CHAPTER 20

The Cuxhaven Raid:
“Stupid Great Things, but
Very Beautiful”

The autumn of 1914 saw war at sea revolutionized by weapons scarcely imaginable a generation earlier: the dreadnought, the submarine, the airplane, and the airship. The potential combatants had already equipped themselves with a number of airplanes, which generals and admirals conceded might be useful for observing the enemy. Airships, lifted by giant bags of lighter-than-air gas strung inside a rigid metal frame, were viewed with greater suspicion. In every war, however, weapons development moves quickly and by Christmas Day, 1914, the Royal Navy was so concerned about the danger from airships—which the Germans called zeppelins—that it mounted an attack by shipborne airplanes on a German airship base on the North Sea. In response, German zeppelins and seaplanes attacked British surface ships and submarines. The Cuxhaven Raid, as it came to be called, was history’s first aircraft-carrier-based air strike. It was also the first naval battle in which, on both sides, the striking forces were made up exclusively of aerial machines.

The rigid airships made famous during the Great War bore the name of their creator, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. Curiously, this aerial pioneer was first inspired in St. Paul, Minnesota, when, as a twenty-five-year-old German officer, on leave from his duty as an observer with the Union army in the Civil War, he was invited to go up in a tethered military observation balloon. Count Zeppelin was enthusiastic about his first ascent and began to dream about the possibilities of lighter-than-air craft. His vision was postponed for the many decades he devoted to a regular army career. Only in 1900, after retiring from the army, did he see his own first airship, lifted by hydrogen bags, actually fly. Soon after, it crashed. Three more privately financed, Zeppelin-designed airships followed, which flew but were discarded or destroyed by fire or storm. Zeppelin’s manufacturing company foundered financially, but the German public, impressed by the dedicated persistence of the little pioneer and awed by the immense size of his airships, came to the rescue. Private money flowed in to support his work, and Zeppelin became a national hero. Originally, he had meant to build huge airships for passengers and cargo, but, as a former military officer, he also recognized the airship’s potential as a weapon. As war approached, the German army ordered zeppelins and on Mobilization Day it possessed seven. The Imperial Navy had only one airship, because Grand Admiral von Tirpitz had resisted any diversion of funds from the building of battleships. “As a naval officer who had got to know the force of the wind and the malice of squalls on sailing ships, I never promised myself much from the airships,” Tirpitz announced. Nevertheless, during the first weeks of war, the German navy, short on light cruisers for scouting, grasped that zeppelins, with their long range and endurance, might make up this deficit. Construction of airships and airship bases received priority; within four months, the German navy had four zeppelins.

Neither airships nor airplanes stirred much interest in the Royal Navy. In 1907, the Wright brothers offered patents on their newly developed flying machine to the Admiralty; Lord Tweedmouth, the First Lord, replied that airplanes “would be of no particular value to the Naval Service.” Tweedmouth, however, did not speak for his First Sea Lord, and Jacky Fisher, builder of dreadnoughts and advocate of submarines, was always open to the potential of exotic new weapons. In 1909, with Tweedmouth departed, the Naval Estimates included a request for £35,000 to build one experimental rigid airship. The money was approved and construction of the airship Mayfly commenced. Mayfly was completed in September 1911, but while she was being trundled out of her hangar for her maiden voyage, a violent crosswind squall broke her in two, a trauma sufficient to terminate rigid-airship construction in Great Britain. Some British naval officers regretted this decision: in November 1911, Jellicoe, visiting Berlin, went up in a zeppelin and came down an advocate. As Second Sea Lord in December 1912, Jellicoe, whose duties included oversight of aeronautical developments, attempted to stimulate interest in the use of airships for scouting at sea. He compared airships favorably with airplanes, whose time in the air was, at best, five hours. Airplanes could neither fly nor land at night; they might travel at seventy miles an hour, compared with an airship’s fifty, but an airship rose when it was stationary, and its buoyancy increased as its fuel was consumed. The other Sea Lords and the new First Lord, Winston Churchill, rejected Jellicoe’s recommendations. “I rated the zeppelin much lower as a weapon of war than anyone else,” Churchill said later. “I believed this enormous bladder of combustible and explosive gas would prove to be easily destructible. I was sure the fighting airplane . . . armed with incendiary bullets would harry, rout and burn these gaseous monsters. I therefore did everything in my power in the years before the war to restrict expenditure upon airships and to concentrate our narrow and stinted resources upon airplanes.”

