurst, would not witness its first flight of a rigid airship for another two years, until USS Shenandoah flew in September 1923.

Hauling stores, about 1922. Upon the loss of ZR-2, air station personnel were reduced to about sixty and the base placed on non-operating status during erection of the ZR-1. The Aerological Building is at left. One should appreciate the geographic and political isolation of NAS Lakehurst, well removed from major centers of population and from the mainstream Navy of the interwar years. Mrs. F. J. Tobin