BY RINALDO S. BRUTOCO
There are hundreds of great stories about Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). The incredibly capable 32nd President of the United States, who survived polio to guide the USA out of the Great Depression, supported England with the Lend-Lease Act to arm Britain before the USA formally entered World War II. He also was America’s architect of a vast industrialization program that began in the mid 30’s and ended up crushing the Nazi war machine. Of all the incredible stories about this most amazing political leader, the one involving the Hindenburg disaster is likely the most interesting and least well-known.
As all his contemporaries knew, FDR was incredibly bright and had a quick mind-–one that could not let a terrible tragedy go to waste. The story of what you think happened to the Hindenburg is directly below. Following it is the one that FDR knew and was confirmed in fairly recent times by a thorough report commissioned directly by the Pentagon.
The Story You Were Told
Zeppelin LZ 129 Hindenburg, a fixed airframe aircraft as opposed to a blimp, was approaching a mooring mast at Naval Station Lakehurst, New Jersey, on May 6, 1937, when it erupted in flames and crashed. Contrary to popular belief, that was not its maiden flight. In fact, the Hindenburg made 10 previous successful roundtrip flights from Germany to the USA after being commissioned in 1936. In addition to its successful flights to the USA, it had also crossed the Atlantic an additional 24 times (often to Brazil). Like its “older sister,” the Graf Zeppelin (which flew over 1 million miles in the 20s), neither the Hindenburg nor any other Zeppelin ever had a single injury.
Movie cameras from a number of German and US companies recorded the entire crash in great detail. The footage shows the Hindenburg starting to land when suddenly, less than 300 feet above the ground, it burst, almost instantly, into a ball of fire. Unsafe to use for lighter-than-air flight operations.
The Hindenburg accident at Lakehurst was visually stunning and caused 35 fatalities among the 97 people on board: 13 out of 36 passengers; 22 crewmen, out of 61, and an additional civilian fatality, Allen Hagaman, standing right beneath the vast ship as it settled to the ground.
Given the story you were told, how did 64% of the passengers (two over 80 years old who walked off after the “crash”) survive such a situation? How did 64% of the crew, including all the officers, survive such devastation? We’ll explain that below. For now, it is worth noticing that the explanation of the Hindenburg disaster doesn’t match the death toll or, if you look closely at the actual footage, how the disaster unfolded.
You were told that the reason for the disaster was the hydrogen lifting gas used to buoyantly lift the ship into the air was so volatile and dangerous it was inherently unsafe for airship operations.
However, you can find more than a single video of someone shooting a high-velocity bullet into the tank of a conventional car, and seeing it immediately blow up. The same person then shoots the same bullet from the same rifle into the tank of a hydrogen car, and it doesn’t blow up: it shoots a vibrant blue flame out of the tank into the air and self-extinguishes within minutes. Hydrogen has a very high escape velocity, which is so rapid the hydrogen “shoots out” of the tank rather than explode. Hydrogen is the only automobile fuel for a car (including gasoline, diesel, propane, and natural gas) that will not explode because it expands so fast as it leaves the tank. That amazing expansion capacity is the reason hydrogen vehicles don’t explode even if shot at.
So, the question becomes, who spread the rumor that the hydrogen “blew up” and why? The purpose of this article is to share the answers to those two questions and explain what happened.
Key Clue: The Detour Over Manhattan
It is agreed that the weather at Lakehurst wasn’t perfect that day. It was raining, but not a full-fledged thunderstorm. Why did Captain Pruss detour from his designated landing spot, which was experiencing light rain at Lakehurst, and detour over Manhattan? He was told by ground control to stand by while the small storm cleared out by the ground tower. He wasn’t told to fly to Manhattan. The rumor that circulated at that time was that Hitler himself ordered the detour. Why? The Hindenburg was almost 1,000 feet long. It detoured over Manhattan at 1,000 feet elevation. Can you imagine what that meant to the people on the ground? Contemporaneous reports say that the folks in Manhattan, ordinary citizens, were mesmerized and partially terrorized. Imagine an enormous flying machine that was as close to the ground as it was long. And, on the tail were 40-foot-high Nazi swastikas.
The USA was trying to avoid any conflict in Europe. So much so the American public was not only isolationist but also still feeling “burned” by all the money it spent on the Allies in World War I and didn’t want to have to pay for another conflict for which they wouldn’t be reimbursed. On top of that, as Rachel Maddow has so brilliantly documented, a remarkably active pro-Nazi movement existed in the USA precisely during the same time frame FDR was wrestling with the desire to want to help Europe halt the Nazis’ aggressive behavior in Europe.