Fisher accepted Churchill’s decision and, from retirement, pressed the new First Lord: “Aviation supersedes small cruisers and intelligence vessels. You told me you would push aviation. You were right.” In fact, Churchill needed no urging. Entranced by these new flying machines and despite appeals from his wife, his friends, and his cousin the Duke of Marlborough—the duke declared that his new fancy was undignified as well as dangerous—Churchill, at thirty-eight, took flying lessons and was ready to solo when his instructor was killed. With that, the First Lord ruefully abandoned the air. Nevertheless, he continued vigorously to promote airplanes, both as scouts for the fleet and as defensive weapons “for the protection of our naval harbors, oil tanks, and vulnerable points.” He acquired for the navy land-based airplanes, with wheels, and sea-based hydro-airplanes—“or seaplanes as I christened them, for short”—with floats. In 1912, a wheeled navy airplane took off from a platform on the deck of the predreadnought battleship Hibernia while the ship was under way; subsequently, the plane landed on shore. In 1913, the old light cruiser Hermes was refitted to carry two seaplanes. At the outbreak of the war, Churchill announced, “I had fifty efficient naval machines, or about one third the number in possession of the army.” By September 3, with the German army on the Marne, all 150 of the British army’s aircraft had been sent to France. At a Cabinet meeting that day, Kitchener privately asked Churchill whether the navy could assume responsibility for the aerial defense of Great Britain. Churchill instantly agreed.

The weeks that followed made clear the division in Churchill’s mind between his disdain for rigid airships as useful components of the Royal Navy and his fear of German zeppelins as deadly, bomb-carrying raiders able to sow destruction over the British Isles. The zeppelin nightmare had first horrified England in 1910, and every year magnified it. Psychologically, there was cause: from the ground, a zeppelin, the size of a dreadnought in the sky, making its serene, unchallenged progress through the heavens, created an impression of implacable power. Sensationalist stories appeared describing enemy flying battleships, each with a heavy cargo of bombs, cruising the night skies over naked, defenseless England. During the winter of 1912 and 1913, “airships on nocturnal missions of frightening import” were “witnessed” far and wide over the British Isles; over London, Sheerness, Portland, Dover, Liverpool, and Cardiff. Alarm spread beyond the tabloids; Colonel Charles A’Court Repington, the military correspondent of The Times, predicted attacks by fleets of German airships on British arsenals, dockyards, and industrial centers. Repington was not alone; Churchill as First Lord warned the Committee on Imperial Defence in December 1912 that “our dockyards, machine shops, magazines and ships lying in basins are absolutely defenseless against this form of attack.”

On the second day of the war, a zeppelin actually attacked a city. Furious that stubborn resistance by the Belgian forts at Liège was upsetting the timetable of the Schlieffen Plan, German officers warned that if the invaders were not permitted to pass, zeppelins would destroy the city. The Belgians refused and on August 6, the zeppelin L-Z arrived overhead. Thirteen bombs dropped; nine civilians died. On August 24 and September 2, zeppelins bombed Antwerp and more civilians were killed.

Suddenly, the menace to England became real. London lay within range of the zeppelin sheds at Cologne and Düsseldorf. German airships might bomb the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, the Admiralty—or, worse, the oil tanks, power houses, lock gates, and magazines at Chatham, Woolwich, or Portsmouth. Churchill, now responsible for the air defense of Great Britain, knew he could not prevent this; he had no antiaircraft guns, no searchlights, no fighter aircraft. Eventually, as the war continued, Churchill’s early belief was vindicated that “airplanes were the only means by which the zeppelin menace was destroyed. However,” he said, “we were not in a position at the beginning of the war to produce effective results. Airplane engines were not powerful enough to reach the great heights needed for the attack of zeppelins in the short time available. Night flying had only just been born. . . . But it was no use sitting down and waiting a year [for defensive measures to be ready. For the moment] only offensive action could help us.”

