In the aftermath of the Midlands Raid, controversy was everywhere. German bombs had claimed more casualties than any previous raid. No Zeppelins had penetrated so far west before and now those living in the regions affected realised just how defenceless they were, while the lack of a coordinated lighting policy, even between neighbouring towns, also caused great consternation. And not a single anti-aircraft gun or aircraft opposed the raiders over the Midlands. Elsewhere, the RFC lost two senior pilots who went up to evaluate flying conditions around London, while others were fortunate to survive bad landings. Yet no Zeppelin had even come close to London. A thorough overhaul of Britain’s air defences was imperative. The actions of William Martin, the skipper of the King Stephen, also filled newspaper columns already overflowing with controversy.
Widespread reporting of the King Stephen’s encounter with L 19 appeared in newspapers in the next couple of days. Inevitably the story reached Germany where the press reacted with a ‘storm of indignation’ and railed at ‘the brutality of the British character’.1
This indignation exploded into outrage when the Bishop of London, the Right Reverend Arthur Winnington-Ingram, addressed a crowd on 5 February and expressed his support for Martin’s actions.
Had he taken the 22 [sic] Germans into his ship they might have turned upon the crew, and the whole German Press would have applauded their action... Any English sailor would have risked his life to save human life, but the sad thing was that the chivalry of war had been killed by the Germans, and their word could not be trusted.2
Somewhat overwhelmed by the publicity, William Martin initially did not return to sea, but any intentions he had to do so later were quashed in late February when the Admiralty requisitioned the King Stephen and fitted her out as an armed Q-ship.
The newspaper coverage spawned letters of praise for Martin, but also delivered hate mail that sorely troubled him. It emerged through interviews with the naval authorities that the King Stephen was fishing the Cleaver Bank area of the North Sea, which was a forbidden zone and there have been suggestions that because of that, Martin gave a false position for L 19, some 40 miles short of this area. However, descriptions of his position quoted in the press do match the location of the Cleaver Bank.3
Another incident was to confirm the strength of ill feeling in Germany against Martin. Operating in its new role as a Q-ship on 24 April 1916, the King Stephen unfortunately encountered German naval forces returning from a bombardment of Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth. The torpedo boat G41 took her crew prisoner before sinking the hated vessel. Despite protestations of innocence, the King Stephen’s new captain, a Royal Naval Reserve officer, Lieutenant Tom Phillips, found himself on trial in Germany accused of war crimes. It was only after an English newspaper containing a photograph of William Martin appeared at the trial that the prosecution dropped the charges against him. Phillips and his 12-man crew remained POWs for the rest of the war.
The hate mail Martin continued to receive affected him deeply. He died on 24 February 1917, his demise attributed to ‘an affectation of the heart’4, but a report published at the conclusion of the war added more detail.
He had received a number of anonymous letters containing threats, apparently from Germans in England, and when he became ill after smoking a cigarette from a packet which had been sent to him in the post, he was convinced that the cigarette contained poison. Analysis proved that his fears were unfounded, but he never recovered from the shock.5
The raid on the Midlands had completely overwhelmed the limited inland aerial defences and many now feared the start of a more intensive period of far-ranging attacks, while the civilian population’s anxiety and lack of faith in the warning system took time to calm. In fact there were no more Zeppelin raids anywhere in Britain for five weeks, but nervousness caused four false alarms in February alone, which saw factories and railways over wide areas of the country plunged into darkness, bringing production to a halt. With the War Office about to take over the responsibility for aerial defence they were under no illusion about the difficulties of the task ahead.
The warning system relied on the telephone network and it became necessary to inform the public, whose use of the telephone system increased dramatically during raids, to restrict themselves to necessary and urgent calls only at these times to keep lines clear for official communications. From 16 February the current lighting restrictions were extended to cover the whole of England except in the most western, south-western and north-western counties, although public concern saw restrictions extend into some of these areas too by April 1916. The issue of warnings required more thought and Neville Chamberlain,6 the Lord Mayor of Birmingham, voiced the opinions of a delegation of civic leaders in the Midlands who argued for special warnings for the extensive munitions establishments in the region. He called for cordons of observers between the east coast and the Midlands to report the progress of enemy aircraft and warn centres of munition production early enough for the extinguishing of lights. But that wasn’t enough for the munitions workers, as the Ministry of Munitions confirmed on 12 February: ‘Our position is that workmen are refusing to work at night at all unless guaranteed that warning will be given in sufficient time to enable them to disperse.’7 Clearly changes were needed to ensure production did not suffer and in the short term Chief Constables were asked to establish a means to inform munitions factories in their areas of approaching raids.
