THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, August 4, 1995 TAG: 9508040494
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WEEKSVILLE, N.C. LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
If it hadn't been for a gutsy gang of hybrid sailors who went down to the sea in blimps, German submarines might have won the Battle of the Atlantic off the Virginia and North Carolina coasts.
Long before Pearl Harbor, a desperate Winston Churchill warned Franklin D. Roosevelt that Nazi torpedoes were sinking ships faster than they could be replaced to carry food, guns and oil to England.
Churchill and the British stood alone against Hitler after the fall of France.
Far to the west, Yankee blimps were gearing up for what turned out to be another finest hour.
But sadly, early Thursday a big part of that World War II blimp history, and all of a mighty wooden hangar that was a monument to Navy and Coast Guard heroism in the anti-submarine war, came to a blazing end.
Fire destroyed the old Navy Airship Dock. No. 2, a laminated pine blimp hanger that was home port for dozens of World War II airships that wrote the book on a deadly innovation in the war against subs.
To house the blimps, two enormous hangars were built in 1941 and 1942. The largest was Airship Dock No. 2, 1,080 feet long and with curved cantilever roof beams 192 feet high. It took 2-million board feet of southern yellow pine to build the monster hollow sausage.
``That hangar (No. 2) is the largest wooden structure ever built,'' said old blimp hands and proud Weeksville residents before this week's fire. The claim was never officially certified, but it was not often disputed.
Few new weapons actually reverse the tides of battle, and in 1941 blimps had been around since a cumbersome lighter-than-air craft flew for France in 1884, years before the Wright Brothers did it the hard way at Kitty Hawk.
But when 700 U.S Navy sailors and 150 officers arrived April 1, 1942, to commission the 822-acre Naval Air Station in Weeksville, eight miles southeast of Elizabeth City, they brought along a new idea and it was a war-winner.
They also brought along a fleet of blimps that added bold new chapters to the history of battle on the seas.
Submarines in the early days of World War II were hard to sink because they were hard to find.
Sub-hunting - then - involved destroyers and corvettes, running a slow-speed surface search so enemy sub echoes from pinging destroyer sonars wouldn't be lost in the turbulence of bow-waves and stern wakes. It's a big ocean and Nazi subs were deadly needles in watery haystacks.
Before the anti-submarine blimps started droning out of Weeksville, the Germans every other day were sinking an England-bound supply ship off the Outer Banks and along the Virginia coast.
But by the time the blimp crews perfected their radical new anti-sub tactics, German torpedoes were only hitting one Allied ship every 2 1/2 months.
By today's lights, the tactics were simple.
Lightweight radars were installed on the wide-ranging blimps, enormously increasing the distance in which a periscope or a night-surfaced sub could be located.
Surface ships were called in for depth-charge attacks, and ultimately small Navy flattops joined the hunter-killer teams with coordinated anti-sub aircraft that pushed the German subs back to the occupied French Coast. Even the blimps carried depth charges and other anti-sub weapons.
By war's end, 186 oceangoing blimps had joined the battle and only one was destroyed by enemy action, according to the Navy. Nearly 90,000 ships were protected by the hunter-killer blimps and ships.
By 1945 bigger and better Navy blimps were crossing the Atlantic to work with teams in the Mediterrean and around the English Coast.
By the end of 1943, the hunter-killers had helped win the Battle of the Atlantic.
In more recent years, Airship Dock No. 2 has been the scene of half-a-dozen lighter-than-air ventures. Airship Industries, a British company, leased the huge building and began building civilian airships.
KEYWORDS: FIRES by CNB