Flight of the airship L 59

On the morning of 21 November 1917 the German airship L 59 took off from the airship base near Yambol in Bulgaria. On board it carried a dozen or so tonnes of weapons, ammunition and medicines for the forces of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who for three years had been fighting in German East Africa, cut off from the world. It was to fly over the Mediterranean, Egypt and Sudan and land in East Africa, from which it was not meant to return. On 23 November, over Sudan, it received an order to turn back. On the morning of 25 November it returned to Yambol after a flight that had lasted about 95 hours and, according to German figures, was at the time the longest flight in the history of aviation.

“The China affair”

The idea of sending an airship to East Africa was put to the Reich Colonial Office by the army doctor Maximilian Zupitza. The British blockade meant that supply ships had almost no chance of reaching the colony, and the advocates of airships were looking for a success that would restore their prestige after the losses over England. To mislead, the undertaking was given the code name “China-Sache”, “the China affair”. The navy airship L 57 was originally to fly, but on 7 October it was wrecked by the wind at Jüterbog. Its place was taken by L 59, then under construction, which was lengthened by 30 metres so that it could carry more cargo. At the beginning of November it flew to Yambol, the southernmost base, from which it could set out for Africa. Its commander was the naval lieutenant-commander Ludwig Bockholt (PL), who had earlier been due to command L 57.

The flight was to be a one-way journey. There was no hydrogen in Africa to refill the airship for the return, so it was decided to dismantle it on the spot: the envelope was to be made into tents, the linen linings into bandages and the duralumin framework into wireless masts. Besides fuel and water, according to a surviving list, the airship carried about 311,900 rifle cartridges, more than 70,000 machine-gun cartridges, 30 machine guns, 61 sacks of dressings and medicines, as well as mail, binoculars, machetes and spare parts for wireless sets. According to various sources the cargo for the Schutztruppe weighed between 14 and 15 tonnes. The Makonde plateau in the south-east of the colony was chosen as the landing ground.

Over the Sahara

The first two attempts failed. On 13 November the weather intervened, and on 16 November the airship turned back over Asia Minor, where according to German accounts it was even fired on by the allied Turks. The third take-off, at about five in the morning on 21 November, was successful. The crew of 21 or 22 men took the airship over Adrianople, the Sea of Marmara and the coast of Asia Minor. Over Crete the aerial was reeled in because of a storm, so no messages were received. At dawn on 22 November L 59 crossed the Egyptian coast in the area of Mersa Matruh and headed across the Libyan Desert, over the Dakhla oasis, towards the Nile. That day the gearbox casing of one of its five engines cracked. Without it the wireless could receive messages but could not transmit them. By day the hot air over the dunes tossed the airship about, and at night the cooled gas lost lift and the ship almost struck the ground. The crew suffered from heat at noon and frost at night, headaches and hallucinations.

On 23 November, when the airship was over the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, according to some accounts about 200 kilometres west of Khartoum, it received a message from the Admiralstab sent by the wireless station at Nauen. It stated that Lettow-Vorbeck’s last foothold had been lost, the whole Makonde plateau was in English hands, part of his forces had been captured and the rest were hard pressed, and it ended with an order to return immediately. Bockholt could not acknowledge the order, because the transmitter was not working. According to accounts the crew begged him to fly on, but he turned back.

Return and record

The return journey was just as dangerous. Over Asia Minor the airship again lost lift dangerously. On the morning of 25 November L 59 landed at Yambol. According to German figures it had flown about 6,800 kilometres in 95 hours, and it still had fuel in its tanks for roughly 64 hours of flight. No aircraft had made a longer non-stop flight at that time.

The British official chronology of the war, published in 1922, noted of this flight that the evidence for it came solely from German statements. Today the course of the expedition is well documented: the text of the message survives in German archives, and an intercepted Turkish-German message about the undertaking survives in British files. The British did, in fact, know about the airship. Captain W. D. Downes wrote in the history of the Nigerian brigade that in November news reached them of a German aircraft flying from Europe, and he even named Kitangari as the expected landing place. General C. P. Fendall wondered whether waiting for the airship might explain why Lettow-Vorbeck fought so stubbornly in the autumn of 1917. The head of British intelligence, Richard Meinertzhagen, claimed years later that the message recalling the airship had been forged by the British, but the documents do not bear this out. The German historian Horst Gründer concluded that the Admiralstab recalled the airship at the request of the Colonial Office, because in view of the news of Lettow-Vorbeck’s retreat the risk of failure was too great.

The recall came just as Lettow-Vorbeck’s forces were in fact leaving the colony. The general himself later considered that the airship had come a month too late and would probably not have found him. L 59 never returned to Africa. Converted into a bomber, it was lost with its whole crew, Bockholt included, on 7 April 1918, when during a flight to Malta it caught fire for unexplained reasons over the Strait of Otranto. The story of its African expedition served Janusz Meissner as the basis for his 1936 novel L-59 (PL).