by Neil Storey
As a result, exact locations were not named in the British newspapers; neither were casualties. Reports from the coroner’s courts and funeral notices that would usually be published as a matter of course in newspapers were prohibited in the case of victims of air raids. As a consequence the details of many air raids simply did not appear in newspapers and have not appeared in books on the subject, and many casualties have remained numbers rather than names.
Despite the restricted news coverage, the feelings of hatred towards those carrying out the raids by those who fell victim to their bombs or suffered the dread a bomb might just be dropped on them as the Zeppelins passed over, continued unabated. The problem was that to those who witnessed British anti-aircraft defences firing shells and pom-pom rounds from the ground, or the efforts of aircraft equipped with machine guns and bombs, they appeared so tiny and so impotent in comparison to the huge Zeppelins that they were only too aware that we were, initially, unable to defeat them. For many, the echoes of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds were becoming only too real, and people gathered around the potentially lethal unexploded bombs dropped by Zeppelins, or the craters left by those that exploded, and regarded them with such curiosity that they may as well have fallen from Mars.
Many of those who lived in the East End of London through both the bombings by Zeppelins in the First World War and the Blitz during the Second World War would recall how the Zeppelin raids were far more frightening than the raids of the Luftwaffe. Whereas the German raiders of the Second World War would drop many more bombs, they would keep on flying over, while the Zeppelins would simply hang in the air dropping bomb after bomb with impunity.
And so the situation remained; especially as Britain’s military did not have a comparable terror weapon nor an effective means of retaliation until Brock, Pomeroy (explosive bullets) and Buckingham (phosphorous incendiary bullets) ammunitions were developed and used to form a lethal combination against Zeppelins. Indeed, it was with the combination of Brock and Pomeroy, used by RFC Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson VC to bring down SL-11 on 3 September 1916, that the offensive was finally turned against the Zeppelin raiders.
From 1915–18, Imperial German Zeppelins and airships made fifty-one bombing raids over the English, killing 557 and injuring 1,358. More than 5,000 bombs were dropped on towns across Britain, causing £1.5 million in damage.
Both Captain Joseph Morris in his book The German Air Raids on Great Britain 1914–1918 (1925) and H.A. Jones in his official history War in the Air: The story of the RAF in the Great War (Volume III, 1931) drew information from the various Reports of the Intelligence Section General Headquarters: Air Raids, but it is clear there were constraints imposed upon them about what details they could or could not include because the reports were classified ‘Secret’ and remained so until their formal release in 1966. Some aviation historians have subsequently drawn on parts of the published reports in relation to particular raids, but few have looked at the original files in detail and many are unaware of their existence at all; as a result many fascinating aspects and details of the story of the Zeppelin air raids have remained untold to a wider audience, until now.
The reports were compiled from information obtained through wireless interception stations, intelligence sources, and from direct observation by anti-aircraft units, military observers and police reports, supplemented by the check afforded by the dropping of bombs. They were printed without any attribution to their author, but the man under whose direction they were collated and who wrote them for their limited audience during the First World War was Lieutenant Colonel Hermann Gaston de Watteville (1875–1963). Best known to military historians for his post-war biographies of Lord Roberts (1938), Lord Kitchener (1939) and ‘The British Soldier’ (1954), he was also editor of the journal of the Royal United Service Institution from 1924–35 and produced an authoritative account of the campaign in Waziristan 1919–20 (1925). It is less well known that he made contributions to a host of military publications throughout his long military career, often signed off simply as ‘H.G. DE W.’ and that he is acknowledged for his contributions to the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, which he made while he was an instructor at the Staff College, Camberley. He was also a good friend of John Buchan, author of the classic spy thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), from the time they met at Oxford, and both of them served in military intelligence during the First World War.
