An aerology (meteorology) class, NAS Pensacola, 1922. Airship operations demanded knowledge of weather, particularly surface and lower-level winds. The U.S. Navy’s LTA program would help realize quantum improvements in weather analysis and forecasting. NARA
The village of Lakehurst, New Jersey, was founded in 1841. Tucked away in the lonely Pine Barrens, it remained a small and isolated community. The Central Railroad of New Jersey defined the character of the place for half a century. It seemed that everyone in town either worked on the line or was dependent on someone who did. By 1900, however, Lakehurst had achieved some celebrity as a health resort. The Pine Tree Inn, a rambling hotel opened in 1898, attracted tourists for a few decades until it was razed in 1937.
The association of Lakehurst with the military began during the First World War. Early in 1915, representatives from the British government opened negotiations with American manufacturers for the production of shells for the imperial Russian government. The Baldwin Locomotive Works of Philadelphia agreed to make artillery ammunition. On 10 June 1915, a new company was organized—The Eddystone Ammunition Corporation—to execute the contract. Since their ammunition and that from other firms would require field testing, a proving ground was established fifty miles away near Lakehurst. A site was selected north of the village on high ground between Manapaqua Brook and the Ridgeway Branch. The test site consisted of little more than a long firing range cleared through the scrub oak and pine, with an unpaved road and observation structures spaced along its length.
Ultimately, Eddystone tested lots representing some 7,600,000 shrapnel and high-explosive shells for the Russian regime. A subsidiary was also organized in September 1917, the Eddystone Munitions Company, to manufacture a variety of munitions for the U.S. government.
The United States entered the European war in April 1917. The U.S. Army acquired the proving ground area later that year and began to develop the site as an experimental ground for gas warfare. This decision was reached in September, but work on the site was not started until late March 1918. Firing trials by the Chemical Warfare Service (Proving Division) began that April. The camp was a large one. As well as having firing ranges, the facility was equipped with permanent gun positions, batteries of several caliber, magazines, rail sidings for delivery of ordnance, laboratories, barracks, and related structures. Security was exceedingly tight and both officers and enlisted personnel were selected with great care. The purpose of the camp: “to test, in actual large-scale field trials, new gases, which from laboratory tests look promising.”1 Two lines of trenches equipped for gas sampling were constructed near the impact areas to simulate those on the European battlefield. Cloud-gas attacks and other experiments with mustard gas were conducted. The camp’s artillery detachment fired shells into the trenches and nearby terrain to note the concentration of gas and its effects on animals in the test areas. This activity increased in intensity up to the armistice, when all such work was abruptly terminated.
The war demonstrated a need for officers trained in gas warfare, so, in 1918, a training camp for the Chemical Warfare Service was established southeast of the proving ground. Construction began in August. Intended to accommodate 1,300 officers and men, the 733-acre camp was located on part of the proving ground reservation one mile north of Lakehurst. The Army designated the facility Camp Kendrick, in honor of a former West Point professor. Barracks and officers quarters, mess halls, administration buildings, an infirmary, power house, and other structures were quickly erected. The first complement of 10 officers and 283 men arrived at the incomplete camp in September. But training for gas warfare and the work of the nearby proving ground had yet to reach their fullest potential before the armistice was signed in November 1918. As America demobilized, the new camp was used briefly to muster out troops returning from France. But in 1919 the site was closed pending sale. It is at this point that the U.S. Navy entered the Lakehurst story.
One week before the notice of sale, two U.S. Navy representatives arrived at Camp Kendrick to evaluate the site as a possible airship base. Cdr. Lewis H. Maxfield, USN, an early advocate of naval airships, and Starr Truscott, chief engineer for the Navy’s design staff, visited the Lakehurst site on 7 April. The two men were impressed with the availability of rail lines and water, the camp’s location with respect to New York and the coast, and its accessibility to Philadelphia and the Naval Aircraft Factory. The factory was now relatively idle and already being considered for the fabrication of America’s first fleet airship; a hangar on the Lakehurst site would be used for assembly of the aircraft and general outfitting. The flat, sandy expanse available at Lakehurst seemed ideal for construction and for flight operations.
Camp Kendrick. In 1917 the Chemical Warfare Service, Proving Division, United States Army, developed a site near Lakehurst, NJ, to test—in large-scale field trials—new gases for war. Here a high-explosive burst rises over an impact area. With cessation of hostilities, Proving Division work was terminated. By January 1919, three-fourths of the commissioned and enlisted personnel had been demobilized. Note the observation tower. R. F. Burd Jr.
Returning doughboys being celebrated in Lakewood, a few miles from Lakehurst, a naval nowhere. In 1919 the Navy Department received authorization for two rigid airships and for a naval air station. That May, about 1,700 acres of the Camp Kendrick site were purchased “for use as a dirigible field,” what would become the Navy’s main LTA base on the Atlantic coast. R. F. Burd Jr.
The topography for many miles around is undisturbed by heights of any kind. Thus the station is not only visible at great distances in clear weather, but there is also the advantage that in thick weather, there is no additional danger in flying low to locate it. Also no local eddies due to high obstacles are formed.2
The unfavorable location of Lakehurst with regard to storm paths was overlooked. This would be unwittingly compounded when the hangar was not constructed with its long axis parallel to the predominant wind direction. The frequent cross-hangar winds would bedevil flight operations from the beginning. Moreover, Lakehurst’s location with respect to the Atlantic Fleet and its command structure in Norfolk, and its remove from fleet exercise areas, would, in the ensuing decades, artificially isolate lighter-than-air from the rest of the service. Removed as it was from major centers of population and from the mainstream Navy of the interwar years, Naval Air Station (NAS) Lakehurst tended to be an isolated and rather lonely command.
The sale of Camp Kendrick was postponed, and the Lakehurst site was recommended. On 16 May 1919, Acting Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the purchase of about seventeen hundred acres “for use as a naval dirigible field.” The secretary of war concurred in the transfer that June. The purchase price was $13,088, or about $8 to $10 an acre.
Three million dollars had been appropriated for a hangar to house two rigid airships, or ZRs. The design work for this unique structure fell to the Navy. Based on plans prepared by the old Joint Army and Navy Airship Board, the Bureau of Yards and Docks drew up specifications for a dirigible hangar on the Lakehurst site. In July 1919, thirty-one pages of general specifications were distributed by the bureau, calling for a dirigible hangar having concrete footings, reinforced concrete floors, steel frame, steel sash and doors, steel rolling doors, asbestos siding, gypsum roof, built-up roofing, copper skylights, gutters, downspouts and ventilators, wood-block floors, terra-cotta partitions, metal stairs, elevators, railroad tracks, docking rails, kitchen equipment, plumbing, heating, lighting,