ACHTUNG ZEPPELIN! III: ACHTUNGIER

BTW these bullets are coming at you in a muddy hellscape

British Zeppelin Defenses: Gentlemen with Carbines

If you've read up until this point, you may find it a bit strange that the British have been entirely ineffective against giant flying bags of explosive gas. There's a few reasons for this. This was, of course, the first time anybody had considered how to defend an entire nation against an aerial attacker, so everything was new and unknown. Also, as in WW2, home defense was the last priority for resources, and thus the early defenders often had little training and obsolete equipment. I thought I'd touch on the British defenders, both for story's sake, and because a lot of the early efforts definitely could be described as aeronautical insanity.

The British were sufficiently concerned with Zeppelins pre-war that the Committee of Imperial Defense had a high level conference meeting in 1908. Here are the conclusions of that meeting:

1. It is possible that further airship developments could lead to Zeppelins capable of bombing the British Isles.

2. “There appears to be no necessity for the Government to continue experiments with aeroplanes.”

3. The use of airships as a way to land troops, contrary to hysterical newspaper reports of the time, is silly.

4. Because bombing of vital facilities is a threat, we should develop our own rigid airships to intercept enemy airships.

While the committee grasped the basic facts, it's analysis about what to do about Zeppelin was a bit off.

Fast forward to the declaration of war. Because the British Army was entirely engaged on the continent, air defense of Britain fell to the Royal Navy. The initial resources for home front defense were...not great. A handful of aircraft not wanted at the front line - the best of which was the Vickers Gunbus, (a name for some reason not considered for the Eurofighter,) and equipment left over from the Boer war: pom-pom guns and acetylene spotlights. After the first Zeppelin Raid in 1915, trucks with Maxim guns patrolled the countryside. Most of this activity was as much for soothing the worries of the public as much as any sort of effective military action. The first Sea Lord, one Winston Churchill, would find himself repeating this tactic in 1940.

A weird wrinkle in British thinking was to hold back defenses. The British knew that Zeppelins would not be set alight with conventional ammo. At the same time, they thought incendiary machine gun bullets (which didn't exist at the time) would also be ineffective. They assumed that the Germans would surround the lifting cells with an inert gas, one that would extinguish any flame. (Not a bad idea, really, if only the Germans could find some Helium.) Thus, the only way for a airplane to kill a Zeppelin would be to climb above the airship and drop bombs upon it. Because Zeppelins were always better at climbing compared to airplanes of the day, that meant intercepting aircraft found it almost impossible to get into position.While resources were few at the start of the war, some attempt was made to come up with better Zeppelin-killing ideas. Something called the 'flaming grapnel' was deployed, a grappling hook on the end of a long rope packed with explosives, which would presumably hook onto the fuselage of an attacking airship. London was initially defended by airplanes with pilots armed with Boer war era breech loading carbines, which fired .45 incendiary ammo. Presumably they drank with Sir Winston, who could possibly explain why these guys were being used when machine gun incendiaries were supposed to be hopeless.

The most effective defense against airship raids throughout the war were policy decisions. In addition to the information blackout, mentioned last time, a literal blackout was coordinated wherever intelligence got warning that the Zeppelins were flying. Since this denied Zeppelins the only easy navigation fix in the black of night, this was to lead to some very lost Zeppelin crews. The British intelligence services also helped. Zeppelins when off raiding would radio HQ that they were scouting “far west, with only the merchant marine codebook.” The British had quite a bit of luck breaking German naval codes, and this signal was a clear a warning as any that the airships were a'raidin'. Mr. Churchill also organized many a offensive raid against the Zeppelins. Several times a naval force either attempted to attack the sheds at Nordholz itself, or tried to lure Zeppelins into the air to shoot them down with either float planes or sea planes. These were all failures. At the critical moment the sea was too rough, or mechanical problems rendered the airplanes useless. The last time this happened it soured the Navy entirely on airplanes for a year or so, and these sorts of raids only started again in 1917.

To get back to were we left off, in June 1915, one more thing Churchill did was dispatch a motley collection of fliers to Dunkirk, with orders to harass the Zeppelins if possible, but at any rate deny the enemy airspace. Despite the ad hoc nature of the enterprise, it was not long before this particular improvisation found success. On June 6th, (to get back to a thread from last time) there was a raid on England involving three Army and one Naval Zeppelin. The Navy airship bombed Hull, while All three Army ships (LZ 37-39) found bad weather over England, and returned to Belgium. That Night, the Dunkirk squadron struck. They bombed LZ 38, the first London raider in her shed, destroying her. A Flight Sub-Lieutenant Warneford encountered LZ 37 the same night as she was returning to base. Making a break for home, LZ 37 engaged Warneford with machine gun fire. Despite this, Warneford managed to get above her and drop his bombs. LZ 37 burst into flames (unfortunately crashing on a convent), the first Zeppelin to be shot down by airplane. Warneford was decorated with the Victoria Cross for this, and became an instant Hero. Sadly, he didn't have much time to savor the attention, as he was killed in a airplane crash just 10 days later. This incident was slightly unfortunate, too, for the British, for it seemed to strengthen the whole “the only way to kill them is to bomb them” argument. This also saw the end of the (recently completed) Belgian sheds being used for anything but emergencies by airship crews.

These twin victories over the Zeppelins were welcomed by the military and the public alike, and did something to assuage the anger the public felt over the raids. Ever since they started, the public reacted to them not as an act of war but as something like we'd view a terrorist attack today.

 Squadron Attacks on London

So while defenses were being worked on, the British had yet to put much real effort into it. The Airship men, however, were not complacent. They were building up a fleet of P class airships, so that when the time came to return to London, they could do so in numbers. They did return to try and attack London several times, but to make a long story short, these initial raids did nothing. On the first of these failed raids on August 10th, L 12 was passing over Dover out to sea when an anti-aircraft gunner placed a shot right in L 12's posterior. Several gas cells developed leaks, and it was not long before some of them were entirely empty. The airship began to sink by the stern. Overboard went ballast, spare parts, machine guns, provisions, and eventually the ship's radio, when it became clear that they couldn't even make Belgium. L 12's stern then settled on the foggy waters of the channel. At daybreak, L 12 was found by a German torpedo boat, and towed into the port of Zeebrugge. There the L 12 was dismantled, but not before the plucky Brits in Dunkirk tried to destroy the airship twice. These raids failed, mainly because of stiff AA defenses. The other story worth sharing from this early series of bombing turnip fields is the hair-raising return flight of L 11 from one of these raids. Just before midnight L 11 was still far out at sea, and the captain, Von Buttlar could see several severe thunderstorms. One was around Amsterdam to the south, and the other was due East. Altering course north to avoid them, he then realized that both storms were moving out to sea, and not inland. Around 2 AM, L 11 was engulfed by both these storms coming together over the Dogger Bank. Through the boiling clouds and torrential rain, L 11 was tossed violently up and down, sometimes only 1000 feet off of the water, sometimes approaching her pressure height of 6000 feet. Lightning flashed constantly between the clouds, charging the air with electricity. Von Buttlar sent his executive officer to the top platform to help conn the ship, who reported St. Elmo's fire 'a foot long' burned on the machine gun sights, and the heads of the lookouts were sheathed in ghostly blue flame, the fire being attracted to the wires in the caps. In the control car, Von Buttlar could summon bluish flame from his fingertips by holding his hand out the window. These are unsettling things to observe when being held aloft by a million cubic feet of hydrogen. L 11 fortunately made it back to base by not exceeding her pressure height.

