SYMHC Classics: U.S.S. Akron

This 2017 episode covers the loss of the U.S.S. Akron -- the biggest single tragedy in aviation history at the time that it happened. But unless you're an aviation or U.S. Navy history buff, you may not know much about this airborne aircraft carrier.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Recently on the show, we talked about the
balloons of World War Two, and while there were also
airships in use during this period of time that we
were covering, we did not really talk about them because
airships could be steered and they could move under their
own propulsions. They were sort of a whole different thing

(00:22):
from the unpiloted balloons that we were focused on. We
said that we would play an airship episode as an
upcoming Saturday classic, and here it is. It is about
the uss Akron, which was a US Navy airship during
the nineteen thirties and the disaster that destroyed it in
nineteen thirty three. And Joy, Welcome to Stuff You Missed

(00:46):
in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy V.
Willson In Tracy, did you know that the loss of
the uss Akron was the biggest single tragedy in aviation
history at the time that had happened. I did not

(01:08):
know that level of detail. Yeah, because unless you're an
aviation or a US Navy history buff, you might not
know much about it. It's one of those things that
kind of doesn't get a whole lot of attention. I
think we might have mentioned it just as an aside
in that episode that we did about the Hindenburg, but
even so we did not get into any detail. Yeah,
and even the Hindenburg disaster, which happened four years after

(01:31):
the Akron was lost, resulted in far fewer lives lost,
but probably because we have terrifying dramatic footage of the
Hindenburg burning, that very tragic incident is far more commonly
recalled in the public consciousness. So today we are going
to talk about the USS Akron, one of two large
rigid airships that were part of the US Navy's five

(01:53):
year aircraft program, which was authorized in nineteen twenty six.
And also just for clarity, a doubt would come up,
but just in case, this is not to be confused
with a much smaller, privately owned airship, also called the Akron.
That airship, which was owned by adventurer and photographer Chester
Melvin Vanaman, exploded off the coast of New Jersey in
nineteen twelve, killing its owner. But that is a totally

(02:15):
different thing. So for the one that we are talking about,
and the fall of nineteen twenty nine, construction began on
the ZRs four in Akron, Ohio that was eventually renamed
for the city where it was built. The Goodyear Zeppelin
Corporation had signed a contract with the Bureau of Aeronautics
in nineteen twenty eight to build this ship, which was

(02:37):
designed by doctor Carl Arnstein to be an airborne aircraft carrier.
In a week into the build, there was an official
ceremony to markets beginning. So sometimes if you're looking at
the historical record, there are a couple different dates that
are listed as the beginning of construction, and that's why
there was some preliminary work done, and then a week
after it they had this official ceremony, and during that serimony,

(03:00):
the chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, Rear Admiral William A. Moffett,
drove a golden rivet into the main ring of the ship.
By the spring of nineteen thirty one, the hull was
well underway and the name for the ship, which was
the Acron, like we said, was announced by Ernest Lee Jankie,
who was the Navy's Assistant secretary. The Goodyear Tire and
Rubber Company, in cooperation with the city of Akron Ohio

(03:23):
actually produced a short silent film about the Acron's construction.
It runs about twenty minutes and it showcases all the
features and innovations of the dirigible. It features the quote
huge building from which the giant airship was hatched, as
well as showing all of the construction phases of this
massive airship. In it, you can also see workers raising

(03:44):
the first ring into position, a massive gas cell being
placed in the frame for an inflation and buoyancy test,
the nose and tail of the craft being moved into position,
and the sheets that comprised its outer covering being applied
to the exterior of the frame, along with a number
of other milestones in the Akrone's construction. Yeah, they show

(04:05):
some cool footage of like them doping that exterior, which
is when they coat it with its protective coating, and
it just looks like dude's spray painting. It's kind of
fun to watch. And the film also mentions the water
ballast that was used to keep the zeppelin steady, which
was supplied by exhaust vapors that were then condensed, so
it was pretty smartly designed as well. On August eighth,

