In February 1916, a move to place the Royal Flying Corps’ various Reserve Aeroplane Squadrons (RAS) defending London under a more unified control had seen them regrouped as No.19 RAS. Two flights concentrated in Essex, at Sutton’s Farm near Hornchurch and Hainault Farm near Romford, although a third flight and the squadron HQ remained at Hounslow on the other side of London while awaiting the acquisition of more land in Essex. On 15 April the squadron changed its designation to No.39 (Home Defence) Squadron, still commanded by Major Thomas C.R. Higgins and operating as part of No.18 Wing (created on 26 March 1916), with Lieutenant Colonel Fenton Vasey Holt at its head having responsibility for all air defence detachments in the London area.1
On the night of 25/26 April, 24 hours after naval Zeppelins had made their latest raid, army Zeppelins returned to the south-east corner of England. For the first time as No.39 Squadron, aircraft ascended from Suttons Farm, Hainault Farm and Hounslow. The squadron was to make its name in the war against the Zeppelins – but it was a slow beginning.
That night five Zeppelins set out from Belgium although one, LZ 81, had Étaples on the French coast as its target.2 Another of them, LZ 87, commanded by Oberleutnant Barth, got no further than Deal harbour on the Kent coast. At 9.55pm, Barth aimed eight bombs at the steamer Argus, sending great plumes of water erupting into the air but they all missed the target. As guns at Walmer opened fire, LZ 87 headed north up the coast before turning out over the English Channel and back to her base at Namur.
The attack by LZ 87 had accomplished nothing, yet the 116 bombs dropped on land that night by the three other Zeppelins achieved little more.
At 12.30am, about two hours after LZ 87 departed, LZ 88 crossed Kent’s north coast near Whitstable. Her commander, Hauptmann Falck, headed south towards Canterbury but engine problems caused him to turn away at 1.05am. After heading east for about seven miles to the village of Wingham, Falck turned north and returned to the coast, dropping 37 bombs (13 HE and 24 incendiaries) as he went.3 The first batch, nine incendiaries, fell at 1.20am on a line parallel with the road leading to the village of Preston, burning out harmlessly in the countryside. Within five minutes 12 more smacked down onto the saturated Chislet Marshes, followed by one that failed to find a target at the village of Sarre. Approaching the next village, St Nicholas-at-Wade, Falck released his first HE bomb. It exploded ‘with terrific force’ in the vicarage garden.
It fell beside a sycamore tree, dug a hole eight feet deep and about twelve feet wide, uprooted the tree, carrying it over a coop of ducklings, all of which escaped injury. The tree in its fall smashed a window in the vicarage, and other windows were destroyed by the concussion, but no one was injured.4
Five more bombs exploded in fields between the vicarage and Shuart’s Farm, then four on Wade Marsh, but all without inflicting any damage. Falck’s last two bombs, both incendiaries, were equally ineffective, the last of them hitting the sea wall at Minnis Bay where LZ 88 left the country at 1.35am.
Earlier in the evening another of the army Zeppelins, Hauptmann Wilhelm Schramm’s LZ 93, approached the Essex coast. No warning had reached the towns of Harwich and Felixstowe, standing either side of Harwich harbour, when the drone of engines alerted the defenders at 10.30pm. Within two minutes searchlights found LZ 93 and the guns of the garrison commenced firing forcing the Zeppelin to climb.5 From the Felixstowe side of the river, a 6-inch gun mounted on a railway carriage opened fire, joined by two 6-pdrs and a 1-pdr close to Landguard Fort, while on the Harwich side two 6-pdrs engaged from Parkeston; between them they fired 195 rounds. The guns near Landguard Fort, situated on a spit of land south of Felixstowe, attracted the first bombs. Two incendiaries fell in the sea followed by a bomb that exploded just north of the Fort, smashing windows in the magazine. Then the mud on the western side of the spit smothered three that landed close to the shoreline; one of these not far from the RNAS Felixstowe aircraft hangars.