A few weeks later, L 10 would be destroyed in the same circumstances, though not before becoming the first Naval Airship to bomb London. On August 17th, L10 under a Captain Wenke made landfall where the captain had been aiming for, and by following the clues left by lighted villages and towns, managed to find the capital. Dropping his bombs on the northeast suburbs of Leyton and Wanstead Flats, Wenke thought he was over the center of the city, for reasons that remain mysterious. The total damage was 10 dead, 47 injured, with a railway station partially wrecked. Two weeks later, L 10 encountered a thunderstorm near Nordholz and fell burning into the sea. Ground crew in Nordholz awaiting her return saw the flash of the fatal explosion. A postmortem revealed that her pressure valves were open, possibly due to a sudden low-pressure zone. L 10's crew and her captain, Kptlt. Hirsch, were the first Naval airship crew to perish during the war.

A German postcard inaccurately depicting L 10's raid.

The next successful raid on London was the Army. LZ 74 and the rebuilt SL 2 scattered explosives and incendiaries all over the city. While 18 were killed and 28 injured, damage was minor, despite that SL 2 started bombing over the docklands (when they actually were docklands.) Strasser, not to be outdone, sent a force of four Zeppelins against Britain the next night. L 11, L 13, and L 14 were to bomb London, but only L 13 actually made it. L 9 was given a special assignment: bomb the benzol works at Skinningrove in North Yorkshire. (Since first publishing this, somebody has kindly told me what benzol is: because Germany and Britain had little in the way of oil supplies, both nations refined coal tar into benzol to stretch those resources further. It was also a way to manufacture TNT.) Captain Lowe made a painstaking search of the general area, correctly identifying three nearby towns, but couldn't see the plant itself. In desperation, he laid a string of bombs down where he thought the plant should be. Though Lowe didn't realize it, he had been right on target, and only by sheer dumb luck that he didn't see the entire plant destroyed:

 “One incendiary bomb made a direct hit on the benzol house, but it failed to penetrate the concrete. Another, a high explosive bomb, fell within ten feet of it...but failed to damage the benzol house. Had the bomb hit this or the tanks, which held 45,000 gallons of benzol, not much of the plant would have survived. The works had another extraordinary escape, as a bomb which made a direct hit on the T.N.T. store failed to explode.” [Emphasis mine.]

 L 13 that night was commanded by Mathy, and he had better luck. Navigating by brightly lit towns and canals, he found London lit up as in peacetime. Approaching from the NW at 8,500 ft, the night was clear enough that Mathy could navigate to the center of the city based on his memories visiting London in Pre-war times with his wife. L 13 carried one 660 lb bomb, which was dropped on Bartholomew close leaving a crater 8 ft deep and impressing Mathy far above: “The explosive effect of the 300 kg bomb must have been very great, since a whole cluster of lights vanished around the crater.” Bombs were scattered elsewhere over London, but Mathy had a very specific target in mind for the main effort. 

North of St. Paul's cathedral was London's soft goods quarter, and it's here where L 13 unloaded most of her bombs and incendiaries. This started an enormous fire which did great damage. AA guns around London were all firing on L 13 at this point, but as the official statement records with some restraint: “ideas both to the height and size of the airship appear to be somewhat wild.” The Pom poms in particular did more harm then good, as the shells only exploded on impact, and thus ended up exploding on London. Mathy was also tracked off and on by about 20 searchlights, which he evaded by climbing to 11, 200 feet. The toll at the end of the night was 26 killed, 94 injured, with a staggering 534,287 pounds of damage done. This was almost entirely the soft goods fire. It was not only the single most destructive raid of the war; L 13 in one night did 1/6th of all the damage done (in monetary terms) in raids on Britain during World War 1.

The experience from the street of this raid was all the more galling to the average Londoner, as L 13 was visible for almost the entire raid. “As seen from below, the airship gave an impression of absolute calm and absence of hurry” one witness reported. With the public, the press, and now the politicians agitating for new action, one Sir Percy Scott was recalled from retirement to coordinate London defenses. He began training gun crews professionally, ordered new, much larger guns from France, established new airfields outside London, and established a network of aircraft observers, linked to the war ministry by telephone. Fortunately, it would be a month before the Zeppelins would visit again, so this work had a good start by the time airships returned.

On the Kraut end of the stick, the raid was met by jubilation by Germany, and especially by the Navy, who really needed something to be proud about. The navy was understandably eager to follow up the success, and directed Strasser to next bomb Liverpool, to interrupt delivery of munitions from the USA. As it turned out, conditions were against this, so on October 13, London was raided again. About this time a new navigation aid for airships came online: a radio beacon system. Two transmitters, (one in Belgium, the other in Germany) could be radioed from the airship. The transmitters would then check the apparent angle of the transmission, and then radio back the track of the transmission. Then, a lost airship could triangulate their position...at least that was the idea. In practice, thanks to the 'airplane effect' and 'night effect' hitherto unknown, the directions given by the station were often contradictory, or wildly inaccurate.

Anyway, the night of the 13th: Five ships started out, (L 11, L 13, L 14, L 15, and L 16) and five ships for the first time made it to England. L 13 to 16 were within sight of each other off the coast, and Mathy, in L 13 ordered all ships to attack from the east and escape to the northwest to keep collision dangers down. Only L 11 was to miss the first combined raid; lagging somewhat behind, Von Buttlar got extremely lost, bombed some villages he found, and then returned home. The ship that shone that night was L 15. Captain Breithaupt was on his first raid over Britain, but manged to find London with little trouble. On his approach he was fired upon by a mobile gun. He released some explosives in retaliation, and manged to knock the gun-crew over with his counter-fire, wrecking the truck they were firing from. After this, he dropped all ballast, rose to 8000 ft, and went all ahead flank toward the center of London. As it happened, Parliament was up late, debating an emergency taxation measure. When the raid started, the commons adjourned to watch the air attack:

“For a few minutes the airship, crossing the Thames on a northeasterly course and passing almost directly over New Palace Yard, was then played upon by two searchlights, and in their radiance she looked a thing of silvery beauty sailing serenely through the night, indifferent to the big gun roaring at her from the Green Park, who's shells seemed to burst just below her.”

 Up above, the view was not bad either. Breithaupt was to report:

 “The picture we saw was indescribably beautiful – shrapnel bursting all around (though rather uncomfortably near us), our own bombs bursting, and the flashes from the anti-aircraft batteries below. On either hand the other airships, which, like us, were caught in the rays of searchlights, were clearly recognizable. And over us the starlit sky!”

L 15 held her bombs until the really good targets could be aimed for. The first bombs were aimed at the Bank of England and the newspaper district, but fell on the theater district a few blocks over. The theater district was busy that night, and the attack caused considerable panic. In addition Grey's Inn was hit, and the national Mint just escaped damage. While this attack was happening, unbeknownst to L 15, a truck was racing below to get to a good firing position. Mounted on this truck's bed was a 75mm French AA auto-cannon, the first of the artillery Sir Scott had ordered. It's first shot misjudged L 15's height, but the resulting burst was close enough to alert Breithaupt that something new was firing at him. At the same time, lookouts reported aircraft at 3500 ft, easily making them out through the searchlights and the smokey trails they left behind. Departing the scene by climbing, L 15 was seen only by one of the pilots as she slipped heavenward. 18 years old at the time, it was the first notable event in the career of Sir John Slessor, who retired in 1952 chief of the air defense staff. (Given the spread between “chasing Zeppelins” and “new atomic jet bombers” you can kind of understand why people in the fifties predicted by 1975 we'd all be flying supersonic airliners.)

The rest of the raiders had mixed luck. Mathy had decided to bomb the water works at Hampton, got lost, and bombed some private houses. He then successfully bombed the Woolrich arsenal, which sounds like a cracking good thing to bomb, but did no damage. The other Zeppelins bombed residential suburbs in London, but one did manage to attack an Army camp overlooking the Thames. The first squadron raid only did a fraction of the monetary damage of the previous raid, but was the deadliest thus far: 71 killed and 128 injured.