(04:28):
nineteen thirty one, first Lady Missus lew Henry Hoover christened
the airship as it was launched, meaning that it was
floating above the hangar floor, but it was still contained
there in the build bay. And when the dirigible was completed,
it was seven hundred and eighty feet that's two hundred
and thirty nine meters long, one hundred and thirty two
point five feet or forty meters wide, and one hundred

(04:49):
and fifty two point two feet or forty six point
five meters tall. When fully inflated, its volume was six
point five million cubic feet and it had been built
with a sturdy, deep mainframe, and this design was actually
a departure from the ringed design of prior dridgibles. It
was inflated with helium, and it featured eight Mayback VL

(05:10):
two engines, which were reversible and thus offered a really
high degree of maneuverability for something this size. The Akron's
design included a third of the interior space dedicated to
a hangar which could accommodate five aircraft. We're going to
talk about how those planes were launched and retrieved in
just a bit. There were also two sections allocated to

(05:30):
crew quarters which featured a galley, mess and washroom in
addition to the sleeping areas. The water that passed through
the airship's engines to cool them was then used to
heat the crew quarters. Yeah That hot water they took
away from the engines then got a second life as
a heating implement. A month and a half after the christening,
on September twenty third, the Akron had her first flight,

(05:52):
which was conducted over Cleveland, Ohio, and before the dirigible
was officially commissioned as a Navy vessel, an additional eight
test flights were conducted, taking the ship farther and farther
each time and testing all of the various mechanisms aboard,
just shy of two years before the anniversary of the
startup construction. On October twenty seventh, nineteen thirty one, the

(06:13):
USS Akron was commissioned after having been delivered to the Lakehurst,
New Jersey, Naval Air Station, with Lieutenant Commander Charles E.
Rosendahl named as the commanding officer of the new vessel.
The Akron had its first official Navy voyage on November second,
nineteen thirty one, on a course that took it down
the east coast of the United States to Washington, d C.

(06:35):
And from that moment on it saw plenty of airtime,
more than three hundred hours in flight over the course
of just a few weeks. Following that, forty six of
those three hundred hours were logged on a single mission
that took the Akron on a round trip to Mobile, Alabama.
And the Akron really proved itself repeatedly. You will see

(06:55):
a lot of discussions of it as being plagued by problems,
and it had problems, to talk about those in a minute,
but it also did some pretty impressive things. On January
ninth of nineteen thirty two, the Zeppelin took part in
a search exercise that showed its endurance and its capabilities
as a search vessel. The goal was for the Akron
to locate a group of destroyers that were en route

(07:16):
to Guantanamo Bay and then follow observe, and report their activities.
Due to the inclement weather on January tenth, the crew
of the Akron wasn't able to sight the destroyers initially,
although the destroyers did report spotting the dirigible, but the
airship kept looking for the destroyers and eventually was able
to spot and report on two groups of ships on

(07:37):
the eleventh, which made the scouting mission a success. Yeah,
this was to be clear when we say it's an exercise,
this is like a planned thing. There were no enemies
that they were siting. This was all sort of training.
And coming up, we're going to talk about an accident
that the Akron had in nineteen thirty one, But first
we were going to pause, have a little sponsor break.

(08:07):
So the following month after where we left off, on
February twenty second, nineteen thirty one, the Acron was damaged
in an accident. It was being moved out of its
hangar when a wind gust blew the tail off its
moorings and the back end of the airship was then
thrust downward and it impacted on the ground. Repairs to
the damage, which was mostly concentrated around the lower fin,

(08:28):
took two months. After this restoration was complete, its first
voyage took place on April twenty eighth, nineteen thirty one,
and this was a smooth nine hour flight, and soon
after there was this really unique technology tested. The Acron
tested what they called a spy basket on its next flight,
and this spy basket was just as it sounds, this

