Forgotten Airship SHENANDOAH

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0:30This episode is brought to you by Perfect Bistro Cat Food. Hey, guys. Today, I'm interviewing my cat about his Perfect Bistro food. Percy, you seem to be a big Perfect Bistro fan. Care to comment? Totally. What do you like about it? You love the high-quality ingredients? And the delicious flavors, of course. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Listen to Percy, guys. Visit perfectbistro.com to try it for your cat. Felix Bunnell here, producer and host of Unsolved Histories.

Hindenburg Audio

1:03On this episode, we begin with a listen back to that classic audio of Herb Morrison describing the arrival and destruction of the giant airship Hindenburg. But this episode is not about the Hindenburg. The story we go deep into is about another earlier airship, which also happened to meet a violent and dramatic end. No one was speaking into a microphone and watching when the Shenandoah went down. But if you know where to look, there are artifacts. And there's a handful of dedicated historians who are keeping the story alive as the centennial

1:36of the deadly disaster nears. And now, the forgotten airship Shenandoah. How do you do, everyone? We're greeting you now from the Naval Air Base of Lakehurst, New Jersey, from which point we're going to bring you a description of the landing of the mammoth airship Hindenburg, which was due here in America this morning at dawn, completing the first transit landing crossing of the 1937 season. Charlie Nielsen, one of our WLS... That's Herb Morrison, a radio broadcaster from Chicago, in one of the most famous audio recordings in history, for May 1937.

2:10The Hindenburg left Frankfurt, Germany, yeah, Tuesday evening, rather, at 7.30, their time. And for better than two and a half days, they've been speeding through the skies over miles and miles of water here to America. As he speaks into a vintage microphone, Morrison is standing alongside a U.S. Navy airfield in New Jersey, not too far from Manhattan. With him is a recording engineer named Charlie Nielsen. They both work for a radio station in Chicago called WLS. Nielsen is operating a high-tech piece of recording gear.

2:43It looks like a turntable or record player, but it makes audio recordings onto giant vinyl discs.

Early Recording Technology

2:49This is a few years before the tape recorder was invented, and decades before digital recording. It was due to land at Lakehurst this morning at dawn, but we learned after our arrival at Newark that adverse wind conditions had been encountered over the area surrounding Newfoundland, which slowed the speed of the ship considerably. You probably know what eventually happens to the Hindenburg while Morrison is watching, and you've likely seen newsreel footage synced up to Morrison's macabre play-by-play. You might even be able to recall some of the specific words and phrases he uses to describe

3:21what he sees as the tragedy, which killed 35 of the 96 people on board and one person on the ground, unfolds in one of the most well-documented disasters of the 20th century. And it's just about sunset and almost the end of twilight right now. And raining, raining as hard as could be. One thing worth pointing out here is that this audio was not broadcast live, as many otherwise reputable documentaries and websites claim. It was recorded by Herb Morrison and Charlie Nielsen, and then played back soon after on

3:53the NBC radio network and heard around the United States. Let me say a few words about the preparations which have been made here at Lakehurst. That was all of you know that the great part of this naval air base has played in the lighter than air transportation here in the United States. The facilities are adequate for the handling of the largest airship built. Just a little piece from where I'm standing is the great mooring mast. To this mast is attached to the nose of the airship. In this part of the recording, Morrison is talking about the infrastructure that had to be built so that airships like the Hindenburg could land at Lakehurst.

4:27The mooring mast is one of the most critical pieces of that infrastructure. That's a tall and very solidly built tower designed so that the nose of the airship can be tied to it. Not unlike how the bow of an ocean liner is tied to a dock, but if the wind could blow the ocean liner in a complete circle around the dock. It is so constructed that as the winds change, the top of the mast can be turned, allowing the airship to swing with its nose always into the wind. Inasmuch as the Hindenburg is 811 feet long, the mast of necessity must be quite a distance

5:00from the hangar, allowing clearance of the ship if it swings around the mast.

