The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 41

SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER; SUNDAY, JULY 12. 1931 ibleI WORTH PROVING OF DIRIG mmmmswmxm 11 1 irriiiiim i mini ji miiiiiiiiiiiiin m.iu iniiiiii.iiii.i iuliuihwiiiiwih JAttING AIR GIANT 5 lehst Maneuvers Indicate How vZnJ Treaty Crippled NavyGoss 'vK: I 4 im'Ht A i. ytsj -St-- MM' Egypt Trip Sets New Record By Karl II. von WIegand Chief Foreign Correspondent of the Hearst Newspapers BEKLIX, July 11. The Graf Zeppelin, famous German airship of the Historic Tlearst-Zeppelin romi-the-workl flight and its unbeaten record of "all air" eir cumiiavagation of the globe in twenty-one is slowly but steadily convincing a hard-headed and skeptical world of the practicability and safety of dirigibles as an outstanding factor in long-distance air transportation.

With -all its advantages in comfort and safety of naviga A SN xj Nile to Beni-Suef, circled and came back, literally "hanging in the air" till morning. The Graf did not want to come down. It took a tug or two on the gas valve levers to change his mind and make him (or her) less "uppish." Then it settled like a big bird into 1he hands of the Tommies. An immense mob surrounded the airdrome largest, it was said, that had ever been seen in Cairo. Thousands had walked all night to be there.

'ft s. IS ft, 1 'i 1xxiJwixAAw xx. xxxx -x ri 3 1 It Notables Present Leaders of Egypt Greet Voyagers i i x. fcrtaijiliiiiiwdlwitiiiiiiloif, Pacific battle fleet. The aircraft carriers, Lexington and Saratoga, are in the right background.

The de DIRIGIBLE LOS ANGELES moored to the Patoca in Balboa Harbor, Canal Zone, shortly before the Atlantic fleet and aircraft took off to repel the "attacking" tion in clouds and fogs over heavier-than air machines, and in the case of the Graf Zeppelin, a radius of more than 5000 miles without landing, the airship has had, still has, a hard fight for recognition as a practical and safe public carrier of passengers and mail. pleted fleet of light cruisers is shown at the left in photo. tl. LI. lilt: Ti llil 1 1 ii illii 1 1 li.isl kl Mi I II 1 1 bi l.i I Uit.

I Li II i MI. 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Hi i 1 1 1 1 1 I 1 1 1 1 -I I 1 1 i 1 I 4 1 i a 1 1 I 1 1 1 i 0 ew Types Personnel Cots Hurt Work Ar ORDER TO DISPENSE with the costly landing crew of 200 men, efforts are now being made to use tractors in bringing the Graf Zeppelin to earth. This photo was taken at Friedrichshafen where experiment was made. tt'rti itttii- tttl'l 'mi i 1 1 1 Hrvih itintrPiti i hi uili'tlii'irulfiltr nn 4if ml nil; uiti.iil mi "in: iHi.ntiiiiPninrwcMtiii'iH-iHH Urgently Needed English Prejudice Fear Results From War and Disasters weakness of the fleet was in destroyers. The London Treaty drastically reduced our destroyer tonnage to 150,000 tons.

While all our destroyers are old and none is of modern post-war design, they are an essential type suitable at least for training purposes. Destroyers, how-ever, must be present in large numbers to be effective. Their duties and maneuvers are very complicated. Hence their personnel must be highly trained and experienced to be efficient. Ismail Sidky Pasha, Dictator-Premier; Tewfik Doss Pasha, Minister of Communications; Rifaat Pasha, Minister of War; Ilerr.

von Stohrer, German Minister to Egypt; General Spinks, British Inspector-General of the Egyptian Army, and many other notables welcomed Doctor Eckener, his three staff officers Captains Lehman Fleming and Von Schiller and the Graf Zeppelin to Egypt. In their enthusiasm the mob broke through the police lines and rushed the ship, all eager to touch it. For a moment there was a little nervousness on the bridge. The police came running up with a fire hose attached to a hydrant, and turned it on the crowd to drive them. back.

I chatted with the British Royal Air Force men. "Aw, if this were only a British ship," some of them remarked. "If this were only our R-101." I could sympathize and feel with them. To thus see German prestige soar in the East and to hear Egyptians say, "The British could not make it, but the Germans did." was a bit hard. The British took it well.

