They didn't give up. Setbacks were inevitable to progress. Count Zeppelin had built and lost five rigid airships prior to 1909, but he went on to build ships which were flown successfully in war and peace. If the Germans, using hydrogen, could do this, Americans, with helium, should not find it impossible, Lakehurst reasoned. And if they had no rigid airships to fly and no immediate likelihood of getting any they would use blimps.
The Navy was more familiar than the public with what the British and French airships had accomplished in the first war. Studying, as all Navy officers were doing in that period, the various possibilities of attack and defense, in case the war then threatening Europe should sweep across the Atlantic, they came to the conclusion that the coast line of America was no more remote from German submarines in 1938 than the coast of England was in 1914.
The airplane had improved vastly in speed, range, and striking power, and their very multiplicity had ruled out the blimps over the English channel, even if helium was available, but those conclusions did not hold along the American coast.
The heroic part played by Allied blimps was a part of the legend of the airship service. Nothing new developed in war had subtracted anything from the ability of American airships to do in this war what British non-rigids had done in the last. Commander J. L. Kenworthy and after him Commander G. H. Mills as commanding officer at Lakehurst turned to non-rigids.
Under Mills was instituted, quietly, unostentatiously, with what ships he had, a series of practice patrols to determine the usefulness of airships in this field, to discover and perfect technique, and to train officers and men.
Lakehurst had a curious conglomeration of airships to start with. There were two J ships of immediate post-war type, with open cockpits, 210,000 cubic feet capacity; two TC ships, inherited from the Army, of more modern design, and larger size; the ZMC2, an experimental job built to study the use of a metal cover, and about to be scrapped after nine years of existence; the L-1, the same size as the Goodyear ships, 123,000 cubic feet, the first modern training ship, which would be joined later by the L-2 and L-3; the G-1, a larger trainer of Goodyear Defender size, useful for group instruction, and the 320,000 cubic foot K-1, which had been built for experiments in the use of fuel gas. Only the K-2, prototype of the 416,000 cubic foot patrol ships later ordered could be called a modern airship, though the Army dirigibles also had good cruising radius.