This was a terrible toll, yet a squadron raid on London was not to be repeated for another year. If nothing else, the Airship raids were a morale embarrassment to the British, and now that a good stock of P class ships had been laid in, the Imperial Navy was determined to take the bombing Zeppelin show on tour. Striking at distant targets such as Manchester and Liverpool would, it was felt, would be the most devastating blow to British morale. And while it was an increasingly acute embarrassment to the war effort and the Government, the British people were not quaking in fear of Zeppelin attacks. Instead, (as it would twenty years later for both Britain and Germany) attacks on civilians bred anger, not fear. If anything, it increased resolve and strengthened solidarity with the people and government to continue the war. And the British were improving: for the first time, the airship raiders commented on the stiffened defenses that actually seemed to be threatening.

So the squadron raids, after an interesting start, were abandoned, at least on London. The rest of the UK was next.

A famous image of the L 15 on her London raid on October 13th. Later it was adapted for the Logo of the British Imperial War Museum.

The Zeppelins in World War One made something like 1000 naval Scouting missions, but I'm giving it the short shift. Naval reconnaissance by aircraft is pretty interesting in some ways, but in practice it's a lot of "flew over ocean; saw nothing" which is hard to work into a narrative. So...have this picture instead.

The Rotating shed at Nordholz. Like the floating hanger, it could be rotated into the wind to make herding a airship in and out of its hanger easier. Weighting some 4000 tons, the hanger could make a complete rotation in an hour.

L 12 under tow.

 

LZ 74 taking off - the people below give a good idea of scale.

ACHTUNG ZEPPELIN II: We All Float Up Here

Major (later Rear Admiral) Peter Strasser, air power advocate.

Last time, we ended on Peter Strasser, the new Commander of airships. In the year since his appointment, Strasser had worked hard, launching a crash training program for new airship crews. Using airships from DELAG and personnel from the Zeppelin company, he had managed to restart the training process that the L1 and L2 disasters had interrupted. He had also done quite a lot building up the Navy airship base at Nordholz. Still, he had quite a headwind when war was declared in August 1914. The Navy had precisely one airship in operation, L 3, and the Imperial army was using its political clout to take airship-related resources originally going to Strasser's force. While Strasser had one airship in service, the army had now eleven.

L 3, the lone Navy Zeppelin, going into a Hanger.

That headwind, however, was about to become a tailwind, and Strasser was soon to float over almost more resources than he knew what to do with. As to why this happened, we must return to the other point I left off with: the Kaiser's Navy was doomed to passivity.

(If you are just here for all the “Captain Strasser and the Sky-Masters of Nuremberg” stuff you can feel free to skip this next bit. It's a lot more, well...)

Captain Strasser and the Sky-Masters of Nuremberg Attend Meetings and Write Memos to Each Other

The reason why the Navy found itself rudderless now that war was declared is the fault of this man:

Kaiser Wilhelm II. Warning: not as competent as he looks.

  The Kaiser many years ago had embarked Germany on a costly arms race with Britain, building a mighty surface fleet to challenge the Royal Navy. This, historians agree, was a terrible idea, as you don't fight the enemy where they most want to be fought. By the time World War One arrived, the Germans had a fleet of battleships and dreadnoughts second to none – except the Royal Navy, who still greatly outnumbered them. To make matters worse, no one in the Naval high command had any idea what to do if war actually happened between Britain and Germany. This was also the Kaiser's fault. The head of both the Army and the Navy, the Kaiser was content to let the Army's brilliant set of staff officers do the real planning. With the Navy; in contrast, the Kaiser continually reserved all important decisions for himself, despite the fact that he didn't really have the intellect or the time to give them his full attention. The result was a service that was very well equipped, but one utterly without direction as to what to do if the storm-clouds over Europe actually broke into war.

Shortly after war was declared, the Kaiser set all things right by decreeing:

1. We should not risk our very valuable battleships.
2. We should send out small amounts of our less valuable ships to attack small patrols of the British navy, slowly wearing them down. We should also do a lot of mining.
3. Because both of these require lots of scouting, this means we need more airships. 

Somebody had evidently noticed that a cruiser took around 2 years to complete, while a Zeppelin only took six weeks. This meant that this new demand for scouting was to be met with airships. So, about a month into the conflict the airship building projects suddenly became a top national priority. This building project was also necessary because the Army had managed to burn through all but one of its Zeppelins in that month. They had been used for scouting, bombing, and (hang onto your hats, A-10 Warthog fans) close infantry support, which I think we all can agree is the worst conceivable use for a hydrogen airship. At any rate, all were destroyed or seriously damaged, save one.

A high officer on the Naval staff, Konteradmiral Behncke, had also launched a campaign to use the Zeppelins as a bomber against Britain. He met significant resistance from the Kaiser, of all people:
first on the basis that the war would be over presently anyway (to be strictly fair to die Kaiser, this was a belief held by everyone on both sides in the first month of so of war) and later, well, for less sound reasons. (Back to that in a minute.) As the war past the first month mark, the German Army retreated to the positions that would become the western front. The mood changed in Germany from euphoria to anxiety, both with the German public and with high command. Much Ire was directed at the British, who's forces were insturmental at defeating Germany at the battle of the Marne, and the idea of 'punishing that nation of shopkeepers' with airships suddenly became a popular cause in newspapers. This in turn made the Navy take the idea seriously. Weirdly, nether the Zeppelin company nor most of high command seem to have considered this idea before, even though the British had been demonstrating a keen anxiety about it for years. Still, some people were ontop of things: when the Navy requested from Strasser an assessment about the feasibility of the idea and potential targets, Strasser sent back a highly detailed report that same afternoon.

 Strasser also understood the politics of such a decision: whoever demonstrated the best ability to bomb Britain would gain enormous prestige, and consequently, most of the Zeppelin resources. The Army too, could see this, and immediately began breaking ground on two Zeppelin bases in occupied Belgium. If anybody was going to have control of this new technology, it would be the Imperial Army.

    The airship builders were caught off guard by this sudden demand. While new designs  for a million cubic-foot-plus still on the drawing boards, and the new factories and hangers still incomplete, it was agreed that ships of the L 2 and L 3 type (called the 'M' class) were an acceptable stopgap. While these new ships were being built, there was one more obstacle to deal with. The Kaiser still opposed the idea, even after the general staff came to agree on it. He was  reluctant to go along not on any legal or humanitarian grounds, of course. He was worried that Zeppelins might end up bombing historical landmarks or one of the many houses of his extended family; after all, Queen Victoria had been his grandmother. His worry about the personal property of his cousins meant that for awhile odd restrictions were placed on the Zeppelin crews. First, they could attack east of London, but not London itself. Then, they could attack  London, but only east of the Tower of London. Then, finally in June 1915,  bowing to public pressure, attacks on London generally were approved, though “royal palaces and monuments, such as St. Paul's Cathedral, were not to be attacked.”

"because god forbid my relations are personally affected by this war that will kill millions"

The first raid happened shortly after the Kaiser gave his permission for attacks in general, on January 9th, 1915. The Navy airship division had been reinforced with 4 new M class ships: the L 4 to L 8 now scouted the German Bight. These ships were substantially similar to the L 2 and 3, with some refinements. They still featured open gondolas (save a windscreen for the pilot), so for the bridge- crew it was like sailing the skies of the North Sea  in an aluminum fishing dory. They were armed with machine guns to fend off aircraft both in the gondolas, in a position on top of the ship, and often in the stern as well. (These positions must have given spectacular views, at the cost of being miserably cold.) The cruising speed was about 65 km/h, and they flew mostly between 3 and 6 thousand feet. Their endurance was already quite spectacular: they were capable of staying aloft nearly 30 hours at a stretch, which gave even these early Zeppelins the legs to fly from Nordholz, Germany to Britain and back again. Missions to attack Britain generally were staged during the 'attack phase' of the moon (8 days before and after the new moon) and interestingly, winter weather was preferable to summer. In addition to the extra darkness, cold air provides more lift than warm air, being more dense.

