Original Item. Only One Available. Forty years ago, at a time when the airplane was an underpowered box kite of short range and meager load-carrying capacity, the German Navy possessed a force of long-range aircraft which were flying scouting missions of up to 24 hours’ duration over the North Sea and carrying out strategic bombing attacks on Great Britain with bomb loads of nearly five tons.

This is an unbelievably scarce Tellermütze for a German sailor of the Kaiserliche Marine serving aboard a German Naval Airship during the First World War. These caps were worn by all Junior NCO’s and enlisted men. The cap tally on the front of the cap reads:

Marine = Luftschiff = Abteilung
Navy Airship Department

The cap retains its two “tails” which make it display gorgeously. The front of the cap bears a Black, White and Red Reichskokarde (Imperial Cockade) which is heavily worn. The interior is in great shape, the leather sweatband still fully intact with some wear, and the stiffener band behind it is also present but it has broken in one spot and is weak in another. The depot stamp on the crown is very faint, but reads:

B.A.W.
?.10.18
58 or 56

We are unsure of the exact depot, but the 2nd line indicates a date of 1918, but we cannot make out the month, only the day, the 10th. The bottom line is the size, either 56 or 58.

This is an extremely scarce cap, the first of its kind we have offered. 63 of the Navy’s airships were lost during the war. After the end of the war, in mid-1919, seven airships were destroyed. Comes ready for further research and display.

The outbreak of war in August, 1914, found the Naval Airship Service comparatively ignored, with one ship, the Zeppelin L3, and not even a base of its own. Suddenly everything changed. The High Seas Fleet, with no offensive plans and a pessimistic conviction of its own inferiority to the British Navy, had at once to improvise a scouting system to give warning of the expected British operations. Great faith was suddenly placed in the Zeppelin, and more ships were ordered. In addition to the main base already under construction at Nordholz, outlying bases were started at Hage near the Dutch frontier and at Tondern near the Danish border. The Zeppelin was on its way to its greatest period of development— sixty-one in all were to serve in the German Navy during the war.

All the Zeppelins had a number of features in common. A rigid framework of duralumin girder longitudinals and wire-braced transverse rings was covered with clear doped cotton fabric and contained between fourteen and nineteen separate gas cells. These were made gas tight by gluing gold beaters’ skin—the intestinal lining of cattle—onto light cotton fabric. Bombs, gasoline, and water ballast were distributed along a keel which ran the length of the ship. Personnel and engines were carried in at first open, and later enclosed and carefully streamlined, gondolas hung below the hull. A varying number of machine guns were carried in the gondolas and on a large top platform near the bow. As far as can be determined from the records, only once were they used successfully against airplanes—on a night in 1918 the L62’s gunners wounded the pilot of an attacking British plane over the Midlands and forced him to land. The ships ascended through dropping water ballast and descended through valving gas. Hydrogen was considered cheap, and a ship would take off with full gas cells even though a high altitude flight was planned, and half the hydrogen in the ship might be blown off as she rose, with release of ballast, to 18,000 feet or more. Some excess load could be carried in the air by dynamic lift, but the ships never took off “heavy.”

The airship bases were large scale engineering projects. The Germans seem never to have thought of the advantages of the mooring mast. They invariably kept their airships in large sheds, when not in use, and manhandled them in and out with ground parties of several hundred men. Although weather conditions might not prohibit flying, the ships were frequently held in their sheds on crucial occasions by cross winds, and a breeze of twelve m.p.h. across the axis of the shed was considered prohibitive. One ingenious solution to this problem was the construction at the Nordholz base of a revolving double shed, 650 feet long, which could be rotated in sixty minutes or less to match the wind direction. Limitations of shed length and height were a real obstacle to progress in airship design. When the first big Zeppelins of the L30 type were coming forward in the summer of 1916, only one double hangar at Nordholz was large enough to accommodate them. That same year, however, a large inland base at Ahlhorn came into service. This station ultimately was to have six double sheds with a capacity of twelve ships, the last hangars built being 850 feet long—longer than the “big barn” at Lakehurst, New Jersey.

The Zeppelins operated throughout the war in the face of a host of difficulties. First was the problem of the highly inflammable hydrogen. One of the service’s worst disasters was the fire and explosion that destroyed the Ahlhorn base on January 5, 1918. The L51 in Shed 1 took fire accidentally; her shed mate, L47, inevitably burned also; L58 in the adjacent Shed 2 exploded, and within a minute, L46 in Shed 3, and the Schütte-Lanz S.L.20 in Shed 4 exploded with tremendous violence, although the two pairs of sheds were separated by a distance of half a mile. Three ships were destroyed in their sheds by fires during inflation, and three Zeppelins and one Schütte-Lanz burned accidentally in the air with all hands. The L10 of the latter group was undoubtedly lost through valving hydrogen in a thunderstorm. Curiously enough it was found possible to fly safely through thunderstorms if the commander was careful not to valve gas, or rise above the “pressure height” where diminished atmospheric pressure would cause the gas to blow off through the automatic valves. On many occasions ships came home after being struck by lightning, the electrical charge being absorbed by the metal framework and running out the tail. Rain and ice could increase the load by several tons, and sometimes a great deal of gas would be lost when ice was thrown off the propellers into the gas cells. Cold air temperatures or high barometric pressure would increase the lift, as would the sun’s heat through expanding the gas.