First report of a German Zeppelin raid. |
They
were the pride of Imperial Germany, the very symbol of the industrial and technological
superiority that was destined to make it the undisputed supreme world
power and absolute master of Europe.
The giant Zeppelin airships
designated with unsentimental Teutonic efficiency simply L3 and
L4
were hauled from their enormous hanger
sheds in the dawning of January 19, 1915 in Fuhlsbüttel. Each was laden
with enough fuel for more than 30 hours in the air and armed with
eight explosive bombs and 25 incendiaries then cast off on a fateful mission.
That
mission was personally approved by Kaiser Wilhelm II himself.
The
war touched off with the assassination
of the heir to the comic opera throne
of a fading empire just 17 month
earlier had not gone as expected. Instead of a war of advancing armies and brilliant
maneuver coming to a quick
conclusion against a soft enemy
like the glorious triumph of the Franco-Prussian War, things had bogged down to a stalemated meat grinder in muddy trenches stretching for hundreds of miles. The triumphs of industrial efficiency—machine guns, multi-shot bolt-action
rifles capable of rapid and
sustained fire, powerful heavy artillery
capable of astonishing accuracy of over long distances, the frightening introduction of poison gas,
and the newfangled airplanes that could provide accurate reconnaissance
and increasingly be used to attack
ground troops—had made maneuver, generalship,
and the gallant charge obsolete. It turned out that the lessons for this war should have come from the grinding disaster of the Crimea
or the stalemate before Petersburg in the waning months of the American Civil War.
The
Kaiser decided that to end the war he had to reach over the lines and smite the enemy population in their secure
homes. It would, he was convinced, destroy moral of his main enemy, the British and cause the civilian
population to rise up and demand peace. He ordered his prize air ships to attack “military and industrial buildings” in England. In fact the Emperor, his Generals, and the
crews of the Zeppelins all knew that bombs were going to fall on civilians.
Kaiser Wilhelm (center) heavily invested his personal prestige in the fleet of dirigibles built by Count (Graf) Ferdinand von Zeppelin (left.). |
The
mighty air ships it was almost 3 am local time when they passed over the English coast in Norfolk. Then the two ships parted, each turning to their designated target in the pitch black night. Along their flight route each dropped incendiary devices for illumination to find the roads and rail lines they needed to guide
them to their targets. A few sheep and local farmers were frightened,
but no one knew where the eruptions were coming from and sparse telephone and telegraph
connections could not be made to raise a general alarm.
The
L3 made for Great Yarmouth, a fishing
port of negligible military
significance. The L4 searched for King’s Lynn more than 50
miles west on the north coast where the River
Great Ouse empties into a wide bay. It was a medieval
town, a market village, and a
very minor port. It, too, had no
military significance.
Each
of the Zeppelins arrived over their targets in near silence and unleashed their remaining incendiaries and
explosive bombs. In each case it was over within moments. The stunned citizens of the two towns
suffered a combined total of nine dead,
scores injured and a handful of buildings, mostly residential housing, damaged. The L4
and L5 each passed once over their
target towns then made wide turns over the English countryside and returned to
Germany in undisturbed dignity.
Although
damage and casualties were light, the Kaiser was right about the effect on
English moral. The raids and others like
it in coming months caused something of
a panic, which grew as no effective
early air raid warning system could be established
and no ground fire air defense seemed
effective. Combined with the horrifying long columns of casualty
lists published every daily newspaper,
peace sentiment was growing in
England, particularly among the working
class grew alarmingly.
This German propaganda postcard celebrated the terror Zeppelin raids were supposedly wrecking on London. |
At
first the Kaiser forbad the extension of
the raids to London, supposedly
out of fear for the safety of his
cousins in the Royal Family. In February he allowed an attack on a real military target, the London Docks,
but ordered his crews to continue to avoid
the city itself.
Finally,
out of frustration, he targeted the enemy capital. The first successful raid there was launched
on May 31, 1915. Although several air
ships were damaged or crashed,
mostly due to inclement weather, none had yet been shot down by what was
becoming known as anti-aircraft artillery.
The
biggest raids of the war were loosed
on London on October 18 in which 71 people were killed and 128 injured,
including 17 who died when a bomb struck
a packed theater. That was the last raid of the year as rough weather over the Channel was making crossings
increasingly to resume hazardous. The 20
raids in 1915 dropped 37 tons of bombs, killing 181 people and injuring 455.
The British turned the raids into propaganda fodder of their own to encourage enlistments. |
When
improved weather allowed the bombing campaign to resume the next year, the
British finally began to develop an
effective defense. First, searchlights were introduced to illuminate the
huge targets and a class of 4 inch guns were remounted on swivels making them much more accurate and able to track
the moving targets. In mid-year the
British introduced the use incendiary
bullets fired by swarming Royal Flying Corps (RFC) bi-planes. The incendiary
bullets pierced the Zeppelin gas cells inside the envelope igniting the hydrogen explosively. For the first time airships were being brought down in aerial combat in
addition to those shot down by anti-aircraft fire and lost to bad weather.
There
were sporadic raids in 1917 and ’18 but the heyday of the airships as offensive
weapons was past. Over four years of use there were 52 raids on
Britain killing more than 500, the vast majority of them civilians. Hundreds of thousands of Pounds of damage was sustained.
British moral wavered as a
result, but did not break. Indeed after people began to know what to expect and the shock wore off, despair turned to defiance.
World
War I might have been the end of Zeppelins as bombers, but it was just the dawning
of the age of so called strategic
bombing. By the time the next Great
War broke out, technology had revolutionized
fixed-wing aircraft and munitions enabling industrial scale slaughter of unimaginable efficiency.
But
it all started with those Zeppelins.
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