Crossing over the harbour to Harwich, LZ 93 dropped two bombs close to the 18th century Government House on St Helen’s Green but both failed to detonate. Schramm then crossed over the River Stour to Shotley, home of a Royal Navy Training Establishment. This attracted seven bombs (three HE and four incendiary) but although reports claim little damage and no injuries, it appears one man was hurt. Albert Edward Redman, a Torpedo Artificer’s Mate, was in the Mess when a bomb exploded nearby, a metal fragment cutting his intestine and lodging in his groin. Taken to a naval hospital, the senior medical officer only gave him a 50/50 chance of survival. Redman’s strident mother, Kate, however, was not impressed with the diagnosis.
When he had finished, Kate stood up, and in a voice of cold fury said: ‘Lieutenant-Commander, you may know the full details of your patient’s innards, but if you think my son is going to go under, you know nothing at all about his guts.’6
Kate Redman was right and her son did survive; he returned to light duties before being invalided out of the service in August 1918.
After dropping the bombs on Shotley, LZ 93 crossed back over the Stour. Schramm dropped one more HE bomb, falling on saturated ground between Parkeston Quay Station and Parkeston. Despite a recovery party digging down 12 feet into the mud they never found it. The concentrated artillery fire had ensured LZ 93 did not dwell any longer than absolutely necessary and, after dropping four more incendiary bombs in Harwich harbour, she turned for home at 10.45pm. Despite passing twice over the towns of Felixstowe and Harwich, Schramm had only a few broken windows to show for his efforts.
The third of the army Zeppelins was LZ 97, commanded by Hauptmann Erich Linnarz. He had carried out the first raid on London eleven months earlier and was now determined to return. He correctly identified the mouth of the River Blackwater where he came inland at 10pm but London proved rather more elusive as Linnarz confessed: ‘Finding London was very difficult as all villages in the area we flew over as well as the capital itself were dimmed excellently.’ On a westward course, after passing Chelmsford, Linnarz reached the village of Fyfield at 10.45pm and five minutes later began to bombard the rural landscape between there and Ongar with 47 incendiary bombs: 11 landed around Fyfield, 15 near Shelley, 17 close to High Ongar and four around Chipping Ongar, all burning out in fields although one damaged an empty cow shed.7 The only logical explanation is that Linnarz wanted to lighten his ship to enable him to gain height before making his attack on London. Linnarz continued towards the capital but, when at 11.08pm a 13-pdr gun near Chigwell Row opened fire as he passed No.39 Squadron’s Hainault Farm airfield, he believed he had reached his target and prepared to release his HE bombs. Leutnant Rohde, executive officer on LZ 97, noted: ‘We must be right over London. Impenetrable shadows envelop the gigantic city, only pierced here and there by minute pinpricks of light. Yet even so the various districts can be unmistakably recognized.’ Despite the confidence of his observation, Rohde was wrong. LZ 97 was approaching the small village of Fairlop.
At high speed we steer for the city, the Commander standing ready on the bombing platform... His hand is on the buttons and levers. ‘Let go!’ he cries. The first bomb has fallen on London!... What a cursed long time it takes between the release and impact while the bomb travels those thousands of feet! We fear it has proved a ‘dud’ – until the explosion reassures us. Already we have frightened them.8
The first four bombs fell around Forest Farm, knocking off chimney pots, smashing windows and leaving craters in the fields. Two more exploded either side of Fairlop Station, damaging a gas main, breaking windows at the station and smashing others as well as doors at Railway Cottages, where the six dwellings provided homes for a widow, a railway signalman, a police constable, two railway platelayers and a clerk; no one was injured.
The explosions at Fairlop alerted searchlights near and far which quickly flickered into life. Rohde described how they came ‘reaching after us like gigantic spiders’ legs; right, left, and all around’.9 More anti-aircraft guns burst into action. The gun commander for the Woolwich Control, watching from a position seven miles to the south was, however, unimpressed by the light show.
Another point noticed was the ridiculously redundant employment of the lights. Not less than (I should think) 20 searchlights were trying to illuminate the target at the same time, most of them well out of range of it and doing more harm than good.10
And the problem was not restricted to the searchlights. The officer commanding Waltham Abbey Control had problems with at least one of his guns.
