In London the final hours of 1916 were defined by a drizzling rain. Restaurants closed at 11.00pm and while a few people lingered in the streets awaiting the arrival of the New Year, there would be no peal of church bells to usher it in. A few thousand rather damp people gathered in good spirits around St Paul’s Cathedral and in the surrounding streets, where vast crowds had gathered before the war, and by 11.30pm the sound of noisily sung patriotic songs filled the air, but it did not last long. A strong force of City Police enforced the order to ‘move on’, and by midnight most of the crowd began to return homeward. Before 12.30am the streets were comparatively quiet.
After almost two and a half years of war there was no end in sight, no suggestion of a return to normality in the immediately foreseeable future. Yet there were positives for those who had ventured out into the gloom of the blackout and the drizzle to celebrate the New Year. Since January 1915 German airships had raided Britain 41 times, claiming the lives of over 500 people, inflicting injuries to over 1,200 more, while smashing and burning homes and businesses to the value of £1.4 million. But in the autumn of 1916 the issue of new bullets, both explosive and incendiary types, to the defending aircraft finally solved the surprisingly difficult task of igniting the hydrogen gas contained inside the great framework of every airship. In the 20 months between January 1915 and August 1916, Britain’s anti-aircraft guns had only managed to damage two raiding Zeppelins, both coming down in the sea, but the introduction of the new bullets heralded a seismic change. In just one month from 2 September 1916 Germany lost four airships, followed by two more on one night in November. The British population no longer felt defenceless in the face of the Zeppelin menace that had haunted the nation for so long, and there appeared a growing sense of optimism that the aerial threat to the country was over.
Beyond airships, those in the capital paid little attention to the threat from aeroplanes. The very first German raids on Britain had been made by seaplanes (more correctly, floatplanes) over Christmas 1914 and had continued irregularly ever since. These mainly consisted of hit-and-run attacks on south-eastern coastal towns, their effect generally limited. The 20 aeroplane raids since December 1914 had resulted in the deaths of 20 people and injuries to 67, while causing damage estimated at £11,500. At the end of November 1916, however, a single German aeroplane reached London and dropped a string of small bombs across the Knightsbridge/Belgravia area, largely unnoticed except by those close to the detonations. The raid caused little concern but there were those who raised a note of caution, including the editor of The Times newspaper.
… like all fresh portents of the kind, this isolated visit is by no means to be ignored. It may have been largely an act of bravado, or it may have had some definite object of reconnoitring or destruction. In any case it is wise to regard it as the prelude to further visits of the kind on an extensive scale, and to lay our plans accordingly. We have always believed that the method of raiding by aeroplanes, which are relatively cheap and elusive, has far more dangerous possibilities than the large and costly Zeppelins.1
Not everyone, however, shared The Times’ opinion.
January – February 1917: the Home Front
Of great concern to the government at the beginning of 1917 was the impact of German U-boat attacks on merchant ships bringing essential foodstuffs and materiel into Britain. If the attacks increased there remained a possibility that Britain would be forced to seek peace on unfavourable terms. With the Zeppelin threat apparently in decline, the Admiralty requested the transfer of seemingly superfluous guns intended for Home Defence to arm more of the merchant fleet. At the beginning of the year, Britain’s anti-aircraft defence plan required 403 fixed guns, 78 mobile types and 12 for training. At this point, however, only 217 were in place and, following the government’s decision, the outstanding 186 guns, as well as 11 of those already in position, were reassigned to the Admiralty. At a stroke London’s allocation of 84 guns reduced to 64. Previously guns defending London were deployed in pairs but now, to cover as wide an area as possible, they were redistributed singly.
Until the end of 1916, the London gun and searchlight defences had been under seven sub-commanders each responsible for their own area and answerable to Lieutenant General Sir Francis Lloyd, General Officer Commanding, London District, for training matters, and to Field Marshal Lord French, Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, for operations. Outside London, anti-aircraft commanders had responsibility for both aspects. In December 1916, however, London aligned with the rest of the country following the appointment of Lieutenant Colonel Maximilian St Leger Simon, an engineer officer, as Anti-Aircraft Defence Commander, London. Since early in 1916 he had been supervising the construction of gun and searchlight positions around the capital. Shortly after taking on his new role, however, Simon found his command seriously reduced.
