Zeppelin Blitz

by Neil Storey

  Zeppelin caught in the searchlights during a raid on London, 1915.

  Zeppelin crossing the North Sea to bomb Britain, with the cruiser Ostfriedland in the foreground.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The National Archives; Imperial War Museum, London and Duxford; RAF Museum, Hendon; The Commonwealth War Graves Commission; Kath Griffiths, Norfolk Library and Information Service Heritage Library; Dr John Alban, Susan Maddock and Freda Wilkins-Jones at The Norfolk Record Office; Great Yarmouth Library (Local Studies); Alan Leventhall, King’s Lynn Library (Local Studies); BBC Radio Norfolk; The Fleet Air Arm Museum, Yeovilton; Sue Tod, Felixstowe Museum; The Association of Friends of Cannock Chase; The Long Shop Museum, Leiston, Suffolk, Woodbridge Museum; Dr Paul Davies and Andrew Fakes of Great Yarmouth Local History & Archaeological Society; Reverend Barry K. Furness, Smallburgh Benefice; Geoffrey Dixon; Scouting archivist Claire Woodforde, Norfolk Family History Society; Kevin Asplin; Helen Tovey, Family Tree Magazine; Dr Stephen Cherry, Stewart P. Evans, Mike Covell, Amanda Hartmann Taylor and my loving family.

  CONTENTS

  Title

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Foreword

  Introduction

  ONE

  1915

  TWO

  1916

  THREE

  1917

  FOUR

  1918

  Appendix 1

  Appendix 2

  Appendix 3

  Bibliography

  Copyright

  AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

  … Came the Thing they were sending us, the Thing that was to bring so much struggle and calamity and death to the earth. I never dreamed of it then as I watched; no one on earth dreamed of that unerring missile.

  H.G. Wells, War of the Worlds (1897)

  Since the first flight of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s LZ-1 over Lake Constance (Bodensee) on the Rhine on 2 July 1900, the vast size (128m long) of these lighter-than-air craft prompted feelings of awe and, as the reality of their military potential was realised, they were increasingly regarded as an ominous presence in the sky, especially by people in the European countries surrounding the German Empire.

  In a world which had witnessed unthinkable progress in industry and engineering throughout the nineteenth century, there were those who feared the technology of military development had gone too far. Authors contemplated the machinery of war with fascination, the most enduring of these being H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, in which an invasion and brutal occupation by extra-terrestrials was unstoppable by even the most modern of our weaponry. Add to this the tenor of over sixty books and numerous magazine articles describing invasions of Great Britain by foreign powers published between 1871 and 1914. The seminal Battle of Dorking by George Tomkyns Chesney, originally published as a story in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1871, tells of a fictional German attack and landing on the south coast of England that had been made possible after the Royal Navy had been distracted in colonial patrols, and the army by an insurrection in Ireland – a situation that was to have resonances in the Zeppelin air raid and bombardment of Lowestoft on the evening of 24/25 April 1916.

  The distrust and perception of anti-British feeling and the sinister machinations of the German race continued to feature regularly in the popular press, and books too, such as The Riddle of the Sands (1903), in which Erskine Childers weaves a tale of two young amateur sailors who battle the secret forces of mighty Germany. Their navigational skills prove as important as their powers of deduction in uncovering the sinister plot that looms over the international community.

  Anglo-German relations were strained further after the launch of the revolutionary HMS Dreadnought – the first big-gun, turbine-driven, iron-clad battleship – in 1906, when the Germans started building their own warships, akin to and rivalling the pride of the British fleet. To many British observers this meant nothing less than a challenge to the maritime supremacy of Great Britain. This fire was further kindled by Anglo-French journalist and writer William le Queux, who produced such best-selling titles as The Invasion of 1910 (1906) and Spies of the Kaiser (1909). He made no secret that his books were fiction, but claimed that they were based on his own secret knowledge and the insight he gained from his connections within the European intelligence community.

