A commemorative bronze medal struck by the German artist Karl Goetz shows shipwrecked men appealing for help from a distant steamer beneath a setting sun. The reverse records the date for this event, 2nd February 1916, and a legend that translates as: ‘Cursed be the Britons at sea, cursed be their bad conscience. Shipwrecked people seeking help were left to sink’.[1] Above and below the legend are the eye of providence and the scales of justice. The figure L19 can just be made out inside the sun’s orb on the obverse, a reference to the name of the unfortunate vessel, which a closer inspection reveals to be not an upturned warship but a downed airship. Goetz’s medal unequivocally accuses British seamen of an act of unchristian inhumanity, but what were the true circumstances surrounding the incident and were the seamen’s actions at all justified?
The event depicted on medal took place arguably at the height of the German zeppelin offensive against Great Britain. Initial raids, which had commenced in January of the previous year, had concentrated on soft targets along the east coast of England such as Great Yarmouth and Southend on Sea. To begin with, the Kaiser refused to sanction zeppelin attacks on London, anxious to avoid killing his royal relatives, choosing instead to hit the French capital. London remained off-limits until the end of May 1915, thereafter becoming the primary target. One of the most injurious and costly zeppelin raids occurred there on the nights of the 8th and 9th September, during which more than 20 Londoners were killed, almost hundred wounded, and an estimated half a million pounds of damage inflicted in the heart of the British capital.
The January 31st raid, from which the L19 was returning when it crashed, was undoubtedly the most ambitious to date. A total of nine zeppelins set off from bases in Lower Saxony and, in L19’s case Tondern, on the Danish-German border, with orders to bomb Liverpool Docks. Pre-war zeppelins had lacked the range for England’s industrial heartlands, but that changed with the introduction of the P-Class in the second half of 1915. Owing to their increased size and improved engines, P-Class zeppelins achieved unprecedented performance, with a top speed of 60mph and a maximum ceiling above 9,000ft. Their payload of 3,500lbs was a significant weight increase over earlier designs, while their maximum range of 2,500 miles meant that for the first time all of England fell theoretically within range.
However, in practice all zeppelin crews had to contend with the problems of weather, navigation and engine malfunction. Strong winds or poor visibility aborted many planned missions, and operations were generally suspended during the colder months. Navigation, already subject to the inaccuracies of ‘dead reckoning’ was further hampered by the necessity of conducting raids on moonless nights. Moreover, the drive for greater engine performance had its side-effects in reduced reliability.
Owing to such difficulties, the 31st January raid did not achieve its stated aim. The attackers, led by Kapitanleutnant Max Dietrich in the L21, lost their way over England’s blacked out hinterland after crossing the Norfolk coast in the early evening. A strong southerly wind drove Dietrich’s dirigible more than 100km to the southeast of Merseyside, causing him to mistakenly release his payload over the West Midlands. Among the small Staffordshire towns unwittingly targeted by L21 and the other airships were Tipton, Bradley, Burton, Wednesbury and Walsall.
Reaching the English coast later than the other raiders owing to engine trouble, Kapitanleutnant Loewe of the L19 experienced similar navigational confusion. Evidently mistaking the River Trent for the Mersey, Loewe unloaded his first bombs over Burton towards 11pm. Perhaps guided by the fires started by previous zeppelin incendiaries, Loewe dropped the rest of his payload over the same Black Country settlements. Apart from some unfortunate livestock, it appears that no deaths resulted directly from L19’s activities. The raid itself, however, which amounted to around 380 High Explosive and incendiary devices, led to the deaths of up to 70 civilians and injuries to more than 100 others.
The zeppelin bombing of Britain marked the first time in history that civilians had been attacked from the sky. Prior to the Great War, the notion was a science fiction one, prophesised by H.G. Wells in his 1907 publication War in the Air. The British public were so ignorant of the potential danger that early raids had been met with a measure of curiosity and awe. The writer D.H. Lawrence articulated the spell-binding impression these huge dirigibles, illuminated by the searchlights below, made on those on the ground when he wrote ‘that the moon is not Queen of the sky… the Zeppelin is the zenith of the night’. However, the utterly random nature of death dealt by these machines soon provoked much darker emotions; terror and anger.