Churchill understood that although at first German zeppelins were immune in the air, this immunity deserted them on the ground. It was here that Churchill proposed to hit them, “by bombing from airplanes, the zeppelin sheds wherever these gigantic structures could be found. . . . In order to strike at the zeppelin sheds in Germany, it was necessary to start from as near the enemy’s line as possible.” Already on September 12, Churchill had called for stationing “the largest possible force of naval aeroplanes at Calais or Dunkirk.” On September 22, four ground-based Royal Naval Air Service planes, flying from Antwerp, attacked zeppelin sheds in Düsseldorf and Cologne on the Rhine. One pilot located the target, but his bombs missed. On October 8, a British naval airplane destroyed a zeppelin in its shed at Düsseldorf. On November 21, four navy planes flying from Belfort in eastern France attacked the zeppelin construction works at Friedrichshafen, on Lake Constance. They did no damage.

There were zeppelin sheds at the German naval airship bases at Cuxhaven and Hamburg. They were beyond the range of British land-based airplanes flying from Britain, France, or Belgium, but they were not beyond the reach of air attack from the North Sea. But how might such an attack be mounted? By 1914, airplanes had taken off from ships but no plane with wheels had landed back on board a ship. Accordingly, unless air attacks from the sea on the zeppelin sheds were to be one-way missions, the planes used must be seaplanes and they must be carried most of the way to the target by ships that could recover them after the raid and bring them home. Excited by this concept, Churchill commandeered four cross-Channel passenger steamers and sent them to shipyards for alterations. (Hermes had been abandoned as being too old and slow.) Each of these new carriers—Empress, Riviera, Campania, and Engadine—was designed to embark three seaplanes, one forward and two aft. Long booms were installed to lift the fragile aircraft out over the side of the ship and place them in the water. Steel hangars erected on the stern decks provided shelter for the seaplanes from wind and sea. The aircraft themselves were single-engine biplanes made for the Admiralty by Short Brothers, Ltd.—Type 74s, Folders, and Type 135s—all of them with floats, two seats, and wings that folded back in order to fit the ungainly machines onto the steamers’ decks. The planes’ maximum speed was 78 miles an hour; the distance they could fly, fully fueled, was between 300 and 400 miles. Each plane could carry, in a rack between its floats, three nineteen-pound bombs, to be released by pulling a wire in the cockpit. A single bomb, the British believed, plunging through the roof of a zeppelin shed and bursting anywhere near the thousands of cubic feet of flammable hydrogen contained in a zeppelin, should suffice. By the end of August, three of the newly created seaplane carriers had been commissioned and sent to Harwich.

The First Lord’s eagerness to attack the Cuxhaven zeppelin base was thoroughly shared by the two Harwich commodores, Tyrwhitt and Keyes. On October 22, Tyrwhitt came to the Admiralty. “[I] arrived at 5 p.m. and was taken at once to the Holy of Holies where Prince Louis, Winston, and Sturdee were, and a long discussion followed. I produced my little plan (or rather, Roger Keyes’ plan) and got through it right away. . . . They kept me a long time and suddenly in walked the Prince of Wales.” *33 The plan was for six seaplanes to be embarked on Engadine and Riviera. The two seaplane carriers would be escorted into the Heligoland Bight by Tyrwhitt’s light cruisers and destroyers, and the force would wait while the seaplanes attacked the airship base at Cuxhaven and returned to be picked up.

The raid was scheduled for October 25. A smooth sea was essential for the seaplanes to take off from open water; at dawn on October 24, when the two carriers and their escort sailed from Harwich, the sea was calm. But a heavy rain fell during the passage across the North Sea and when, at first light on the twenty-fifth, the seaplanes were hoisted over the side, a fresh cloudburst prevented four of the six from rising off the water. A fifth seaplane managed to fly twelve miles but turned back after the engine had stopped twice because of rain. The sixth managed to fly twenty miles, but returned because there appeared to be no chance of finding its target in the storm.

Tyrwhitt was disappointed, but, returning to the Admiralty, he found Churchill still enthusiastic. “I got considerable butter over my part in the proceedings,” the commodore wrote to his wife. “We are going to try again and I can’t help thinking we shall succeed this time.” The next attempt came on November 23. This time Jellicoe brought the Grand Fleet into the middle of the North Sea to support the carriers, but the operation was canceled by the Admiralty before the seaplanes were lifted onto the water. Explanations for this differ: Churchill blamed poor weather; Jellicoe declared that “the enemy had a force present in the Bight which would be too strong for our detached vessels.” Tyrwhitt was disgusted.