From the Tommies to the British High Commissioner, Sir Percy Loraine; General Spinks and others, they played the game. Treaty tonnage allowed does not permit more carriers of the size of our Saratoga, sufficient is available to build five suitable ones of smaller size. The maneuvers showed these are urgently needed to permit concentration of greater numbers of aircraft where needed, coupled with ability to cover more places at once and with less liability to serious damage from attack. leave Cairo till Sunday morning, twelve hours after the Graf Zeppelin. On its trip to Egypt the Zeppelin was scheduled to start from Friedrichshafen at 6 in the morning.

It was 6:01 when the great ship began to glide out of the air dock. At 6.10 Dr. Hugo Eckener, veteran commodore of the air, in command, gave the order, "Hoch." Slowly we ballooned upward in Ihe fresh morning air, the just peeping over the Swiss Alps, polishing the 800-foot hull into burnished silver. It whs wonderfully silent as we rose. A clang of engine bells and then the muffled roar of ihe five motors.

We were off. Few Submarines Only New Boats Present at Maneuvers Object Lesson British Battleship Visits Fleet of waters that separate us from our possessions, trade centers and essential lines of communication in the Far East. The demonstrated weakness of the new cruiser type compared with battleships emphasized the great necessity for additional cruisers of that type. Also, it emphasized the geat victory scored by the Japanese and British statesmen at London in getting our authorized numbers of these vessels reduced, from the twenty-three we might have had completed by 1933, to the maximum of eighteen we are now permitted to have, only fifteen of which we are allowed to complete by the close of 1936. The London Treaty denied us the possibility of partially overcoming the handicap of the naval base provisions of the Washington Treaty by reducing to such a low limit the number of these cruisers we could build.

The eight large Japanese pruisers of this class, plus four more mounting eight-inch guns, operating from their near-by bases, will more than equal twice the number we can have operating from Pearl Harbor, not to mention the nineteen heavy-gun vessels of this type the British might operate from Singapore and Hongkong. Experience in the fleet maneuvers demonstrated the value of one new naval policy the basing of all combatant naval aircraft on the fleet, so that henceforth they will he a part of the fleet, to a still greater extent, and be able to move with it to the point where most needed. They will have the mobility that all other naval craft have, and will not be tied to the fixed bases and limited in scope of operation, as are alt land-based aircraft. ing permission, but sent Major Booth and Colonel Gossage as representatives of the British Air Ministry and furnished the landing crew in Cairo. At 8:30 a.

m. on the Egyptian border and across a corner of the tawny Libyan Desert. Here and there a cluster of black tents of the Bedouins. The nomads stared in amazement at the "flying ship." Airplanes they saw almost daily, but never such a monster. Across the deep bin ft Arabs Gulf to Alexandria.

For the first, time that ancient city of Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, Caesar and Marc Antony beheld an airship. The populace was wild with excitement. Southward into the teeth of a stiff wind we turned and flew over the Nile delta, probably the richest soil in the world. Below us soon the Nile, like a ribbon, with scores of picturesque lateen-sailed feluccas. Commodore Eckener growled impatiently.

The sky was partly overcast. The different temperatures under the clear spot end under the low clouds created vertical currents, making the wind gusty and causing a somewhat bumpy movement of the Zeppelin, but not enough to upset any bottles on the tables. "If Dr. Eckener thinks this is he should be with us once on the R-100," remarked Major Booth. By Capt.

N. H. Goss, U. S.N. Well-knowit" sUtthority on Naval Affairs an Sea Power.

(AUTHOR'S NOTE The ideas, opinions or assertions expressed in the accompanying article are vot to be construed to express the official position or opinion of the Navy Department, or reflect the opinion of the naval service at large, but are based on the author's long experience, in the Navy, his interest, in its efficient development to meet modern conditions and req uirr-mrtits, and much study by him of the effect, of sea. -power on our international relations.) The results of the London Treaty, now the law of the land, were strikingly illustrated during the 1931 concentration of the United States fleet off Panama the annual assemblage under the Commander-in-Chief for war problems, maneuvers and tactical exercises, of the naval forces normally in the Atlantic and the Pacific. These maneuvers not only demonstrated the effect of this treaty, binding on us for the next five years, but emphasized our needs when the treaty expires in 1936. As a direct result of the treaty, the fleet this year was weakened in battleships, destroyers and submarines compared with other recent years. Over France Military Planes Keep Eye on Zeppelin In England there is still a residue of strong prejudice against Zeppelins from the war.