The Forgotten Airship Shenandoah

5:05The forgotten remnants of another mooring mast on the opposite side of the country are among the only pieces of infrastructure left from an earlier airship, which also met with disaster in the United States, but which, unlike the Hindenburg, has been pretty much forgotten. The back motors of the ship are just holding it just enough to keep it from... It bursts into flame. It bursts into flame and it's falling. It's crashing. Watch it. Watch it. Get out of the way. Get out of the way.

5:35Get this shotty. Get this shotty. It's crashing. And it's crashing. It's crashing. From KSL Podcasts... Get out of the way, please. It's burning and bursting into flames and it's falling on the morning... I'm Felix Bunnell. This is Unsolved Histories... This is terrible. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the world. The forgotten airship, Shenandoah. Four or five hundred feet into the sky and it's a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. The smoke and the flames now and the flames crashing to the ground, not quite through the

6:06mooring mast. Oh, the humanity and all the fans are just screaming around here. I don't do it. I can't even talk to people whose friends are on there. I can't even talk to people whose friends are on there.

6:38And you can still see, they must have set it when they were building it, they must have put it in wet concrete. That's Lee Corbin, retired Navy, Air Force, and airline pilot. You might remember him from Season 1 of Unsolved Histories for the research he did to understand what might have happened to Flight 293. Lee is standing in an otherwise unremarkable grassy field dotted with tall fir trees. Through those trees is the main runway of McCord Air Force Base south of Seattle, which is where Flight 293 departed from.

7:09But the concrete Lee is examining predates Flight 293 by decades. Nowadays, McCord Field and McCord Air Force Base are part of Joint Base Lewis-McChord, or JBLM. And then there's various pads around here because the support facility was back here. As you look around, you can kind of see through the grass, little support pads and stuff like that. So this was original? Or what? This is where the mooring mast for the Shenandoah that came out here in 1924.

7:41This is what you were talking about? Yeah. The Shenandoah was the U.S. Navy's first airship in the early 1920s when so-called lighter-than-air aviation was being explored for civilian and especially military purposes. Lighter-than-air means just that. Unlike a heavy airplane that requires wings and motor to stay aloft, airships, also known as dirigibles or zeppelins, use lighter-than-air gas, just like a child's balloon, to float up into the sky. Lee is a top-notch amateur historian

8:12who specializes in military history and aviation history. That's how he found the remnants of the airship mooring mast at McCord. There's no plaque, no interpretive signage, and nothing online about it, other than a few interviews Lee has given over the years. There was the mast itself, and then there's a water line that went up and a fuel line and electrical power that went up to the ship. How tall was the mast? I don't know, 165 feet, give or take a couple feet. It had guy wires in too, right?

8:43It had guy wires, and if you could, you'd probably need a metal detector or something like that to find them, but there's all these blocks. There should be blocks spaced out around here evenly where the guy wires went. I've known Lee for a decade or so, and we've worked on countless projects together. Like me, Lee is passionate about tracking down remaining bits of otherwise forgotten infrastructure that played some important but now long-gone role in an event of historical significance. It's a simple recipe,

9:13and the airship mooring mast at McCord is a perfect example. Back in 1924, there was nothing out here. But it was just considered Camp Lewis, you know, the future Fort Lewis. So this is where they decided to put this mast up for the first cross-country flight of a dirigible in the United States. It was owned by the name. And that's where the historical significance part of the recipe comes in. The name Shenandoah comes from an indigenous leader in a town, river, and valley in Virginia.

9:46It's also the name of that first American airship, with a rigid frame, multiple engines, huge internal bladders containing helium, and a passenger cabin or control car attached to the underside, which made the first cross-country flight in the United States more than 100 years ago. It was 680 feet long, and the diameter was about 79 feet at its widest diameter. The Shenandoah came to what was then Camp Lewis in October 1924.

10:17That's about seven years before the Hindenburg was built in Germany. The Navy saw a bright future for airships as a smart way to protect American waters from surprise attack. In the time before radar, there was no other practical way to see over the horizon and stay aloft for days at a time, the way you could with a lighter-than-air airship. The Navy was also making plans to send the Shenandoah to explore the Arctic, and a cross-country flight was a good way to test airship technology and generate goodwill among the American public.

