NONFICTION - June 16, 1991

ZEPPELINS OF WORLD WAR I by Wilbur Cross (Paragon House: $18.95; 212 pp.). It’s hard to imagine, these days, how panic-stricken Londoners must have been by the first effective zeppelin strikes of the First World War. Able to fly well above both antiaircraft fire and Britain’s Royal Flying Corps, the German airships could strike almost at will, if not very accurately and only at night; lit up by searchlights and thus turning “the color of the harvest moon,” as one journalist put it, the zeppelins became agents of terror and emblematic of the enemy’s technological superiority. As it turned out, however, the success of these early raids was misleading, for dirigibles proved to be inherently dangerous, overly susceptible to the vagaries of the weather, and vulnerable to incendiary fire from more modern airplanes--in short, a military dead-end. Popular historian Wilbur Cross has based much of this volume on the writings of German zeppelin crewmen, and the result is an unexpectedly engaging read.