Guttman - Zeppelin vs British Home Defence 191518

Britains first inkling that the English Channel was no longer the watery barrier it had been in ages past came on 17 January 1785, when Jean-Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries flew across it in a hydrogen balloon. In that same year, Lt Jean Baptiste Meusnier of the French Corps of Engineers conceptualized an elliptical gasbag using hand-cranked propellers for both propulsion and steering, although he could not raise the funds to realize it. That would have to wait until 9 August 1884, when French Capitaines Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs unveiled the first successful airship, a streamlined hydrogen envelope with an electric motor running a four-bladed airscrew that propelled it at up to 15mph for 23 minutes. In the early 1900s, Alberto Santos-Dumont perfected a steerable airship using a gasoline engine, which he flew all around Paris.

On 2 July 1900, Germany grandly outdid them all as Luftschiff Zeppelin LZ.1, a rigid hydrogen airship incorporating an aluminium-zinc alloy framework 420ft long and 38ft in diameter, and powered by two 14hp Daimler engines, rose above Lake Constance, culminating ten years of obsessed experimentation by its creator, Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin. His achievement would be emulated in 1905 by August von Parsevals keeled semi-rigid airship and in 1909 by SL.1, the first of a series of rigid airships using a wire-braced wooden framework devised by the Schtte-Lanz Luftschiffsbau.

At last freed of its tether, the airship could carry passengers and cargo anywhere within the range of its fuel supply. Whether its inventors approved or not, the airships military application swiftly followed, as the balloons ability to spy on enemy forces, utilized since 1794, could now be self-projected deep into his territory.

After 1903, that potential would be challenged by the emergence of another innovation the heavier-than-air craft. Both airship and aeroplane would undergo a spurt of rapid development in World War I, largely because it pitted them against each other. The prospect of aerial attack had been anticipated as early as 1899, when The Hague Declaration prohibited future combatants from launching projectiles from balloons or other kinds of aerial vessels. Although 44 nations signed it then, only 27 of them signed the renewal in 1907, one of the abstainers being Germany.

In 1908, Britain began planning for aerial attack a prospect made even more plausible on 25 July 1909, when Louis Blriot flew his monoplane across the Channel. By 1910, the British had added 3in and 4in artillery and 1-pounder pom-pom guns, capable of being directed skyward from makeshift high-angle platforms or from trucks, to its defences.

Zeppelin airship LZ.1 makes its first ascent over Lake Constance on 2 July 1900. (Library of Congress)

On 4 August 1914, the Deutsches Heer (Imperial German Army) marched into Belgium, and Britain, sworn by treaty to safeguard Belgian neutrality, declared war. In the face of continuing Belgian resistance, the Germans committed bloody depredations that fed an Allied propaganda campaign representing them as scourges of civilization Huns, as the British called them. Those atrocities included a bombing raid on the fortress town of Lige by army Zeppelin Z.VI on 6 August, killing nine civilians, and night attacks on Antwerp on 25 August and 2 September.

As early as August 1914, Konteradmiral Paul Behncke, deputy chief of the German naval staff, proposed bombing Britain. He was supported by Grossadmiral Alfred von Tirpitz, who wrote, The measure of success will lie not only in the injury which will be caused to the enemy but also by the significant effect it will have in diminishing the enemys determination to prosecute the war. Kaiser Wilhelm II balked on approving the plan until 7 January 1915, and even then forbade attacks on London, lest they endanger his relatives in the Royal Family.

On the night of 19 January 1915, naval Zeppelins L.6, L.3 and L.4 left Fuhlsbttel and Nordholz to cross the North Sea. L.6 had to turn back, but L.3 dropped nine high-explosive bombs on Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, while L.4s incendiaries fell on Kings Lynn and other Norfolk villages. The first airship raid on English soil caused two fatalities and 13 injuries, but minimal damage and none to a military target. Nevertheless, four months before Italy entered the war, and long before its General Giulio Douhet publicly aired his theories on how the aerial bombing of enemy industries, resources and civilians could win wars, Germany set the precedent for a succession of raids on British cities, including the capital, London.

Although the material damage the Zeppelins did and usually would do in future was modest, the very arbitrary nature of the civilian casualties their bombs inflicted raised public outcries for the government to do something. That in turn spurred the British to develop an air defence system that would ultimately incorporate searchlights, anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) and specially modified aeroplanes. It also compelled both the British Army and Royal Navy to divert at least some of their aerial assets from the Western Front to Home Defence. In that respect, the Zeppelin menace constituted the first terror campaign to be waged from the air. Moreover, between the morale factor, the occasional damage done and the resources diverted to countering them, the Zeppelins can also lay claim to being historys first strategic bombers.

LZ.5, which was adopted by the Deutsches Heer as Z.II, shown at Limburg in October 1910. (Greg VanWyngarden)

The irony to that distinction lies in the fact that giant airships swiftly proved to be grossly inefficient, hazardous and vulnerable vehicles for the task. By the end of 1916, British Home Defence had developed to a point whereby the terror went both ways, for while Britons wondered whether the next bomb falling in the night might have their names on it, Zeppelin crews crossed the Channel with a nagging qualm as to whether this latest sortie would be their last.

The Deutsches Heer crew of Z.IX (LZ.25), which reconnoitered and bombed its way over Belgium and northern France including dropping nine bombs on Antwerp on 25 August 1914, killing 26 people and damaging the royal palace. Retribution came swiftly on 8 October, when Flt Lt Reginald Marix in a Sopwith Tabloid bombed and destroyed the airship in its shed at Dsseldorf. (Greg VanWyngarden)

All in all, it was a unique air war, but one from which lessons would be learned that would be reapplied to bombing campaigns in the future the sort that would pit aeroplane against aeroplane.