10:48It had five engines. It originally had six on it, and then they took one off to save weight because they didn't feel that they really needed all six big old Packard engines. They just kind of, you know, spun along at a moderate RPM. Normal cruising speed was about 40 knots. They could do 60, supposedly. When the Shenandoah arrived at Camp Lewis, that mooring mast, which we've already made so much fuss about, well, it didn't quite work out as planned

11:19because of the weather. Which was one drawback for airships. They could, at times, be more susceptible to weather conditions than heavier-than-air aircraft. There's also one very important difference between the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg that's worth pointing out. For that critical lighter-than-air lift, the Shenandoah used helium, a so-called noble gas, which is not flammable or dangerous in any way, and which is still used everywhere for birthday balloons, holiday parade inflatables, and the Goodyear blimp. The United States has always had a good supply of helium

11:51from huge underground deposits in Texas. Because Germany in the 1930s did not have easy access to helium, the Hindenburg used a different and much more dangerous gas. There's debate about what ignited the Hindenburg on that fateful day in 1937, but there's no doubt about why it burned so quickly and completely. It was filled with highly flammable and explosive hydrogen gas.

12:16Still, even using helium, the Shenandoah presented challenges to its crew when they tried to land at Camp Lewis for routine expansion of the gas inside the airship. So what they had to do is the heating of the sun would make it very difficult for the ship to sometimes get onto the mast. So what they would actually end up doing is flying around, just basically waiting for the sun to go down, and then the gas would cool off, and then the ship would be able to get down to the mast. So they kind of ran into that situation on that day.

12:49Which, Lee says, was a perfect excuse to take the Shenandoah for a joyride or a kind of public relations flight around Puget Sound. And so they just basically flew all around Tacoma and Seattle, just, you know, wasting time, waiting for the sun to go down. You know, the newspapers had been, you know, reporting that the ship was on its way. And I think, as I remember, they said something like 40,000 people showed up down there in Camp Lewis to watch this thing get more to the mast. And there's photos of all the cars

13:19parked out there in the field just waiting for this thing. Lee says there was another famous visitor also in town on that foggy day in October 1924. On that very day, Babe Ruth happened to be in town doing an exhibition baseball game at that big bowl stadium there in Tacoma. As it turned out, the giant airship was a bigger draw than even the Sultan of Swat. And of course, the Shenandoah is flying all around Tacoma, so everybody is jumping in their cars

13:50to go down to Camp Lewis to see this thing when it eventually gets moored. So poor Babe Ruth got put out by the fact that there was this airship that was taking away money from the exhibition game that he was trying to put on there that day. By the next day, the Babe took his bats and balls and headed out of town, and so did the Shenandoah. They left the next day. They moored at the mast finally, and then the next day, they left, flew around Seattle

14:20and out to Bremerton a little bit, and then started heading down to San Diego.

14:26As the Shenandoah flew around that day, one of the naval officers aboard the airship probably knew the terrain better than any other member of the crew. And he also had a direct connection to the earliest days of the Boeing Company. Along with the forgotten mooring mast, a man named Roland G. Mayer is another part of the story that Lee uncovered in his research. He was born in Seattle in 1898, and he grew up in the Central District there in Seattle. And then he went to the University of Washington

14:57and graduated in 1917. And what's interesting about his background is Bill Boeing needed some aircraft engineers for his relatively new aircraft factory because they were starting to increase production because of World War I. Roland Mayer had been hired by Bill Boeing at the same time as two other young engineers from the University of Washington, both of whom would go on to long and illustrious careers in aviation,

15:28Philip Johnson and Claire Egvett. But Mayer didn't stay with Boeing. Both Johnson and Egvett stayed with Boeing and went on to become presidents of the company eventually. So there's no telling what Mayer would have done. I believe he had already taken the civil service exams to go to work for the Navy. So he only stayed there at Boeing for a couple of weeks. And then he left to go to Philadelphia to start work with the Navy. And then he was originally hired as a civilian and then he decided to go ahead

15:59and join the Navy.