While GHQ, Home Forces prepared for the transfer of aerial defence from the Admiralty, they had been looking at ways of improving the warning system and much of what Chamberlain suggested already featured in their plans. But, as the time set for the transfer approached, the War Office looked to delay matters. Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, had returned from the Dardanelles in mid-January and immediately decided it was a bad time to make such important changes. The Lords of the Admiralty, however, were having none of it and insisted the transfer took place in February as scheduled. Only after two high-level meetings was the new arrangement confirmed, the most important element being,
The Navy to undertake to deal with all hostile aircraft attempting to reach this country, whilst the Army undertake to deal with all such aircraft which reach these shores.8
When Admiral Sir Percy Scott took command of London’s anti-aircraft defence in September 19159 he planned two gun rings surrounding the capital. Although not yet complete, GHQ, Home Forces adopted this plan. On paper the anti-aircraft defence of Britain required 475 guns but at the time of the handover there were just 295, with 65 defending the London area and 230 (197 Army and 33 Navy) across the rest of the country. A quick inventory, however, resulted in the War Office classing only 80 of these as ‘efficient’. More guns were in the process of conversion to an anti-aircraft role and, although the Admiralty agreed to hand over 86 AA guns currently on order, in the end they transferred only 21, the rest diverted to arm merchant ships in the war against the U-boats. Even so, new guns were on order and the aerial defence capability gradually increased.
Plans to increase the number of night or emergency landing grounds available to the RFC resulted in the establishment or preparation of 44 more by the end of February, from Newcastle in the north to Kent and Sussex in the south. The need for the RFC to create new Home Defence squadrons was clear too, but that would take time due to a shortage of aircraft and personnel. In the meantime training squadrons at Norwich (No.9 Reserve Aeroplane Squadron (RAS)), Thetford (No.35 Squadron), Doncaster (No.15 RAS) and Dover (No.20 RAS) received 12 BE2c aircraft to assist with home defence, and six more joined No.5 RAS for the defence of the Midlands. They were in place by 1 March 1916. In addition, three BE2cs that the RFC had moved to Cramlington for the defence of Newcastle in December 1915 now, at the beginning of February 1916, formed the nucleus of the new No.36 (Home Defence) Squadron.10
The lack of a co-ordinated response from the reserve squadrons surrounding London was also a concern. To improve the situation, those aircraft were regrouped into a new single squadron on 1 February 1916. Under Major Thomas Higgins, No.19 RAS was to fulfil a dual role, defending the capital and training new pilots.
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The cycle of the moon ensured no Zeppelins threatened Britain while the Army settled into its new role, but the moon had no impact on the opportunistic raiders of Seeflieger Abteilug (SFA) 1 at Zeebrugge. Their stinging hit-and-run raids in 1915 had proved an annoying thorn in the side of the British defences, their sudden appearance and quick departure meant local aircraft were rarely able to get airborne before the raiders had dropped their bombs and departed. And so it continued.
Wednesday 9 February was cold but bright and sunny along the Kent coast and many people were out enjoying the unexpected spring-like weather. At 3.36pm two German floatplanes crossed the coast. A Friedrichshafen FF33e, with Oberleutnant-zur-See Faber and Flugmeister Jacobs on board, peeled off towards Ramsgate, while a Hansa-Brandenburg NW, crewed by Leutnant der Reserve Friedrich Christiansen and Leutnant-zur-See Exner, turned towards Broadstairs.
On the eastern edge of Ramsgate a double-decker tram trundled along Dumpton Park Drive. As it neared Montefiore College, a woman on the tram noticed an aircraft in the sky.
I jokingly remarked how exciting it would be if they started to drop bombs when I noticed the crosses on the wings denoting that it was a German machine. The next moment about twelve feet behind us the earth seemed to cough up with a splash like a mine exploding at sea and this was followed in quick succession by three other explosions in the field.11
A woman and her children living across the field about 150 yards away heard ‘a succession of terrific bangs’.
