Customer Reviews

The Hindenburg

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Ah, back to the Hindenburg, the disaster that claimed few lives but played out so spectacularly it burned its image into our minds. Mooney's book looks at the event, giving us a brief history of the airship followed by a comprehensive account of the ship's last flight to New York. No airship enthusiast will be bored by this book. It is well written, despite the author's annoying tendency to start each chapter commenting on the sun's indifference to the human clock or calender. My only problem with the book was its contention that the explosion was an act of sabotage by one of the riggers. This idea is not new, and could of course be true, but I believe the evidence suggests a natural cause. Why do so many feel that arson and sabotage are necessary ingredients to a good disaster story? But this detracts little from the work. I recommend it to Hindenburg junkies and aviation historians.

There are much better books on the subject of the Hindenburg disaster and the role it played in American/German history & pop culture. This speculative work takes a long time to get going and then, when it finally reaches the climax of the airship's demise, it is regrattably short on storytelling.

Hindenburg enthusiasts will enjoy it, but should not be considered a definitive textbook.

From the beginning there have been various theories to explain the sudden destruction of the Hindenburg. The official version--German and American--was that the airship was the victim of static electricity stored up in the docking tower. A present day popular theory is a variation on this theme i.e. The Hindenburg was coated with an Aluminum based paint that was flammable and could have been ignited by a spark of static electricity.

Mooney believes otherwise. Nazi Germany had a strong Communist 'Second Column'. Mooney believes that one of the crewmen on the airship was a Communist-inspired saboteur who set a time bomb. The bomb was timed to go off AFTER the Hindenburg docked giving the passengers--and particularly the saboteur--time to get off safely. Unfortunately there were strong headwinds and the Hindenburg burst into flames before achieving a secure docking. Mooney claims that the Americans located parts of the time bomb shortly after the disaster but, because of American embarrassment and German propaganda, a fictitious story was promoted.

Personally, I don't know but it makes more sense than the 'aluminum' story. Probably the most remarkable aspect of the disaster was that there were so many survivors. Anyone watching newsreels of the explosion would believe that almost everyone died. Some who had the ship literally burn down around them were only scortched. Amazing.

Overall, the book was a quick read, and was an enjoyable source of backround information to enhance my appreciation of the Hindenburg crash site when I briefly passed through Lakehurst, NJ recently. I have no doubt that better works are out there, if you care to look for them. This author does best when he sticks to the facts. The chapters describing the early days of balloon ships and the unusual character Count von Zeppelin are adequate. Zeppelins enjoyed a vanishingly short window of primacy during World War I, when German Zeppelins silently plied the English skies, armed with bombs, and high enough to be out of range from groundfire. Given the face of warfare today, it boggles the imagination to think that was less than 100 years ago! Post-war, and into the era of the Third Reich, politics infected the zeppelin community, which to that point had existed as a close-knit brotherhood of airship explorers. There is enough nonfictional information to make a completely enjoyable book without delving into fiction. The speculative tale of sabotage, and the concocted details flushing out the biographies of passengers and crew are uninspired, and don't contribute much. Nothing against historical fiction- I'm a big James Michener- but this author's strengths lie elsewhere.
Pro's: cheap, quick read, adequate source of nonfictional background info about the Hindenburg
Con's: the fictional story reads flat, and there are almost definitely better works out there on this subject if you care to look for them.