But the wind blew steadily stronger as the commander was hurrying ashore. It reached gale force, hurricane force, 40 knots, 60 knots in gusts, varying in direction crazily around a 60-degree arc. It picked the ship up and slammed it down, damaging the fuselage, breaking a propeller. Little and Peck climbed aboard to pull the rip panel and let the gas out. After the storm passed, they could cement the panel back in, reinflate the bag and go on. But the fates were against them. The cord leading to the rip panel broke. Desperately, the two men started climbing up the suspension cables to the gas bag with knives, planning to rip the panel out by hand. But a tremendous gust caught the ship, lifted it up. Seeing the danger to the crew, Peck shouted to them to let go, and he and Little dropped over the side. Little broke an ankle. The ship surged upward, crewless, set off like another “Flying Dutchman” across the Atlantic, was never seen again. Just three days later Hawker and Grieve set out from St. John’s, landed in the ocean. Alcock and Brown cut loose their landing gear a month later and landed in Ireland. One of the three Navy seaplanes, the NC-4, reached Europe on May 31 and the British dirigible R-34 set out on July 2 for its successful round trip to Mitchel Field. But for a trick of fate and the lack of equipment available today, a blimp would have been first to get across. Many things happened in the airship field between the two wars, but most of them affected non-rigid airships only indirectly, as the Navy was primarily concerned with the larger rigids. The loss of the Hindenburg by hydrogen fire (which American helium would have prevented), coming on the heels of tragic setbacks in this country was enough to dismay anyone except Commander C. E. Rosendahl and his stouthearted associates at Lakehurst Naval Air Station. They didn’t give up. Setbacks were inevitable to progress. Count Zeppelin had built and lost five rigid airships prior to 1909, but he went on to build ships which were flown successfully in war and peace. If the Germans, using hydrogen, could do this, Americans, with helium, should not find it impossible, Lakehurst reasoned. And if they had no rigid airships to fly and no immediate likelihood of getting any they would use blimps. The Navy was more familiar than the public with what the British and French airships had accomplished in the first war. Studying, as all Navy officers were doing in that period, the various possibilities of attack and defense, in case the war then threatening Europe should sweep across the Atlantic, they came to the conclusion that the coast line of America was no more remote from German submarines in 1938 than the coast of England was in 1914. The airplane had improved vastly in speed, range, and striking power, and their very multiplicity had ruled out the blimps over the English channel, even if helium was available, but those conclusions did not hold along the American coast.