At the beginning of the 20th century, the Wright Brothers’ experiments in aeronautics resulted in the completion of the first recognised manned, controlled and powered aeroplane flight in history. Soon the buzzing of aeroplane engines could be heard not only in America but across Europe too. Rapid progress in aeroplane development ensured they had a role to play when Europe descended into war in 1914. In Germany in particular, another area of flight had also made great strides – airships, especially the large rigid type developed by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin and first flown in 1900. Such was the progress that aeroplane and airship met in combat over Britain in 1915, just twelve years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight. Flight was in its infancy in 1914, but by the end of the conflict in 1918 it had changed the face of war forever.
The impact on Britain when these giant airships – Zeppelins – first appeared over the country has been explored in my previous book, Zeppelin Onslaught – The Forgotten Blitz 1914-1915 and now I have continued that history through 1916 in Zeppelin Inferno. The stories of 1915 and 1916 are very different and can be read in isolation or as a continuing narrative. It took rapid development to progress from those first tentative flights to German bombs dropping on Britain in 1915, yet the continuing advances in 1916, both offensive and defensive, pushed aviation to ever greater heights.
It has always been my intention to tell the story of this campaign, the first sustained aerial bombing campaign in history, by intertwining the personal experience of the individual with grand strategy. That has required diligent research and much detective work – press censorship meant newspapers reported on the raids but could not say where they had occurred. But by marrying these two types of report – military and personal – we can discover the full impact of the raids and how they were experienced by ordinary people on the ground and those intrepid young men in the air.
During the course of this research I have made extensive use of the historical Ordnance Survey maps made available by the National Library of Scotland on the ‘Old Maps Online’ website. These have enabled me to track individual bombs falling on obscure farms and in streets that no longer exist, adding to our understanding of how each raid developed, and with a level of accuracy completely unknown to those who took part.
This period of Britain’s history is an important one, yet it is one too often overlooked, consumed by the enormity of the Blitz of the Second World War. Yet the lessons learnt painfully during this time helped lay the foundations for the air defence system that proved effective in the later air conflict. As such the thrilling, emotional, heroic and sometimes even amusing stories of this ‘Forgotten Blitz’ deserve to be more widely acknowledged.