I at once caught up the baby. Another little girl was sitting close to the kitchen window, and I had only just snatched her away when it was smashed by the concussion. We looked out afterwards and all we could see was a dense mass of brown smoke rising from the field.12
Two teenage girls in the fields saw the explosion and ran towards the tram. As they passed through a gap in a hedge one caught her dress and the other stopped to help her. As she did so the other three bombs exploded close to the terrified pair. Both girls fainted. When the first bomb exploded the driver of the tram slammed on the brake and all the passengers abandoned the vehicle, but rather than running away to safety many scrambled into the field to search for bomb fragments while others cared for the two rather shaken girls. And this extraordinary scene got rather more bizarre when a group of roller-skating soldiers emerged from the nearby skating rink and glided down the road towards the tram to see if they could offer any assistance!13
The aircraft that flew over Broadstairs homed in on three large buildings on the southern side of the town: two convalescent homes and Bartram Gables girls’ school. Four small bombs streaked down with one smashing through the school’s roof before exploding in an upper room, bringing down the ceiling of the classroom below in which 14 children were studying.14 The room filled with smoke, dust and plaster but only one child was injured, nine-year-old Hermione Michaels, whose foot was cut. The bomb also slightly injured Alice Eastop, a housemaid working at the school.15 The other three bombs fell in the school grounds breaking a few windows. The sound of the explosions alerted soldiers at the convalescent homes: ‘The children were delighted at the way the wounded men came over the fence, running and hopping along on their crutches anxious to be of service.’16
Not far from the school other bombs fell in the grounds of large houses in Dumpton Park Drive and Ramsgate Road but damage was insignificant.17 The two aircraft penetrated no more than 300 yards inland and departed as soon as they had dropped their bombs. Local estimates evaluated the material damage at £305. Although 19 RNAS aircraft took off as well as five from the RFC, by the time they were airborne the raiders were on their way back to Zeebrugge.18 Back in Germany the raiders’ reports led to the publication of an optimistic press release: ‘During the afternoon of the 9th inst. some of our naval aeroplanes dropped a number of bombs on the port and manufacturing establishments, as well as the barracks at Ramsgate.’19
Seven days after the raid, on 16 February, the Army officially took command of London’s aerial defence, followed by responsibility for the rest of Britain a few days later. The man now ultimately in command was Field Marshal Sir John French, Commander-in-Chief of the Home Forces, a position he had held since 19 December 1915. He had only been in the role a few days when German aircraft made another stinging attack on the coast.
At 10.55am on Sunday 20 February, two Friedrichshafen FF33e floatplanes appeared over the Suffolk town of Lowestoft. Many people were on their way to church on this bright sunny morning. Although the two aircraft dropped 17 small HE bombs on the town there were no casualties.20 The line of the inner harbour divides the town and a police report indicates at least 11 bombs dropped north of the harbour. A small fire broke out the Central Station’s parcel office but three bombs that fell within 40 feet of the gasworks only damaged a stables and smashed windows. Other bombs caused minor damage at the electric light station in Rotterdam Road and at the domestic waste destructor yard. At 5 Essex Road a bomb smashed through the roof of a workman’s cottage and landed in the back bedroom but failed to explode. The fortunate occupants were downstairs in the kitchen at the time. One bomb, which struck Pike’s Restaurant, caused considerable damage and destroyed an outbuilding.21 On the south side of the harbour a bomb struck the quayside and in Belvedere Road one damaged machinery at a timber yard and another detonated in the roadway smashing a number of windows. About 230 yards away a bomb struck the roof of a large house at 107 London Road South, where,
... fragments of slates and tiles were thrown in all directions, while nearly all the windows were shattered. Considerable damage was done to the interior on the top floor, but here also the occupants were on the ground floor and escaped injury.
The force of the explosion of this bomb blew in all the windows in one side of an adjacent Methodist chapel [in Mill Road]. As the morning service was at that moment starting the chapel was full and the congregation were greatly alarmed. There was no kind of a panic, however, and all left the chapel quietly and without disorder, the service being abandoned.22
On the seafront, at 16 Esplanade, the house served as headquarters of 68th Provisional Battalion, 5th Provisional Brigade. A bomb exploding five yards from the building cut the telephone line, smashed a greenhouse and windows while flying glass injured an officer and a clerk. Berthed in the harbour, HMS Halcyon fired one hopeful round at the raiders from a 4.7-inch gun while three naval 6-pdr Hotchkiss guns and a 12-pdr at Lowestoft also engaged, but the raiders were unharmed as they headed back out to sea.
Completely taken by surprise, the Great Yarmouth RNAS pilots were at church when the raid commenced. Despite their valiant efforts to get back to their station and take off, none of the five pilots saw any sign of the raiders and at least one, Flight sub-Lieutenant Egbert Cadbury, regretted his haste: ‘It was simply terribly cold – I had no time to get ready and had not got any gloves; I have never been so cold before.’23
Although there were no serious casualties in Lowestoft, the Town Council was angry, firing off a strongly worded resolution to the Prime Minister, the First Lord of the Admiralty and the Secretary of State for War.
