Back in the late 1990s I became aware of a building in Farringdon Road, London, bearing a plaque at pavement level. The plaque describes how the building was destroyed in a Zeppelin raid in September 1915, and subsequently rebuilt. It is now known as the ‘Zeppelin Building’. This plaque fascinated me. I was born a Londoner and had been writing about aspects of military history since the late 1980s, but here was an aspect of the capital’s history – Germany’s First World War air raids on Britain – that I knew virtually nothing about. I began reading the available books on the subject but quickly became disappointed with their lack of depth and detail. This pushed me on to dig deeper, to unearth more on this largely unnoticed period in the nation’s history. In more recent times this German air campaign has become popularly dubbed the ‘First Blitz’, but if anyone asked about my work and I told them I was researching the ‘First Blitz’, the response was almost universal: ‘There was more than one?’ This first overseas bombing campaign in history has become overlooked, dwarfed by the enormity of the Blitz of the Second World War. For me, the ‘First Blitz’ had become the ‘Forgotten Blitz’.
In pursuit of a comprehensive understanding of the campaign, I turned my attention to The National Archives in London. There my quest struck gold, for within the records of the Air Ministry are folders bringing together all documents relating to each individual German air raid on Britain during the Great War, and within the War Office records are summary reports, encapsulating the information contained in the Air Ministry documents, along with maps tracing the routes of raiding German airships and aeroplanes. Over the coming years, I consulted every document available there. I now had the foundations for a detailed history of this campaign. But I wanted more; I wanted to give voice to Britain’s civilian population, those individuals who had been the first to experience the horrors of attack from the air, those long-forgotten victims.
The government of the time produced statistics at the end of the war, revealing that 1,414 people in Britain had died as a result of air raids. This, however, may be a little under-reported as those who died of injuries after the figures for individual raids were compiled were missed, and there is an inconsistency in the way deaths due to ‘shock’ during raids were recorded in different regions. Whatever the actual final figure, the government of the time made no attempt to compile an official list of the victim’s names. I determined to do what I could to redress this oversight. It was not easy.
In more recent years some local historians have looked at raids in their own areas, revealing the names of victims there, which has proved extremely helpful, but in places, particularly in London, where almost half of all the deaths occurred, no work of this nature has ever been published.
The early air raids received in-depth coverage in local newspapers, giving details of streets where bombs fell and the names of the dead and injured. That all changed after the first Zeppelin raid on London in May 1915; from then on, no specific details were allowed to be reported. Newspapers now told of attacks on an ‘east coast town’ or ‘a midlands town’, without naming the place. Likewise, victim’s names were excluded but, thankfully, reporting of coroner’s inquests often did include names, just not places.
Uncovering the names of these long-forgotten victims required focused detective work, comparing newspaper, police and military reports, inquests and the General Register Office Death Indexes, and the occasional shot in the dark following up a hunch and ordering death certificates with fingers crossed, hoping to discover another victim. Sometimes I hit the bullseye, other times I did not. With the completion of this third book, the lists I have compiled give names to 1,285 of the 1,414 victims, who still remain officially unidentified – 91 per cent of the total. I hope that readers may be able to help trace the final missing 129, allowing them to emerge from the shadows and be united with the others who shared their fate.
A similar amount of detective work involved tying anonymous newspaper reports to specific incidents. Comparing these reports with damage and casualties listed in police reports has allowed me to attribute some accounts to exact addresses, which in turn has given voice to individuals who experienced all the horrors of aerial bombing: the destruction of their homes, the death or mutilation of loved ones and their own injuries.
I set out at the beginning of this project to present a detailed and balanced account of the campaign, bringing it to life with the stories of those who played a part in it. Beyond the civilians’ experiences, I have enhanced the narrative by weaving in accounts from those who took to the skies to defend Britain from attack, and welcomed the views of German airmen too. Each experienced the campaign in a different way, but those experiences all form part of the same story.
Through the three books in the Forgotten Blitz series – Zeppelin Onslaught, Zeppelin Inferno, and now Gotha Terror – I have completed the story that began in December 1914, when an unopposed German aeroplane dropped a single bomb on Dover, blasting an unsuspecting gardener from a tree. It ended three and a half years later, in May 1918, when the final raid saw forty bombers target London and south-east England. Between those raids, the populations of cities, towns and villages, from the Highlands of Scotland to Portsmouth on the south coast of England, had also found themselves on the front line in this new age of aerial warfare.
Technological advances across all areas of the military during the years of the First World War were remarkable, but the progress in military aviation was simply astonishing. At the beginning of the war aeroplanes were limited to a reconnaissance role, were unarmed, and had a very limited lifting ability, but by 1917, Germany was sending bombers across the North Sea capable of carrying a bombload of 1,000kg and that had a greater wingspan than any aircraft that flew operationally in the Second World War, until the development of the B-29 Superfortress by the United States in 1944 (and then only by 3ft). The management of aerial defence, virtually non-existent at the beginning of 1914, progressed too, slowly at first but gaining pace as the war progressed, ultimately laying the foundations for future air defence systems.
The focus of this book is 1917-1918, the final two years of the war. This period marked the decline of the Zeppelin threat and the emergence of a new deadly scourge: the bomber aeroplane. Having won the battle against the Zeppelins, Britain, taken by surprise by this unexpected development, returned to the drawing board to create a new plan of defence.
This first sustained strategic bombing campaign in history deserves to be more widely known. Its lessons, impact and experiences were still widely felt when Britain went to war with Germany again in September 1939. Yet it remains the Forgotten Blitz. The time has come to change that.