De Watteville’s work within military intelligence remained, for the most part, secret. His obituary in The Times stated he served in the Royal Artillery from 1900 to 1924 and during the war was Mentioned in Despatches and made a CBE. It only mentioned that he served in the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office during the Second World War. It took his friend Captain Cyril Falls, the author of a number of the military operations official campaign histories and numerous books on military history, to set some of the record straight in a tribute published a few days later, in which he quotes Brigadier General Sir James Edmonds as stating that de Watteville’s intelligence work at the War Office before the First World War was ‘outstanding’. During the war de Watteville had a reputation for speaking and writing French and German ‘like a native’ and was awarded the Legion d’Honneur by the French. Falls summed up de Watteville:
As a talker he was one of an old school, witty, biting when a snap was deserved, above all polished and precise – in fact a delightful companion. Finally, he was the best critic of military history I have known. He read before they went to press all my official volumes and most others on the First World War and never made a criticism that was unwanted.
So, one may ask, were the Reports of the Intelligence Section General Headquarters: Air Raids accurate? When Jones was researching for his War in the Air immediately after the First World War he visited Berlin, and through the courtesy of the president of the marine archive he studied the original reports and had conversations with wartime Zeppelin commanders. He also took the opportunity to compare notes with Reichsarchiv officials and found that the German airship reports confirm in general, but not in detail, the British air raid reports. He commented:
The Zeppelin commanders had to face many difficulties. They set out on their long journeys with no reliable knowledge of the weather conditions over the British Isles. Slight miscalculations of the changes of wind strength and direction led to errors of navigation which are reflected in the places named as bombing targets in the commanders’ reports. Nor was there much opportunity to check navigation by direct observation. It is clear that the airship crews were continuously baffled by the darkening of English cities. The German directional wireless stations were not of much help. The angle subtended by the bearings obtained when an airship made a wireless call for her position was, of necessity, narrow, and the resultant calculation was at best approximate, and, sometimes, definitely inaccurate.
The difficulties in navigation outlined by Jones also concur with those discussed by Admiral Reinhard Scheer in his chapter on airship attacks in Germany’s High Sea Fleet in the World War (1920).
Zeppelin Blitz is the first published book to draw extensively on the Reports of the Intelligence Section General Headquarters: Air Raids. Much of the material is transcribed directly from the original texts, including de Watteville’s pithy comments on the actions of the Zeppelin raiders and their commanders. The accounts drawn from the reports are combined with information recorded in Metropolitan, Borough and County police reports and a host of contemporary sources from my extensive research over the last twenty-five years in both public and private archives. Recorded are the flight paths of the raiders, where the bombs fell, the names of numerous casualties and the locations of anti-aircraft guns. There are also rare and previously unpublished photographs of bomb damage, Zeppelin crews and crash sites, and first-hand combat reports by both Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and RNAS pilots that vividly recount the engagements with Zeppelins, all of which combine to provide an authentic and revealing insight into the Zeppelin r
aids of the First World War like never before.
Neil R. Storey
Notes
1. TNA AIR 1-604-16-15-242 Air Raids on England: Miscellaneous p.4b
2. Ibid p.4a
3. Ibid Minute Sheet 3
4. Ibid Minute Sheet 2
Charles Hunt, chief constable of King’s Lynn, examines an unexploded HE bomb dropped on King’s Lynn during the night of 19 January 1915.
INTRODUCTION
The First Zeppelin Air Raid – 19 January 1915
While Britain’s navy still ruled the waves, the coastal class airships, or ‘blimps’, and aircraft of the RFC and RNAS were fearfully inadequate in comparison to the German Zeppelins which were, in effect, the long-range heavy bombers of their day. Zeppelins could cross the North Sea from their bases in Germany and, flying far beyond the range of battleship shells or field artillery, they could literally take the fight to the enemy.
General von Falkenhayn, Chief of the Imperial German General Staff, was keen to commence combined operations against Britain, but his plans and airships failed to impress the Imperial German Navy chiefs – they had their own plans.