This Council protests against the defenceless state in which the persons and property of the inhabitants were found to be; that a full and impartial investigation is called for into the circumstances under which any attempt at resistance proved to be so completely futile.24
Lord French’s new task was not going to be an easy one.
About half an hour after the attack on Lowestoft, another floatplane, a Hansa-Brandenburg NW, approached the Kent coastal town of Walmer where many people were enjoying a Sunday morning walk.
The aircraft approached from the south-east but estimates of its height varied wildly. At the time a motorboat, Elsie, was just offshore with two men on board. A rowing boat was heading back to the beach from the Elsie. Those on both boats had a close shave.
We had just taken in the anchor and started the motor, when three violent explosions occurred barely 50 yards astern, falling between the motor-boat and the rowing-boat... The explosions followed each other in rapid succession, and all three bombs fell practically in line about 20ft to 30ft apart. The explosions caused a great upheaval of water... We also heard further explosions, obviously from bombs dropped on the land.25
Two friends, Cecil Pedlar and George Castle, both aged 16, were walking along a road on the seafront. Cecil had recently run away from home to enlist in the Army but his family informed the authorities of his real age and the Army sent him home again. George worked as a grocer’s assistant. As people began to point to the sky a cry went up, ‘Look out; it’s a German. Get under cover.’ Seeing the great plumes of water rising from the sea, Cecil turned to George: ‘We had better be going, or we shall have a bomb fall on us.’ They had gone just a few paces when an explosion burst in front of them. A boatman standing on the beach told how he was knocked off his feet.
This was the bomb that killed the boy who was walking along the roadway, and terribly injured a man who was walking behind him. I rushed over to give what help I could, but I found that the boy had been killed on the spot, being almost blown to pieces... the bomb fell right at his feet with a blinding flash and roar. The effect was terrible, and it was a fragment from the bomb that wounded the man.26
It seems, however, that Cecil Pedlar’s wounds were not as serious as first thought. A police inspector described them as a ‘wound in the left thigh and shock, condition not serious’. But for George Castle there was no reprieve.27
Seconds later a bomb exploded in Dover Road, smashing windows in 25 shops and houses along the eastern side before a final bomb fell at the vast Royal Marines Depot. It exploded in the barracks’ Works Department yard, close to the married quarters and the garrison church where a service was underway. The blast damaged a workshop roof and smashed all the windows down one side of the married quarters and at the church. A Marine suffered a cut leg. It is difficult, however, to reconcile newspaper reports of the stoic attitude of the congregation.
The Te Deum was being sung when a tremendous explosion was heard, which shook the building and caused a momentary pause to the singing. However the service proceeded without the least sign of anxiety on the part of the congregation.28
Having spent little more than a minute over land, the raider now disappeared into clouds over the sea. The RNAS despatched 18 aircraft over the next 90 minutes from Dover, Eastchurch and Grain, and the RFC launched five from Dover, but they really had no chance of catching him. That afternoon the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, came to see the damage for himself. Unknown to the Germans, Asquith was staying at Walmer Castle, just three quarters of a mile from where the bombs fell.
Another German hit-and-run raid struck the Kent coast on 1 March. The raider, a Friedrichshafen FF29 crewed by Flugmaat Huth and Flugmeister Johann Jacobs, departed from Zeebrugge and approached the town of Margate at 6.10pm. Darkness was falling and reports state that the aircraft was flying low at about 1,500 feet. Lydia Peile was sitting comfortably at home in Norfolk Road in the Cliftonville district when she was shaken by ‘an awfully loud explosion, quite close, followed quickly by another – Bombs of course, & we wondered if the next one would come on the house’.29 That first explosion – at 6.14pm – was a bomb that partially demolished the back of 5 Norfolk Road, causing havoc within the house where a mother and her baby were in a room used as a nursery. The baby, nine-month-old Jack Dodman, was on the floor. When the bomb exploded his shocked mother scooped him up but immediately dropped him again in panic. He landed on his head and died almost immediately.30 Lydia Peile soon heard what had happened: ‘It was hateful seeing the ambulances arrive, but the other people were only suffering from shock.’
