Posted on 08/24/2013 11:22:58 AM PDT by Winniesboy
Quantity of cow intestines used in manufacturing airships was so enormous that making of sausages was temporarily outlawed....
To millions of sausage-starved Germans,... Zeppelins were perhaps less harbingers of a new kind of warfare than colossal reminders of the culinary sacrifices required by the fatherland...
.. the military appetite for the dirigibles so strong – that the making of sausages was temporarily outlawed ...
With the guts from more than 250,000 cows needed to produce the bags that held the hydrogen gas in each Zeppelin, the German war machine had to choose between long-range bombing and wurst. It chose the former...
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
After the war, things went from Graf to Wurst.
Didn’t take a turn for the wurst, I see.
Hmmm....so the Nazis actually REDUCED the number of weiners the common people encountered? Definitely a different concept from modern government.
Got to admit — those Zeppelin crews had guts.
Jones and Bonham hardest hit.
And all these years, I was laboring under the misperapprahension that the skins of the Zeppelins were made from lacquered silk — or some such fabric.
IIRC, the product made from bovine intestine is called “gold-beaters’ skin” for its use in the production of gold leaf for plating.
Many years ago I had heard how Zeppelin manufacture in WW1 caused a shortage of gold-beaters’ skin. Didn’t know about the sausage shortage, though.
Yes, the skin itself was lacquered silk, the gas bag inside it was cow intestine as rubberized fabrics hadn’t quite caught up to the tech requirement yet.
Think of it as a balloon inside a duffelbag that is held off the balloon by thin strips of wicker.
Ich habe nie etwas Wurst*
Ich bin ein Burploser
I NEVER SAUSAGE A THING!
In WW II, the German People had to give up some of their potatoes to make rocket fuel for the V-2. But at least they got to hear the roar of the Rocket engines on the radio and know they were striking back at England for the Bombing they were getting each night. The folks in WW I didn’t get that pleasure.
Oh, you're right on that. But the bladders that held the hydrogen were inside the skin.
Still, I’m not sure if I believe this tripe ...
Thanks for the explanation. Learned something.
Welcome.
One source said it took two hundred thousand sheets of goldbeater skin to make an impermeable bag.
And zeppelins had more than one gas bag from front to back.
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