16:02A little less than a year after the Shenandoah visited Tacoma, with Roland Mayer aboard, the massive airship would meet with its own unique disaster in the skies over Ohio. Unlike the Hindenburg, there was no play-by-play recording made by a radio reporter and no newsreel footage of the moment of destruction. Still, the Shenandoah disaster would capture public attention for days as newspapers published gory photos of the wreckage and Americans mourned the loss of the airship and so many members

16:32of its brave crew. The wreck even inspired at least one tribute song, which sold thousands of records and thousands of copies of the sheet music. Roland Mayer was aboard the Shenandoah when it crashed and would play a critical role in the survival of several members of the crew of the doomed craft. He also was a glider pilot,

17:27also was a free balloon pilot and has a free ballooning license and a glider license, actually, that was signed by Orville Wright. So that'll give you an idea of how long ago he was involved in all of this. Kevin Vogel is the grandson of Shenandoah Airship Officer Roland Mayer. Mayer was from Seattle. He had joined the Navy after college and was closely involved in the design and construction of the airship. When you're an officer in the Navy

17:58and you say jump, people jump. And I, you know, I think he was very fair and I think he was highly respected and I don't think he tolerated incompetence, let's put it that way. Vogel says his grandfather Roland never really talked about his years in lighter-than-air aviation, including the time aboard the Shenandoah when it went down. Actually, he was very closed-mouth about that time frame and incidents related. I mean, there are a lot of letters back and forth. I have letters from,

18:28to my grandmother, from him, right after the Shenandoah crashed. They had to secure the site and they had to, because, you know, people were walking in, walking off with pieces of the Shenandoah. And that's what happens when a, you know, a crash site, people go, oh, a souvenir. Vogel says his grandfather did show sensitivity to the family of one of the Shenandoah crew members who didn't survive. Though he showed it somewhat cryptically in a telegram to his own wife. There's a very touching telegram that he sent

18:58to his wife, Mabel, and he says in the telegram that she had better go over to the name of one of the other people serving on the ship, indicating very subtly that he had not made it and that she should be there when this guy's wife hears the news that her husband didn't make it. And I guess because it was a telegram that other people had access to it, so he just wanted to, in code, basically tell her that she would have

19:29instinctively known there was an issue and gone over to look after this person. In the age of routine jet travel for civilians and during a time when those who can afford it are even venturing into outer space, the details of the Shenandoah tragedy might seem almost quaint or old-fashioned. Or, at least, they seem to have played out in almost slow motion during a summer thunderstorm in the Midwest. When the high winds and downdrafts of that thunderstorm started to tear the Shenandoah apart,

19:59historian Lee Corbin says Roland Mayer, as a designer of the airship and an experienced lighter-than-air aviator, was in his element. He was running back and forth throughout the ship trying to figure out what was going on and how they could keep the ship together, and then it broke apart. A century after it was lost, Lee is among just a handful of people who have studied the final moments of the Shenandoah. Ian Ross is another and he sums up what happened next. It hit extreme turbulence over Ohio

20:29and broke into basically three pieces. Ross says that when the airship crashed in southeastern Ohio on that stormy morning in September 1925, it was unlike any aviation tragedy before or since. And the control car with most of the officers, I think 14 of them, dropped away and fell to earth and killed everybody in the control car. The upper section, the dirigible section, if you will, broke into two pieces and both of those pieces floated to earth.

21:00The control car is the main crew compartment on the underside of the airship. What he calls the dirigible section is the giant football-shaped structure containing all the helium which holds the airship aloft. Ross says that in the Shenandoah disaster, those two pieces of the dirigible section separated in midair. The rear section kind of floated down and dragged across and most of the people that were in that section survived. For the six crew members in the front section, the section where Roland Mayer

21:30also found himself, the scenario was a little more complicated. When the Shenandoah broke apart, the front section floated free and actually gained altitude. The men aboard had no choice but to pilot the giant piece of wreckage as if it were essentially a huge rudderless balloon as it traveled another eight miles beyond where the control car had fallen to earth. And those men used their ballooning skills because every airship man, that's how they were trained, was hydrogen or helium balloons.