Upper Machine gun nest near the bow of the Zeppelin.

Airships going for a raid would generally leave around ten or eleven in the morning, which would give them all day to make the flight to Britain and arrive as it was getting dark. After darkness fell, the ship would then drop its bombs on anything that looked valuable, and then returned home, usually arriving at base in time for breakfast the next day. You may notice that 'anything that looked valuable' is pretty vague for a bombing mission, and that's because navigation was the greatest difficulty. Airships found that dead reckoning was useless over the North Sea, as the wind could push a Zeppelin far off course without the crew noticing. The ship's compass was held in a mixture of alcohol and water, but still frequently froze. Even sextants were often useless, as you need both a clear sky and a clear horizon line (or at least one with a very flat cloud band) two conditions that were difficult to obtain over the North Sea and Britain. Captains would intend to go to this or that general area, but the success or failure of this was determined by vagaries in weather, not to mention luck.

The static lift generated by the Hydrogen varied on temperature, barometric pressure, and (slightly) on humidity. To deal with this variance, airships were first 'weighed-off' before flight, IE put in a condition of neutral buoyancy. This was done by figuring the weight of everything onboard – including, presumably, weighing the men and all their supplies – and then balanced between the lift and the weight. Even with first world war technology, this was done so precisely that a man forward and a man aft could easily lift the entire airship when it was weighed off. As the Zeppelin flew, it grew lighter as fuel and bombs were used. Ballast was carried in rubberized canvas sacks along the keel that could be emptied if a ship needed extra lift. The engines could generate some lift as well, and adjusting   the ballast could give a Zeppelin a positive or negative angle while flying, depending on need.  In the final stages of the flight, Zeppelins could also vent gas to decrease lift. When getting back to the hanger, the weighing off process was repeated, to make manhandling the ship back into the hanger easier.

On a wing and a prayer

    Anyway: January 13th 1915. The first raid.

    Well, the first attempted raid: the entire fleet of 4 ships was dispatched, and the entire fleet immediately ran into a winter storm full of snow and freezing rain. Strasser threw in the towel at 2 PM and ordered the squadron back. On January 19th, the Navy tried again, sending L 3 and L 4 to raid the Humber, and sending L 6 to raid the Thames. Strasser himself rode in the L 6, but a engine crankshaft broke three hours in, and the decision was made to turn back. The other ships made it to England, and while it might have started a nice day in Germany, it was a dirty ol' winter night on the coast of England, filled with rain and snow. L 4 crossed a coastline, and the captain assumed he was at the mouth of the Humber river. Searching in the murk for the Humber industrial area, he descended to 800 feet, and in several separate incidents found himself fired upon. Dropping bombs in retaliation, he realized that he was not where he thought he was: the Captain guessed he was somewhere north of the Humber. Coming across a large lit town, and once again believing himself under fire, L 4 dropped the rest of her bombs, and then escaped out to sea, but not before radioing “Successfully bombed fortified places between the Tyne and the Humber.”

    The best luck of the night was had by the L 3, who not coincidentally also was the only ship to get a positive navigational fix. Descending through the clouds over the coast, L 3 let off several parachute flares, which allowed the Capetian to identify a particular lighthouse. The L 3 was just north of Great Yarmouth, a minor naval port and once of the places mentioned on Strasser's probable target list. Finding the town around 9:30, L 3 lit off another flare, and in the middle of a driving rain proceeded to attack the town. Even though the speed of L 3 was, ah, slow - and she was only at 3000 feet - L 3 didn't have any sort of bomb aiming device. Several likely targets were spotted (the town gas works and a drill square for reservists) but all were missed by L 3's bombs. L 3 then headed out over the sea. Both L 3 and 4 got back the next morning without further incident, despite the fact that during the night the freezing rain caused some 4400 pounds of ice to form on L 3's cover and outer rigging.

Clearly, the results were not earthshaking. But news of the raid was met with wild enthusiasm from the German public. Like the Doolittle raid, it didn't do much in practical terms, but was a hell of a morale booster.  Here's a newspaper editorial that I think conveys what people were saying.

“German warships have already bombarded English seaports, German airmen have dropped bombs on Dover and other places, and now the first Zeppelins have appeared in England and has extended its fiery greeting to the enemy. It has come to pass, that which the English have long feared and repeatedly contemplated with terror. The most modern air weapon, a triumph of German inventiveness and the sole possession of the German Army, has shown itself capable of crossing the sea and carrying the war to the soil of old England! […] An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, only in this way can we treat with England. This is the best way to shorten the war, and thereby in the end the most humane. Today we congratulate Count Zeppelin, that he has lived to see this day, and offer him the thanks of the nation, for having placed it in possession of so wonderful a weapon.”

The mood was somewhat different in Naval Headquarters, as admirals read British accounts, and discovered that the raid had succeeded in attacking only civilian targets. L 4 had been nearly eighty miles south-east of the Humber, and the 'fortified' positions turned out to be tiny villages, the substantial town turning out to be King's Lynn. Rather pointed memos also made mention that attacking defenseless civilians made Germany look bad in neutral countries, particularly the Netherlands and America.

    The German army production of the first raid was a bit different. If the Navy raid was a comedic satire about men groping in darkness and striking at enemies they didn't see clearly, the Army production was more Keystone Cops. On March rth, 1915, Kapitanleutnant Helmut Beelitz found his ship, the L 8, (a M class ship first earmarked for the Navy) in one of the army's forward sheds in Belgium. He had been ordered to return to the base in Dusseldorf, and Beelitz thought he could get there after raiding Britain. Loading up with incendiary devices, the L 8 set off to raid Mersea Island, south of Essex. L 8, thanks to a think overcast, had to descend occasionally to check where she was. The first time she did this she was over Bruges, the second, just west of Ostend. Also just west of Ostend was where the Belgian front lines came down to the sea, so when the L 8 descended below 1000 feet and fired recognition signals, she was riddled with rifle and machine gun fire.

    By dumping all bombs, ballast, and most of L 8's fuel, Beelitz managed to get the now badly leaking L 8 back into the clouds. Bypassing the Belgian bases, L 8 made for Dusseldorf, but 85 miles short her last bit of luck finally ran out. The port engine overheated due to lack of water, and the starboard engine broke down. With two of three engines gone, L 8 now lacked the thrust to to keep her (formerly) lighter than air frame aloft, and she slid stern first toward the ground. First, her stern got entangled in trees, and then L 8's bow swung sideways, hitting the same grove with enough force to throw the entire bridge crew out of the forward gondola. Between the trees and the wind, L 8 was reduced to scrap and cloth in about half an hour.

This set the tone for some time for Army Zeppelin operations. The Army attempted to raid England again on March 17th with three airships, but couldn't find England thanks to heavy mist. Z XII then used her cloud car to find and bomb Calais, but made a hard landing at base and was out for 2 weeks. On March 20th, three Army ships raided Paris but had one ship destroyed on the return journey. Once again, the Army was managing to burn through its hydrogen skyship supply rather quickly.

On April 14th, the Navy struck again. Captain Mathy took the new L 9 to scout the North Sea. Finding himself within 100 miles of Flamborough Head without sighting anything, he radioed for permission to raid England. Since the weather seemed unusually good, Strasser gave him liberty of action, and L 9 trawled off the coast, waiting for darkness to fall. Mathy, by the way, is a somewhat important character. Before a captain of a Destroyer, Mathy transferred to the airship service and became a close confidant of Strasser, as well as the most successful airship captain of the war. Think of him as the Otto Preminger of the late Victorian Zeppelin set.

