That&#x27;s a story in itself.<p>The Germans used airships to bomb Holland and the UK during WW I.  Early in the war, before superchargers, the airships flew higher than the airplanes the allies sent to stop them.  But with improvements in allied airplane engines, Germany started to take heavy losses.<p>So they started to build a series of airships they called &quot;height climbers&quot;.  The idea was they&#x27;d drop their bombs, drop their ballast, and fly home far above allied aircraft.  It worked, too, though they lost a lot of people to hypothermia and oxygen deprivation.<p>Fast forward to the end of the war.  As part of the Treaty of Versailles, the remaining German airships were divvied up among the victorious countries.  What the US (and others ) got were the stripped-down airships that were never intended for normal use.  These were ships designed right to the edge of simply falling apart, because otherwise they would have been destroyed by airplanes.<p>And that&#x27;s what the US used as a template to produce domestic airships.  It&#x27;s no surprise they broke apart in a strong wind.<p>Zeppelin knew how to build airships, though.  By 1937 the <i>Graf Zeppelin</i> had flown over a million miles without incident.