Some Military Music

Our mission that day was to locate two merchant vessels—code-named White 57 and White 65—that hadn't been seen or heard from in many weeks. Like all ships at sea during World War ii, they had been on radio silence; and, if bad weather had kept them from taking accurate sightings, they could be wildly off course or—most dreaded—sunk by the torpedo of a German U-boat. This was November 1943. The submarine menace was less than it had been in the awful years of 1941 and 1942, but merchant vessels continued to be sunk with sickening regularity. In 1943 alone more than 400 merchantmen had gone to the bottom along the Atlantic seaboard, and two unarmed ships in or about those sea-lanes sailing without escort or convoy, like the White 57 and the White 65, were sitting ducks.

So this was an important mission—important to those who compiled statistics at the Eastern Seaboard Command, but far more important to the poor bastards aboard those ships who probably felt lost and forgotten, and were certainly eager not to become one of those statistics. It was unusual at this stage of the war for ships to be sailing alone, without escort, but to such the sight of a blimp could seem like a letter from home. We were confident—and so we believed were most mariners—that blimps performed a useful service. Not only could we tell lost ships where in the wide ocean they were (our navigation was bound to be better than theirs), but our very presence could reinforce their hope of getting to port alive. It was widely believed, and bruited about, that no ship or convoy escorted by a blimp had ever been attacked by a U-boat. Just why this was so, if it was, no one seemed to know; but it was our pride to believe that, like the albatross, we were a bird of good omen to sailors.

Blimps were uniquely equipped for this kind of mission. They came in several sizes, but the operational workhorse used throughout the war (and the only model I ever flew, save for the tiny L-ship in training) was the 252-foot-long King-ship. A K-ship could cruise slowly (top speed about 65 knots) and could—weather permitting—stay aloft for twenty or more hours without refueling and easily search more than a thousand-mile swath of ocean—weather permitting—in a day. No other aircraft then extant could, or so we believed, match that performance—and helicopters were not even in the picture.

But there was always that conditional, "weather permitting"; for blimps, though hardy creatures in their own way, were idiosyncratic flying machines subject to peculiar needs. They were hybrids, part airplane, part balloon, and on the particular day of this flight—November 8, 1943—we were especially concerned about the weather because the bag of the K-13, the ship I was assigned to fly, had been leaking helium and thus had less than normal lift. A leaking ship was not in itself alarming. Blimps often got a little porous, especially at auxiliary bases like this one at Charleston, S.C., where we operated without hangars or much maintenance and where the ships, between flights, were left to swing like kites on their masts in all weathers, sometimes for weeks at a time. But such loss of helium meant that, for this mission, we would take off with only 570 gallons of fuel instead of the usual 650 gallons or so, with the result that our time aloft and range of search would be curtailed. Blimps, unlike airplanes, were breathing creatures, highly sensitive to changes in altitude and temperature, and had to be understood in terms of a specialized vocabulary peculiar to balloons—terms like lift, static heaviness, weigh-off, air pressure, pressure height, and other derivatives from a pneumatic world.

But a blimp was also like an airplane in that it took off like a heavier-than-air craft (albeit on only one wheel) and was driven (in K-ships) by two Pratt and Whitney...