Also, it must be said: one handsome son of a bitch.

With Mathy made landfall at 8:45 PM, quite pleased with himself with making Tynemouth. Actually, he was passing over Blyth, 9 miles to the south, and this mistake was to through Mathy's navigation out of whack. (It must be said that Mathy later would demonstrate an uncanny knack for finding his position, part of why he was so successful as an airship commander.) Mathy had also interrupted an open air recruitment drive in Blyth. The Times reported one of the speakers “had just been describing the barbarities which would follow a German invasion when the drone of an airship engines was heard. 'Here they come,' he exclaimed.” Mathy, having done his bit for English recruiting, and thinking he was over the shipyards on the Tyne river, dropped several bombs on the apparent industry. He was actually dropping bombs on mining villages north of the Tyne, but fortunately damage was limited to a scorched barn roof.  (Mathy assumed the lack of lights below was due to a blackout.) He actually reached the industrial town of Wallsend, but was low on bombs by then. Damage was limited to slight injuries and a damaged house.

L 6, who's tail is already close to what would become standard.

There were several minor raids in the following weeks, and Strasser came along for the ride twice. The first time, another engine failure caused an early return, and the second, unyielding winds immobilized the ship for several hours, till it turned for home. (This was to give Strasser the reputation of being a 'Jonah' among airship crews: taking Strasser along was seen as a sure way to have mechanical failure or immobilizing headwinds.) L 5 managed to burn down a lumber yard, (3000 feet up in the open gondolas L 5's crew could clearly hear the wail of the responding firetrucks) but several other raids suffered from mechanical failures or, for the first time, searchlight and antiaircraft fire, and didn't accomplish anything. The last mission saw L 5 saved by only the barest of margins, cutting across neutral Holland and just making German soil before running out of fuel. This convinced Strasser that the M class ships were fundamentally unsuited for long distance raiding, and that further expeditions to the green and pleasant land should wait until the next generation airships were available.

LZ 38, the first P class to see service. Features include enclosed gondolas and the keel buried in the hull.

Meanwhile the Army Zeppelins started to get its act together. A fresh infusion of modern airships in May included the first million cubic foot plus model: the 536 ft. long LZ 38. With a capacity for nearly 3 tons of bombs, the new 'P' class also featured four new Maybach MC-X engines with a combined output of 850 horsepower. That made for a cruising speed of 96 km/h and a service ceiling of 4000m (12,000 ft.) Gondolas were now the fully enclosed cabins we now think of, and the triangular keel of the airship was now enclosed in the hull. The man in command of LZ 38 was a Major Erich Linnarz, who flew many small raids in LZ 38, apparently to learn the way to London. He attacked Bury St. Edmunds, Southend, and Ramsgate. LZ 38 was twice approached by British fighter planes, but both times simply out-climbed the would-be interceptors. In the last days of May the Kaiser finally gave permission for London to be bombed east of the tower, and the night of 31st of May - 1st of June, the Major was off.

Taking off at dusk from the base at Namur, just north of Brussels, LZ 38 flew for London. At 22:55 the Metro police were warned of an incoming airship, and while still absorbing that bit of unexpected news, LZ 38 started to drop bombs. Considering that most of the targets were residential, Maj. Linnarz seems to have taken the view that dropping bombs anywhere in London was good enough. His flight across the capital took over 20 minutes, and at no time did searchlights or AA guns attack LZ 38. The actual damage done was not great: 41 fires set, a distillery and a cabinetmaker’s yard burned down and 7 people killed, though the raids also set off a series small anti-German riots. The total cost of the raid was estimated to be around 18,000 pounds, but unlike earlier raids, LZ 38's crosstown fandango was seen as deeply troubling to British authorities. After all, the Zeppelin had bypassed both the British Army and Navy, dropped explosives on the capital as it pleased them, and then flew off without so much as a by-your-leave.

    Taking the Zeppelin raids seriously prompted the British to make a small but crucial change. The British Government placed a strict gag order on all newspapers regarding Zeppelin raids: hereafter, only the official Admiralty statement could be printed. This statement was carefully stripped of any useful geographic information, only describing targets and casualties in the vaguest of terms. This was a quite intelligent move, as now Zeppelin crews couldn't check their navigation against British reports (and as a consequence remained in the dark as to how badly they were getting it wrong.) On the other hand, now that claims of grandiose damage and destruction were being responded to with essentially silence, it confirmed the truth of such claims to German ears, both in the military and with the public.

So the Army had grabbed the prize: they bombed London first. This deeply worried the Navy, who instructed Strasser to use the newly delivered L 10 to make a Naval London raid, post-haste. The L 10 was the Navy's first P class airship, and like LZ 38 was considerably more capable than the old M class. On June 4th L 10, captained by Kptlt. Klauss Hirsch was dispatched with SL 3 to raid London and the mouth of the Humber, respectively. Hirsch got lost, and fighting a stiff headwind, decided he couldn't make London before dawn. L 3 instead attacked what Hirsch thought was a Naval base, with “the bright lights of Ipswich providing excellent illumination.” Those bright lights were in fact those of London, and the bombs fell on the Gravesend Yacht club, which was burned to the ground. (To be fair, it was serving as a naval hospital, so it was sort of a military target.) SL 3 attacked a railway station that didn't exist, and as it was already getting somewhat light, she then returned to base.

L 9.

Two days later,  the Navy and the Army tried to raid London again. On the Navy side, L 9 under Captain Mathy got to Britain without much trouble, but the high temperatures and shortness of the night convinced Mathy to attack his alternate target, “a coastal town according to choice.” A cloak of mist covered everything, so L 9 used parachute flares in a painstaking 2 hour search for a positive navigation fix. Persistence paid off, and Mathy got his fix, and then set a course for Hull. Reaching Hull by 1 AM, L 9 hovered over the same area and released her entire payload, and avoided a 'light battery without searchlights' by ascending to 6,500 ft. (The light battery was a small scout cruiser in dry-dock, Hull's only defense.) This was the most effective raid of the war up until this time, causing some 44,000 pounds worth of damage, and causing considerably more damage due to the riot it caused. Angry Mobs sacked German or supposedly German shops throughout the city.

    The Army Zeppelins that night fared...worse, though I'm saving that tale for next time. One more raid, though, I will cover: the Navy raid of June 15th,  the last of the 'early' raids.. L 10 and the new L 11 were dispatched to England but L 11 almost immediately broke a crankshaft, leaving L 10 to shadow the British coast at nightfall. Captained once again by Hirsch, L 10 came inland, and could make out many blast furnaces along a riverbank industrial area. Heavy batteries started to fire at L 10, and since he was over an industrial area, L 10's captain decided to release all his bombs. On Hirsch's account, the results were spectacular: whole buildings collapsed, explosions in blast furnaces, and the start of many fires. The glow of the aftermath was visible, Hirsch said, some 80 km out to sea. But he had no idea where L 10 bombed or what. Thanks to the press blackout, this would remain a mystery to the Germans for the rest of the war.

For once, the actual damage done lines up with the account of the captain. L 10 made landfall at Blyth, and was taken south by a wind so fast that no warning had been given to the South Shields industrial area, who were caught with their lights (and furnaces) on. The center of all this activity was Palmer's shipyard, which had been constructing the super-Dreadnought Resolution. L 10's first bombs damaged the Marine Engineering works to the tune of 30,000 pounds and then bombs fell on the engine construction department of the shipyard itself, doing severe damage. Seventeen shipyard workers were killed and seventy-two were injured. Also damaged was a chemical plant, and several nearby coal mines. For once, at least, a Zeppelin bombed targets of great military value.

L 11 from another P class airship, 1915.