Churchill did not give up. On December 21, five days after the Scarborough Raid, Keyes and Tyrwhitt were told to try a third time. On Decem-ber 23, the weather forecast was promising and the Admiralty ordered the raid to be carried out at dawn on Christmas Day. Three seaplane carriers, Engadine, Riviera, and Empress, escorted by the light cruisers Arethusa, Undaunted, and Aurora and by eight destroyers, were to sail from Harwich for the Heligoland Bight. The force would be small because Tyrwhitt believed it would be easier for a few ships to penetrate the Bight undiscovered. Keyes sent out eleven submarines, positioning some around the launch point, others at the recovery position, still others off the German river mouths to intercept the High Seas Fleet should it emerge. Around the British submarines’ conning towers was painted a red and white checkerboard stripe to aid in recognition by British aviators who might need to land short of the carriers. Engadine, Riviera, and Empress would be escorted to a point fifteen miles north of Heligoland, where the seaplanes would be hoisted onto the water. After attacking the zeppelin base, the pilots were to reconnoiter the German fleet anchorages at Cuxhaven and Wilhelmshaven, noting the warships pres-ent, then fly west along the German coast to the island of Norderney; there they would turn north to rejoin the carriers, which would be waiting twenty miles offshore. Again, Jellicoe would bring the Grand Fleet into the middle of the North Sea. In this way, notes R. D. Layman, a leading contemporary historian of the Cuxhaven Raid, 150 British warships were to be employed “to deliver to the German mainland exactly eighty-one and one half pounds of explosives. This was the combined weight of the bursting charges in the twenty-seven bombs to be carried by the seaplanes.”

Hoping for surprise, Tyrwhitt sailed from Harwich at 5:00 a.m. on the day before Christmas without preliminary warning to anyone, leaving “stewards who had been landed . . . to obtain extras for Christmas Day . . . on the quay frantically waving turkeys and geese” at their departing ships. Entering the Bight at 4:30 on Christmas morning, they observed four small German patrol vessels. Soon after, Arethusa intercepted urgent German wireless traffic to and from Heligoland. Still two hours from the launching position, Tyrwhitt considered turning back; if enemy ships were on patrol in the Bight and if his force went forward and launched its seaplanes, the carriers would risk being discovered and sunk before their aircraft could be recovered. Nevertheless, unwilling to have come so far only to give up again, Tyrwhitt went forward.

Half an hour before dawn, the British ships reached their launch position and stopped their engines. The three carriers each hoisted three seaplanes onto a calm sea. The weather was cold and there was a breeze from the east, but the growing light revealed high visibility and no hint of fog; this was ideal flying weather. The planes were fueled for three hours’ flight. At 6:30 a.m., nine seaplanes were in the water, unfolding their wings and starting their engines. At 6:59 a.m., Tyrwhitt on Arethusa hoisted the signal for takeoff. Two planes suffering engine failure remained on the water and were hoisted back aboard the carriers. The lightness of the breeze forced the others into extended takeoff runs, but eventually, seven British seaplanes lifted into the air, passed Heligoland, and headed southeast toward Cuxhaven. Tyrwhitt signaled his ships to turn west and steam for the recovery position off Norderney.

The target for the seven attacking seaplanes was the Nordholz airship base, set amid fruit orchards eight miles south of the port of Cuxhaven. The base, which in October 1914 had become the headquarters of the German Naval Airship Division, consisted of a single huge shed containing two side-by-side hangars, each 597 feet long, each the home of one zeppelin. The twin-hangar structure itself was a technological marvel: the entire 4,000-ton mass, says Layman, was “mounted on a giant turntable that could swing it into any prevailing wind, a crucial consideration in the operation of airships for a wind blowing . . . across a hangar’s mouth . . . could keep a ship immobilized inside for hours or even days.” Another naval airship base existed near Hamburg; between them, the two bases housed all four of the German navy zeppelins then available for North Sea operations. The four airships, all constructed in 1914, were identical: 518 feet long, lifted by 794,000 cubic feet of hydrogen, powered by three motors that could drive the ship at 50 miles an hour. Each had a crew of twenty-four and a possible bomb load of several hundred pounds.