With a general belief that the threat of Zeppelin raids had now greatly diminished, the Home Defence squadrons of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) also came under scrutiny. On 6 February 1917, Sir David Henderson, Director-General of Military Aeronautics, informed the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir William Robertson, that the RFC urgently needed 36 night-flying trained pilots for two new night-bomber squadrons destined for France, as well as nine replacement pilots per month. These he felt, in the current situation, could be released from Home Defence squadrons. The proposal received approval three days later.
Already well under-strength, a snapshot of the RFC’s 11 Home Defence squadrons on 7 March 1917 shows their establishment set at 222 aircraft, of which the squadrons could muster just 147, with only 125 of those serviceable. It was a similar story with the pilots. Of 113 pilots that rostered, of an establishment set at 198, only 82 were fit to fly.2
Despite these shortages within the RFC, plans were also under discussion to further reduce the role of the anti-aircraft guns in Britain to allow the redeployment of manpower elsewhere, and a surprising proposal put forward by Lord French received swift approval, leaving London Anti-Aircraft Defence Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Simon, dumbfounded. The order read,
No aeroplanes or seaplanes, even if recognized as hostile, will be fired at, either by day or night, except by those anti-aircraft guns situated near the Restricted Coast Area which are specially detailed for this purpose.3
The ‘Restricted Coast Area’ included Dover, Newhaven, Shoeburyness, Harwich, the Medway and the mouth of the Thames. An explanatory note rationalised the decision, explaining that aeroplanes flying at great height were difficult to identify as friend or foe, resulting in a great deal of ammunition being expended for little or no return, while falling shells inflicted damage on property and injuries to civilians in populous areas. It meant anti-aircraft gunners inland or defending London could no longer engage enemy aeroplanes. Zeppelins were still a legitimate target, but as they only attacked at night it seemed unnecessary to man the guns during daylight hours, enabling the surplus men to be transferred to the Western Front.
Lieutenant Colonel Simon took stock of the situation. He had lost almost a quarter of his guns and now his command received orders not to fire at enemy aeroplanes. He could engage Zeppelins but all these high-level decisions were made in the belief that the Zeppelin threat was all but over. Simon, however, uncomfortable with the non-engagement order, diligently prepared a detailed new plan for defence against aeroplanes which he filed away, ready for retrieval should Lord French’s order be rescinded.
During this time there had been little in the way of German raids. Lone seaplanes attempted to bomb shipping close to the Kent coast on 14 February and again two days later, while a Zeppelin appeared in the same area on 17 February but did not venture inland. All of which no doubt reinforced the decisions to reduce Britain’s air defences.
On 1 March, the first German bombs of 1917 fell on British soil, putting all these confident assumptions to the test.
1 March 1917, 9.45am: Broadstairs
At 9.45am, a man in Broadstairs, on the Kent coast, standing in his garden noticed a dark cloud in the sky then, suddenly, an unidentified German aeroplane emerged and began to drop bombs. This type of raid always proved difficult for the pilots of the RFC and Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) to oppose because it was almost impossible to spot a single high-flying aircraft until it reached the coast. They rarely lingered more than a few minutes before turning for home, having dropped a handful of bombs. This occasion was no different.
The first three bombs all fell in the sea as the raider approached Victoria Gardens where the next bomb exploded, showering a rather surprised Chairman of the Council, Dr Brightman, with clods of earth. Heading inland on a straight course, the raider dropped bombs in King Edward’s Avenue, Cinder Path by the railway, two in Grosvenor Road and one in Gladstone Road. In Grosvenor Road, one exploded in the playground of the County Council School (now St Mildred’s Primary) just a few feet from a classroom full of children. The teacher, Miss Webb and five of her class were cut by flying glass. The other bomb in Grosvenor Road, exploding in the garden of No. 15, also narrowly avoided causing a tragic incident.
In an upstairs room, a little girl three and a half years of age, was looking out of the window. Her mother had just placed her arms around the child’s face when the bomb exploded and shattered the window. The mother’s hand was very slightly cut and the child, though her head was covered with powdered glass, escaped injury.4
A family in Gladstone Road were fortunate too. The final bomb destroyed the upper storey of their villa, Fern Cottage. Moments before the explosion, Mrs Catt, wife of the town’s Registrar of Births and Deaths, had just returned to the house from the garden where, ‘The lawn … was studded with slates shot from the roof and embedded in the ground like arrows from a bow’. Those inside emerged from the house shaken but, miraculously, uninjured.