At 23.13 the... gun at Temple House opened fire... The target was far out of range of the gun at the time. The Officer in charge has no reasonable explanation to offer for such a proceeding... He joined the Control from the Anti-Aircraft Training Depot, Shoeburyness, on 16th April, consequently his experience of the work is very small. I expect he will do better in the future.11
On board LZ 97 this eruption of gunfire and dazzling illumination forced Linnarz to turn onto a more southerly course as he continued releasing bombs. Two or three fell near Barkingside Station, three at Aldborough Hatch Farm and two at Newbury Park but they caused no damage. Approaching Seven Kings the intensity of the anti-aircraft fire increased as the guns south of the Thames joined in. The Woolwich commander noted much of it was wayward but it was enough to turn LZ 97 away from the capital. Two bombs dropped 50 yards apart at Chadwell Heath where one exploded in a ploughed field on the east side of Grove Road, smashing windows in five houses, while the other caused No.20 Farm Terrace to collapse like a house of cards. Fortunately its occupants, the Chapman family, had ignored official advice and were outside looking for the Zeppelin when the bomb struck and were unhurt.
Linnarz was now heading away from London while the guns along his path kept blazing away and the searchlights continued ‘stabbing in the darkness’, forcing him to twist and turn on his course. LZ 97 eventually broke clear of the defences and crossed back over the coast near Clacton at 12.34am. Before Linnarz reached his home base at Namur he had to evade an attack by French aircraft close to the Dutch border during which LZ 97 attained a height close to 15,000 feet.12 As Leutnant Rohde nonchalantly noted: ‘On looking at the altimeter we find that we have broken the airship height record.’13
While the intense anti-aircraft barrage had worried the crew of LZ 97, it also had an impact on the ground. The more shells fired up into the air meant there were more to fall back to earth. Fred Berris, living at 21 Pelham Road, Ilford, suffered an injured shoulder from falling debris when a shell fell on his house. Superintendent A. Boxhall, Metropolitan Police, also noted two other incidents in Ilford, six in Seven Kings, four in Barking and three in East Ham.14
Seemingly unknown to the crew of LZ 97, the airship also came under attack by pilots of No.39 (Home Defence) Squadron in a close encounter that marked the beginning of a new phase in the Zeppelin war. Alerted to a raid, six BE2c took off between 10.30 and 10.50pm. All pilots flew set patrol routes on the north-eastern and eastern approaches to London, some at 5,000 feet and others at 7,000 feet, both well below the height of LZ 97. The two ‘A’ Flight pilots from Hounslow, to the west of London, both saw the Zeppelin held in the searchlights but it was too far away and too high for them to come into action.
Although LZ 97 passed ‘C’ Flight’s Hainault Farm airfield, neither pilot from there, Alfred Brandon nor Charles Black, were able to reach the Zeppelin, which Black estimated flying at between 12,000 and 13,000 feet.15
The two ‘B’ Flight pilots from Sutton’s Farm came closest to success. Second Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson, had climbed to 7,000 feet when he first saw LZ 97 held by a concentration of searchlights. He began to climb towards it.
When just over 8000 feet, I was in a fairly good position to use my machine gun; this I did, firing immediately under the ship. The firing must have had little or no effect, for the Zeppelin must have been a good 2000 feet above me, if not more...
I fired at the Zeppelin three times (each time almost immediately below it); the machine gun jammed five times, and I only got off about 20 rounds. When the Zeppelin made off in a E.N.E. direction, I followed for some minutes, but lost sight of it.16
While Robinson made his attack, ‘B’ Flight’s commander, Captain Arthur Travers Harris17, was urging his reluctant BE2c upwards. At 5,000 feet he observed searchlight activity to the north and turned towards it. At 7,000 feet he saw LZ 97 held on the points of the searchlights and, anticipating her movements as she turned east, he manoeuvred into a position to launch a head on attack, albeit from about 2,000 feet below. As the Zeppelin loomed over him he made his move, but it did not go according to plan.
