The Hindenburg Milestone

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It is, perhaps, appropriate that a milestone anniversary for the Hindenburg disaster comes less than a month after a milestone anniversary for the Titanic disaster.

In April, of course, we observed the centennial of the sinking of the Titanic. Twenty–five years later, on this day in 1937, the German airship Hindenburg met a fiery end as it tried to land in New Jersey.

Everyone knows the story of how the Titanic was regarded as unsinkable before it struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sank to the bottom of the North Atlantic. I don't know if people felt the same way about the Hindenburg in 1937 — if there was a widespread conviction that the Hindenburg would arrive safely at its destination.

Perhaps there was. The Hindenburg had been flying for little more than a year, and it had been used for propaganda purposes at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It had crossed the Atlantic earlier in the year and was making the first of 10 round trips between Europe and the United States.

The Hindenburg set no speed records. Even in their relatively developmental state 75 years ago, airplanes could still get people across the ocean faster than airships like the Hindenburg — but airplanes couldn't come close to matching the creature comforts available on the airships. The people who traveled in them were paying for amenities, not speed — and they paid a lot for the privilege.

They were not unlike the first–class passengers on board the Titanic, who were pampered in every imaginable way. The Titanic could cross the ocean as fast as or faster than any other ship on the sea, but a huge ship like that simply couldn't slither through an ice field the way a smaller ship could — and that was its fatal flaw.

No conclusion has ever been reached about the cause of the Hindenburg disaster — but it seems to me that a significant contributing factor would be the fact that, in the 1930s, highly flammable hydrogen was the fuel being used on airships. In the last half–century, airships have relied on the far less flammable helium.

That might not have made a difference, though, if the talk of sabotage that has persisted for 75 years is true. Surely, a saboteur would have found another way to accomplish his objective, and the landing that was scheduled for 75 years ago tonight would have been far too tempting to pass up. Heavy preflight publicity virtually guaranteed that the Hindenburg's arrival would be extensively covered by the press of the day.

In spite of the huge fireball that erupted, more than half of the passengers and crew survived. Proportionately, that was far better than the survival rate on the Titanic although the passenger manifest on the Hindenburg was far shorter.

There was never a chance that the fatality rate on the Hindenburg would come close to that on the Titanic. The numbers just weren't there.

Part of it may have been the shock value that comes from an outcome that simply isn't possible. And part of it may have been the experience, the immediacy of seeing it happen on newsreels.

Whatever it was, the Hindenburg deserves its spot in history the same as the Titanic disaster 25 years earlier — or the Challenger disaster nearly half a century later.

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A Great Moment in American Journalism

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A great moment in American journalism occurred 100 years ago in the aftermath of the sinking of the Titanic.

Unfortunately, it is probably one of the lesser known stories surrounding the famous shipwreck.

Carr Van Anda, managing editor of the New York Times, scooped the competition largely because he put two and two together and concluded that the reason there had been no more communication from the ship was that it had sunk, and he insisted on publishing that information.

The problem was that the White Star Line, the shipping company that owned Titanic, had reported via wireless transmissions that the ship had, in fact, encountered some problems with ice, but it insisted the ship had not sunk.

But Van Anda had seen the wireless transmissions from the ship and noted the fact that there had been no more transmissions after the early morning hours of April 15. He was convinced that meant the ship had gone down, and, although Van Anda was nearly 1,000 miles away from the scene of the disaster, other newspapers were reluctant to dispute White Star's account and Van Anda did not have the benefit of modern technology, he went with his gut instincts.

It was a real gamble, a roll of the dice, and if White Star's version of events had been true, and it turned out that the reason there had been no more transmissions from Titanic was due to equipment failure or something like that, we might be commemorating the centennial of "Van Anda's folly" and not the sinking of the Titanic.

It was a few days before he was proven correct. The ship that brought the Titanic's survivors to New York was delayed by various factors (including the same ice that had brought down Titanic) and didn't get there for three more days — and it "was under a virtual news blackout," writes James Barron of the New York Times. "Its telegraph operators were not distributing messages from newspapers seeking information about the Titanic."

But when it finally arrived, the story was told — and Van Anda was vindicated.

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The Tragedy of the Titanic, a Century Later

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From time to time, man persuades himself that he has conquered nature.

A century ago tonight, the passengers on the Titanic's maiden voyage probably believed they were safe from any danger. Whether that really was how the people of that time saw it or not, Titanic came to be known in popular lore as unsinkable — even though it had sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic.

But that reputation for being unsinkable, reports Rosie Waites of BBC News Magazine, "is perhaps the biggest myth surrounding the Titanic" — according to Richard Howells of Kings College London, who calls it "a retrospective myth." Sort of like the Camelot characterization of the Kennedy years that arose following the assassination, I suppose.

If the people of 1912 really did believe Titanic was unsinkable, their faith proved to be misplaced as the great ship sank after striking an iceberg in the North Atlantic only minutes before midnight on April 14, 1912.

Everyone knows that story, I guess. It's one of the great "ooops" stories — and certainly one of the great tragedies — of all time. More than 1,500 people lost their lives.

The great tragedy of Titanic, as Chris Berg writes for The Wall Street Journal, is that the "ship of dreams" had a nightmarish flaw that was created by regulations of the time, regulations that were followed to the letter by the White Star Line but which proved to be wholly inadequate.