In good weather, the British pilots easily would have seen their target. From the air on a clear day, the high walls of the huge airship hangar were visible a dozen miles away and would have been recognized by the British aviators as they passed over Cuxhaven. But the weather, so clear and bright at sea, had deteriorated during the hour it took the planes to reach the German coast. As the sun rose higher, the fringe of the coastline and the river mouths remained visible, but over the inland plain, a heavy blanket of gray fog covered villages, farms, and fields. From time to time, the fog shifted, thinned, and even gave way to small patches of blue sky—at the Nordholz base at 6:30 a.m., the zeppelin L-6 had no difficulty lifting off for patrol.

When they arrived, the British pilots and observers looked down into “a thick ground fog drifting in masses . . . which blotted out everything except what was lying immediately under the machine.” One aviator descended to an altitude of 150 feet and still could not see the ground. Another set his course by a line of railway tracks and passed over villages, farms, and plowed fields. Eventually, the tracks led him to the Jade estuary where he flew over seven light cruisers, many destroyers, and a battle cruiser, all of which vigorously fired at him. Another pilot dropped his three bombs on sheds that he thought might constitute a seaplane base. One bomb scored a hit, but the sheds subsequently turned out to be structures for drying fish. Of the seven seaplanes that had taken off, only one reached the Nordholz zeppelin base. Its crew had been mistakenly briefed that the base was farther to the south and, because dense fog obscured the immense airship hangar, they failed to recognize it and contented themselves with bombing two antiaircraft guns. Only two of the seaplanes came close to harming the enemy. One dropped three bombs near the light cruisers Stralsund and Graudenz; the closest fell into the water 200 yards from Graudenz. Another seaplane, her engine misfiring, gave up the search for the zeppelin base, turned back, and, passing low over the Schillig roads, caused consternation among the crews of the warships anchored there. All of the ships opened fire on the small plane and some attempted to get under way. *34 The seaplane was hit, but the observer, Lieutenant Erskine Childers, a Royal Navy reserve officer now on active duty and the author of the popular thriller The Riddle of the Sands, managed to perform his mission. Childers was an expert on the German North Sea coast and river estuaries and, knowing exactly where he was and what he saw, he pinpointed the location of seven battleships and three battle cruisers in Schillig roads.

By 9:30 a.m., the raid was over. The British seaplanes had done no military harm. Ten bombs had been dropped on woods, fields, sheds, water, and sand. Six of the seven seaplanes, flying separately, had reached Norderney and were heading out to sea to find the carriers. Their fuel tanks were almost empty.

As British seaplanes flew this way and that over German farms, fishing sheds, and naval anchorages, and while Tyrwhitt’s force was steering for the recovery position, the German surface fleet remained at anchor. This was fortunate for the attackers. Once it became clear to scouting German patrol vessels, airships, and seaplanes that there were no dreadnoughts supporting Tyrwhitt’s little force in the Bight, even a few German light cruisers would have sufficed to overpower the unarmed and unarmored seaplane carriers. Tyrwhitt’s ships enjoyed this lucky exemption from surface attack because of a misunderstanding on the part of the German Naval Staff. The Germans had been expecting an attack on the Bight, not from the air, but on the surface. The British Admiralty had been collecting merchant vessels to convert into masquerade battleships and battle cruisers—the dummy fleet. Word of this collection process had reached Berlin. The German Naval Staff, however, did not know its purpose and believed that the assembled ships were to be brought in and sunk in the North Sea river and estuary channels, in order to block egress by the High Seas Fleet. They assumed that the raid, when it came, would be escorted by the Grand Fleet. On December 24, the Naval Staff received “dependable information” that the British were coming on Christmas Day. Expecting that the attack would be delivered by a massive British force that could be challenged only by the entire High Seas Fleet and mindful of the kaiser’s injunction that the battleships must not be risked, Ingenohl assigned the defense of the Bight on Christmas Day to U-boats and airships only. Even when reports from patrolling submarines and zeppelins indicated that the attacking British force was small, Ingenohl’s caution remained unshakable; Tyrwhitt’s ships, he assumed, were the vanguard of a larger British force. As a result, no German surface warship moved. Four battle cruisers, Seydlitz, Moltke, Derfflinger, and Von der Tann, were in Schillig roads, torpedo nets retracted, ready to proceed to sea, but the signal never came. At 10:00 a.m., they were ordered to reextend their torpedo nets. By then, in any case, it was too late; a thick fog had spread over the estuaries. Germany’s superior surface strength was useless.

