It is a little hard to realize today that whatever air battles were waged over water in the last war were conducted chiefly by lighter-than-air craft. Planes staged spectacular battles along the Allied lines in France, but lack of range and carrying capacity forced them to leave sea battles to the airship. As a measure of that situation, the great hangars at Friedrichshafen, spawning ground of the Zeppelins, one of the outstanding targets in all Europe if England were to draw the dirigible’s fangs, lay hardly more than a hundred miles from the French borders, but even that distance was too great for effective attack. While these greater events were taking place, British airships, smaller in size, less spectacular, were playing no small part in repelling Germany’s other threat, the submarine. Blimps Used to Search for U-Boats Navy opinion around the world was skeptical at the beginning of the War as to whether submarines would ever be practical. There were mechanical troubles, accidents, usually costly. Even Germany, prior to 1914, used to send an escort of warships along to convoy its subs to their station—then send out for them afterward to bring them home again. But the war was only a few weeks old when the captain of the U-9, cruising down the Dutch coast, discovered that his gyro compass was off, and when he got his bearings saw that he was 50 miles off course. He wasted no breath, however, on many-syllabled German swear words, for off on his southern horizon were the masts of three British ships. He dived, came up alongside, and in 30 minutes, single handed, with well directed torpedoes, had sunk in turn HMS Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy. The morning of September 22, 1914, marked the beginning of a new era in Naval warfare. The warring nations grew furiously busy building their own U-boats and devising defenses against the enemy’s. Among these defenses was the non-rigid airship. These two vehicles, so widely different, have much in common. If we may be technical for a minute we may say that the airship and the submarine are both buoyant bodies, completely immersed and floating in a medium—air and water respectively—of changing pressures, that each uses dual sets of steering gear and rudders to control direction and altitude. And further, that the airship in 1941 faces the same division of opinion as the submarine faced in 1914, as to whether, particularly with rigid airships, it will ever be widely used and accepted. In any event in 1914 there was an urgent and immediate job to be done.