His Majesty’s Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World’s Largest Flying Machine—Samuel C. Gwynne (New York, NY, USA: Scribner, 2003, 299 pp.)

The author compellingly tells the story of the loss of the British Zepplin R101 which crashed and burned in France on 5 October 1930, about 8 hours after leaving central England while on its initial international voyage. The British government paid for the construction of the R101. It was the largest airship ever built: in length at 777 feet, it was as about as long as 2½ football fields, the covering filled six acres, and enclosed 5½ million cubic feet. Its empty weight, without hydrogen, was ¼ million pounds and it was powered by five diesel engines each of 585 horsepower with enough fuel to go 4,000 miles. What motivated this expensive zeppelin? As the author explains, the airship was to serve as an adjunct to British colonialism. By the end of World War I, Britain was the largest imperial power in history. It controlled a quarter of the earth’s land mass and with 412 million people about a quarter of the world’s population. However, starting in the earliest decades of the 20th-century colonialism was in trouble, for example, with the Boer War in South Africa and the 1916 Easter uprising in Ireland. The enormous loss of life incurred by colonial subjects forced to defend Britain in the Great War created unrest in the colonies. The book is cleverly organized. He opens with the gathering of the passengers and crew on the night of 4 October 1930, at Cardington, an industrial suburb of the English city of Bedford where R101 has been built and moored. The zeppelin is to be launched for a trip to India and scheduled for a stopover in the then-British colony of Egypt. We know that the flight will end in tragedy—just reading the book’s dust jacket tells us that. But, the actual disaster is not a historical picture of the event, and a discussion of crashes and safety of earlier vessels, but also to focus on two of the men lost in the disaster.