One of my earliest memories is that of hearing my parents speaking to each other in German, something they only did in the privacy of our home, due to certain resentments prevalent at that time, and one of their go-to phrases was, “Wenigstens sind wir keine Luftschiffwurmer,’ or sometimes, ‘Zumindest…,’ depending on the situation.  Whenever some problem or difficulty presented itself and anger or frustration was beginning to set it, one or the other of them would start to recite the phrase and the other would join in to finish it in unison.  This little ritual seemed to relax and calm them both, allowed them to take a step back and regroup.

Unfortunately, as part of our integration into American society, our newly adopted home, I was immersed in the culture of the English language, to the detriment of our German heritage, and I didn’t fully understand what it was they were saying.  Some of the words, yes, but not the meaning behind them.  It was only years later, when I was a bit older and had developed a curiosity about my ancestry, that I made the effort to piece together a translation of the phrase, which turned out to be, roughly, ‘At least we’re not airship worms,’ and while I was glad to finally know what my parents had been saying to each other in those moments, I still had no idea what the hell it was supposed to mean.

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During the Great War, World War One, it was illegal in Germany to make sausages.

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The lighter-than-air ships, or Zeppelins, built by Germany during the early 1900’s, and which were used for aerial bombing missions during the War, required the use of cow intestines in the production of the internal gas bags needed to hold the vast quantities of hydrogen which gave buoyancy to the huge vessels.  The achievable ‘tightness’ of the intestinal skin, also known as goldbeater’s skin (a holdover term from its previous use in the gold leaf manufacturing industry), was found to possess gas-loss prevention qualities far superior to those of other materials which had been tested for their possible use in hydrogen containment.  Even the natural rubber products available at the time couldn’t be sealed well enough with the adhesives of the day to compete with the intestinal product.

The construction of a single German Zeppelin demanded enough goldbeater’s skin that it took 250,000 individual cows to fill the requirement.  The same amount of ‘natural casings’ would be enough for over 20 million potential sausages.

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While experiments in electromagnetism and its potential commercial uses began in the late 1800’s, the first true radar systems wouldn’t become operational until the 1930’s.  Thus, during the Great War, the German Zeppelins made their cross-Channel raids on the British home islands without the benefit of navigational radar.  Likewise, the English defenders operated without defensive radar systems – the Chain Home stations were still some years off.

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The early airships struggled to achieve altitudes approaching 10,000 feet, usually cruising at much lower heights, which often had them operating in the midst of the cloudy weather conditions over the English Channel where visibility was extremely limited, or, at times, virtually non-existent.

One response to this difficulty was the addition to the Zeppelins of something known as a sub-cloud car.  This was basically an observation pod which was manned by a member of the airship crew and lowered by steel cable for several hundred feet in order to get below the cloud cover and afford the individual an untrammeled view of the surroundings.  The crew member could then relay navigational details to the main cabin via a wired intercom system.

While riding in the sub-cloud car, the crewman remained in a very lonely and exposed position.  Retrieval of the pod was a slow process which could only be initiated from the main ship and was prone to various mechanical mishaps.  Being engaged by enemy aircraft or ground fire while entombed in the observation pod was not an enviable circumstance, nor was being stuck there with an inoperative retrieval system as the angry waves of the Channel raged below or the craggy shoreline of Southern England came into view.

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I dream one night that I am a Zeppelin dangler, a lighter-than-air worm, plying the skies on a mission of glory.  No pod for me, thank you very much, just wrap a cable around my waist and drop me down into the dark and misty void – ramrod straight and arms akimbo, I swing my gaze from one limit of the horizon to the other, a steely-eyed hero from the days of yore; all visions of the landscape below framed by my own two feet.  But then the airship dips and I swing low and suddenly I’m skipping across the English Channel like a rag-doll.  My stomach lurches as the water pulls away and I fall sickeningly into a deep trough between waves, and then a violent expulsion up into the air, only to crash back into the cold ocean once more – slapping along the white-tops like a skipped stone, blinded by the salty spray and choked by the dark waters.  And then the English coastline is below me and I’m being dragged across the ground – I’m running like mad, legs and feet a blur beneath me, trying to keep from being smeared across the landscape as I run past a long line of concrete edifices each cast in the shape of a gigantic human ear.  A Sopwith Camel drops out of a cloud bank, the sun blazing in the sky behind it, the pilot at the controls is all leather helmet, goggles and trailing scarf; a maniacal grin on his face as he squeezes the trigger on his cowl-mounted twin Vickers, but all that emerges from the comically oversized bores of the machine gun is a burped-out stream of purple heirloom carrots which are promptly sliced into thin disks by the airplanes rotating propellers.

‘Faulty interrupter gear,’ I mumble to myself as I push my head down into the pillow and doze off once more…