Other bombs in Norfolk Road damaged 12 houses.31 From Cliftonville the FF29 approached the Kingsgate area north of Broadstairs, dropping two bombs between Percy Road and Kingsgate Avenue. A local newspaper reporter was unimpressed, claiming they ‘only had the effect of creating momentary excitement, and providing the glaziers with a fine opportunity for plying their trade’. One woman explained what happened at her house.
All the front windows were smashed – those upstairs being blown across the room and those downstairs falling outwards. A fragment of shell went through a bedroom window curtain, pierced the frame of a mirror and became embedded in the wall at the back of the room. If the raid had happened half-an-hour later all the children would have been in bed, and I don’t know what would have happened to the little ones.32
The last two bombs dropped on the wide-open spaces of the North Foreland golf course. With no advance warning of the raid and rapidly diminishing light, the commanding officer at RNAS Westgate decided against sending up any of his aircraft in pursuit. The raider, however, did not make it back to Zeebrugge. Running into difficulties on the return flight, the pilot ditched in the North Sea about ten miles off the Belgian coast where French patrol boats located it at 9am the following morning. They recovered the bedraggled pilot, Huth, but it was too late for his observer, Jacobs – he had drowned.33
* * *
In Germany there had been ongoing discussions as to whether it was necessary to restrict airship attacks to moonless nights. The Army General Staff carried out a test over Cologne in November 1915 using Zeppelin LZ 77 to determine ‘the exact degree of visibility from the surface during the full moon period’.34 Those observing concluded that at the heights airships could now attain there was no undue risk. But an army airship commander, Ernst Lehmann,35 felt their findings were flawed.
The observers had been located too close to the large and densely populated industrial centres. The haze, which is invariably found hanging above such districts at night, had obscured their vision.36
Pressure mounted on Strasser to accept the findings for his naval airships but he remained unconvinced. A couple of days before the February full moon he ran his own test over the base at Hage using Zeppelin L 16. Flying at heights between 9,500 and 10,500 feet, the Zeppelin remained clearly visible, ‘as a dark silhouette against the moon, or as a light streak away from it’.37 The Navy remained committed to only raiding on the darkest nights of each month. The Army, however, sent out four airships during the full moon on the night of 20/21 February at the opening of the campaign against the fortress of Verdun. French anti-aircraft fire hit LZ 95 at 10,500 feet and ‘some of the Zeppelin’s gas cells were torn almost to shreds’.38 Her commander, Hauptman Friedrich George, had commanded LZ 74 when she bombed London on the night of 7/8 September 1915, but now he was in trouble.
LZ 95 limped back to its base at Namur but hit the ground before reaching safety; she was beyond repair, but George and his crew were the lucky ones. Their comrades aboard LZ 77, commanded by Alfred Horn, had also taken part in that same raid on England in September 1915, and were now attacked by a mobile 75mm gun firing incendiary rounds. Set on fire, LZ 77, ‘like some fantastic torch... fell writhing to the earth’, smashing into the ground at Brabant-le-Roi, near Revigny.39 There were no survivors. Ernst Lehmann had no doubts as to the cause of the loss: ‘We concluded that while LZ 77 had been shot down by the new flaming shells, the fault really lay in a recent order directing moonlight raids.’40 The Navy Zeppelin commanders were unsurprised by the outcome.
The Zeppelin crews had other concerns too. The 240hp Maybach HSLu engines, first fitted into Navy Zeppelin L 15 and Army Zeppelin LZ 79 in September and August 1915 respectively, had been rushed into service. As a result, fractured crankshafts, broken connecting rods and crank bearings, as well as over-heated dudgeon pins, were causing engines to fail, with dire consequences in the case of L 19. Frustrated, on 4 March Peter Strasser took all five Naval Zeppelins driven by the HSLu engines out of service (L 15, L 16, L 17, L 20 and L 21), shipping the engines back to the Maybach factory at Friedrichshafen and demanding a solution to the problem.
The 4 March also heralded the dark skies of a new moon and a new raiding period. Strasser’s decision meant that he could only call on three older Zeppelins, L 11, L 13 and L 14, all fitted with the earlier 210hp Maybach C-X engine. Bruges, the most westerly weather station available to Germany, reported favourable conditions and on the next day, Sunday 5 March, the Zeppelins departed. This time their target was Scotland’s docks and shipyards on the Firth of Forth. The weather station, however, unable to predict weather patterns approaching Britain from the north and north-west was completely unaware of a low-pressure system rapidly advancing from Iceland bringing with it snow, sleet and extremely high winds. It was a Zeppelin commander’s nightmare.