(08:48):
small addition that hung from the bottom of the airship
with space for a man to sit in and observe
the ground below, and the intent was that the ship
itself could stay within cloud cover for the most part,
while the basket could hang just below the clouds. This
test did not go well. It really really did not
go well, and it's kind of it's not surprising to

(09:11):
me that it did not go well. The spy basket
swung back and forth really wildly, and it was considered
to be way too unstable for practical use. Fortunately, though,
the test was conducted with a sandbag in the spy
seat and not an actual person, so no one was
harmed or just traumatized by the test. No additional work
was done to try to make it viable either. They

(09:32):
were like, this is not going to work, and they
abandoned it immediately. Yeah, we're about to talk about an
interesting mechanism that kind of ties into this, and I
will explain. So we mentioned earlier that the Akron was
intended to be an aircraft carrier, and the first time
that function was tested was on May third of nineteen
thirty two, and in that flight, which was conducted on
the eastern seaboard along the New Jersey Coastline, pilots used

(09:55):
the akron so called trapeze installation, which was a method
for docking aircraft the dirigible in flight, and this kind
of followed up on that spy basket idea because planes
that were hooked on were still hanging under the airship initially,
and those guys could also cite the ground, so that
kind of replaced that whole idea. There's actually some footage

(10:16):
of some of these types of connections and they give
a sense of just how precise and skilled the pilots
of the planes had to be. There was a rod
assembly on the lower side of the akron that was
the trapeeze that had another rod across the bottom with
a very slight downward band in the middle, and so
for a plane to dock, it had to have what
looked like an inverted basket of rods also affixed to

(10:39):
the top of it. So imagine on top of the
cockpit there's this whole other little assembly, and at the
apex of that inverted metal basket was a hook, So
the pilot would have to carefully align his plane so
that that hook would catch on to that trapeeze mechanism.
Once the plane had hooked onto the trap and settled

(11:01):
to the bottom of the bend, mechanisms would drop into
place to keep the plane's hooks centered there, and then
the plane and the pilot could be drawn up into
the akron's internal hangar. This has been described in some
writings as like better than any amusement ride on Earth.
To me, it seems slightly terrifying, but your mind would
be very well And I'm wondering. I'm wondering what all

(11:26):
signaling and whatnot. They had to make connections just because
earlier this year I toured the Midway and listened to
pilots talk about landing on an aircraft carrier on the ocean. Yeah,
which is also kind of a white knuckle experience. But like,
there are definitely things that you have in your field
division to align with in instruments, so I'm very curious. Yeah,

(11:50):
since that was usually sort of centered underneath the airship,
like they could align a little bit just by centering.
But I mean it looks so sort of casual and relaxed.
When you watch the footage, they just seem like they
zip up. They're very it's smooth and they just latch on.
But I can't imagine that there weren't some clunkers some way.

(12:14):
But these were also incredibly well trained pilots. And the
two pilots that performed that maneuver in the May third
test were Lieutenant Daniel W. Harrigan and Lieutenant Howard L. Young.
They first did the demonstration with an end to Y
DASH one biplane trainer and then with a Curtis XF
nine c DASH one sparrowhawk, and these tests went really well,

(12:36):
and they actually performed them again the next day for
members of the House Committee for Naval Affairs who watched
all of these proceedings and how well this whole thing
worked from a vantage point as passengers on the Akron.
On May eighth, the Akron took flight again, this time
traveling down the East Coast to Georgia and then cutting
west to California. The ultimate destination for the Akron was Sunnyvale, California.