Nevertheless, German pilots and airship crews did their best. At 7:35 a.m., the first zeppelin most British seamen had ever seen appeared in the sky ten miles south of Tyrwhitt’s force. This was the L-6, which had been cruising above the Bight in search of the British and whose efforts were rewarded when it spotted Tyrwhitt’s ships. Twenty minutes later, British lookouts saw a German seaplane on the horizon in the same direction. Meanwhile, as the ships moved west, Empress developed boiler difficulties and began falling behind. Soon, this circumstance made the converted former packet boat the focal point of the first air-sea battle in history. At 9:00 a.m., two German seaplanes attacked Empress. The first dropped seven 10-pound bombs from 1,600 feet; the bombs burst in the water 200 yards off the starboard bow. The second seaplane dropped two 22-pound bombs more accurately from 1,800 feet; they exploded only twenty and forty feet from the ship. Empress’s captain did his best to throw the Germans off by zigzagging while his crew enthusiastically fired rifles at the German planes. No harm was done on either side.

Meanwhile, L-6, drawing closer, descended from 5,000 feet to 2,000 and, approaching Empress from astern, attempted to reach a position directly overhead. Despite his own ship’s apparent vulnerability, Captain Frederick Bowhill of Empress soon discovered that the airship above him could not turn quickly. Bowhill took quick advantage: “My method of defence was to watch [the zeppelin] carefully as she manoeuvred into position directly overhead. I then went hard over. [When] I could see her rudders put over to follow me, I put my helm over the other way.” By repeated turns, Empress was able to avoid the three 110-pound bombs dropped by L-6, although two fell only fifty yards away. When her bomb racks were empty, L-6 departed.

A few minutes before ten, the Harwich Force arrived at the recovery position thirty miles north of Norderney. The sea and the sky were empty. Minutes later, two British seaplanes appeared overhead, landed near Riviera, and were hoisted aboard. Almost simultaneously, ten miles nearer the coast, another seaplane had landed alongside the destroyer Lurcher, from which Keyes was supervising his submarines. The pilot taxied up to the destroyer, shouted that he had only five minutes’ worth of fuel remaining, and asked the direction to the carriers. Realizing that the rendezvous was too far off, Keyes invited the pilot to come on board and took the seaplane in tow. Tyrwhitt, meanwhile, continued to wait for the remaining seaplanes. At 10:30 a.m., his ships were attacked again by two German seaplanes, which dropped seven bombs. All missed. These air attacks convinced Commodore Tyrwhitt that “given ordinary sea room, ships had nothing to fear from either seaplanes or zeppelins.” Later, writing to his sister, Tyrwhitt said, “Zeppelins are not to be thought of as regards ships. Stupid great things, but very beautiful. It seemed a pity to shoot at them.” Once the last attack had died away, Tyrwhitt realized that the four overdue seaplanes were far beyond their fuel endurance and must be considered lost. He signaled, “I wish all ships a Merry Christmas,” and turned his force back to Harwich.