I opened fire with my Lewis gun and Brock ammunition. The gun jammed almost immediately. I turned again and flew behind and about 1500 to 2000 feet below the Zeppelin, and managed to clear my gun, opening up again. A second jamb occurred almost immediately; while freeing this jamb, I sideslipped and lost sight of the Zeppelin.18
Although his attack proved no more successful than Robinson’s, it is his troublesome ammunition that is of interest.
* * *
Right from the beginning of the war the question of how to successfully bring down a Zeppelin had proven difficult to answer. The Royal Laboratory at Woolwich had developed ‘flaming bullets’, an incendiary bullet for use in the .450 Martini-Henry carbine but this was not up to the task. On 17 May 1915, aircraft from RNAS Dunkirk had attacked Zeppelin LZ 39 and although she sustained minor damage from bombs, the machine gun and rifle fire proved ineffective. It led to Commodore Murray Sueter, Director of the Admiralty Air Department, issuing a memorandum which effectively delayed finding a solution to the problem.
It was very disappointing not to be able to fire the airship with the incendiary ammunition and bombs provided. Probably the exhaust gases from the motors are turned into the ring space. If this is so, the matter of igniting the hydrogen is one of great difficulty.19
The feeling was that these exhaust gases pumped into the envelope created an inert layer which prevented incendiary ammunition igniting the hydrogen. The theory was wrong but it ensured official attention looked elsewhere for a solution to the Zeppelin threat.
Besides various bombs, the anti-Zeppelin arsenal included the Ranken dart and fearsome sounding ‘Fiery Grapnel’, with its explosive-tipped hooks lowered by cable to catch onto a Zeppelin and detonate, but this was never used in action, which for the pilots tasked with deploying it was probably good news. And the problem with all these weapons was that the attacking aircraft needed to get above the Zeppelin to use them, which happened only rarely as German airships could easily outclimb the lethargic aircraft allocated to home defence. A few aircraft carried Le Prieur rockets attached to their outer struts. Designed in France they had been used successfully against observation balloons but, like the grapnel, they never saw action over Britain and so the problem remained unsolved. Although the flammable qualities of hydrogen were well known, it only becomes flammable when mixed with oxygen. While contained within the gas-tight cells inside the Zeppelin framework the hydrogen remained inert. The problem was to find a way to allow the hydrogen to mix with air before igniting it.
While no official work to develop a bullet that might achieve this goal was underway, a number of individuals independently looked to solve the problem. Those bullets fired by Captain Harris against Zeppelin LZ 97 were from a trial batch developed by Flight Lieutenant Frank A. Brock, head of the Admiralty Air Department’s Intelligence Section, who used knowledge gained as a director of his family’s fireworks company to find a solution to the problem. Aware of Sueter’s comment about the possibility of inert gases effectively smothering incendiary bullets, he set out to design one with both explosive and incendiary properties that would detonate between the airship’s envelope and gas bags. After trials in 1915 and another in February 1916, the Admiralty placed an order for the Brock bullets. The RFC officially trialed the bullets on 29 April, four days after Harris had used some of an early batch unsuccessfully against LZ 97. On 15 May the RFC placed an order for 500,000 although the final batch was not delivered until the end of the year.20 The RFC, however, remained unconvinced by the bullet and in 1917 returned 400,000 to Woolwich; instead, the organization favoured the Pomeroy explosive bullet.
John Pomeroy, an inventor from New Zealand, had first put his mind to designing a bullet to destroy a Zeppelin when he saw a picture of one of Count Zeppelin’s early airships. He demonstrated his first explosive bullet in 1908 but nothing came of it. In 1914 he was in London when war broke out and on 27 August Pomeroy submitted his ‘anti-Zeppelin bullet’ to the War Office but, ‘was turned down promptly’. The following year Pomeroy went to America and the military there were about to conclude an order for his bullets when he heard news of the first Zeppelin raid on London and, dropping everything, he boarded a ship to England. ‘I knew I had a good thing,’ he explained, ‘and wanted the bullet to be used against the Zeppelins.’