22:02They used their ballooning skills. I think they were in the air for nearly an hour to run up to a high level and then they were able to valve off some of the gas and bring it into a very gentle landing and all the men in the front section survived. And, says Ian Ross, a lot of the credit for the men's survival goes to none other than Roland Mayer. And I personally believe very strongly in that he played a vital role in the survival

22:32of that front section. Ross knows about Roland Mayer because Ross' grandfather was Herbert Wiley, an airship commander for the U.S. Navy in the 1930s and one of Roland's closest friends. Ross also has a personal connection. Mayer and his wife, Ross says, practically raised Ross' mom after her mother, Herbert Wiley's wife, passed away. A few years ago, Ross wrote a book about Herbert Wiley and about the U.S. Navy airship he commanded called the Macon. Ross immersed himself

23:02in the envelope-pushing culture of American airships of the 1920s and 1930s. And, I mean, you had to be a courageous person to go up in these things, even if they're paying you 50% extra. Because it was, it could be a frightening experience, especially in those days. Remember, most people had never been a loft in their life. And all of a sudden they're in this huge gas-filled vehicle. Just amazing to me, I think. I would have loved to have seen one. Kevin Vogel,

23:33Roland Mayer's grandson, has no doubt that his grandfather played a critical role in the survival of the men in the front section of the Shenandoah. But, since we know that Roland Mayer never really shared his memories, the details are hard to verify. If my grandfather had sat me down and told me what actually had happened, I could relate it all to you. He never did. And I don't think, other than his, the inquiry board, which I also think probably he said exactly the way he thought it happened because he's that way, but he also would have

24:03made it a team effort no matter what he did because that's what you do as an officer. One of those team efforts reportedly came in the final moments that the front section was airborne, around sunrise, when it was close enough to the ground that the men were able to drop a line. You know, they dragged the line down on the ground and apparently it went over the roof of a farmer's house and the farmer came out and they kept yelling to him to tie the line off. If you run ahead and tie the line off on a tree so that it would hold the ship in place.

24:33Somehow, that farmer, roused from his home in the early daylight, only to come outside and see a chunk of what used to be the Shenandoah skimming overhead, got the message. And it's my understanding that once that happened, someone, I don't remember who it was, shimmied down the line and asked the farmer to get a shotgun so they could start shooting the gas cells of the aircraft, which to me is kind of ridiculous on a certain level because they're very big cells. It's not like they're huge. So a shotgun hole

25:04and it's not going to do a lot to bring it down, let's put it that way. So I'm hearing stories that I don't know if true or not. I'm, you know, all of this is going on. You hear bits and pieces and I honestly just can't tell you.

Shenandoah Crash Aftermath

25:20Fortunately,

Shenandoah Crash Aftermath

25:20in Noble County, Ohio, where the Shenandoah crashed, interest in the tragedy still runs high among a core group of dedicated amateur historians. My late husband and I started a collection of Shenandoah memorabilia and we have a camper that we converted into a mobile museum. Teresa Rayner and her late husband, Brian, spent the better part of 40 years studying the Shenandoah and sharing the story in their mobile museum. She says the story about the farmer is true.

25:51His name was Ernest Nichols. But that part about tying the line from the forward section of the airship to a tree is not quite correct. He tied it to a fence post but it did not want to hold so they ended up shooting holes in the gas cells so that it would lay onto the ground and those men all got off. Teresa knows because she heard much of the story directly from one of her neighbors, the farmer's son, Stanley Nichols. When we first got acquainted with him he was a very reserved man, a wonderful man but just kind of

26:22reserved and quiet and it took him several years to get to where he would even talk about it to us. He said, I was only three. Though Stanley was just a child in 1925, he had vivid memories of climbing inside the wreckage of the front section which had crashed to earth in his backyard. And he said, after the guard got there, one of the National Guards did let him walk up inside but he said, I was scared to death. He said, I didn't stay long. He said, I just went up

