 The Men and Women of the Sea Services
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Bronze Reliefs Naval Airships |
| "They were dependable." In the matter of manned flight under power, the airship precedes the fixed wing aircraft by a half century. After the first flight of a balloon with a steam engine (in France in 1852) and since World War I, the Navy's interest in rigid and non-rigid airships was for their value in scouting, anti-submarine patrol and airborne early warning. Following World War I, the Navy continued development and operation of rigid airships, notably the Shenandoah, the first helium-filled rigid airship, and the Los Angeles, Macon, and Akron. All except Los Angeles came to violent ends through crashes in storms‹ ending the Navy's interest in rigid airships before the beginning of World War II. But the nonrigid airship, or blimp, came into its own in the Navy during World War II, when blimps escorted 90,000 surface ships, without a single vessel lost by submarine attack‹and without a loss of their own in their first two years of combat.
More than 150 blimps served in the war. The workhorse was the K-type, 253 feet long. They operated along both coasts, in the Gulf of Mexico, as far south as Brazil, and in 1944 out of Morocco over the Strait of Gibraltar, and from France and Italy. Their wartime mission was threefold‹anti-submarine warfare, anti-mine warfare and search and rescue. It has been said that if airships had served no other function in the war, their record of locating and rescuing shipwrecked and airwrecked crews merits them national gratitude. The Navy's airship program continued after World War II until 1961, when the Navy retired its last active airships, presumably to be replaced by land and sea-based helicopters. Yet while the airships served, ``they were dependable.'' Sculptor: Miklos Simon. Sponsored by the Naval Airships Association.
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