The pilot, well on his way back to Zeebrugge by the time any RFC or RNAS aircraft were airborne, escaped unmolested. It was a similar story to many of the seaplane raids that had gone before.
16 March 1917, 5.20am: Westgate
Two weeks later another unidentified single German seaplane appeared over Kent. The pilot intended to bomb shipping in the Downs, a favoured anchorage off the Kent coast near Deal, but he lost his way in low cloud. At 5.20am, having descended to about 1,300ft, somewhat surprised he found himself overland between Margate and Westgate, and heading north towards the coast.
Six bombs fell in fields, four of them on Mutrix Farm where the RNAS had a seaplane station, resulting in a few broken windows in nearby cottages. Turning back towards Westgate, the ten small 5kg bombs he dropped only smashed windows in Belmont Road. The final five bombs fell on the lawn of the Streete Court Preparatory School, on a greenhouse in Rowena Road, and 20 yards from the bandstand on the seafront, with the last two swallowed up by the waves. Again, the raider departed before any defence pilots could effectively react. The police gave a top estimate of £45 for the damage caused by the raid and, despite the rude early awakening, the town’s residents escaped injury.
***
In Germany, the New Year heralded a period of re-evaluation. The Naval Airship Division, under the command of the Führer der Luftschiffe, Fregattenkapitän Peter Strasser, had suffered considerable losses in the last four months of 1916. The introduction of new bullets, both explosive and incendiary types, meant that any airship venturing over Britain faced likely destruction if located by aircraft of the RFC and RNAS. After these losses, Strasser now faced questions as to the value of continuing the raiding programme. But he remained convinced that his Zeppelins offered a chance to unsettle Britain. His argument won over those who doubted the value of the raids.
It was not on the direct material damage that the value of the airship attacks depended, but rather on the general result of the German onslaught upon England’s insularity, otherwise undisturbed by war. The disturbance of transportation, the dread of airships prevailing in wide strata of society, and above all the occupation of very considerable material and military personnel were considered outstanding reasons for continuing the attacks.5
Strasser had a point. In Britain the RFC had 11 squadrons allocated to Home Defence, as well of those of the RNAS, and in total, over 17,000 personnel were committed to the nation’s aerial defence.
Approval to continue raiding was one thing, but the unanticipated vulnerability of the current model of Zeppelin, the ‘r-class’, meant changes were necessary. Introduced in the summer of 1916 with Zeppelin L 30, Strasser and the men of the Naval Airship Division had great hopes for its impact on the air war over Britain, but its arrival coincided with the development of the new bullets, and the latter held the upper hand. Suggestions that an increase in speed might be the answer were rejected by Strasser and, on 17 January 1917, he advocated a reduction in weight to allow Zeppelins to attain greater heights – to 16,500ft when fully loaded – thus taking them beyond the ceiling of any of the aircraft currently allocated to Britain’s Home Defence. A meeting followed and eventually a series of changes met with approval, including the removal of one of the three engines in the rear gondola, fuel load reduced to be sufficient for a 30-hour mission, a reduced bombload of between 1,500 and 1,800kg (approx. 1.5 to 1.8 tons),6 as well as a lightened frame structure and a more compact control gondola.
While engineers set to work on the new plans, Strasser returned to his headquarters at Nordholz and, unwilling to wait idly by for the new designs to be completed, ordered an immediate weight reduction for five of the latest ‘r-class’ Zeppelins: L 35, L 36, L 39, L 40 and L 41. All changes were made by 5 February. He achieved this by the removal of one engine from the rear gondola and some of the bomb release mechanisms. This work resulted in an average weight reduction of about 2,000kg or 2 tons. Altitude trial flights saw the ships attaining heights between 16,100 and 17,100ft while carrying slightly varying loads. The changes added an additional 3,000+ft over the original ‘r-class’. That, however, was as far as it went for Zeppelin L 36. On 7 February she crashed on a frozen river in fog when a loss of hydrogen caused handling problems. While the crew survived, L 36 did not.