26:53and he said, the wind was whipping some of that outside of it and he said, I just went in real quick and come back out but he said, I was really scared. But he said, outside of that, you know, he really couldn't tell us too much except that he knew what his father had done. The Rainers built their mobile museum to the tragedy in the 1990s. As you come in one end, you'll see a three-foot model, you'll see a canvas seat that we feel came out of the control car. We've got several different pieces of framework and depending on

27:24where the framework was used in the airship, it depends on the shape. We have some of the gas cells which was made of a cotton cloth and what was called gold beater skin which was nothing but the stomach lining of oxen. It was the material they could find at that time that was the most lightweight plus leak proof so that they wouldn't lose any of the helium. Before Brian Rainer passed away more than a decade ago, the couple would often take the mobile museum to schools and they would park it near one of the three places where sections

27:55of the Shenandoah crashed and open their display to the public. Along with the mobile museum, Rainer says that one key reason that the memory of the Shenandoah lives on in Noble County beyond people like her and her late husband is because the mascot for the high school there is called the Zeps, short for Zeppelins. Though, she says, Brian Rainer was never quite happy with the way the mascot looked. This was a pet peeve of my late husband's. They keep changing the way the mascot looks and for a few years they made it,

28:26you know, how the Shenandoah is a nice slender, you know, well, sometimes they get more of a blimpy look to it and he never liked that. He said, that's not really what the Shenandoah looked like. That Zeppelin was nice and thin. It was not that fat.

28:44The government investigation into the wreck of the Shenandoah ultimately concluded that the severe late summer weather over Ohio was simply too much for the rigid structure of the airship to take. A total of 14 men died in the disaster but remarkably, 29 men survived including Roland Mayer. After the crash, he stayed with the Navy's lighter-than-air program and served as an officer aboard the airship Los Angeles. By the late 1930s, rigid airships like the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg

29:14were ultimately made obsolete. Advances in aircraft design and radar and multiple high-profile deadly disasters didn't do much to prove their viability or instill confidence in the technology. Two additional Navy airships were destroyed in storm-related crashes in the 1930s. The Akron crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 1933, killing 73 of the 76 on board. Commander Wiley finally ordered abandoned ship. The Macon, commanded by Roland Mayer's

29:45friend Herbert Wiley, crashed off the coast of California in 1935 and all but two aboard survived. The huge craft which the West Coast so recently hailed merged into the sea, its officers and men dropping to safety with rubber life rafts as a dozen Navy vessels ablaze with searchlights rushed to save them.

30:06The Los Angeles was the only one of the four U.S. Navy airships that wasn't destroyed in a crash. Still, in World War II, the U.S. Navy used dozens of smaller inflatable blimps, not unlike what Goodyear flies today, for patrol and reconnaissance. During the war, Roland Mayer managed a warplane factory in Fort Worth, Texas. He also settled there after his military career ended and passed away in the 1970s. As for the mooring mast at what's now JBLM,

30:37Lee Corbin says it remained standing in the meadow for more than a decade. The mast was only used once and they intended to use it in the future, but just nothing ever happened. Lee says that in the early 1930s, base officials expected a visit from the Navy airship Macon, which was 200 feet longer than the Shenandoah. This required adding a new feature to the meadow surrounding the mast. In fact, in 1931, as I remember,

31:08they built a 600-foot diameter track in anticipation of the, I think it was the Macon coming out here. And the Macon was so big that they had to put a weighted car at the tail so that it would swing in the wind, but not just swing wildly. So they had to build a track for the weighted car to go around. Of course, the Macon never did visit. In fact, the Shenandoah was the one and only airship to ever use the mooring mast

31:38at JBLM and the mast and the track were dismantled in the late 1930s. To the naked eye, there's no visible evidence of the track. However, in 2024, using readily available LiDAR images from an online database, Lee discovered several sections of the track still in place hidden only by tall grass. Back in the 1930s until the moment when the mast was taken down, because this is the U.S. Navy we're talking about, the structure was kept in tip-top ship shape to be ready

32:09at a moment's notice. And the Navy kept one machinist mate on duty