(13:00):
The stop was planned at Camp Kearney in San Diego County,
and this stop was a tricky undertaking. The crew at
Camp Kearney had not brought in a dirigible like the
Akron before, and the specialized moorings that were used at
the Navy base in Lakehurst, New Jersey, were not on hand,
and to further complicate the landing, the craft was lighter
than normal because it had burned so much fuel on

(13:22):
this cross country trip, and because the heat from the
sun had warmed it, the gases inside had expanded to
be less dense, so it just wasn't as easy to
control as it normally would be. Those two factors led
to a loss of control of the ship, and to
prevent it from hitting the ground nose first, the mooring
cable had to be cut. This did prevent a crash,

(13:42):
but it also resulted in a tragedy. Four of the
men who were holding lines to the ship didn't let go,
and one of them fell from a height of fifteen
feet which is four point six meters, and broken arm.
Three others held on. Initially, Apprentice seamen CM Cowart was
able to cling to the line and not lose his grip,
and after a wild ride of about an hour, he

(14:04):
was pulled onto the akron. Yeah, there was allegedly an
attempt or a thought for a while that they were
going to land just him on the ground, but then
they realized they were not confident that they could do
it without slamming him into the ground, so he ended
up being pulled aboard. Two other men were not so lucky.
Aviation Carpenter's mate, third Class Robert H. Edzel, and Apprentice

(14:26):
Seaman Nigel M. Henton both died after they lost their
grips on the lines that they held and they fell
to their deaths, and when interviewed a few days later, Cowart,
who was the man who had survived, said quote, I
just hung on. I saw the other fellows fall and
it didn't make me feel any too good, but there
was nothing I could do about it except to hang
on tighter. The Acron continued its missions. Though it stayed

(14:48):
on the West coast for several weeks, it traveled north
to the Canadian border and participated in scouting fleet exercises
similar to the one that we mentioned earlier, when it
searched for destroyers that were headed to Guantanamo Bay. The
Akron once again performed admirably in these exercises. In June,
the airship left California to head back to Lakehurst, and

(15:08):
that journey took four days from June eleventh to June fifteenth,
nineteen thirty two before the Akron was able to get home,
and that was in part because it encountered several incidents
of just really bad weather along the way, and when
the Akron finally docked in New Jersey, the seventy nine
main crew was exhausted from the journey. When they're described
as coming down the gang plant, they just all sound

(15:31):
like they were completely depleted. And the next several weeks
brought a welcome respite from flights as the airship underwent
maintenance and repairs. In July, the Akron was once again
air ready and assisted in a rescue mission when the
yacht Curlew went missing. This had been part of a
six hundred and twenty eight mile which is one thousand
and eleven kilometer race from Montauk to Bermuda. When the

(15:51):
boat and the six people on it were lost during
some bad weather. All the other twenty five yachts made
it through, but contact with the Curlew had been lost.
The Akron was ordered to fly in circles along the
course from the Curlew's last known location and to try
to report results back to naval operations. It was eventually
found off the coast of Nantucket. Yeah, but that yacht

(16:14):
search had caused a little bit of a pause in
the Akron's training missions, But we're going to get right
back into that after we first take a quick break
to hear from one of the sponsors that keep stuff
you missed in history class going. So the focus of

(16:35):
the Akron's efforts at that point rescue missions for yacht's aside,
was continued experimentation and development of the trapeze system. They
really wanted to primarily just drill the pilots so that
they would be extremely good at this. And the man
in charge of these ongoing trapeze experiments, as appointed by
Rear Admiral Moffatt, was Commander Alger Herman Dressel, and under

(16:56):
Dressel's leadership, the Akron continued to advance its trapeze work,
eventually achieving the ability to manage a full load of
Curtis F nine C two Sparrowhawks on August twenty second,
nineteen thirty two. There was a new problem, though, due
to a timing accident and the relay of orders because
the command was given to early the dirigibles. Finn hit

(17:18):
a beam in the hangar as it was being taken
off at moorings. This put a stop to the trapeze
training that had been underway while the Finn had to
be repaired, but the last quarter of nineteen thirty two
still yielded eight successful flights for the Akron, so that
a little accident had happened in August and they were
able to repair it pretty quickly. Training continued for the