It is a good guess that the Hindenburg flight over Manhattan, some reports concluded, was commanded by Hitler personally. He wanted to send a message. With that flight, Hitler was saying to the American public, “Stay out of anything in Europe; we Germans are the “Master Race,” and “We command technologies unlike any other power on earth (e.g., the massive Hindenburg).” You don’t want to tangle with us as our war-making capability is invincible. What a statement that “fly over” Manhattan made. It was working for a short while—until the Hindenburg crashed.
What Caused the Crash?
There are several theories on the causes of the crash.
One theory was that static electricity built up on the outer skin or surface of the airship and ignited the hydrogen. On the day of the 1937 disaster, the Hindenburg had already successfully executed 34 round trips across the Atlantic. Its older sister, the Graf Zeppelin, the far less technologically sophisticated, had achieved over 1 million miles circumnavigating the globe in all types of weather in Germany, the USA, South America, and other locations. It is highly unlikely to this sophisticated researcher that something as simple as a static electric charge would be the correct answer for this one incident, which altered a 100% perfect safety record up until then. The Graf Zeppelin “leaked” far more hydrogen from its lifting gas bags, so it would have been far more likely to have had a flammability incident from leaking hydrogen than the Hindenburg.
An alternative theory was vigorously propounded by Hindenburg Captain Max Pruss: sabotage. Something as simple as a small battery, a flash bulb, and a timer set in the upper vertical stabilizer (all agree the incendiary moment began there) would have been precisely enough to cause what occurred.
Captain Pruss was not alone in his belief that sabotage was to blame. Vice Admiral Charles Rosendahl, commander of the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst and the man in overall charge of the ground-based portion of the Hindenburg’s landing maneuver, also believed that sabotage was the cause. He laid out his beliefs in significant detail in his 1938 book, What About the Airship?, released one year after the disaster.
A third and final voice in the sabotage conclusion was Hugo Eckener, former head of the Zeppelin Company and the “old man” of German airships. He had commanded the Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg for hundreds of thousands of miles. Hitler also appointed him to investigate the Hindenburg crash jointly with the Americans. Virtually all of the in-person witness testimony from the crew and a few bystanders who saw the blaze originate agreed that the flash of fire first appeared just in front of or on the horizontal stabilizer.
What happened to the sabotage theory? Hitler didn’t want that to be the conclusion, as it would have made it look like he had dissent at home precisely when he was convincing the German people of his invincibility. Unsurprisingly, Hugo Eckener, heading up the German end of the inquiry for the German government, changed his assessment of sabotage and never explained why. It would appear that Heir Hitler told him to. Neither Commander Rosendahl nor Captain Pruss ever changed their conclusion.
What about the US Department of Commerce? Well, Roosevelt didn’t want the Department of Commerce to reach that conclusion either, or it would have foiled his entire plan to “trick” Hitler, as discussed below.
The Pentagon’s Conclusion
The Pentagon wanted to get to the bottom of the Hindenburg crash. They hired Dr. Addison Bain, a distinguished NASA scholar with a significant reputation in hydrogen studies. He assessed that hydrogen was not the cause of the fire that engulfed the Hindenburg because he correctly assumed that the fire that broke out in the vertical stabilizer was either sabotage or static electricity. Rather than run either of those two competing theories into the ground, he focused on how fast the fire spread up the full length of the Hindenburg.. Go to YouTube and watch the archival video footage. It is clear that the fire spread in 16 seconds from the rear of the ship where it started to the front. It was
Why did the fire spread so rapidly? Because the skin of the Hindenburg was coated with a very highly flammable paint mix: aluminum-impregnated cellulose. That mixture is actually a type of solid rocket fuel! Yes, the hydrogen burned as the envelope of the Hindenburg split open like a ripe melon. The ship was literally coated with rocket fuel. As the skin ignited the hydrogen, it billowed out rapidly and still had enough lifting capacity to cause the massive ship to drift gently to the ground. That’s why 67% of the passengers were able to walk off unharmed as it settled to the ground. Of the 13 passengers who did die, almost all were individuals who were fearful of the flames and jumped off the Hindenburg to their deaths. Had they stayed put, less than 13 would likely have died. Fear killed them— not hydrogen. The ignition was a spark that ignited the skin of the ship.
The detailed report commissioned by the Pentagon , which it stands by to this day, ends with a single sentence: “The moral of the story is do not coat your airship with rocket fuel.”