Terror was precisely what the German high command was aiming for. It was naively believed in Berlin that British morale could be so reduced by air attacks that the government would be forced to sue for peace. By the start of 1915, it was already clear that the planned-for swift German victory envisaged by the Schlieffen Plan would not materialise. The strategic bombing of mainland Britain offered the opportunity to carry the war from the trenches of Belgium to ‘the sod of England’. But the hoped-for psychological effect on the British public was not one of weakened resolve but rather defiance. Army enlistment in Staffordshire was reported to have increased significantly after the January 31st raid, spurred on by recruitment posters that claimed it was far better to ‘face the bullets’ on the battlefield than be murdered in one’s bed.
At least some of the public anger was aimed at its own government. At the time of L19’s demise, the British had been struggling to find a way to combat a seemingly invulnerable weapon. In November 1914, the Royal Navy had launched a pre-emptive seaplane attack on the main zeppelin base at Cuxhaven in Lower Saxony without much success. Targeting German airships on the ground would remain the only way to destroy them up until the middle of 1916. This was because early fighter aircraft could not attain the necessary ceiling and because their existing weaponry was not able to ignite a zeppelin’s hydrogen-filled envelope. Anti-Aircraft guns were hastily introduced but were largely ineffective for the same reason, and exploding shells could cause harm to civilians when they fell to earth as shrapnel.
It wasn’t until June 1916 that a zeppelin was successfully brought down by air attack. British pilot Reginald Warneford destroyed L37 over the Belgian city of Ghent by dropping bombs onto the airship’s envelope after a prolonged and determined effort to reach the necessary altitude. And the British public had to wait until September of the same year before a zeppelin was destroyed over the skies of England by an aircraft fitted with specialist incendiary bullets, a scene of fiery destruction that was met with jubilation below. Until that point in time, the impunity with which zeppelins bombed England was understandably the source of considerable public ire.
Nevertheless, the British public reserved most of its scorn for the enemy. Although newspapers were forbidden to report the exact location of attacks for fear of aiding German spies, the human toll of such raids spread anecdotally. Hearing of the families killed during the raid would have raised strong emotions whether learned from the newspaper of over the garden fence. Indeed, German-sounding businesses and tradesmen were often the unfortunate targets of reprisals in towns where initial attacks were made.
Such vengeful sentiments were stoked by an uber-patriotic press, keen to fill gaps in its knowledge about the real war with whatever tales were prevalent on the street; usually involving rape, torture and mutilation. As early as December 1914, the Daily Express was running cartoons depicting the enemy as ‘baby-killers’. Other news reports referred to the Germans as ‘baby slayers’ and ‘baby butchers’. In the autumn of 1915, stories of German atrocities on the Western Front, though in many cases fabricated, were given official recognition with the publication of the Bryce Report.
The myth of the so-called ‘bestial Hun’ propagated by the British press was not without factual foundation. Indeed, keen to end the war as swiftly as possible and mindful of the activities of French partisans during the previous Franco-Prussian War, the German High Command had adopted a policy of Schreklichkeit or ‘frightfulness’. Such a policy called for war to be waged ‘more recklessly, less scrupulously, more violently and more ruthlessly than in the past’. The execution of this policy had been evident in the unlawful killing of up to 5,000 Belgian civilians during the opening phases of the war. This same edict was seemingly embraced by Peter Strasser, the head of the German Zeppelin fleet, who claimed that ‘modern warfare is total warfare’ and that ‘there is no such animal as a non-combatant.’ To many Germans, bombing civilians was little different to starving them wholesale through the British blockade, but according to the British establishment, press and politicians alike, aerial warfare was a prime example of ‘technological advancement being bastardised and forced to serve the bestial motives of the Hun.’
Aware of their infamy among the British citizenry, zeppelin crews anticipated no mercy should they be forced to land on English soil. This may explain in part why in spite of serious mechanical problems with three of his airship’s four engines, Loewe did not abort his return journey over land and instead made doggedly for the distant German coast. In spite of losing three of its four engines, L19 had almost reached the Frisian Islands to the west of the German North Sea coast by the early hours of 2nd February, but the neutral Dutch had orders to prevent any incursion by foreign aircraft, and its approach there was met with a hail of rifle fire that appears to have further weakened the dirigible’s buoyancy. Without power, leaking gas and blown back out to sea by an offshore wind, L19 went down on a dark winter sea about 40 miles off the Dutch island of Ameland.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 