In fact, three of the four missing planes had landed in the water near Norderney and their crews had been rescued by Keyes’s submarine E-11. At 9:30 a.m., Captain Martin Naismith in E-11 was waiting submerged off Norderney when, through his periscope, he spotted a British seaplane in the air. He ordered his boat to surface. The pilot, seeing the red and white band around E-11’s conning tower, landed nearby, reported that he had only five minutes of fuel remaining, and asked for a tow to the nearest carrier. Naismith agreed. Ten minutes later, as he was getting under way with the seaplane attached, a German airship (it was L-5) was seen approaching from the east. Then, to complicate matters, a submarine appeared on the surface, heading directly toward his little procession. In fact, it was the British submarine D-6, which had seen the seaplanes land and was coming to see whether she could help. Naismith, however, assumed she was a U-boat. A minute later, D-6 dived—she did this because of the approach of the German zeppelin—but Naismith interpreted this maneuver as that of an enemy submarine preparing to attack. Suddenly, to add to Naismith’s concerns, two more of the missing British seaplanes appeared at the end of their fuel endurance and landed near E-11. Naismith now faced the problem of rescuing four additional airmen in the face of what appeared to be imminent attack by an approaching airship and a submerged submarine. Casting off the towline, he maneuvered so close to one of the newly arrived seaplanes that the pilot and observer were able to step directly onto the submarine’s deck; he told the two airmen in the other plane to swim to his boat. By then, the zeppelin was less than a mile away, but Naismith, mindful of orders to destroy British seaplanes that could not be brought home, ordered a machine gun brought up to the conning tower and had a seaman begin firing at the floats of the three empty seaplanes. Before the planes obliged by sinking, the zeppelin was overhead and Naismith was forced to crash-dive. Two bombs from the airship tumbled down; their explosions shook but did not harm the British submarine. Naismith took E-11 down 140 feet to rest on the seabed, decided to remain, and there the submariners and their five guests sat down to a Christmas dinner of turkey and plum pudding. D-6 had a narrower escape. When her captain brought her back to the surface, he looked up and found L-5 fifty feet directly over his head. With machine-gun bullets clanging against his hull, he quickly submerged and headed for home. Six seaplanes were now accounted for; the crew of the seventh was picked up by a Dutch trawler. The fishermen kept the airmen on board for a week and then returned them to Holland where they were returned to Britain as “ship-wrecked mariners.” On Christmas Day in the Cuxhaven Raid, not a man was lost on either side.

But loss was to follow. Jellicoe, hoping that the seaplane raid would provoke the High Seas Fleet to make an appearance, had spent the day cruising with the Grand Fleet 100 miles north of Heligoland. At dusk, the wind and sea were rising and by 10:00 a.m., on the morning of the twenty-sixth, a gale was raging with mountainous waves. Jellicoe turned north for home. During the passage, three men from destroyers were washed overboard and one was swept off the deck of the light cruiser Caroline. Three badly battered destroyers had to be sent into dry dock.

There was more. In the black hours before dawn on December 27, the Grand Fleet, pitching and rolling in the huge seas of Pentland Firth, approached Scapa Flow. When the lead battle squadron, showing no lights, turned north from the Firth into Hoxa Sound, the captain of the battleship Monarch suddenly saw a patrol trawler dead ahead. Attempting to turn, Monarch slewed directly into the path of her sister Conqueror, following astern. The two big ships collided, with Conqueror driving her bow into Monarch’s stern; both bow and stern were fractured and partially crushed. By December 29, Monarch had been mended sufficiently to permit her to sail for serious repair at Devonport. But Conqueror could not leave Scapa until a special salvage unit had made a temporary patch to permit her bow to take the punishment of an oncoming sea. When the crippled battleship sailed on January 21, the seas were still too heavy for her tender bow and she had to turn back for more patchwork. She finally reached Cromarty Firth on January 24; there she underwent further repair in the Invergordon floating dry dock before moving on to Liverpool for a complete reconstruction of her bow.

The loss of two of his most powerful ships was a blow for Jellicoe. Monarch was gone for three and a half weeks and rejoined the Grand Fleet on January 20. Conqueror did not return until March 6. Their absence, added to the permanent loss of their sister Audacious, reduced the 2nd Battle Squadron, the Grand Fleet’s most modern, from eight ships to five. This deficit, plus the programmed absence of other vessels for essential overhaul, brought the Grand Fleet down to its lowest point of numerical superiority over the High Seas Fleet during the war. For several weeks in January 1915, Jellicoe and Beatty each had only a one-ship advantage over their German counterparts: eighteen dreadnought battleships to seventeen; five battle cruisers to four. Here was the numerical parity the German Naval Staff and Admiral von Ingenohl had been seeking; achieved, “not by their exertions,” as Layman puts it, “but by pure luck.” But Ingenohl, intimidated and cautious, would not have attempted to exploit the opportunity, even had he known it existed.