That flaw was in the number of lifeboats on board, and that number was based on regulations that were "written for a different era and enforced unthinkingly."

It is, asserts Berg, "the most iconic regulatory failure of the 20th century."

As Berg writes, "There were a host of other failures, accidents, and mishaps which led to the enormous loss of life," but the lifeboat capacity is a glaring one reduced to cold, hard numbers: There were more than 2,200 people on board, and the lifeboats, even when filled to capacity, could only accommodate about half.

Unfortunately, many of the lifeboats were allowed to leave the ship with empty seats. Consequently, more than 1,500 people perished.

"From the moment the Titanic scraped the iceberg," Berg writes, "the casualties were going to be unprecedented." But, obviously, more modern appraisals of the needs of seagoing vessels could have limited those casualties.

Titanic was a prescient name, in many ways, I suppose. Surely, the grandiose nature of the name contributed mightily to the ship's image of invulnerability.

And, when it sank, the loss of life, the reporting of the catastrophe and the ramifications were, indeed, titanic.

For a long time, it was thought that Titanic was too far below the surface ever to be found. But, in the mid–1980s, Robert Ballard and his crew re–ignited a wave of Titanic hysteria with their discovery of the ship's remains some 2½ miles down.

But, as Andrew Wilson writes for the Smithsonian magazine, fascination with Titanic's compelling and tragic tale has never really gone away. It has just gone through "waves of Titanic mania."

"The public's appetite for information and details — accounts of suffering, bravery, self–sacrifice and selfishness — seemed insatiable" at the time of the sinking, Wilson observes.

That much was obvious from the first newspaper reports that screamed of the loss of life aboard the allegedly unsinkable ship. It was as if the people of the time refused to believe that they had been wrong about the great ship.

For days — weeks, even — subsequent newspaper headlines reminded readers of the number of casualties. I've seen such an insatiable fascination with such a macabre subject a few times before — for example, when the space shuttle Challenger exploded — but nothing that I know of (short of, perhaps, an act of national aggression, like the attack on Pearl Harbor) has had the staying power of Titanic.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the sinking, the movie based on the event, 1997's "Titanic," which won 11 Oscars, has been re–released in 3–D. Even though it has been nearly 15 years since that movie was released — and everyone already knew how the story would end when it came out the first time — it continues to get positive reviews and, as I understand it, pretty good box office numbers, too.

A commemorative cruise, with descendants of Titanic's passengers on board, set sail earlier this week with the intention of following the route Titanic took and being at the crash site for tonight's anniversary.

That's staying power.

Daniel Mendelsohn makes an interesting point in his article in the New Yorker, even if it is a point that was made by another (unnamed) historian: "It may not be true," Mendelsohn writes, "that 'the three most written–about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War and the Titanic,' as one historian has put it, but it's not much of an exaggeration."

Now, in my studies of history, I have had the opportunity to study the story of the Titanic. That's something that many of those who saw that movie 15 years ago likely had not done, given that so many were in their early teens and were smitten with co–star Leonardo DiCaprio and saw the movie countless times simply to drool over him.

(Actually, as the Washington Post recently revealed, there are people out there — not necessarily teenagers, either — who do not know that Titanic struck an iceberg and sank a century ago.)

But I had read accounts of the sinking, and I was impressed with the attention to detail in the movie. The sets, the costumes and the facts were mostly correct. The Grand Staircase, for example, which played a prominent role in the movie, appeared to be precise in its re–creation.

Many of the people who saw the movie back in 1997 probably did not know the name of the man who captained the ship.

For the record, his name was Edward Smith, and it is acknowledged by just about everyone that he died in the disaster, but no one really knows how he perished.

Many historians claim he was seen on the bridge a few minutes before the ship sank beneath the waves. There are tales that he was in the ship's wheelhouse, others that he was in the radio room.

A heroic — although improbable — account holds that he saved a child's life, carrying it to a lifeboat before urging the surviving crew members to "[b]e British" and swimming off to die in the sub–freezing waters.

That, in fact, is probably how many of the Titanic's passengers and crew died that night. There was a popular misconception for a long time that many of the victims drowned when they were pulled below the surface in the wake of the plunging ship or trapped in its bowels, but the film actually helped set the record straight.

The frigid waters of the North Atlantic caused many of the victims to die of hypothermia or cardiac arrest. The upper portions of their bodies remained above the surface, thanks to the lifejackets they wore, but the cold water (reportedly 28° F) took their lives within a few minutes.

To be sure, some did go down in the sinking ship — and almost certainly died from the pressure well before the vessel came to rest on the sea floor.

I don't know if any passengers' remains are still entombed in the ship after a century. I doubt that any would have made it to the bottom in the initial sinking, given the pressure at that depth. But stranger things have happened, I suppose.

And there are all sorts of analogies to be drawn from the 100th anniversary of the Titanic tragedy and the withdrawal of Rick Santorum from the Republican presidential race or the dismissal of Arkansas football coach Bobby Petrino.

But even without those contemporary tales, the Titanic story seems to be alive and well in the 21st century.

"The Titanic has never been bigger," writes Joel Achenbach for the Washington Post.

I suspect that is true.

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