  In the spring of 1909, newspapers had columns of reportage about the advances, and planned advances, of the parameters of manned flight. In May 1909, John Moore-Brabazon became the first resident Englishman to make an officially recognised aeroplane flight in England. The previous year, Alfred Harmsworth (Baron Northcliffe), proprietor of the Daily Mail newspaper, had put up a reward of £1,000 for the first flight across the English Channel, a feat which was achieved by Louis Bleriot on 25 July 1909. So, no aircraft had crossed the English Channel before July 1909, but after reports of successful distance trials of Zeppelins in Germany, in the climate of anti-German fears many considered that the purpose of these monstrous creations could only be a sinister one and worried how long it would be before they appeared over Britain.

  Curiously, in March 1909, Police Constable James Kettle was walking his beat on Cromwell Road in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, when, upon hearing the ‘steady buzz of a high-powered engine’ was caused to look up, where he saw a ‘bright light attached to a long oblong body outlined against the stars as it crossed the sky at high speed.’ His report was met with interest from national newspapers, but no doubt fearing the panic such accounts could create, a senior police officer was sent to front the explanations. Kettle, it was claimed, had simply been ‘mistaken’; the whirring he had heard was attributed to the noise from the nearby co-operative bakery, and the object in the sky was explained as a Chinese lantern attached to ‘a very fine kite flying over the neighbourhood of Cobden.’ The speed Kettle had mentioned was just brushed off as ‘a little poetic touch for the benefit of you interviewers.’

  However, more sightings of these mystery airships began to occur across the country, and by May 1909 newspapers across Britain were full of accounts of unexplained airships which had been seen and heard traversing the night sky over Great Britain, at locations as far apart as Wales and Suffolk. In one notable instance, on Friday 7 May ‘a long sausage-shaped dirigible balloon’ was spotted over New Holland Gap, 1½ miles from Clacton in Essex. On a spot over which the airship had passed was found what was described as ‘a stout ovoid dark grey rubber bag, between 2ft and 3ft in length, enclosed in a network mesh, with a stout steel rod passing through the centre of it and projecting about 1ft from each end. One end of the rod is capped with a steel disc resembling a miniature railway-waggon buffer.’ It was thought that the object was some sort of ‘fender’ designed to break the contact of a descending aerial machine with the earth – the bag was stamped ‘Muller Fabrik Bremen.’

  On 14 May, the Daily Express’s Berlin correspondent had reported:

  … It is admitted by German experts that the mysterious airship which has been seen hovering over the eastern coast of England may be a German airship. England possesses no such airship, and no French airship has hitherto sailed so far as the distance from Calais to Peterborough. On the other hand, the performance of several German airships, including the Gross airship, which has made one voyage of thirteen hours, would render it possible for them to reach the English coast. At the same time it is improbable that the German airship seen above England ascended from German soil. An aerial voyage to the English coast would still be a dangerous and formidable undertaking even for the newest airships …

  However, by this date sightings of mystery airships had been reported from Ely, St Neots, Wisbech, Peakirk, Orton and Wingland in Cambridgeshire; Ipswich, Saxmundham, Bradfield St George and Woolpit in Suffolk; Southend-on-Sea in Es
sex, and even Sandringham, where it was said the mystery airship had been spotted by royal servants. The witnesses generally agreed that the mystery airship was cigar-shaped, at least 100ft in length, the engines made a ‘throbbing’ noise and that it appeared to perform its manoeuvres with ease. Some also claimed to have seen ‘the glare of its searchlight.’

  On Monday 17 May, the subject of the mystery airships was brought up in a debate in the House of Commons. Sir Arthur Fell, MP for Great Yarmouth, had asked Richard Burdon Haldane, the Secretary of State for War, if he could give the numbers of dirigibles, either constructed or in the course of construction, by Germany. Mr Haldane replied that seven dirigible airships had been built, and another five were under construction, with more than £100,000 being earmarked specifically for the craft in 1908. Mr Horatio Myer (MP for Lambeth North) followed up by asking Haldane: ‘Will the honourable gentleman, in any report he may circulate, tell us about a certain dirigible supposed to be hovering about our coast?’ This question was greeted with laughter, and no reply was received.