The War Office conducted trials in June 1915 then asked Pomeroy to supply more bullets for a further trial to be conducted in his absence. Pomeroy objected: ‘I cannot comply with the request as part of my secret lies in the preparation of the shell as well as the explosive compound, and I have never allowed a shell to go out of my possession.’21 And so official interest in the bullet waned. But the dogged Pomeroy did not give up. In December 1915 he contacted the Munitions Invention Department (MID) of the Ministry of Munitions and from early 1916 Pomeroy worked closely with the Department to perfect his bullet. At trials in May 1916 it performed well, resulting in the MID ordering a consignment of 500,000 of the experimental bullets but then problems became apparent requiring changes and a further trial in July 1916. The following month the Pomeroy bullet22 entered service.23
Another private individual who recognised the need for a weapon to oppose the threat posed by the Zeppelins was James F. Buckingham, an experienced chemist who owned an engineering works in Coventry where he built engines and small automobiles. He began experimenting with incendiary bullets.24 Choosing phosphorus as his incendiary compound, his .450 bullet underwent three trials for the RNAS in April 1915 where it did well but then Sueter’s concerns regarding inert gas protecting a Zeppelin’s hydrogen stifled official interest. With encouragement from individuals within the Admiralty, Buckingham persevered, adapting his idea to a .303 bullet for use in machine guns. He sent 200 of these to the Admiralty for trial on 12 October 1915 and eleven days later they placed a large order for the RNAS with deliveries commencing on 4 December 1915. Buckingham continued to improve the design and on 27 April 1916 the Ministry of Munitions placed an order for the RFC. Further improvements were implemented until Buckingham registered a new patent in June of that year.25 Both France and America made orders too and by the end of the war some 26 million Buckingham incendiary bullets were delivered.
Prior to the war, the Royal Laboratory at Woolwich had considered the need for a tracer bullet, but the bullet available in 1914 proved unsatisfactory. When the Buckingham incendiary bullet first appeared, the smoke trail it left made it suitable as a tracer too and it was employed in those dual roles until a new tracer was developed. Early in 1916 the Ministry of Munitions took over part of the factory of Aerators Ltd, a company that made the Sparklet Soda Syphon.26 At the time, Aerators were engaged making copper bullets for the French Lebel rifle. Using the bullet as a base for a new tracer, extensive experiments resulted in an effective trace visible for 1,000 yards. In July 1916 the RFC placed an order for the new bullets, known to everyone as the ‘Sparklet’.27
All these bullets showed promise but none stood out above the others. When supplies of the Brock and Pomeroy, as well as the Buckingham or ‘Sparklet’ incendiary/tracers, had been received by the RFC and RNAS, the pilots received instructions to load them alternately in the 97-round Lewis gun ammunition drum – Brock/Pomeroy/Buckingham or ‘Sparklet’ and so on. It was hoped a combination of types would offer the best chance of success.
* * *
The raid by army airships on the night of 25/26 April, when the Brock bullets were fired for the first time, proved futile with estimates of damage to property reaching only £568. Undaunted, Zeppelin LZ 93 returned again the following night, her commander, Wilhelm Schramm, making his third raid in consecutive nights.28 He fared no better this time as engine problems cut short his visit to Kent. Appearing off Deal at 10.30pm, 18 minutes later LZ 93 was under fire from two 6-pdr guns at Westgate on the north coast. Although six pilots from No.39 (Home Defence) Squadron and a RNAS BE2c were searching for LZ 93, she made an untroubled escape. No bombs fell on land.
The final Zeppelin raid of this dark phase of the moon took place on the night of 2/3 May. With Scotland as the target again, eight naval Zeppelins had the Rosyth dockyard and the Forth Bridge in their sights. Weather conditions were such that none made it there and their alternate targets were both interesting and varied. The army also sent one Zeppelin out; Ernst Lehmann making his first raid in a new ship, LZ 98, set out optimistically for the long-range target of Manchester. She appeared off the mouth of the Humber at 7.25pm but a combination of anti-aircraft fire, rain and mist prevented Lehmann from coming inland and he abandoned the raid.
