During the war, members of the RAF—and the WAAF—ferried American planes from South America to Europe, Africa, and the Far East. Pilots often followed the coastline but sometimes they could cut a thousand miles off their journey by flying over the jungle. Some of them came to grief, and blimps, with their ability to move leisurely and to hover, proved the most effective rescue ships. The Navy had blimp bases along the Brazilian coast, the largest at Santa Cruz, where the inadvertent hospitality of the Germans provided the airships with a huge hangar originally built to house the Graf Zeppelin.