  And there the sightings of mystery airships over Britain ended as abruptly as they had begun. Most of the local and the serious national press appeared to have tired of the stories, and even spurned them. The Yarmouth Mercury commented that, since the first ‘flittings of a mysterious airship over the eastern Counties at night time … the halfpenny London press, hungry for sensation, have worked up a very fair scare.’

  This climate of fear was revisited in October that same year by the twenty-minute film Der Luftkrieg der Zukunft, also entitled The Battle of the Clouds, directed by Walter R. Booth, in which a squadron of airships conduct a bombing raid upon Britain, firing a town with incendiary bombs, wreak havoc in the countryside and bring down an aeroplane which had tried to shoot one of the airships down, and are only foiled by the launch of a missile that had only recently been perfected by a jobbing inventor. The Battle of the Clouds is now regarded by many to be the very first film of the science fiction genre.

  Many of the questions raised by these mystery airship sightings still remain, over 100 years later, and those from 1909, before the Channel had been officially crossed by any flying machine, are by far the most enigmatic. No evidence has yet been uncovered, in the German archives or from British Intelligence, to prove that covert missions had been undertaken by Zeppelins over Britain under the cloak of darkness in 1909. So, what did the people see? It is clear that far more people saw the airships and lights than just those who gave their names and stories to the newspapers. Could all these witnesses really have been mistaken, or deluded? Perhaps Britain had been gripped by a mass panic or, tantalisingly, was there more to the mystery ‘scare ships’ seen over Britain in those spring skies of 1909?

  Whether Zeppelins made their appearance over Britain before this time or not, fears of offensive attacks by aircraft had already been voiced in government circles. As a result, in 1908 Prime Minister Herbert Asquith had approved the formation of an Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and an Aerial Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence to investigate the matter. Both committees were composed of politicians and officers selected from the navy and the army.

  Then there was the Aerial Navigation Act 1911, passed when Winston Churchill was Home Secretary, which allowed prohibition orders to be issued over certain areas for certain events or occasions. For example, one of the first orders issued under the Act prohibited the navigation of aircraft of every description over any place within 4 miles of Norwich during King George V’s visit to the city for the annual Norfolk Agricultural Association Show there on 28 June 1911. The problem was the Act had no teeth; admittedly the punishment for such an infringement was a hefty £200 fine or imprisonment for six months (or both) for aviators caught flying over a prohibited area, but it did not outline guidelines for a military reaction to such a situation. Such guidelines only came in January 1913, after a new flurry of sightings of ‘scare ships’ across Britain – in Yorkshire, Norfolk, Kent, and Wales, among other places – in 1912, when the Aerial Navigation Bill, to amend the 1911 Act, was introduced to the House of Commons by Colonel John Seely, Secretary for War. This gave the Secretary of State powers to prohibit aircraft from flying over certain areas, which could include the whole of the coastline and the ‘territorial waters adjacent thereto’ (i.e. within three miles of the coast) and, significantly, if an aircraft flew over a proscribed area or failed to comply with the landing conditions a signal was to be given by ‘the officer designated for the purpose’. If the aircraft still failed to comply it would ‘be lawful for the officer to fire at or into such aircraft and to use any and every other means necessary to compel compliance’.

  By 1913 Churchill had been appointed First Lord of the Admiralty and was only too aware of the threat that aerial warfare could present in any future war. He had already created an Air Department within the Admiralty in 1912 and had appointed Captain Murray Sueter as director to oversee the creation of a new branch – The Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS). Churchill actively involved himself in the debates on how to counter the Zeppelin menace, producing the Admiralty report Aerial Defence, published in January 1913. He believed that our aeroplanes could potentially deal with Zeppelins in the air if we had enough of them; that rifle fire from a battalion of troops could be effective in keeping an offensive airship high enough that it would have difficulty aiming its bombs; and he raised questions about how fast British Howitzers could be deployed in an anti-aircraft role. On the outbreak of war Churchill proposed that Zeppelins should be attacked on the ground when they were vulnerable and suggested that a pre-emptive strike on the Zeppelin sheds would reduce or remove the possibility of air raids on Britain.

