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H O M E P A G E
PETER HESSELBACH early gliding pioneer and avid photographer, was born near the provincial German city of Darmstadt in 1907. He studied engineering at the Kohn Gymnasium, graduating at the end of 1924 “with exceptional honours”. In 1929, he and fellow German gliding experts were brought over to Truro, Massachusetts by J.C.Penny Jr. and the American Motorless Aviation club (A.M.A.C.) in an ultimately successful attempt to break existing gliding records. In 1936, Peter Hesselbach received a letter from Royal Excavation Corps (R.E.C.) Head, Gordon Bindon-Bhore, offering him a position as coordinator of the Corps new gliding program. At the time Peter was unhappy with his job as an inspector of municipal works in Darmstadt; the invitation seemed a way to return to what he loved doing most, gliding. He wrote back by return post accepting the offer. His arrival that March at R.E.C. regional headquarters in Wiveliscombe, Somerset was greeted with profuse enthusiasm. The excitement proved contagious, as a letter to his old friend Capt. Roehre illustrates: “As soon as the weather warms up, we are leaving on an expedition into the sandy coastal flatlands north of this village. We will be taking 10 different gliders and as many as 30 men with us - it seems almost too good to be true! I have yet to see the designs, but Bindon made extensive notes during the A.M.A.C. trials, so their technology can’t be too far behind ours.” It was indeed too good to be true. On the eve of the teamÕs departure for the coast, Bindon-Bhore and MacRupert unveiled the R.E.C.’s new fleet of gliders at a meeting of all expedition members. These consisted of several pairs of hastily constructed rawhide wings and one exceptionally flimsy canvas gliding suit, equipped with special arm holds so the wings could be flapped. “Peter turned completely pale and his neck contracted like a turkey’s,” Bindon recalled later.
Despite his reservations, Peter’s name was listed among those who departed on the North Wessex expedition on May 10, 1936. After a few days of uncertainty, he found himself enthralled by the openness of the landscape, the ocean vistas, the dramatic swirls of cloud - “the feeling is like that of a Caspar David Friedrich painting of the Ruegen,” he wrote to Roehre. He also began to warm to the task of making the gliders flyable. Abandoning the stiff, heavy oak frames for lighter, more flexible ash, he reconfigured the design into a more aerodynamic shape, over which he stretched and restretched the rawhide over a period of days, trimming it each time until it was gossemer-light. By late June he was able to report a flight “of well over three quarters of an hour, at a maximum altitude of almost 75 feet” with the redesigned ornothopter. During this time, Peter was well aware that most of the expedition members were involved in taking tinctures and decoctions made from hallucinogenic herbs and spices, undergoing deep hypnosis, using ritual objects to go into trance states. The Expedition was ultimately undone by these practices when Brockman and MacRupert found a large cache of hallucinagenic honey near the Taw delta. In 1938, as war became inevitable, Peter Hesselbach was called back to Germany for military service. Due to a misreading of his work with the R.E.C., he was assigned to the Deutsches Pionierren Korps (DPK) to blow up bridges on the Eastern front, instead of to the Luftwaffe where he more properly belonged - an uncharacteristic error in the usually efficient German bureaucracy. His name was among those listed as missing when the Russians broke through the Dnieper line in the July of 1943. The Royal Excavation Corps, learning of his disappearance, sent a rescue expedition to Northeastern Siberia in hopes of locating him. (see The Circular River Expedition)