The eight naval Zeppelins had made good progress until they were about a hundred miles off the mouth of the Firth of Forth, at which point the wind changed direction. Now blowing strongly from the south, it had the potential to seriously hamper the long flight back to Germany. Even so, three continued on towards Scotland – L 11, L 14 and L 20 – while the rest turned into the wind to search for targets in the north of England. Of these, Max Dietrich believed his L 21 bombed Middlesbrough and Stockton, but he was much further south, crossing the coast north of Scarborough at 9.40pm.
Heading inland, 50 minutes later Max Dietrich found a target, which unknown to him was the city of York. L 21 circled to the south of the city before dropping 18 bombs (five HE and 13 incendiary) over the village of Dringhouses, then set a course for the city centre. Dringhouses bordered the Knavesmire, home to York racecourse, where a large military encampment had been established. The bombs shattered windows in the village, while an officer and a soldier at the camp received minor injuries.
On the north-east corner of the Knavesmire stood Nunthorpe Hall, serving as a VAD Hospital for wounded servicemen. Moments after the bombs fell at Dringhouses, L 21 began its run over the city. An initial batch of seven bombs (three HE and four incendiary) landed close to Nunthorpe Hall where one incendiary struck the roof. A report written for the Daily Mail suggests that the invalids, who were quickly evacuated, managed to find humour in their situation.
The roof of the building at once burst into flames, but there was no panic... Accustomed to Hun frightfulness, the wounded treated the situation with cheerfulness. They forgot the scars of the battlefield and the injunction of the nurses to maintain quietness and as the flames reached higher and higher the heroes sang the tuneful melody ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’.29
With L 21 flying on a north-east course over York, the next bomb smashed down just beyond the Hall in Nunthorpe Avenue. Advance warning of possible air raids in York was given by lowering and raising gas pressure, which altered the brightness of the lights. Mrs Chapman, who lived with her family at 6 Nunthorpe Avenue, was out when the pressure fluctuated. Concerned, her husband and their two adult daughters, Emily and Norah, went out to see if they could see her and get her to hurry home. In the street, her husband watched an incendiary bomb fall at Nunthorpe Hall just as his wife came into view. As he shouted to his family to lie down, a bomb exploded in the middle of the street: ‘Road material and fragments of the bomb flew in all directions... Every pane of glass near was shattered and the roofs of the houses nearest to the explosion also had their tiles lifted off.’30 The bomb wrecked three or four houses in the street, including the Chapmans’ home.
Five more HE bombs fell in quick succession then, when he felt sure the Zeppelin was moving away, Mr Chapman ran to his family. All had been hit by fragments of the bomb: Emily died within five minutes, Mrs Chapman’s left arm was badly injured and at hospital they amputated it, while Norah’s injury was particularly grim.
Norah has had a wound through the top part of her right arm, and out at the back of her shoulder, and it was poisoned, so it had to be scraped out every morning and syringed through, and then filled up with disinfected wadding, they had to keep the wound open until it was perfectly clean.31
Even before Mr Chapman reached his family, more lives were lost. Just seconds after Nunthorpe Avenue, L 21 passed over Scarcroft Road and dropped a bomb on a house at 13 Upper Price Road. An elderly couple, George and Sarah Avison, were inside when the bomb struck causing the upper storey of the house to collapse. As rescuers dug through the rubble of the fallen walls they found the couple dead in their bed. Other houses nearby suffered considerable damage. About 60 yards further on, two bombs exploded in Nunthorpe Road, followed by one in Victoria Street and another in Price’s Lane, which ran alongside the old mediaeval city walls. Doors were ripped from their hinges and windows and roofs smashed. Wilson Kirby went to see the local damage: ‘Nunthorpe Road caught it very severely, particularly about Kettlewells the butchers and right up to St Clement’s Church which had a few, perhaps 40, small panes broken. It is a proper wreck about there.32 At a corner by Victoria Street and Caroline Street, a bomb smashed into the middle of three cottages.