Later that month, on 28 February, the first of the new design Zeppelins, L 42, entered service under the command of Kapitänleutnant Martin Dietrich, although it did not yet feature all the planned changes. Designated the ‘s-class’, these Zeppelins, designed to fly beyond the reach of the British defences, were later nicknamed the ‘Height Climbers’ by the British authorities. While the general appearance remained similar to the ‘r-class’, one obvious difference struck all who saw them – the vast envelope of the airship now painted with black dope, except the upper portion, making it harder for searchlights to find the target in the night sky.
Away from the race to complete the conversion of ‘r-class’ Zeppelins and the development of the new ‘s-class’, sad news emerged for Germany. Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, the father of the rigid airship, died on 8 March 1917. Although no longer directly involved with airship development, he attended an aeronautical exhibition in Berlin. Struck down with appendicitis while there, he died from post-operative pneumonia.
On 10 March, Strasser joined Martin Dietrich onboard L 42 for a test flight during which she ascended to 19,700ft. Although delighted with the performance, Strasser struggled when moving around the airship in the rarified air at this unprecedented altitude. When he returned slowly down the ladder into the control gondola he gasped breathlessly to Dietrich, ‘One-has-to-talk-slowly-up-here!’7 Containers of compressed oxygen were issued to the crews for use over 16,000ft, but many of the men were initially reluctant to do so, the oxygen having an unpleasant taste and using it could lead to terrible headaches that lasted for days.
Strasser’s plan to take his Zeppelins to new heights had come to fruition, but the practical limitations operating at such unprecedented heights would impose on his airships and crews had yet to be fully understood.
Just six days after L 42’s altitude test, she joined a force of four other converted Zeppelins (L 35, L 39, L 40 and L 41) in an attack aimed at London, the first in over four months. It did not go well.
16-17 March 1917, 10.20pm: Kent and Sussex
On the same day that the single seaplane had bombed Westgate on the Kent coast, Strasser’s Zeppelins ascended between 12.30 and 1.30pm. The weather seemed perfect but unknown in Germany a storm was rumbling towards Britain from the north-west. At sunset, as they climbed above 10,000ft, the Zeppelin commanders found solid cloud and at 12,500ft encountered fierce winds running at an estimated at 45mph. Attempts to ascertain their position by wireless bearings were thwarted by British blocking attempts, while the wind pushed all five airships further south than they estimated based on dead reckoning. Instead of crossing the coast north of the River Thames as intended, they made landfall over Kent and Sussex. And matters were further compounded by thick cloud overland lying between 3,000 and 9,000ft. In short, the Zeppelin commanders had no idea where they were and could see little or nothing of the ground. One, L 42, never even reached the British coast, engine failure leading to a long battle with the wind which forced it, with Strasser on board, ever deeper back into Germany, finally landing 26 hours after take-off. While the Zeppelin crews held an unswerving devotion to Strasser, they had always regarded him as a ‘Jonah’ figure when he flew on missions as technical problems often occurred with him onboard. This mission reinforced that perception. Even so, as difficult as L 42 found the conditions, she fared infinitely better than L 39.
Kapitänleutnant Robert Koch, the 35-year-old commander of L 39, crossed the Kent coast at 10.20pm.8 Koch’s first command had been Schütte-Lanz 3 from October 1915, before taking over Zeppelin L 24 in May 1916, then transferring to the new L 39 in December of that year. Over Kent, Koch dropped a bomb at Bekesbourne from where flares burning at the RFC airfield were visible; a BE2e had taken off from there 10 minutes earlier. The bomb exploded on farmland. Three other RFC pilots were in the air as were two from the RNAS but the low cloud ceiling made the already difficult task impossible. Heading south-west across Kent, L 39 dropped five explosive bombs and an incendiary near Wye, where there was another airfield, but all fell harmlessly between the villages of Sole Street and Waltham. Koch left the coast of Sussex at 11.40pm. Continuing to struggle against the elements, the wind carried L 39 over France where anti-aircraft gunners found her and shot her down near Compiègne: ‘The crew were all burned to death. A few of the bodies were seen to drop from the falling airship. The rest were found in a charred condition in the wreckage.’9 The brief three-month existence of L 39 ended in disaster. Strasser had lost another experienced captain in Robert Koch, along with his crew.
