In Shad­ow Before the Flame: The Hin­den­burg Dis­as­ter and the Pre­lude to War, Cather­ine Grace Katz mas­ter­ful­ly explores the infa­mous cat­a­stro­phe of the Ger­man Zep­pelin the Hin­den­burg. Katz suc­ceeds in mak­ing her book a taut page-turn­er by shrewd­ly mak­ing use of what the read­er like­ly knows and doesn’t know about the Hin­den­burg. 

Before get­ting deeply into the book, I looked up the disaster’s date, which was May 6, 1937. Know­ing that made the chap­ter head­ings — which are dates start­ing in April 1936 — por­ten­tous. As the chap­ters drew clos­er to May 6, the ten­sion ratch­ets up, just as the recur­ring image of a tick­ing clock height­ens anx­i­ety in the movie High Noon.

And yet, an even greater source of ten­sion comes from the excel­lent job Katz does in acquaint­ing us with the pas­sen­gers and crew of the doomed air­ship. The pas­sen­gers ranged from the well-off to the wealthy, which makes sense since trav­el­ing from Ger­many to the Unit­ed States on the hydro­gen-filled Zep­pelin was very expen­sive. Katz, who has done prodi­gious research on those onboard recounts, for exam­ple, the back­sto­ries of Nel­son Mor­ris, heir to a Chica­go meat­pack­ing for­tune, and his friend and neigh­bor Bert Dolan, whom Mor­ris invit­ed to join him on the flight. Dolan, in France on busi­ness, accept­ed, intend­ing to sur­prise his wife by arriv­ing on time for Mother’s Day. Heiress Mara­gret Math­er was one of the last to book pas­sage on the Hin­den­burg, doing so because she pre­ferred fly­ing to sea trav­el. The youngest per­son aboard was four­teen-year-old Wern­er Franz, a cab­in boy who took his job eager­ly to alle­vi­ate his family’s penury. 

In each of these cas­es, and in many oth­ers, the read­er is left won­der­ing whether he or she will sur­vive. I read the book over Rosh Hashanah, and that unnerv­ing hol­i­day prayer ​“who shall live and who shall die … ” played loud­er in my mind as the Hin­den­burg drew ever clos­er to its destiny.

And part of its des­tiny was to be the first mass casu­al­ty event cap­tured on live audio. Mid­west­ern radio broad­cast­er Her­bert Mor­ri­son and a col­league were at the Lake­hurst, New Jer­sey dock­ing site to record what they thought would be a straight­for­ward land­ing. Instead, Mor­ri­son gave a heart-wrench­ing moment-by-moment account of the dis­as­ter, famous­ly cry­ing out in pain and dis­be­lief, ​“Oh, the human­i­ty.” While his com­men­tary was not heard live, when it ran its raw authen­tic­i­ty revealed radio’s pow­er to con­vey news more pow­er­ful­ly than print jour­nal­ism ever could. 

Katz explains the mechan­ics of fly­ing, maneu­ver­ing, and land­ing the Hin­den­burg with her char­ac­ter­is­tic clar­i­ty and dili­gence. Doing so enables her to present the con­sen­sus expla­na­tion for why the ship explod­ed. One thing is clear: using hydro­gen to buoy an air­ship presents an unac­cept­able risk of dis­as­ter. So why didn’t the Zep­pelin use heli­um instead, which is inflammable?

The answer touch­es on part of the book’s sub­ti­tle, The Pre­lude To War. Ger­man engi­neers would have pre­ferred to use heli­um, despite its greater expense, because of its safe­ty. But heli­um, like today’s rare earth mate­ri­als, was strate­gi­cal­ly valu­able and hard to come by. Amer­i­ca was one of the few nations that had sub­stan­tial heli­um reserves, and the Roo­sevelt admin­is­tra­tion was unwill­ing to sell it to Hitler’s regime for nation­al secu­ri­ty rea­sons. FDR main­tained that stance even after the Hin­den­burg blew up. And he was right to do so. Heli­um-filled bar­rage bal­loons were used to great effect on D‑Day, con­firm­ing the wis­dom of not selling.

And while on the top­ic of the title, Katz deserves kudos for craft­ing such a lyri­cal one. The Hin­den­burg was over eight hun­dred feet long, and it cast a mas­sive shad­ow as it float­ed over land and sea. Trag­i­cal­ly, that shad­ow pre­ced­ed the flame that engulfed not just the ship but, in time, the world. Oh, the humanity.