The rather flimsily constructed houses collapsed, and all the inmates were buried amongst the debris. There were 18 persons in the three cottages – a majority of them being young children – but all were rescued from the ruins alive, though some were rather badly injured.33
From Price’s Lane the next bomb fell just the other side of the city walls in Newton Terrace where the explosion wrecked four houses and injured three people, while a bomb falling in Kyme Street, backing on to Newton Terrace, smashed windows and doors and left one woman injured. Although the preceding 15 bombs between Nunthorpe Hall and Kyme Street had fallen in a line about 950 yards long, Dietrich flew the same distance over the city before dropping his next and final bomb. This exploded at 10.45pm about 450 yards south-east of the city’s magnificent cathedral, York Minister, in St Saviour’s Place. The road was busy.
William Chappelow, aged 49, and his wife Sarah had been to a picture house and were walking along St Saviour’s Place on their way home. Ernest Coultish, the captain of a keelboat, was also walking along the same road as was Benjamin Sharpe. He was on his way home from Leetham’s Mill, which had been forced to close for the night when the gas lights dimmed. Sergeant Edward Gordon Beckett, serving in a Royal Field Artillery Ammunition Column, was home on leave with his family in Haver Lane and Susan Hannah Waudby was at 13 St Saviour’s Place where she ran a lodging house. When the sound of bombs first reached them, Beckett’s mother became very nervous, so he said he would go out and try and find a place of safety for the whole family. He reached St Saviour’s Place just as the bomb fell. It was carnage.
Exploding in the street, the bomb opened up a crater, smashing a gas main and wrecking three buildings. An eyewitness saw the bomb fall but after it exploded he was dazed for ten minutes. When he recovered, he found a man lying dead on the ground near his doorway and another a few yards off. William Chappelow, Benjamin Sharpe and Sergeant Beckett all died instantly. The bomb ripped away the lower part of Chappelow’s legs and fractured his skull. The back of Sharpe’s lifeless body was peppered with wounds while Beckett died after a large metal fragment smashed into his jaw. Coultish was still alive but bleeding heavily from a stomach wound. He died two hours later in hospital. A man who arrived at the scene after the explosion made a search of the shattered houses. He found the body of Susan Waudby amongst the wreckage of her lodging house; she had suffered terrible injuries to her head and right shoulder. From upstairs three lodgers were brought out alive although all were overcome by fumes from the broken gas main. Private Leslie Hinson, aged 18, was serving in the 3/1st East Riding Yeomanry based in the camp on Knavesmire but he was found lying on a sofa amongst the wreckage of one of the houses. He was still alive when rescuers pulled him clear but he also died in hospital. These were the last victims of the raid on York.
Dietrich now turned L 21 back towards the coast, dropping a single incendiary bomb at the village of Kirby Grindalythe at about 11.25pm before passing out to sea near Bridlington 25 minutes later. His bombs had claimed nine lives and left at least 29 people injured.
The other four Zeppelins that headed into the southerly winds after abandoning the attempt on Scotland ran into fierce snow-squalls and thick cloud over north Yorkshire where their raid ended with possibly the greatest wastage of bombs recorded in the entire campaign. But it started with great promise.
Otto von Schubert brought L 23 inland over Robin Hood’s Bay at about 9.15pm then headed inland over the North Yorkshire Moors. As was common practice, von Schubert released a single incendiary bomb, checking the effects of the wind, before turning northwards and heading for the favoured target of the Skinningrove Ironworks. A policeman noted that it fell at 9.45pm near Danby Head on Danby High Moor where it set fire to the heather.34 Leaving the moors behind, L 23 reached Skinningrove 20 minutes later where the ironworks were in darkness. Von Schubert’s 11 bombs (seven HE and four incendiaries) partly wrecked a storehouse while others fell harmlessly in fields or gardens, but three rows of cottages sustained some damage.35 Coming under anti-aircraft fire from Brotton, L 23 moved away to the east for a couple of miles before dropping six incendiary bombs at 10.10pm over the tiny settlement of Street Houses. One of the bombs set fire to a house where a 12-year-old girl suffered burns. Continuing along the coast to Whitby, von Schubert went back out to sea at about 10.25pm.