Admiral Hugo von Pohl, Chief of Naval Staff, sought an audience with the Kaiser to obtain sanction to conduct air raids on Britain. The Kaiser was initially against any such action but, after conference, a compromise of allowing bombs to be dropped only on specifically targeted military installations and docks was agreed.
During December and early January, a few airship reconnaissances pushed close to the English coast, and fears did grow of aerial bombing attacks being carried out by Zeppelins. These fears led to what may arguably be the first civilian casualty caused by Zeppelins (or at least the fear of their attacks).
On Friday 15 January 1915, Mrs Alice Mary Cubitt (50), the wife of Gorleston bank manager Henry Cubitt, was helping her neighbour, Dr David Walter, in the construction of a ‘dugout’ place of safety against air raids and bombardment, in his garden at 2 Park Road, Gorleston Cliffs, when the structure suddenly collapsed (probably due to the sodden soil caused by continued rainfall). This buried the pair under a large quantity of struts, boards and earth. Dr Walter managed to extricate himself, and as he did so, he called to his servants to summon the assistance of some of the military sappers at work on the cliffs, who came running with spades to release Mrs Cubitt, but she was found to be dead. Medical examination revealed that she had a weak heart and the shock of the collapse had killed her.
Four days later, on the morning of 19 January 1915, Zeppelins L-3, under the command of Kapitänleutnant Johann Fritz, and L-4, under Kapitänleutnant Count Magnus von Platen-Hallermund, set out from their base at Fuhlsbüttel with orders to bomb key installations along the River Humber. Both Zeppelins were carrying crews of sixteen men, eight 110lb explosive bombs, ten or eleven 25lb incendiary bombs and enough fuel for thirty hours’ flying.
The two Zeppelins were to be led across the North Sea by L-6, which flew out of Nordholz carrying no lesser man than Peter Strasser, Chief of the German Naval Airship Division. L-6 had been given the ‘prize’ target of the Thames estuary. The mission of L-6 was, however, cut short when the crankshaft of the port engine broke while she was north-east of the Dutch island of Terschelling. It was still 90 miles to the English coast and, fearing that the weight of ice that might collect on the envelope of the Zeppelin would prove too much for her to carry with only two engines, Strasser recorded that he: ‘… decided in agreement with the commander of L-6, but with a heavy heart, to turn back.’
Admiral Hugo von Pohl, Chief of Imperial German Naval Staff.
When reading what follows next, it is worth keeping in mind the words of Horst von Buttlar-Brandenfels, commander of the ill-fated L-6, and Zeppelin commander on numerous later raids, who recorded the problems of navigation during these early operations in Zeppelins over England:
Fregattenkapitän Peter Strasser, Chief of the Imperial German Naval Airship Division.
In those days we always flew as far as possible in sight of land in order to be able to determine our ship’s position the more accurately and, above all, to have some means of checking the speed at which we were going. Our wind measurements, which we received before ascending, were extremely inadequate, and did not give us anything like a true idea of the conditions, more particularly as all observations regarding the west – and these were the most important and most valuable from our point of view – were altogether lacking. Whether the wind was increasing or abating could be determined only by ascertaining the position of the ship at various intervals, and these positions, as I have already pointed out, were fixed by keeping observation on the land. Later on, all this was entirely changed and we navigated our ships in accordance with wireless information.
Flying in sight of the Dutch coast had, of course, this disadvantage, that the ships were reported to England the moment they steered a westward course but, for the reasons above, we had to put up with this drawback. Moreover, in any case it was probably that English submarines, which were constantly busy in the North Sea laying mine barrages, reported the approach of the airships by wireless. Whether … we should succeed in reaching England or not was entirely dependent on whether our engines would be able to hold out.
L-3 and L-4 Zeppelins approached the Norfolk coast in company, passed over the Haisborough lightship and were first spotted from land at 7.40 p.m., flying low. Each ‘carried a light’ and were described by an observer at Ingham, 1½ miles from the sea, as ‘like two bright stars moving, apparently 30 yards apart.’ Before coming overland at 7.55 p.m., they separated. L-3, making landfall over Haisborough, turned south-east, and L-4 made for Bacton.