It is an inconsistent prejudice, since bombing planes killed far more people than did the Zeppelins. Among the now vast aircraft industries and air transportation companies using only heavier-than-air machines, can still be found considerable opposition, quite open or concealed, to the use And development of lighter-than-air craft. Anti-airship propaganda can, in some instances, even be traced suspiciously close to some of the big steamship companies. The appalling disaster to the British R-101 which I claim was avoidable and in the main due to three things: national pride, certain details of design and construction and inexperience in handling such ships has been used to renew, even intensify, skepticism and opposition to airships. Nevertheless, the Graf Zeppelin, in all probability the last of hydrogen-filled airships, has just demonstrated again the commercial practicability of dirigibles.

With sixty-six persons on board, including twenty-five passengers and a quantity of mail, we flew from Fried richshaf-en to Alexandria, Egypt, in thirty hours and forty-five minutes. The return from Cairo to Friederichshafen, at times against strong head winds, was made in thirty-four hours. To make the same trip on fast trains and express steamers takes 105 hours. Home Again Air Craft Makes Its Return Quickly This year the destroyers present at maneuvers, including necessary plane guards for use with 1he air force, numbered only a little above one-third what the London Treaty allow us. This was due to a voluntary reduction of naval personnel following the ratification of the treaty.

Very few submarines were present at fleet maneuvers this year. This was directly due to the reduction in our submarine force by the London Treaty, and incidentally to the new arrangements required to make our reduced tonnage of these vessels, only six of which are of modern post-war design, as effective as possible. Certain vital points need first call on the available strength of these vessels, and this, under the reduced tonnage of the London Treaty, left very few to serve during the maneuvers with the fleet. But the total allowed London Treaty tonnage of 52,700 does not go very far, can't cover all places at once. As a result only the new boats and the boats, nor.

mally based in the Panama Canal Zone, were present, something like fifteen in all. When it is realized that only the six modern fleet submarines of the class have any substantial surface speed, and that all submarines, without exception, have inherently low submerged speed, it is easy to see that this number was quite inadequate to cover even one side of a maneuver in the Panama Canal area, let alone afford vessels for the reconnaissance and observation duties for which invisibility particularly fits submarines. The maneuvers, however, did serve to emphasize the need of modern design submarines to get maximum service out of the small tonnage we are allowed. They also showed how inadequate an allowance of 52,700 tons is to cover the great expanse Most apparent of all the effects of the London Treaty was the crippling of the fleet due to reduction in personnel, a voluntary action which left us without men to man a large proportion of the vessels remaining to us under the treaty. This not only resulted in seriously crippling the destroyer force, but, by prematurely decommissioning th battleship to be scrapped later under the treaty, caused us to lose the trained men needed to man the new cruisers under construction.

The Fleet received an object lesson on how the treaty affects us in the visit of the magnificent new battleship Nelson, the British flagship. No one eould fail to note the vast difference between her and our own battleships California and Texas, as they lay together at Balboa. But for the treaty, we could now have four similar vessels under way to replace our four old 12-inch gun battleships. Three of these are to be scrapped, at any rate, but we can have no new Nelsons to replace them. The remaining one will also be lost to the Fleet to help provide men to man the new cruisers.

Altogether the effect of the London Treaty was very apparent; less battleships, less destroyers, less submarines each a type particularly valuable to us in any naval undertaking. The maneuvers, by emphasizing our deficiency, emphasized two other things our needs, and the fact that not only the London Treaty, but the Washington Treaty as well, with all their discriminating restrictions on us, are only bindinj for five more years, until the end of 1938. tCwrrlfU. lift. Caimal Uc.