As L 23 departed, Zeppelin L 13 arrived, Eduard Prölss taking her inland towards the moors. A half hour earlier Werner Peterson crossed the coast near Scarborough in L 16, about 20 miles further south. Prölss soon became aware of a large fire. To him it appeared that another of the raiders had found a worthwhile target and had bombed it with some success. But he was wrong; the fire he saw was a result of the incendiary dropped about an hour earlier by von Schubert. Fanned by the wind, the fire had caught hold and a large area of heather was now burning fiercely. At about 10.50pm Prölss ordered the release of a number of HE bombs over the raging fire. As he did so Peterson approached from the south in L 16. He saw the other Zeppelin and believed it was attacking the industrial town of Stockton-on-Tees, actually 17 miles to the north-west. He, too, dropped bombs on the remote moor, imagining: ‘well-placed hits on buildings at the site of the fire as well as clearly recognisable [railway] tracks and embankments.’ After dropping his bombs Peterson turned L 16 over the village of Castleton as the fire on the moor escalated and headed east along the valley of the River Esk for about five miles to Lealholm. There he dropped five bombs at about 10.55pm, which fell between there and Lealholmside. A farm building sustained some damage while the sound of smashing windows filled the air and two men narrowly escaped flying bomb fragments.36 Peterson now turned north-west, released five incendiary bombs over Moorsholm at 11.15pm without causing any damage before passing out to sea near Skinningrove at about 11.25pm.
After L 13 had added its bombs to the great conflagration on Danby High Moor, Prölss turned south, following a very confused route for nearly two hours before heading out to sea north of Scarborough at 12.50am. During that time he released two parachute flares near Pocklington, an incendiary at Fridaythorpe and another at Seamer.
At 10.50pm, as L 13 and L 16 were both dropping their bombs on Danby High Moor, the final Zeppelin, L 17, approached the Yorkshire coast. At 11.05pm Kapitänleutnant Herbert Ehrlich appeared over the village of Carlin How, alongside the Skinningrove Ironworks, which had been bombed an hour earlier by L 23. Ehrlich ordered the release of 17 bombs (13 HE and four incendiaries) over the tightly-packed terraced streets. They wrecked six houses and caused slates to crash down from the roofs of numerous homes all accompanied by the sound of smashing glass, while a joiner’s shop and several outbuildings were also destroyed. However, no one was hurt because the residents, alerted by the earlier attack, had sought shelter at a local mine. From Carlin How, Ehrlich headed over the moors and saw the huge fire engulfing Danby High Moor. With visibility limited, like the captains of L 13 and L 16, Ehrlich concluded that the inferno marked a major target and so L 17 became the fourth Zeppelin to waste its bombs on the wild and remote moorland. His bombs released, Ehrlich turned away from the conflagration and went out to sea about three miles north of Whitby.
The police concluded that following the single incendiary dropped on the moor by the first Zeppelin (L 23), the attack at 10.50pm (L 13 and L 16) resulted in the explosion of at least 39 bombs, with the final attack (L 17) seeing at least six incendiaries added to the total.
It seems likely, however, that some bombs failed to explode and remained undetected, increasing the total as Superintendent Rose of the police at Guisborough later concluded.
Seeing that this moor is very boggy it is quite probable there are bombs still buried in the bog. Some of the holes have water in them and are very deep consequently bombs dropping in such places as these and failing to explode will be difficult to recover.37
While the Zeppelins were threatening Yorkshire, the RNAS launched aircraft from Redcar (a BE2c), Scarborough (a BE2c and an Avro 504C) and Whitley Bay (two BE2c). Only Flight Lieutenant Bruno de Roeper from Redcar saw a raider but was unable to close. No.15 RAS at Doncaster sent up two BE2c, while two pilots from No.33 Squadron at Bramham Moor and others from No.36 Squadron at Cramlington were also in the air but they had no luck finding the raiders.38
Peace now settled over this remote part of the North Yorkshire Moors, the traumatised sheep and grouse the only victims of one of the most intense aerial bombardments of the Zeppelin war. But the raid was not over. Much further to the north the Zeppelins that continued towards Scotland were still seeking targets, while one embarked on a long-range odyssey from which it would never return.