This weekend will be filled with awe and thrills and heritage as Columbus Air Force Base hosts a spectacular air show on Saturday and Sunday. It is a world class event that is free, open to the public and not to be missed.
There is a lot of aviation heritage to be celebrated in the Golden Triangle. This weekend’s air show will carry us from the past with Tora Tora Tora to the future with the F-35 Lightning II Demo Team. Here in the Golden Triangle, we are also fast approaching the centennial of an aviation milestone.
At 9 a.m. Oct. 8, 1924, an almost 2 1/2 city block long silver bullet shaped airship passed over Columbus. Traveling at 55 mph and at an altitude of about 2,000 feet, it angled slightly southwest then west toward Greenville. After a few minutes it passed low over Crawford.
It was the USS Shenandoah on the first transcontinental flight by an airship. It was a brief passage during the early days of aviation which has been all but lost to local history.
It is always interesting to view a historic event from two different perspectives. That is especially true when those events had a local element and maybe a slice of comedy. So, it is with the USS Shenandoah.
The story of the Shenandoah itself is a fascinating one of the beginnings of air travel. Built by the U.S. Navy on the pattern of the great German zeppelins of World War I, it was 682 feet long with a width of 78 feet, 9 inches and a height of 93 feet, 2 inches. As the Navy’s first rigid airship, it was christened and commissioned on Oct. 10, 1923.
In 1924 as both a training flight for a proposed arctic flight to the North Pole and a public relations venture, the Navy decided to send the airship on transcontinental flight. Along the way, the Shenandoah would radio greetings to the mayors of towns it passed over. That was the flight that passed over Columbus and Crawford on Oct. 8, 1924.
The West Point Leader newspaper had a lengthy article detailing the flight with the headline “Continent Spanned by the Shenandoah.” The Columbus papers for that week are missing so the Columbus coverage is not known.
The January 1925 issue of National Geographic contained a 47-page account of the flight. Included was a map showing the key cities that the Shenandoah passed over. The route across the country took it over Spartanburg, South Carolina; Atlanta and Carrollton, Georgia; Birmingham, Alabama; Columbus and Greenville; Bastrop and Shreveport, Louisiana; and Dallas and Fort Worth. From Fort Worth, it flew to San Diego and Tacoma, Washington. It then flew back across the country to New Jersey. The trip took 19 days.
Included in the National Geographic article were descriptions of the cities and countryside seen during the flight. The Shenandoah left from the Naval station at Lakehurst New Jersey on Oct. 7 at 1 a.m. At 7:15 a.m. the next day, she approached Birmingham and there “the mantle of smoke from her steel mills was visible.” Between Birmingham and Columbus “… the forest seemed without a break.” She passed over Columbus at 9 a.m. and Greenville at 11:47 a.m.
As the Shenandoah passed Columbus and crossed over “the land of cotton,” the scene below was one of white fields of cotton and square white bales stacked at railroad depots. Through trees and in clearings were seen dirt roads leading to “weather-beaten houses.” The airship seemed to terrify chickens and livestock and children looked up “in awe.” Some of the children were seen waving in greeting, and one man was observed running into his house and coming back out waving a white tablecloth. The observer felt he was waving a greeting to the Shenandoah. A story from Crawford causes one to wonder if it was a symbol of greetings or actually an improvised white flag of surrender.
I had not heard the story of the Shenandoah passing over Lowndes County until about 10 years ago, when it was mentioned to me by Tommy Gentry. Tommy said that his father, “loved aviation and used to tell me stories of the time that a dirigible flew over Crawford when he was a lad. The dirigible was flying at about 200 feet in a southwesterly direction. He told me, “My uncle William Albert Gentry Jr. (Dub) and Neil (Cornelius) Ervin were standing on the steps of the old Crawford Post Office on that day. He indicated that the direction in which ‘she’ was traveling would have put it passing over the Saunders Carson Plantation. I asked if he heard the sounds of the engines and he said that he did not. He said the townspeople in Crawford ‘thought the world was coming to an end.’”
Tom Hardy’s father, Harris, knew of the Shenandoah’s coming and had Tom, then a small child, out in their front yard to watch the great airship’s passing. Tom remembers watching it with fascination and recalled that when it passed to the south of his house at about 1,000 feet high “it looked like it was a quarter-mile long.”
Unfortunately, the Shenandoah had a short life. On Sept. 2, 1925, it was scheduled to leave Lakehurst Naval Station on a training flight to Dearborn, Michigan. Her commanding officer, Lt. Commander Zachary Lansdowne, requested permission to delay the flight because of bad weather. His request was denied, and she departed as scheduled. The next morning, it passed through a severe thunderstorm over Ohio and broke apart in turbulence. Of its 43 officers and crew, 14 including LCDR Lansdowne were lost when she crashed near Marietta, Ohio.
Army Col. Billy Mitchell’s public criticism of the Navy’s handling of the Shenandoah and LCDR Lansdown’s weather concerns helped lead to Mitchell’s 1925 court-martial for insubordination. That court-martial ended the career of Mitchell, who is considered the “Father of the U.S. Air Force.”
As is often the case, when one views a historic event, whether it incites terror or inspires curiosity usually comes down to perspective.
As I enjoy the air show and watch the Thunderbirds and the F-35 demonstration Saturday, I know I will be pondering on just how far aviation has come in the last 100 years.
Rufus Ward is a local historian.
Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 34 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
