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1923 Airship Dixmude disaster...
1923 Airship Dixmude disaster...
Item # 701350
December 25, 1923
CHICAGO DAILY TRIBUNE, Dec. 25, 1923
* Airship Dixmude explosion disaster
* Imperial German Navy zeppelin
* Given to France for war reparations
The front page has a nice banner headline: "FIFTY MEN NEAR DEATH IN AIR" with subheads. (see images) Nice for display. This was one of the very first airship disasters.
Complete with 46 pages, light toning and a little wear at the margins, generally good.
wikipedia notes: Railway workers in Sciacca, Sicily, were preparing to take out a train due to leave at 02:30 when they saw the sky to the west light up, the glow then sinking out of sight behind a hill, while a hunter on the seashore, watching the thunderstorm, saw a flash of lightning strike a cloud, followed by a red glare inside the cloud and four burning objects falling from the cloud. In the morning two aluminium fuel tanks were washed up, bearing the numbers "75 L-72" and "S-2-48 LZ-113" and various other debris, including charred scraps of fabric and even fragments of the duralumin girders. However, news of these events did not reach the outside world for several days; the French government, unwilling to admit the possibility of the airship's loss for political reasons, apparently suppressed these reports and issued its own series of false reports of rumoured sightings of Dixmude, suggesting that it had been blown inland over Africa. It was not until 26 December, when fishermen found a body, identified as du Plessis by documents found in the pockets, that the loss of Dixmude was acknowledged. His watch was stopped at 02:27. Only one other body was recovered, that of radioman Antoine Guillaume, which was recovered four months later. It was the deadliest airship accident in history at the time, surpassed in 1933 by the destruction of USS Akron, which killed 73.
Category: The 20th Century
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