(17:39):
trapeze system as well as training for the gun and
lookout cruise, and they also worked with a formation scouting
setup to test that where two planes flanked the Akron
as they performed search exercises. In early nineteen thirty three,
the Akron had a leadership change. Commander Dressel was moved
to the akron sister ship, the USS, making His replacement

(18:01):
was Commander Frank McCord. This personnel change took place on
January third, nineteen thirty three, and almost immediately McCord was
underway on a flight with his new command and the Akron.
On this first flight under McCord traveled down the East
coast to Florida, stopping in Miami Dade County at Opalaca, Florida,
to refuel. This is not to be confused with the

(18:23):
very very familiar sounding Opalaika, which is a city in Alabama.
After the refuel at the Naval Reserve Aviation Base in Opalaca,
the Akron proceeded to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This mission was
to inspect bases, and the crew performing those inspections was
actually taxied from the Akron in flight to the bases

(18:43):
via an into Y one biplane. Once the inspection rounds
were completed, Commander McCord and his crew took the Akron
back to New Jersey. Inclement weather kept the Akron grounded
for several weeks at Lakehurst, but it wasn't long before
the trapeze training continued. And as we mentioned when describing
the trapeze mechanism, it really did require an incredibly deft

(19:05):
hand on the part of a pilot to hook onto
the airship. So it really if it seems like we're
just saying over and over that they were doing a
lot of training in this particular area, it's because they were.
It was needed to get those pilots just so proficient
that they could do it almost without having to think.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was morn in as the thirty
second President of the United States on March fourth, nineteen

(19:27):
thirty three, the Akron was overhead, but just a week later,
on March eleventh, the Akron once again left its northeast
home of Lakehurst. This time, the mission took the airship
to Panama, stopping once again at Opalaca, Florida en route,
and after that the dirigible and its crew were on
course for the Naval station at Balboa in the Panama

(19:47):
Canal zone, which sits just at the south end of
the canal if you're looking at it, and that's the
entrance from the Pacific Ocean. And as with the Akron's
mission to Cuba, the objective in this case was an inspection,
this time of a possible site for an air base.
Once the inspection was concluded, the Akron headed back to Opalaka.
This time, additional drills were conducted at the Florida base.

(20:09):
The gun crews got target practice using the N twoy
ones as targets. As March nineteen thirty three came to
a close, the Akron headed back to New Jersey from Florida,
but the airship wasn't moored for long. On April third,
another mission began, and this time it was intended to
help calibrate radio direction finding stations along the New England

(20:31):
coast which were used for radio triangulation, but the voyage
wasn't smooth. When the Akron passed over Barnegot Light in
Ocean County in New Jersey at ten pm on April third,
the airship was already dealing with severe weather. Two and
a half hours later, at twelve thirty am on April fourth,
the Akron was whipped by a particularly powerful gust and

(20:51):
dropped tail first into the sea. There had been a
witness to the Akron struggle with the wind, and that
was amanship called Phoebus that had seen lights in the
air dropping down toward the Atlantic, and the crew aboard
the Phoebus actually thought they were witnessing a plane crash.
So Phoebus altered course to investigate, and about a half

(21:13):
hour after the incident they pulled the first person from
the water, and that was Lieutenant Commander Henry V. Wiley,
who was unconscious at the time. At this point, the
crew of the Phoebus still thought they were finding the
results of a plane crash. They had no idea that
the Akron had been in the area. Phoebus also sent
out its boat to widen the search for victims, the

(21:34):
boat crew fished Bosun's mate, second Class Richard E. Deal,
Aviation Metalsmith's second Class Moody E. Irvin, and Chief Radioman
Robert W. Copeland out of the turbulent water. Copeland died
after being transferred to the Phoebus, despite efforts to revive him.
As the rescue effort continued, Lieutenant Commander Wiley regained consciousness