The Cuxhaven Raid destroyed no zeppelins or zeppelin sheds, but it had taught the Admiralty and the fleet that the previously dreaded aerial monsters need not be feared by ships at sea. Tyrwhitt wrote to his wife on December 29, “They [Churchill, et al.] are awfully pleased with the raid and most complimentary. Couldn’t be nicer! I was really surprised at everybody’s pleasure and delight. They want more and I expect they will get it before too long.” Materially, the raid cost the British more than it did the Germans. Four British seamen had been swept overboard, four seaplanes had been lost, and two dreadnought battleships and three destroyers had been disabled. The Germans suffered no casualties and lost one seaplane. But, morally, the opposite result had been achieved. Once again, a British force had steamed into the Bight, challenging the Imperial Navy. From airship and submarine reports circulating through the German fleet, everyone soon learned that no British dreadnought had been present to support the raiding force. Four German battle cruisers, a dozen light cruisers, and scores of destroyers had been poised to go to sea, but had been denied permission. The result was shame, frustration, and renewed discussion of the need to find a new Commander-in-Chief for the High Seas Fleet.

The First Lord of the Admiralty recognized the Christmas Day raid in practical terms as a failure to blunt the new German airship weapon. Zeppelins were no longer to be feared by ships at sea, but Churchill, now responsible for the air defense of the British Isles, remained apprehensive about the damage airships might do when attacking cities. A New Year’s Day 1915 memorandum prepared for the Cabinet declared that Churchill had “information from a trustworthy source . . . that the Germans intend to make an attack on London by airships on a great scale at any early opportunity. . . . There are approximately twenty German airships which can reach London now from the Rhine, each carrying a ton of high explosives. They could traverse the English part of the journey, coming and going, in the dark hours. The weather hazards are considerable, but there is no known means of preventing the airships coming, and not much chance of punishing them on return. The un-avenged destruction of non-combatant life may therefore be very considerable.”

Fisher shared Churchill’s alarm. Twenty zeppelins, each carrying a ton of bombs, would be coming, Fisher asserted in a letter to Churchill on January 4, 1915. One ton “would completely wreck the Admiralty building”; twenty tons would cause a “terrible massacre.” Fisher had proposed to deter such an attack by warning the Germans in advance that any captured zeppelin personnel would be shot. “As this step has not been taken, I must with great reluctance ask to be relieved of my present official position as First Sea Lord. I have allowed a whole week to elapse much against my judgement before taking this step to avoid embarrassing the government. I cannot delay any longer.” Churchill’s response to this threat was typical of the way he dealt with the old admiral:

My dear Fisher:

The question of aerial defense is not one upon which you have any professional experience. The question of killing prisoners in reprisal for an aerial attack is not one for the Admiralty and certainly not for you to decide. The Cabinet alone can settle such a matter. I will bring your views to their notice at our meeting tomorrow. After much reflection, I cannot support it.

I hope I am not to take the last part of your letter seriously. I have always made up my mind never to dissuade anyone serving in the department over which I preside from resigning if they wish to do so. Business becomes impossible on any other terms.

But I sympathise with your feelings of exasperation at our powerlessness to resist certain forms of attack; and I presume I may take your letter simply as an expression of those feelings.

Yours very sincerely,

Winston S. Churchill

Fisher withdrew his resignation.

Soon afterward, on January 19, the zeppelin bombardment of England began. Two German naval airships dropped twenty bombs on Great Yarmouth and on several villages along the Norfolk coast. Four civilians were killed and sixteen wounded; the zeppelins departed untouched. In time, zeppelin night raids over London became a thrilling, popular spectacle as searchlights illuminated the silver, cigar-shaped behemoths gliding majestically overhead. During the war, fifty-seven airship raids were launched against England, the most destructive coming on September 8, 1915, when twenty-two Londoners were killed and eighty-seven injured. By August 1918, when the last zeppelin raids on England took place, the airships were larger, their speed had risen to 80 miles an hour, their lifting capacity had increased to 50 tons, and their ceiling was 18,000 feet. Over four years, airship and airplane attacks killed 1,413 people in Britain and wounded 3,408. For the first two years of the war, the zeppelins were immune to harm in the sky. Then on September 3, 1916, a German airship, SL-11, was “clawed down in flames”—as Churchill had predicted would happen—by a British fighter plane using incendiary bullets. The young pilot, Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson, was immediately awarded the Victoria Cross.