Count Zeppelin, and a paradise destroyed

Today I write to you from Friedrichshaven

Today I write to you from Friedrichshaven. Of course by the time you read these words it will be my tomorrow, and it may well be the day before yesterday for you that I have written them. But today is today for me, and I am here in Friedrichshaven.

Friedrichshaven ought to be a pretty place. And so it was - an old German medieval town, lying in a picturesque setting on the sunny north shore of Lake Constance in southern Bavaria. Look straight across the lake and there, against the backdrop of a row of Alps, is Switzerland; Austria is clearly visible to the left. But the ancient town was levelled, almost literally, by Allied bombers one night in the spring of 1945, and what we see today is a 1950s bland and utilitarian replacement.

The fate of Friedrichshaven was sealed, inadvertently, by Ferdinand, Count Zeppelin. Zeppelin was for most of his life a relatively undistinguished German soldier, but he devoted his later years to aeronautics, and designed the famous aircraft that was to make his name a household word.

Airships in their simplest form are merely propelled and "dirigible" - or steerable - balloons. But the earlier and smaller airships were "nonrigid", their shape being maintained only by the pressure of the gas within.

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These non-rigid airships became unwieldy as their size increased, and Zeppelin was convinced that the answer to this problem was to house separate bags of gas inside a light but rigid framework covered with a fabric.

In 1906 his LZ3, designed in conformance with this concept, captured the imagination of the world by completing a successful flight of 60 miles in slightly under two hours.

Following this success, the German Kaiser, Willelm II, assigned Count Zeppelin a large tract of land adjacent to Friedrichshaven for the development of this novel form of aviation, and very soon "Zeppelins" built on Lake Constance were being used for civil aviation.

As designs improved during the 1920s and 1930s, these great aircraft provided those who could afford it with the ultimate in flying luxury. They could cross the Atlantic in a little over two days with a silent smoothness quite unknown before that time.

But following a number of tragic and well-publicised disasters, most notably the explosive disintegration of the Zeppelin Hindenburg in New Jersey in May 1937, the lighter-than-air approach to flight was more or less abandoned. The complex developed by Count Zeppelin at Fried rich shaven, however, continued to be the focus of the German aeronautics industry as the second World War approached. And so, inevitably, it became a target that night in 1945.