Thinking about it I’m not sure where my fascination with airships comes from. But look at them, they do look so regal and romantic. From Indiana Jones kicking out the Nazi for not having a ticket to just loving Led Zeppelin in general. Airships were a fascination. Not something that I necessarily thought about but when I did my eyes would light up.
Thomas Pynchon utilizes airships effectively in Against the Day as a team of young explorers, the Chums of Chance, man their airship Inconvenience taking it to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 and then through the Hollow Earth and other such shenanigan. Jim Butcher’s steam-punkish, The Aeronaut’s Windlass, which desperately needs a second book in the series, is also a fun romp on an airship. They have long provided a good background for adventure and sci-fi stories.
And my favorite UFO event is the airship flap that begun in 1896 and carried over into 1897, which had to have served as some inspiration for Pynchon. Running parallel to the airship flap are the claims made from the drawings and writings left behind by Charles Dellshau, which have led to the idea of some mysterious 19th century breakaway civilization centered around airship technology. While that’s all a little too outlandish to me, it’s still really fun to think about.
This is all to say that when I came across S.C. Gwynne’s His Majesty’s Airship The Life and Tragic Death of the World’s Largest Flying Machine (Scribner), I was pumped to learn more about actual airships. And Gwynne does not fail on that front. He provides the brief, substantive history of airships I didn’t know that I needed starting with Count von Zeppelin in the aptly titled chapter, “A Brief History of a Bad Idea,” with heavy emphasis on Germany as they were leaders in the field.
But the bulk of the book centers around the doomed British airship, R101, and the series of botched fuck-ups that led to its crash and death of 48 of its 54 passengers on October 5, 1930. Design flaws. Rushed timelines. Lack of test flights. Chain of command issues. Drinking problems. And chapter after chapter of realizing that airships are a stupid as shit way to travel.
You get treated to overviews of each of the characters involved with the development of the R101 with particular attention paid to Lord Christopher Thomson, an aristocratic-socialist and friend of Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald who would serve as his Air Minister, which is demonstrably a cool title. Thomson viewed airships as the savior of the British Empire in their ability to quickly tie together it’s farthest outposts. He pushed and pushed for this, which led to R101’s main journey a multi-day marathon flight from England to Karachi with only one planned stop in Egypt on the way. That the ship just made it over the channel and into France goes to show the doomed nature of the whole enterprise.
It’s a great story and Gwynne does a good job in telling it. And it is precisely that telling which is ultimately my biggest takeaway. As a historian and someone generally interested in the craft of writing history. The story itself is fairly straight forward with the disadvantage of there being no drama in what happened. The subtitle gives it away.
Gwynne instead focuses on the people involved in the narrative and the airships themselves to create what dramatic tension there is. With his background as a journalist, his primary triumph is his framing of the story and going back and forth between the R101 and the history of the airships. The people who planned or flew the airships and the day of the crash.
I always find it a constant struggle when writing history to not just be like this happened, then this happened, then this happened, and it all happened because of this. That is the easy way of going about things, and probably what most historians would do. If you ever read a local historical society’s journal or even a dissertation or thesis.
Gwynne’s journalism background adds an element of craft to the telling of R101’s fateful journey. That while staying true to the history, story, and people involved, also manages to weave a compelling tale that you want to read. By taking some extra time to frame the narrative in a compelling fashion, he is able to maintain a contextual center for the story.
Context is always something near and dear to a historian, so to be able to construct the narrative whilst maintaining that contextual element is definitely a treat. And writing and framing is definitely not something that is taught in History Departments. It is just something you kinda pick up from writing so many damn papers and book reviews. But it is something that History student could benefit from.
Extended Musings
There’s a good story in His Majesty’s Airship, where the British reversed-engineered downed German zeppelins during WWI. This was important because German airship technology and knowledge was so much far advanced than any others in the world at the time. So when the British created their own airships based off the remains of German ones it went as about as well as you would expect.
It led to some shitty-ass airships that crashed and exploded and what you expect shitty-ass airships to do. Well, this got me thinking about the reverse-engineering of UFOs, which has been a big claim in the UFO community since well Roswell. And has received renewed interest thanks to whistle-blower David Grusch’s latest claims and testimony in front of a Senate Hearing.
Now I have no real horse in this race, and I don’t really believe any of these new claims are all that new. I’m at the wake me up when you have a body or can actually produce some sort of craft phase.
But I love finding historical examples for things and his claims that us Americans have been trying and failing to reverse-engineer this UFO technology. And the reverse-engineering of airships brings up a good point in that British engineers tried to skip an important step of trial and error, or to quote Ian Malcolm, the Brits “didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves.”
As a result they built shitty-ass airships. The same holds true about reverse-engineering any sort of UFO technology IF!!!! there are even UFOs/UAPs laying around in some hangar somewhere. Even if we have been at it for 70-80-100 years or whatever, the extreme hubris to believe that we could harness or even figure out what this technology is, let alone try to recreate a completely foreign technology, is staggering, if not dangerous. But along those same lines, not doing anything with these UFOs or UAP parts might be some form of negligence. Beats me!