  Features appeared during the opening weeks of the war in newspapers and magazines with such alarmist titles as ‘The Zeppelin Menace’ or ‘How Zeppelins might Threaten Great Britain and Ireland’, which included illustrations of maps with overlays showing the range of Zeppelins.

  Britain suffered the first direct attacks upon its soil in modern warfare before the end of 1914. Bombardments by scouting groups of the Imperial German Navy were carried out first on Great Yarmouth and Gorleston, on 3 November 1914 – the shells fell short of the shore there, but the bombardments of Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby, on 16 December 1914, resulted in 137 fatalities and left 592 injured, most of whom were civilians. A total of three bombs had also been dropped by lone German aeroplanes; the first falling on Dover on 24 December, the next two on Cliffe, in Kent, on Christmas Day.

  The media hype was growing, and hit its apogee when the first air raids were actually carried out by these long shadowy monsters, on the night of 19 January 1915. Zeppelins had been well established in the minds of the British populace as a terror weapon that rained death from the skies. In the wake of the raid, a barrage of press coverage was unleashed, proclaiming the attack an outrage and branding the Zeppelins as aerial ‘baby-killers’ (although no babies were actually killed in England during the first raid). Further scaremongering, and even fear of collaborators guiding the Zeppelins from the ground with lights and motor cars, ensued.

  Fears of panic, and the effect of these and any further raids on morale, led the government to take stringent measures to minimise or censor the reportage of most future air raids. Formal action was taken after the Harwich Garrison Commander, Brigadier General C. Reginald Buckle, wrote a detailed formal complaint to his superior, the Lieutenant General Sir Charles Wollcombe, Commander-in-Chief, Eastern Command on 30 April 1915. After suffering an air raid the press had reported that his military installation had been attacked and that the Germans had intercepted the information, he added. ‘I deem the matter one of urgency and as no useful purpose is served by the publication of these facts, and possibly very much damage may be done thereby, I suggest that steps should be taken to terminate it forthwith.’1

  General Staff Colonel Arthur Warre Elles forwarded the letter to Horse Guards for Commander-in-Chief, Eastern Command, adding ‘The ge
neral public is really not interested in exact details of time of attack and route of the hostile craft. The local people are in possession of the information at first-hand, and do not need to be informed by the press.’2

  Military Intelligence had already considered the question and concluded that ‘press reports are no real help to the enemy’3 but the characterful General William Sefton Branker, Director of Military Aeronautics, stated that although he did not consider the press reportage much help to enemy intelligence:

  I see no harm in preventing carefully worked out itineraries appearing in the press; their suppression will give the Iron Cross hunters of substantiating their claims of having bombarded a fortress and obtaining their coveted distinction; but any attempt at complete suppression will surely give rise to all sorts of disquieting rumours and demands for the truth.4

  As a result, a ‘D-Notice’ was issued on 1 June 1915.

  The D-Notice scheme, introduced in 1912, was run as a voluntary system by a joint committee headed by an Assistant Secretary of the War Office and a representative of the Press Association whereby the request was only advisory and as such was not legally enforceable. News editors could choose not to abide by a D-Notice, but it was very rare such a request from such an authority was not complied with and if it was breached the displeasure of the War Office would be sent in letter form and an explanation requested from the editor. The wording was simple:

  In the public interest and to prevent the publication of information useful to the enemy, it has been decided nothing may appear in the Press in regard to raids by enemy aircraft except the official statements issued by the Government. Newspapers which advertise Insurance against air risks should take care to avoid publication of addresses of claimants or other details which would indirectly afford information of places attacked. The publication of photographs illustrating damage done by enemy bombs is prohibited.