After this, there was a lull in raiding activity. Hirsch warned Strasser that despite his successful raid, June and July were bad times to raid Britain, as the warm air lessened lift, and Britain was sufficiently north enough to not get entirely dark during the summer solstice. By this time, the Imperial Navy was well happy with its airship fleet. In addition to the prestigious raiding of Britain, the Zeppelins had become effective scouts and mine spotters; truth be told, the Zeppelins had become a security blanket to the risk-averse surface fleet. The leaving of port by virtually any naval vessels had become impossible without a Zeppelin scouting mission first. The airship construction program had its resources and funding institutionalized.

As for the Army, that summer saw the end of their interest in raiding Britain. The Army had many commitments on the western and eastern fronts, so Zeppelin forces were dispersed widely. Also, now that the prestige of raiding London had been collected, so to speak, the main Army interest had been satisfied. The Navy, by contrast, could concentrate all its airships in one area, where they could be used for scouting or raiding, as circumstances warranted. As the surface fleet of the Imperial Navy would often only leave port, as one Commander put it “when it was positive that the enemy would not be met” this meant quite an excess of capacity that could be used for attacking the United Kingdom. So, for the rest of the summer, airship activities were dedicated to their original mission: naval reconnaissance. When the Airship Squadrons returned to Britain the fall, it would be for a systematic assault on London.

ACHTUNG ZEPPELIN I: Origin Story

The place our story starts is with the man Zeppelins were named after: Ferdinand Adolf Heinrich August Graf von Zeppelin, or Count Zeppelin to his friends. He was a German aristocrat who was born rich and married richer, and had until 1890 been a General in the Kaiser's army. Count Zeppelin was a patriot and decorated war hero, with a reputation for bluntness. This bluntness one day managed to annoy the Kaiser himself, and Count Zeppelin found himself prematurely retired. Denied his passion for the Army, Zeppelin turned to his other great passion: airships.

Count Zeppelin and his astonishing mustache.

Count Zeppelin was convinced Germany would need 'sky-crusiers' (as he called them) if she was to continue to rise in greatness. During the American Civil War, Lt. Zeppelin had served in the Union army as a Military Observer, and had been greatly impressed in a balloon ride he took in St. Paul, Minnesota. His first proposal in 1895 to the military was a balloon-train type thing, propelled by ludicrously heavy gas engine making about as much power as a VW Beetle. This was rightfully rejected by the military, but sympathetic men on the review board connected Zeppelin with engineers who could help him refine his idea. The first craft made by Zeppelin and his engineers was rather impressive. Launched from a specially constructed floating hanger, LZ 1 (Luftschiff Zeppelin 1, Airship Zeppelin 1 in English) took flight in July 1901. 

    LZ 1 was 126 m (420 ft) long, and displaced 400,000 cubic feet, and weighed some 13 tons. Even more impressive, it actually worked, sort of. It made two flights and didn't kill anyone, but the gas engines made all of 30 hp, making LZ 1 more of a 'balloon with ambition' rather then a proper powered craft. After this, Count Zeppelin was struck with a string of accidents. Successor ships  ran afoul of high winds, or ran afoul of high winds and then caught fire. Having spent his last Deutschmark on the ship that caught fire, Count Zeppelin was saved by the public; Zeppelin's persistence in the face of failure had turned him from a national laughingstock to a national hero. The ship that was built with that money, fortunately, neither ran afoul of high winds nor caught fire, and landed Zeppelin funding from the German military, which was his goal from the start.

    The design Count Zeppelin had refined partially through experience and partially by his engineers was fairly simple. The cigar-shaped hull was made from thin aluminum struts. Inside were the hydrogen lifting cells, which were made of something called gold-beater's skin, a very fine leather usually used for making gloves.  Two central gasoline engines drove four propellers. There was a central cabin near the engine room, and fore and aft gondolas. Initially, these gondolas were open to the wind, kind of like twin aluminum boats under-slung the fuselage. Control surfaces were fairly primitive, having rudders and elevators, but not in the cross shape you may be familiar with. 

   
       The German military, especially the Navy, was interested in Zeppelin's skyships for several reasons. The rigid airship as it was forming could climb faster, and fly higher then aircraft of the day, a fact that remained mostly consistent throughout WW1. They had already shown a capacity for enormous range, and could carry radios, which is something airplanes at the time couldn't do. In addition to that (and this is possibly the most important detail) airships were considerably more forgiving of mechanical breakdowns. Engines, for example, could be fixed “on the fly.” This forgiving nature had considerable appeal at a time when flight itself was still a new endeavor.

    The single exception to this forgiving nature was of course, the hydrogen lifting gas. Hydrogen, despite what you may think, is actually very difficult to ignite in it's pure state. As we will see, airships were frequently riddled with bullets to little ill effect. It's when hydrogen mixes with oxygen that you get, well, the Hindenberg disaster.  In Zeppelin's experimental days - despite all the accidents -  nobody was injured, let alone killed. This is somewhat remarkable as Zeppelin used his leftover experimental airships to form the world's first airline. Both a practical use of resources and a calculated ploy to cultivate the airship as a national symbol, DELAG was entirely successful. Germany was a power on the rise, thanks to education and technology, and the airship had become a potent patriotic symbol of this.

 The first military airship was made for the Navy was creatively named L 1. She was 518 ft long, displaced nearly 800,000 cubic feet and had a crew of 14. She also had 20 tons of useful lift, and featured 3 centrally mounted engines of 180 hp driving the four propellers. Made with everything the Zeppelin company had learned about airships, she was state of the art. The Navy wanted L 1 and her sister ships for a number of reasons, mostly for (if you will pardon the pun) a pilot project regarding big rigid airships. Aside from actual Naval reconnaissance abilities, this commissioned series of airships would hopefully give engineers and planners a good idea about what capabilities the next class would require. This was especially important as if the new, hypothetical ships were substantially bigger, it would require new, larger hangers, and larger sheds at the factory. Launched in late 1912, L 1  was a success, showing every intention of being all everyone hoped. She  made shakedown and training flights almost every day into 1913. The Imperial forces made plans for 2 squadrons of 5 ships each. L 2, an improved, L 1 was taking shape at the Zeppelin company.

L 1.

L 1's Control Car. Note the integrated handles for the ground crew. The big box at right is a radiator.

    L 1's success then caught the eye of the head of the German Navy, Grand Admiral Tirpitz. He ordered the L 1 to participate in the annual fleet exercises of the Imperial Navy, scheduled for August and September, in the North Sea. True to form, L 1 proved to be an excellent scout: it could spot and report the 'enemy' ships even while surface scouts were still arriving in the area. The end of all these accomplishments came on September 9th  during one of these practice maneuvers.

    Heavy weather was reported incoming to the area. The Captain of L 1 abandoned his more ambitious flight plans for the day, and stayed close to the squadron of destroyers he was escorting. Just before L 1 returned to base, the storm hit. A torrent of rain was followed by a violent updraft, throwing L 1 to 6000 feet, considerably above her 'pressure height' of 2000 feet. This caused L 1's fail-safe valves to vent gas. Suddenly much heavier, She was then was hit with a violent downdraft, and as the crew frantically dropped ballast and reversed engines for more lift, L 1 plopped into the sea. The crash killed or knocked out  the men in the  gondolas; they were never seen again. The only survivors were from the mid compartment. Even though a passing tramp steamer was close at hand to the crash site, only 6 out of the crew of twenty survived.

The crash created a bit a of a shock throughout Germany. As said, these were the first deaths involving airships. The Zeppelin company blamed the military for 'overloading' L 1, and predictably, the military blamed the company. What had really wrecked the L 1 was simple ignorance: meteorology was in it's infancy, and the updraft/downdraft action of a storm front was unknown. While the early Hydrogen-based aviators knew “lightning = bad” more complex phenomena would remain beyond them, sometimes with disastrous results.