Now you know what really happened to the Hindenburg. The remaining question: What was Roosevelt’s “trick,” and why was it so important to the outcome of World War II, which had not even begun at that point?
The Genius of FDR
An interesting statistic known to FDR in the 1930s was that the USA controlled 100% of the world’s helium supply. Conversely, it was also known to everyone who could do high school chemistry that any country could produce unlimited supplies of hydrogen from regular water, into which one places a cathode and an anode and passes a small electric current between the two poles. The electrical bond between hydrogen and oxygen to form water is exceptionally weak, so the slight electrical current breaks the molecular bond of H20 into pure hydrogen, which collects on the cathode end, and pure oxygen, which collects on the anode end. This process is called electrolysis. It is extremely easy to create and is unlimited in its abundance. Imagine what it would have meant to Hitler to have an unlimited supply of energy he could make in Germany to fuel his global war machine. Hitler would have had a limitless source of fuel for the Nazi war machine to build not only massive, globe-straddling airships but also all other forms of war equipment. Imagine if Hitler continued to believe that Germany was invincible because it could build massive airships and other war equipment; he wouldn’t have had to invade North Africa to obtain oil supplies!
In a matter of hours, after the Hindenburg crashed, FDR realized that he could convince Hitler to abandon the use of hydrogen as too explosive and dangerous to use for civilian purposes, let alone military ones. FDR had his PR folks generate stories about how dangerous using hydrogen was. He made a mockery of the fact Hitler didn’t know how dangerous hydrogen was. FDR wanted Hitler to know that it was suicidal to try to use it in airships or otherwise. Apparently, it worked. Hitler ordered the almost fully assembled sister ship to the Hindenburg, which had been built by the Zeppelin company, to be totally dismantled and used for scrap to make fighter planes. He also ordered the Zeppelin company never to make any more zeppelins and to switch their technical abilities to fabricate other aeronautical equipment items more beneficial to the Nazi war machine. Hitler bought the rouse and discontinued all uses of hydrogen during World War II. That was FDR’s “trick,” and it worked
The US, with 100% of the world’s helium, made and operated dozens of airships for various missions well into the 1950s.
Epilogue
FDR’s propaganda was so effective that in order to “trick” Hitler, he had to really pound on the theme that hydrogen was so unsafe you couldn‘t use it for anything. He couldn‘t let up on that during the entire war, so Hitler would not return to hydrogen and change the fuel dynamics of the War. He had to keep the pressure on to convince the entire world that hydrogen was inherently unsafe and unstable. He etched in stone the phrase, “Look at what happened to the Hindenburg.”
As a politician, strategist, and propagandist, FDR was without an equal—then or now. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. He created an international false belief that was so strong that even when all the powerful rockets launched into outer space were launched with hydrogen as their primary propellant, people still believed that hydrogen was impossibly dangerous. Even when the entire world watched Apollo 11 launch to the moon in July 1969 on a hydrogen rocket, people globally believed it was unsafe to use hydrogen. As noted at the beginning of this article, the only gas tank in a truck or car you fire a bullet into that won’t explode is hydrogen. There have been over a hundred thousand refuelings in California of our 17,000+ hydrogen vehicles by “soccer moms,” teenagers, guys like me, and all manner of drivers over the last decade without a single injury or fatality!
Finally, the “spell” FDR cast over hydrogen to aid his war plans has begun to dissipate. In the immediate future, plants currently under construction will make “green steel” using hydrogen, and trains running in France, Germany, Canada, and California will become the replacement locomotive for intracity rail, replacing all diesel engines. Another “hard to abate” sector is the manufacturing process for making ”green cement,” which will be available in the global marketplace by the end of this decade.
The list of hydrogen uses grows longer each month. Hydrogen is becoming so ubiquitous that McKinsey and other reputable international think tanks now estimate that today’s $50 billion in global hydrogen sales will grow to over $1 trillion within less than a decade.
If FDR had lived to see the end of World War II, would he have taken credit for creating one of the greatest hoaxes of all time? Franklin certainly was known for his keen intellect and engaging sense of humor. You can almost hear him say, “You wouldn’t believe the fog I created around that menace Heir Hitler in convincing him the safest fuel in the world was the most dangerous. That was a good piece of old-fashioned storytelling.”
Photo: The quintessential image of the Hindenburg’s fiery fall in Lakehurst, New Jersey on May 6, 1937 captured by photojournalist Sam Shere (1905-1982).