Pyramids Sighted Giant Gas Bag Pleats Over Antiquity Arkansas Ahead Old Battleship Still Superior in Power Hlovable Fields Shortage of Carriers Shows Weakness At a speed of 72 miles Ave glided over Lake Constance, the Falls of the Rhine, hills and valleys of Switzerland, and at 7:23 were passing over the aerodrome of Basle. Ten -fifteen found us off Lyons, headed down the picturesque Rhone Valley, and at 12:55 out over the Mediterranean west of Marseilles while sitting at luncheon. The French General Staff had for the first time requested Doctor Eckener to keep away from Lyons and Marseilles. Hitherto we had always flown over them. We wondered what secrets were hidden there.

Occasionally a French military plane flew alongside of the Zeppelin as if seeing to it that we kept within the air lane permitted. Shortly before sunset we were in the narrow and, to ships in bad weather, very dangerous Straits of Bono-facio, that separate Corsica from Sardinia. Curiously enough, the Italians had forbidden Doctor Eckener to pass through the straits on the Sardinian side, so we hugged the rugged Corsican coast, which is French. The most interested passengers aboard the Zeppelin were the commander of the British airship R-lOO, Major Booth, and Colonel Gossage, British Air Attache in Berlin. The British Government, which in March, 1929, would not permit the Graf Zeppelin, on our flight to the Orient, to fly over any part of Egypt, this time not only had no objections to the Egyptian Government grant Mail Value Speed Over Present Means Demonstrated I Dr.

Eckener and Captain Fleming were received by King Fuad who congratulated the Commodore and expressed his pleasure that he had brought the Graf Zeppelin to Egypt. In the evening the Graf Zeppelin returned from the flight to Jerusalem under Captain Lehmann, and at 6:35 was off again for Friederichshafen. A forty-mile west wind held down the speed of the Graf to twenty-five miles an hour for a little while. Dr. Eckener turned southward deep into the Libyan desert, to get around the corner of that wind.

Then, turned north, taking it on his beam, coming out east of Benghazi, and headed straight north for the Adriatic. Near Spalato, he changed his course to the eastward and crossed the Dinar Alps of Jugo-Slavia at 5000 feet, threading hia way in the black night between mountain peaks much higher. It was navigation such as Major Booth and Colonel Gossage had never before seen. At midnight, Vienna was seen below, and at 5 Monday morning Friederichshafen came in sight. My only complaint is that the food was too heavy.

For such long flights there should more "airy" euisin. (Corrlfbt, 1)31. to K. T. Ammic.h, Int.

"The Fyramids in sight!" came a shout from the bridge. rush to the windows. In the distance, silhouette-like against the sun, loomed the world's most ancient monuments. We circled them and the Sphinx and twice over the city of Cairo with the domes and needle-like minarets of the many mosques. SouthAvard up the Nile we flew, lolling along lazily, motors not much more than turning over.

A gorgeous desert sunset, and then the curtain fell. The night was velvety black in which the stars shone like huge diamonds on a black dress. Cheers, shouts and the bark of dogs came up to us. Lights twinkled in the stygian darkness. We proceeded up the Three battleships, representing over 25 per cent of the numerical strength of that type present, were absent due to the treaty.

While their place in numbers was taken by three of the new 8-inch gun cruisers, the difference in relative strength between the two types is such that the one 12-inch gun battleship remaining with the fleet, the old Arkansas, was able through her superior gun power and protection qualities to neutralize this entire division of heavy cruisers. The other three 12-inch gun battleships, which cost less than a modern cruiser and were already paid for, are lost to the fh-' forever. The next most apparent These movable fields also enable naval aircraft to concentrate during the night or during unfavorable flying weather and to launch an attack from near by without exhausting the very limited radius which all planes with a heavy military load necessarily have. At the same time the maneuvers demonstrated two present weaknesses that interfere with carrying this plan into effect shortage of aircraft carriers and lack of aviation knowledge and experience among senior officers responsible for directing and coordinating fleet operations. While the Waxshincton To test the relative speed for mail between the Zeppelin and the British Imperial Airways Service on the Egypt-London route, I mailed simultaneously letters on the Graf Zeppelin and by the Imperial Airmail on a Saturday afternoon.

The letters that went on the Zeppelin were delivered in London Tuesday morning, those that were sent by Imperial Airmail were delivered Friday evening. They were special delivery, those by the Zeppelin were not. The Imperial Airmail, it must be stated in fairness, did not.