    L 2 launched on the 6th of September 1913, just two days before L 1 met her demise.  The same basic design as L 1, L 2  was about 200,000 cubic feet bigger, and had several aerodynamic tweaks. The gondolas were now enclosed (over the objections of Count Zeppelin, who insisted that open gondolas allowed the crew to 'sense the air') and the support struts to the propellers were enclosed in triangles of canvas. She made ten shakedown flights without incident, and then on October 17th , a simple altitude test was scheduled. It was, however, to be a red-letter day. On this flight, L 2 would have a number of top brass along for the ride: several engineers, including her designer from the Zeppelin company, and the head of the new Naval Aviation department.

The L 2.

L 2 and some admirers.

The morning of the 17th was a sunny and warm, a perfect fall day...and then, embarrassingly, a delay. One of the engines would not start after L 2 was brought out of her shed, and some two hours were spent rebuilding the engine, presumably as officers scowled at the mechanics. At 10 am, all was put right, and L 2 took off, circled the field, and then began to climb. It's around this time observers noticed large jets of flame shooting out of L 2's exhaust ports. This was shortly followed by an explosion that blasted flame through the airship's length. Set ablaze, L 2  fell, her frame buckling with an explosion that broke windows a mile distant. The glowing skeleton of the L 2 fell to earth near some laboring Army engineers. The engineers rushed to help, but the wreck was so hot that they were repulsed. When the fires were out, they cut into the wreck to search for survivors. Three men were found alive, horribly burned. Two of these men died at the site, and a third lingered till nightfall in a Berlin hospital.

 The L 2's final flight was the result of two factors, the first being the delay on the ground. While the mechanics tinkered, the sun warmed the lifting cells, causing them to expand to full “pressure height.” (In WW1-era German airships, lifting cells were trimmed before flight to a certain altitude. As a ship rose, the cells would inflate as air pressure became less. When they reached 100% inflation, they have reached the pre-set pressure height. From this altitude and below, an airship can fly without risking venting the hydrogen gas. Above pressure height - in an extremely dubious safety feature - valves would vent gas, both to prevent cell explosions, and to slow the ascent on an out of control airship.) So, when L 2 took off at 100% pressure, her increasing altitude caused hydrogen venting. In what I think I'll characterize as a design flaw, the second factor was that the valves were on the bottom of the pressure cells, and flooded the gangway with hydrogen. Some of this volatile mix of hydrogen and oxygen got sucked into the rear engine, which ignited, which in turn ignited the entire gangway, and, well, downhill from there.

    These two accidents were a sore blow to the German airship program. In some ways it mirrored the Soviet 'Nedelin catastophe', the accident killed several key technical personnel as well as killing (after the L 1 disaster) the only trained airship crew.  This also saw the end of Count Zeppelin having anything to do with the actual design of airships. Not that he had made any design changes that caused the L 2 disaster; but as mentioned before, the Count was blunt. So it's no surprise the Count started a public argument with Adm. Tierpitz  about who was to blame for the L 2 disaster. During the state funeral of the men who died in the L 2 disaster. From this point on Zeppelin was in charge of his company, but as a figurehead, and a increasingly distant and bitter one at that.

    Despite all this, the military, especially the Navy, were still interested in rigid airships. With greater control over production, the Navy could now commission the much larger airships that it felt would be capable of long range scouting. (Count Zeppelin had the capitalist’s preference of using  existing capital instead of building newer, larger factories. This limited the size, and thus the capability, of the airships produced.) And the U.K. was definitely scared of airships; when the L 1 first took flight, it resulted in a rash of UFO-esque 'sightings' of airships gloaming over the British landscape.

    And a rival firm had emerged for the Zeppelin company. In 1909,  an engineering professor named Dr. Schutte set up the Schutte-Lanz airship works. As Dr. Schutte was an actual engineer, he had no problem with applying science to some of the, ah, idiosyncrasies of the Count's designs. He was the first one to test out airship designs in a wind tunnel, for example, a suggestion that would have caused Count Zeppelin to bristle his mustache. (As it turns out, symmetrical front and rear airships have drag issues that a tapered rear end does not have.) All these good ideas would create the old-timey airship as you know it, as when WW1 broke out, the German Government became the sole possessor of all Schutte-Lanz's patents, allowing Zeppelin company to borrow whatever good ideas they wanted. One idea that went distinctly un-borrowed was the trademark of Schutte-Lanz airships, a rigid frame constructed out of plywood. This plywood had a tendency to soak up humidity in certain environments, (IE the North Sea) and weigh the airship down. At any rate, the SL airships, as they were designated, never performed as well as the Zeppelin designs. Usually SL type airships were shuttled off to less demanding work, usually in the army. At any rate,  the government, pleased to foster competition, immediately placed lots of orders with Schutte-Lanz.

    The Imperial Army took advantage of this new source of hydrogen floaty-things. Now that the concept of airships had been shown to have military uses, the Army (the eternal dickish big brother to the imperial navy) bought most of SL's output. Thus, at the start of the great war, the service with most of the airships was the Army, not the Navy, despite the Navy having much greater need for them, as we will see.

    It's here we must end, with the introduction of a new character. The new commander of the Naval airship division was a man named Peter Strasser. In the source I'm getting most of my info from, he is described as 'one of the outstanding naval officers on either side of the first World War.' In addition to being a leader of men, he also had a keen technical mind that grasped the new technical challenges that operating airships brought. Well loved by his men, he also became an advocate for the use of airships, especially for bombing Britain. When the war actually dawned, this activism and energy set him and the naval airship division apart from the rest of the German Navy. While surface fleet was doomed to passivity, the Zeppelin crews were determined to attack as much as possible.

An explanation for the intense Condor posts, and in many ways this blog

 When I was a teenager reading books about World War 2, I always found the Condor very interesting, because it was always mentioned, but rarely talked about in any detail. So as a kid knowing that it was both really atypical for a Luftwaffe aircraft (being four engined and really long range) and knowing how many problems the 'no long-range bomber' thing caused Germany, I always wanted more detail then I was finding. Many years later, I got into scale modeling again and accomplished a little dream, building a 1/72 model of the Fw 200. Whenever I build a model, I usually end up doing a fair bit of reading, both for historical accuracy, and because if I've bought a model kit of something, it usually mean I find the subject interesting.

As this particular kit took me a long time and was very detailed, I ended up doing a metric fuckton of research. And then after the model was done, I had to tell other people what I'd learned...

Most of the things on this blog are the products of this (admittedly) kinda weird cycle.

(The kit was Revell Germany's C-8 Condor, which I'd recomend to anyone interested in building a Fw 200. The only caution is that the kit's radar antenna are molded in plastic, and thus, are not very good. Look to the aftermarket for photoetch antennae if these things bother you [IE you are me].)

The Story of the Fw 200 Condor (Part 2)

Fw 200 C-3. The brass exhaust pipes are the big visual clue for the later engine.

Two Condors over the ocean.

(Part 1 can be found here.) 

Attack of the Nazi Big Birds

    When the Condor crews of KG 40 returned in January, they picked up where they had left off, and sank 64,000 tons of shipping, while loosing only a single plane. A Condor C-3 had performed a strafing run on a tiny rescue tugboat, the HMS Seaman, and was totally surprised when the Seaman opened up with her quite modern AA armament: a 20mm Oerlikon cannon and two .50 machine guns. Running headfirst into this buzzsaw of fire, the Condor flopped into the sea, and its three surviving crewmen were captured. Intelligence gathered during interrogation of these POWs were the start of effective defenses against the Condors.

