“The mission would be a risky one – no airship had ever flown such a distance.”
TO DESCRIBE Germany’s Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck as a thorn in the side of the British Empire is something of an understatement.
Beginning in 1914, the dashing 34-year-old Prussian lieutenant-colonel led a rag-tag band of 3,000 regulars and 10,000 colonial troops in an audacious four-year guerrilla campaign against the Allies in East Africa – modern day Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania.
A master of ambush, sabotage and hit-and-run tactics, von Lettow-Vorbeck, also known as Der Löwe von Afrika or the “Lion of Africa”, never lost a battle and consistently outfoxed the 300,000-British, Belgian and Portuguese troops tasked with destroying him.
Operating deep in the African bush, von Lettow-Vorbeck’s brigade, known as the Schutztruppe,spent much of the war living off the land. By in 1917 however, they were in desperate need of resupply. For Berlin, figuring out how to sustain this force, which was keeping hundreds of thousands of enemy troops pinned down in a remote backwater, was vital to the German war effort. But getting fresh equipment and ammunition to them was going to be a challenge. British control of the Atlantic and Indian oceans ruled out shipping materiel by sea. And no plane yet had the range to reach the region, which was more than 4,000 miles from friendly territory. Some in the high command wondered if a Zeppelin might be up to the task.
A Zeppelin to the Rescue
German airships had been mounting bombing raids on French cities since the war’s opening days and beginning in 1915, they were flying long-range strikes against England itself. Might a specially equipped navy dirigible operating from southern Europe be able to deliver supplies to von Lettow-Vorbeck a hemisphere away? No one had ever flown such a vast distance, but in theory it could be done (and so it had to be tried).
German manufacturer Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH offered one of its newest machines, the L 59, for the mission, which Berlin codenamed China-Sache or “China Show”.
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