The other crews had little to show for their night’s work.
Kapitänleutnant Herbert Ehrlich, commanding L 35, came inland over Kent about 20 minutes after L 39. At 10.55pm, Ehrlich dropped three bombs on farmland close to villages around Canterbury. He reported that he had bombed London. Another six bombs fell close to those dropped by L 39 near Sole Street and Waltham, bringing down a cottage ceiling near Crundale. Now heading towards the Dover area, L 35 aimed five more explosive bombs (two of them big 300kg types) at the RFC’s Swingfield Emergency Landing Ground (ELG), but they only damaged nearby farms. One of the Zeppelin’s crew left a personal message for those below, dropping ‘facetious postcards’ overboard.10
Ehrlich dropped six more bombs, doing little damage, before L 35 went out to sea west of Dover at 12.15am. The wind took her towards Calais then Belgium before pushing her south of her home base at Ahlhorn. Running low on fuel, Ehrlich found apparent sanctuary at Dresden, but things did not go well. As L 35 entered the shed, a strong gust of wind lifted her tail, smashing it down hard and breaking her back. Repairs took three months.
Like Ehrlich in L 35, Kapitänleutnant Erich Sommerfeldt commanding L 40, also claimed to have bombed London. Heading a second wave, L 40 crossed the north Kent coast at 1.00am. A few miles east of Ashford, his first bomb smashed a few roof tiles at Nackholt, before something inexplicably drew Sommerfeldt south towards the vast flat expanse of Romney Marsh where, at about 2.00am, five large explosive bombs and three incendiaries dropped close to Newchurch. Continuing south towards Ivychurch, 14 incendiary bombs fell around Appledore Farm but all were quenched by the sodden ground, but an explosive bomb killed four sheep. Another seven explosive bombs blasted fields around the villages of Old and New Romney. Sommerfeldt reported this concentration of 30 bombs within an area of about 4 miles as his attack on ‘London’. L 40 battled against the wind to get back to Ahlhorn, finally arriving there after a 26-hour flight.
The last of the raiders, L 41, commanded by the former army airship officer Hauptmann Kuno Manger, came inland at Pett Level between Hastings and Winchelsea at 1.20am, making a rare Zeppelin appearance over the county of Sussex. Manger immediately released eight explosive and two incendiary bombs. Two fell in the sea while the concussion from the others shattered windows and doors in two unoccupied bungalows and at a pair of farmhouses. Manger now appears to have spotted flares burning along the coast at East Guldeford, about 6 miles to the northeast, the site of another RFC ELG. The historic town of Rye, from where the River Rother flows to the sea, stood just in advance of the airfield, with Rye Harbour about a mile and a half downstream from the town. Ignoring, or not noticing the town, Manger dropped seven explosive and six incendiary bombs on the Camber Marshes, either side of the Rother, only inflicting minor damage and no bomb landed within 400 yards of the airfield. L 41 passed out to sea near Dungeness at about 2.05am, about 10 minutes ahead of L 40. Manger also battled to get back to Ahlhorn, eventually landing with only two working engines.
Because of the cloud cover, none of anti-aircraft guns in the threatened area opened fire and by the end of raid the RFC and RNAS had flown 17 sorties. Amongst these the first operational sortie flown by the RFC’s No. 78 Squadron ended in tragedy when Second Lieutenant David Fowler, aged 19 and characterised as ‘fearless as a lion, and as playful as a kitten’, crashed his BE2e and died just 9 minutes after taking off from Telscombe Cliffs airfield.11
For Germany this raid presented the first experience of operational high-altitude flying. New challenges presented themselves in the form of unexpected high winds in the sub-stratosphere as they edged up to 20,000ft and with multiple cloud layers obscuring the ground. The results were far from what Strasser had anticipated. Of the five latest Zeppelins, one abandoned the mission, one was shot down and the crew killed, one suffered serious damage when landing and the other two limped back to Germany. The British recorded a weight of bombs amounting to 4.3 tons (4,360kg), with others dropped out at sea, achieving material damage estimated at just £163. The Zeppelins appeared safe from attack but their offensive capabilities were compromised.