L-3 was spotted by a patrol of 6th Battalion, Norfolk Regiment (Cyclists) TF, as it passed over Eccles Gap. It then steered over Lessingham, Ingham (8.05 p.m.) and Martham (8.15 p.m.), where Kapitänleutnant Fritz attempted to find out where he was by dropping a flare. Mr Frank Gray, the landlord of the Royal Oak, happened to be looking out and saw the flare, which he described as looking like ‘a big star’ and was astonished at how the phenomenon ‘stood out of the starless inkiness of the rest of the sky.’ The casing from this flare was picked up in a lane near the hall at Martham, and was described in the Yarmouth Mercury as being ‘about 2ft long and 3½in diameter. At one end, which was solid except for a sort of turn screw in the centre, were the figures 6, 12, 15, 18 at even distances round the edge and there were various German words on the tube itself.’
Shortly after 8.15 p.m. L-3 dropped its first bomb, an incendiary, on farmer George Humphrey’s water-logged paddocks near St Michael’s Church at Little Ormesby, leaving a small crater about 1½ft wide. Heading seaward to skirt the coastline, it was spotted south of Caister (8.22 p.m.) out to sea.
Zeppelin L-3, which, under the command of Kapitänleutnant Johann Fritz, dropped the first bombs during the first Zepplein air raid on Britain, 19 January 1915.
Turning almost immediately towards Great Yarmouth and spotting the town, L-3 dropped a parachute flare to illuminate its target. The people below believed they were being swept by a searchlight, and another small detachment of soldiers from the 6th Battalion, Norfolk Regiment (Cyclists), who were on coastal defence duty, opened up with rifle fire. Crossing the town from north to south, L-3 dropped its second bomb, another incendiary, at 8.25 p.m., which landed on the back lawn of Mr Norwood Suffling’s house at 6 Albemarle Road, overlooking the Wellesley Recreation Ground. This bomb ‘burst with a loud report’ but did little damage, apart from gouging a 2ft crater and splashing mud up the house.
The third bomb, the first of the explosive bombs to be dropped, described in the Yarmouth Mercury as a ‘diabolical thing’, fell at the back of 78 Crown Road, narrowly missing one of its elderly occupants, Mrs Osborne, who, at the moment of impact, was crossing the small back yard to the back door. Still shaking as she spoke to the reporter, she said of the sound: ‘It was like a big gun … If I had gone just a step or two further I must have been killed by it.’
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On the morning after the raid, the bomb was dug out of the small crater it had made in the pavement by Norfolk National Reservists and taken to the York Road Drill Hall, where the detonation mechanism (including a small air propeller operating on a fuse) was removed. The defused bomb became the object of much interest and curiosity to the large number of people who came to see it through the day.
The fourth bomb, an incendiary, fell a few yards further west, failing to detonate, and it buried itself harmlessly against the gate post of Mr W.F. Miller’s livery stables behind Crown Road.
The people of the St Peter’s Plain and Drake’s Buildings area of the town were not to be so lucky. Here landed the fifth bomb, a devastating high explosive (HE). Some of the windows of St Peter’s Church and parsonage were blasted in, and the front of St Peter’s Villas, the home of fish worker Mr E. Ellis, was brought down by the explosion. Luckily he was in the kitchen; the back door was blown off its hinges and fell on top of him, as did the kitchen window and sundry other wreckage, but he only suffered cuts from flying glass and debris, and he was thankful – only minutes before he had been in the room that took the full blast. He did suffer wounds severe enough to receive hospital treatment – a gash to his knee caused by the falling glass penetrated deep and caused him a lot of pain. He appears in several photographs, standing indignantly in front of his house with his head bandaged. Luckily, his wife and family were away in Cornwall, where Mr Ellis was soon to join them for mackerel fishing.