Which is more dangerous — a submarine or a zeppelin? That question was on the minds of Mainers a century ago as they scanned the skies and coastal waters for signs of these new military terrors even before the United States entered The Great War.
Hudson Maxim, the famous scientist and Maine native, said submarines, or “torpedo boats,” were the worst by far, while the zeppelins, often called airships, were a failure when it came to waging war, according to the Bangor Daily Commercial on Feb. 19, 1915.
“… of what use is a zeppelin? It is incapable of being steered, and no more than drifts from place to place; it cannot carry any great weight in bombs and torpedoes … though like some fabled monster, it may strike terror in the hearts of all beholders, its uses are chiefly in outward show,” said the explosives inventor and brother of the even more famous Sir Hiram Maxim, inventor of the first portable and fully automatic machine gun.
Mainers were looking for zeppelins, just as they were searching the woods for German wireless transmitters. One Maine newspaper “in the western part of the state” had been publishing a standing column on the subject of mysterious airships and had peopled the Maine forests with “German aeronauts and spies.”
Then the Bangor papers joined this game. “Ha! Bangor has seen an airship,” a Bangor Daily Commercial headline chortled on Feb. 25. “Portland no longer has monopoly on aerial night prowlers.”
A man living in nearby Northern Maine Junction told some friends he had heard an airship cruising overhead the other night. His friends suggested that he had been drinking.
Then, a week later, the newspaper got a phone call that “people in two different parts of [Northern Maine Junction] had heard borne distinctly on the still night air, the whir of an airship’s motor; and the report spread that one of Kaiser Bill’s night prowlers had passed overhead.”
Airships were used for reconnaissance, more than bombing at this stage in history. The Bangor Daily Commercial’s desperate reporter suggested it was possible that airships were making regular runs over Maine and “doubtless it would be possible to establish an aeroplane station somewhere in our capacious woods, although it would seem to be a singularly pointless and stupid thing to do.”
Meanwhile, German submarines, as well as mines and war ships, began proving just how dangerous they could be. Even neutral U.S. shipping wasn’t safe, a fact of great interest in Maine where marine-related activities were an important part of the economy.
One of the first American ships to go down was the Carib, which was sunk in the North Sea off the German coast by a mine while on her way from Charleston, South Carolina, to Bremen, Germany, with a load of cotton. The announcement topped the front page of the Bangor Daily News on Feb. 24.
The Carib was commanded by Edgar L. Cole of Thomaston. Three crew members died in the explosions that followed. A Harrington native, Capt. Cole came from a well-known sea faring family.
Bangor residents Mr. and Mrs. Frank H. Tupper, who were also from Harrington, were interviewed by a Bangor Daily Commercial reporter about Cole for a story on Feb. 25.
The Tuppers had apparently received a letter from Cole’s sister, who said her brother was aware of the dangers involved in making the voyage. In fact, Capt. Cole had urged his employer to send him on the mission because he was a single man. He had sent his belongings back to Harrington to relatives, fully expecting to die. He, however, was one of the survivors.
Americans were seeking any excuse to stay out of the war, and they were willing to put up with the loss of a few merchant ships to remain neutral. The Bangor Daily News in a particularly uncharitable editorial on Feb. 27 reminded readers that Cole and his employers had only themselves to blame for going into the mine-infested waters.
“Capt. Cole took his risks,” the newspaper said. “If he had escaped the torpedoes he would have earned a great amount of money. He missed his guess and lost his fortune. There was nothing of an act of war about the whole performance.”
The sinking of the Bath-built cargo ship William P. Frye by a German commerce raider off the coast of South America — the first American ship destroyed in World War I — created a good deal more uproar.
The cruiser Prinz Eitel Friedrich sailed into Newport News, Virginia, on March 11 with 342 prisoners taken from a half dozen cargo and passenger ships destroyed in the past few months. The Frye was the only American vessel in the group.
The German cruiser had blasted a large hole in the huge steel square-rigger’s hull on Jan. 28, after the captain became impatient with efforts to throw her cargo of wheat into the ocean. He had declared the load, bound from Seattle to Queenstown, England, to be contraband.
The German government announced later, however, that it was all an unfortunate misunderstanding. Germany’s definition of contraband had been modified while the Eitel was at sea. The captain was unaware of the change.
Built by Arthur Sewall & Company of Bath and named after Maine Sen. William P. Frye, the vessel’s ownership was divided among 38 Sewall family members and connections. One of the owners, Samuel S. W. Sewall, urged the U. S. government to move against the German warship “as a sea rover and her crew as pirates,” the Bangor Daily News said on March 12.
That didn’t occur. “The German government agreed to pay for the ship and cargo, although the amount was still being negotiated when the United States entered the war in 1917,” according to historian Roger F. Duncan in his book “Coastal Maine: A Maritime History.” Because no one was hurt, the crew was well treated and the Germans admitted they were at fault, “a wave of sympathy washed over the Eitel,” according to Duncan.
Public opinion did not turn against the Germans until the sinking of the Lusitania with the death of 124 Americans in May, and it took two more years before the country declared war.
Meanwhile, Mainers were still dithering over imaginary German airships.
On March 22, the Bangor Daily News reported that a police officer and three University of Maine students waiting in front of the Orono Drug Company for the 10:40 trolley to Old Town heard “a very well defined buzzing sound.”
They called out two other men, including the operator at the telephone exchange across the street, who heard “the mysterious whirring and buzzing.” All reportedly were convinced it was an airship.
A night reporter at the Bangor Daily News wrote, presumably with tongue in cheek, that there was “no evidence of destruction by bombs either in the town or on the University campus…”
He called the telephone operator at Old Town, but “she knew nothing of the craft and said that there had been no evidence of it in the upriver city.” Nevertheless, the story found its way into print the next day.
Hence, it was another quiet night along the Penobscot River for most except for the buzzing and whirring in the sky disturbing a few. Later, it would turn out, just as Hudson Maxim said, that German submarines were much more dangerous than zeppelins.
Wayne E. Reilly’s column on Bangor a century ago appears in the newspaper every other Monday. His latest book, Hidden History of Bangor: From Lumbering Days to the Progressive Era, is available where books are sold. Comments can be sent to him at wreilly.bdn@gmail.com