Between June, 1917, and the end of the war British blimps flew 1,500,000 miles, nearly as many as the Zeppelins. A French Commission made an exhaustive study of dirigible operations after the war, and the late Rear Admiral W. A. Moffett quoted from its reports in summarizing lighter-than-air lessons taken from the war, when he told the Naval Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives that “as far as they could learn, no steamer was ever molested by submarines when escorted by a non-rigid airship.” France and Italy had long coast lines, used the blimps extensively along the Bay of Biscay, the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, but England found still greater use for them because it was an island. So blimp scouts played a singularly useful role from Land’s End to the Orkneys, stood watch at the mouth of the Firth of Forth, the Solway, the Humber, and the Thames. CHAPTER III American Airships in Two Wars [Illustration: Airship and hangar] Compared to British and French airships, American dirigibles made a less impressive record during the first war. This for the reasons that there were few enemy activities in our waters until the very end, and that there were few American airships to oppose them. Virtually the entire airship organization had to be created after we got into the war. Naval attachés abroad had been watching blimp operations over the English channel, and on the basis of rather meager information which they furnished, Navy designers were working on plans, when the Secretary of the Navy, in February 1917, 60 days before the declaration of war, ordered 16 blimps started at once. Nine of these were to be built by Goodyear which had at least given some study to the principles, had built a few balloons, one of which, flown by its engineers out of Paris, had won the James Gordon Bennett Cup Race. No one in this country, however, knew much about building airships, and less about flying them after they were built. Operating bases would have to be built and the very construction plants as well. The first Goodyear airship under the Navy order was completed before the airship dock (hangar) at Wingfoot Lake was ready, and the ship had to be erected in Chicago and flown in. The engineers who built it, Upson and Preston, made their first airship flight in delivering the ship to Akron, using theoretical principles applied in the international balloon race the year before, to make up for their lack of practical experience. Those first ships were small, slow, lacked range, uncovered many shortcomings. Flight training was done under adverse circumstances. Men had to teach themselves to fly airships, then teach others to fly them.