Last of the Last

Perhaps she was never as strong and sturdy as her builders calculated on paper. Perhaps she had never really recovered from an old rib injury last year. Perhaps the wet windy weather had something to do with it. Or perhaps the crew was somehow at fault. Nevertheless orders are orders and therefore the U.S.S. Macon soared away from her Sunnyvale mooring mast on schedule early one morning last week to take her usual part in fleet maneuvers off the California coast. In command of the Navy's one & only dirigible and her 82 officers & men was Lieut. Commander Herbert Vincent ("Doc") Wiley. That grey-haired 43-year-old skipper, who looks a little like a youngish Herbert Hoover, was not feeling his usual cheery self. His father had died the week before.

All that day and the next the Macon cruised down the rough, ragged shoreline while battleships and cruisers sported about on the Pacific below her. Off Santa Monica there was wind and rain but the airship had often bucked worse weather without trouble. By the time the Macon was ready to turn around and start for home, the little storm was practically over and the air had cleared enough for persons on shore to see her red and green lights flashing through the dusk.

The dirigible was about a dozen miles off Point Sur when something went suddenly, inexplicably wrong in her stern. A jar--a lurch--and the operator of the elevators in the control car felt the wheel jerked out of his hands. Wallowing like a wounded whale, the Macon rolled over on her side, stuck her nose into the air, started to climb. The lookout atop the great bag telephoned the control car that a rib had snapped in the framework, that No.1 gas cell near the fin had ripped open. Steady as a stone, Commander Wiley ordered gas valved from the forward cells, all water ballast and emergency fuel aft dumped, the engines slowed down, in a vain attempt to level the ship off. The altimeter registered 4,600 ft. before the Macon faltered in its helpless ascent, began to fall tail first. Pike-plain to all aboard was the fact that the Navy's last dirigible was rapidly going to pieces in midair. No. 2 gas cell popped open, then No. 9. Girders began snapping like so many pretzels. One rudder gave way and the whole stern seemed to crumple like a paper bag squashed by a playful child. By the time Commander Wiley ordered the radio operator to send out an SOS, the Macon, sick to death, was settling down toward the ocean at the rate of 300 ft. per minute.*

All hands at bow to trim ship!

Men by the dozens went forward along the narrow catwalks. As they ran, they wriggled into life jackets.

Stand by to abandon ship!

The engines were reversed. Everyone had left his post but Chief Radio Operator Ernest Edwin Dailey. Coolly chewing gum, he sat tapping out the falling wreck's position almost up to the instant it smacked into the waves. Then he jumped, never to be seen again.

Thanks to Radioman Dailey, warships were swarming to the rescue before the Macon's stern touched water. Out of the dirigible's lockers had been yanked collapsible rubber life rafts which, when a valve is opened, inflate with carbon dioxide. These were tossed overside. After the crash, the crew slid down lines from the upturned bow into the sea, swam to the life rafts. Last to leave the control car was Commander Wiley and a young lieutenant who banged his head getting away. Badly stunned, he would probably have gone down if his captain had not seized him by the collar, towed him to a life raft.

Calcium flares floating on the sea-surface guided the rescue ships through the dark to the scene of the disaster. Like a troop of cavalry under the command of Rear Admiral Joseph Mason Reeves aboard his flagship Pennsylvania, the light cruisers Memphis, Richmond, Concord, Cincinnati swung up into position, dropped lifeboats. Within an hour 81 officers and crew had been safely bundled aboard the rescue ships. But long before the last survivor had been picked up all that was left of the $4,000,000 Macon, its chief radio operator and a Filipino mess boy had been swallowed up by the Pacific off Point Sur.

March 1933, at the great Goodyear-Zeppelin airship dock at Akron, Ohio. A high-school band blaring "Dixie." Lines of shivering spectators on the cold concrete. Mrs. William Adger Moffett on the arm of her husband, Rear Admiral Moffett, Chief of the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics. Eight pretty girls from Macon, Ga. The huge silver bow of the ZRS-5-. . . Mrs. Moffett mounted a bunting-draped platform, pulled a red-white-&-blue cord. Two hatches in the airship's nose flopped open and out flew 48 startled pigeons. Cried Mrs. Moffett: "I christen thee Macon!"* Mighty cheers for the third dirigible built in the U. S.

Three weeks later the U.S.S. Akron fell into the Atlantic off the New Jersey coast during a violent thunder storm (TIME, April 10, 1933). With her perished Admiral Moffett and 72 others. Sole surviving officer was Lieut. Commander Wiley who could no more account for the loss of the Akron then than he could last week for the loss of her sister ship in the Pacific.

The Macon made her maiden flight in April 1933. Since the Los Angeles had been decommissioned year before, she became the only U. S. dirigible left in Naval service. Last spring in flying from California to Florida she broke two small girders in rough air over Texas (TIME, May 21). Even so, her builders and operators pooh-poohed the idea that there was anything structurally wrong with her.

Though all but two members of the Macon's crew survived the disaster, public opinion turned strongly, swiftly against further experimentation with this type of aircraft. President Roosevelt summed it up when he announced that the U. S. would hereafter leave the development of dirigibles to Germany. Instead of replacing the Macon, he would put the same money into 50 long-range scouting planes. Utterly blasted was the long-cherished hope of raising U. S. capital, of winning U. S. public confidence for U. S. dirigibles in commercial service.

Thus came to an end a $100,000,000 adventure by the U. S. with lighter- than-aircraft. Other countries have fared little better. France abandoned lighter-than-aircraft after the German-built Dixmude was lost with all hands in a Mediterranean storm in 1923. When Britain's R-101 crashed at Beauvais, France in 1933, wiping out the best of that country's lighter-than-airmen, she ordered the R-100 scrapped, has built none since. Only country to pursue the development is Germany, where the huge Hindenburg is soon to be launched as a running mate to the eminently successful Graf Zeppelin. This summer the Navy plans to lend its Lakehurst plant to the Zeppelin company as a U. S. terminal for an experimental transatlantic mail & passenger service.

Singing "Hail, Hail, The Gang's All Here," the survivors of the Macon were landed at San Francisco. A Naval court of inquiry to determine the cause of the accident was convened aboard the U.S.S. Tennessee in the harbor. Three days after the crash "Doc" Wiley got something he had long been waiting for: an order from Washington promoting him from the rank of Lieutenant Commander to that of Commander.

* Express elevator speed: Chrysler Building, 800 ft. per min.; Empire State, 1,000 ft. per min.

* Georgia's Representative Vinson, as chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee, got the Macon named for the biggest town in his district.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.