(21:54):
and communicated to the crew of the German vessel that
it had been the Akron and not a plane they
saw descend into the sea. For more than five hours,
Phoebus continued to search for survivors, but their efforts were
for naught. Two more men actually died in the search
effort when another blimp, the non rigid J three, which
also served out of the base at Lakehurst, went on

(22:17):
a mission to search for survivors. Five men survived the
unsuccessful forced landing of the J three, but there were
two killed. Five and a half hours after the Akron
went down, the Coastguard destroyer Tucker arrived on the scene.
The Phoebus transferred the body of Chief radium In Copeland
and the surviving crew of the Akron over to the Tucker.

(22:37):
In the search for any additional survivors, the destroyer Tucker
was joined by the Portland, a heavy cruiser, destroyers Cole
McDougall and Hunt, the cutter Mojave, and two Coastguard planes,
but no additional members of the crew of the Akron
were found. This loss was particularly noteworthy because of the
leadership staff that was on board when this accident happen.

(23:00):
So in addition to the regular staff, Commander McCord, Rear
Admiral Moffett, his aid, Commander Henry B. Cecil, the commander
of the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst, and several additional
guests were also on the Akron when it went down.
In total, seventy three men lost their lives when the
Akron was destroyed. So for comparison, we mentioned the Hindenburg

(23:22):
at the beginning of the show, and the death toll
in the Hindenburg disaster was thirty six, one of whom
was a man who had been on the ground. Sixty
two of the people aboard the Hindenburg survived, which is
a far greater proportion than the three who survived the Akron.
Not long after the disaster, Wiley, Richard Deal and Moody
Irvin appeared together before the public, and Wiley described to

(23:45):
the events of April fourth. This way, we were rescued
by the German tanker Phoebus and are the sole survivors.
Just before the accident to the Akron, I was in
the control tower on the left side of the control tower.
Our first indication of being near the center of the
storm was when ship shuddered violently, and per Wiley's account,
the crew did not realize how closely they had gotten

(24:06):
to the ocean until they had sudden visibility that they
were only about three hundred feet from the water, and
he continued quote, the order was given to stand by
for a crash. The ship hit the water within thirty
seconds of that order, and most of us, I believe,
were catapulted into the water. We were in the water
about forty five minutes, and we are now ready for

(24:28):
duty in airships or wherever we may be assigned. Incidentally,
Herbert Wiley had been passed over for command of the
Acron when both Dressel and McCord were appointed. Wiley had
notified McCord of the weather conditions that could include potentially
hazardous storms before the ACRONA had left for the mission,
but McCord had determined that they should proceed as planned.

(24:49):
A storm that developed in their path was one of
the most powerful in a decade. Yeah Even though there
had been indications that there was going to be inclement,
whether there was no sense of how bad and how
violent this storm was going to be. Wiley was commanding
officer aboard the Akron's sister ship, the USS make In,
when it went down in a storm off the California

(25:11):
coast just a year later. Wiley also survived that incident.
While portions of the Akron were salvaged from the sea
weeks after it sank, in two thousand and two, additional
debris was explored by the Navy. Portions of the ship's
rigid ribs were observed still sticking out of the sediment
on the ocean floor. The Akron's pennant is now part

(25:32):
of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum's collection.
In twenty fourteen, a grant from the National Film Preservation
Foundation to the University of Akron's archival services enabled the
Library division to preserve several films of the Akron, and
several of them were referenced in this episode. We will
link to them in the show notes. Yeah, it's just four,

(25:53):
but they're really interesting. Particularly that one that shows them
training to hook onto the trepeze is really spectacular. It
seems very slow and relaxed, but when you realize what's happening,
it seems almost discordant in how calm it seems, because
I would be completely in a state of nerve wreck.
So that is the Akron. We may eventually also do
an episode on the sister ship the USS make in,

(26:16):
but for the moment, that's the Akron. Thanks so much
for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is
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(26:41):
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(27:05):
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