    In February 1941, a new tactic was tried. With U-boats nearby, Petersen sent five Condors against convoy HG 53, south of Portugal. Each Condor claimed a small ship, but the real advantage to this attack was that it caused the convoy to scatter. U-37 managed to slip inside the convoy during the night and sink three more merchantmen. Convoy OB 287 was spotted off of Iceland and was attacked by a KG 40 Condor daily for five days, sinking 2 ships and damaging three. And, in a first, a Condor managed to shadow a Convoy until a wolfpack could show up; the resulting attack that night claimed 9 merchant ships. On Febuary 26th, another multi-aircraft attack was launched on convoy OB 290. Only four Fw 200s were sent, but they somehow managed to bag seven merchantmen between them – and again the convoy scattered, and U-47, commanded by Gunther Prien, managed to get amongst the ships that night and sink three more ships. In two months, the Condor had managed to sink 173,000 tons of shipping – or if you prefer, 46 ships. During the same period, U-boats sank only 60 ships!

    Fortunately for the Allies, this was the apex of the Condor's success. In early march, the high sortie rate KG 40 had managed caught up with them, and flights were few. KG 40 also returned to direct Luftwaffe control. When Goering returned from his Christmas vacation, he immediately started to mewl to Hitler at how unfair it was that the Kriegsmarine got its own planes.  After two months Hitler, possibly just tired of hearing his bad lieutenant's endless bitching, decided on compromise. He returned control of the Condors to Goering, but created Fliegerführer Atlantik (“flyer command  Atlantic”) to help air co-ordination with the Navy.  General Harlinghausen was appointed the new head of this command, and it must be said he really did try his best to improve inter-service cooperation. Unfortunately, if some general above him got an idea as to how to use the unusual airliner-bombers, nothing much could be done, and the U-boats would find  themselves without recon aircraft. The fact that the Condor was also a transport would exacerbate this tendency, as the  Nazi war machine was going to have many emergency evacuations. Commander Petersen in March onward of 1941 was busy establishing new wings in KG 40, with KG 40/II using the new Dornier 217, and KG 40/III using He 111s. These conventional bombers were often reassigned from anti-ship operations to supporting other Luftwaffe ventures – often conventional bombing raids against the UK.  All in all, KG 40 was a low priority for resources, though they were first in line when an appropriate new bomber was deployed. They were the first squadron to get the Dornier 217 (in March 1941) and were among the first squadrons to re-equip with the He 177, once it became available.

    The convoys, on the other hand, were starting to get some resources to fight the Condor threat. The Royal Navy's first attempt at hunting Condors in late 1940 was to equip a Q-ship with many AA guns, and have it sail in the straggler position behind the convoy. This it did, seeing absolutely nothing for two months before being sunk by a U-boat. (I'm guessing they didn't tell Churchill about that one.) Another, much more desperate plan was considered: remember that the British had gotten their mitts on an pre-war Danish Fw 200? There was a plan afoot to disguise it as a Fw 200 C, fill it up with commandos and explosives, and then have this Cuckoo bird land at Bordeaux. Then, commandos would blow up as many Fw 200s as possible.  It never came off, probably because while there were plans for the commandos to escape in their plane, realistically, it was a suicide mission. The CAM (Catapult Aircraft Merchantman) ships were another risky improvisation. A normal merchant ship with an aircraft catapult, CAM ships were one-shot air cover: mounted on this catapult was an older fighter that the British could spare (usually a Hurricane Mk.1 or a Blackburn Skua) that would fling itself into the sky via rocket powered catapult. There, the  aircraft could hopefully shoot down the Condor intruder, and then ditch into the sea, where the pilot would (even more hopefully) be recovered by the convoy. While they would claim a few Fw 200s, the CAM ships in general were a poor use of resources – planes had to sit exposed on the catapult in all weathers, which meant pilots would sometimes be flung into the sky, only to discover their airplane wouldn't fly! It also tied up some 2 squadrons worth of pilots, who were elsewhere needed.

A CAM ship.

Meanwhile, after the roaring start to 1941, the Condors were having trouble. March was lost just recovering from the operational tempo of January and February, and April saw the Condors encounter for the first time foes in the air. A CAM ship made their first Condor kill, with the CAM pilot successfully ditching and being rescued, and Bristol Beaufighters provided air cover for the first time west of Ireland – one fighter bagged itself a Condor on April 16th. By May, the failure of KG 40 to provide useful intel so annoyed Donitz that he began sending his submarines further than the Condors could fly – and was rewarded immediately with a string of sunk merchantmen. In truth, while the Condor crews were mastering the difficult art of finding convoys for the U-boats, the jobs of shadowing and attacking were becoming steadily more challenging  for the modified airliner. After a five plane attack on a convoy came to naught off of Portugal in June, the order went out that Condors were to restrict their attacks to lone vessels, not convoys. From March to June, only four small ships would be sunk by the Condors.

       In June, Major Petersen performed his final flight with KG 40. He and the nine best Condor crews from KG 40 were sent to Greece, where they conducted a bombing raid against ships in the Suez canal. This is something the Luftwaffe had been doing for awhile, hoping to sink enough ships to render the strategic waterway useless to allied shipping, and apparently thought it worthwhile to try with Fw 200s. (It's also possible this mission was put together just to humiliate General Harlinghausen and/or Fliegerführer Atlantik. The failure of Fliegerführer Atlantik to support the Bismark on her sally into the Atlantic in any way was seen as egregious by High Command, and Harlinghausen found himself the target of many fingers pointing blame.) Three Condors were lost on the raid, and it did little aside interfere with Atlantic operations. Petersen was then sent to Berlin, where he was put in charge of trying to get the He 177 out of the "spontaneous fire" doldrums the program had been in. Performing well at this job, he spent the rest of the war in command of the Luftwaffe testing squadron, which flew the Me 262, the He 219, and the Me 410 before they saw combat. When the war ended, the unit was in the middle of testing the Dornier 335 'Arrow.'

       With Petersen gone and the operational environment toughening, the last 6 months of 1941 saw little success. Having sunk only four small ships for a total of 10,000 tons, the Fw 200 was having increasing trouble in accomplishing its mission, let alone act as an effective bomber. These troubles coincided with a new player in the Battle of the Atlantic. If previous bets the Royal Navy made were long shots that didn't pay off, then another idea now entering service would score the jackpot – one that would not only be an effective counter to the Fw 200, but would also be an enormous asset in winning the Battle of the Atlantic. The Hannover, a German merchantman captured at the start of the war, was turned into the appropriately named HMS Audacity, the first escort carrier. Only carrying 6 aircraft, which she had to carry on her flight deck as she had no elevators, the Audacity's Martlets (the British name for the Grummun Wildcat) were highly effective at shooting down Condors, claiming four in her very brief career. Once a Condor was shot down, KG 40 gave Audacity's convoys a wide berth, and convoy losses plummeted. HMS Audacity herself was soon a victim of the U-boats, and was sunk in the  battle of convoy HG 76 in December 1941. An important battle in its own right, HG 76 fended off a determined attacks by U-boat wolf packs  and marauding Condors overhead. After sinking several U boats, one submarine managed to close when Audacity was exposed and torpedo her. The next day after Audacity was sunk, a Condor returned to shadow the convoy again, only to find it was sharing the airspace with a new hostile – an RAF B-24 long-range patrol plane. While the Audacity's career was brief, her success against deterring the Wolfpacks and Condors was inarguable, and she was the first of an incredible 130 escort carriers the Allies would launch during World War 2. 

HMS Audacity, with her interesting naval camouflage.

Pining for the Fjords

    The end of 1941 saw two small additional events: the failure of Nazi Germany to destroy the USSR in six months, and the entry of the United States into World War 2. Donitz as always tried to get the maximum return on his submarine fleet, and sent his U-boats to the North American coast. The result was a second happy time for the U-boats. At the same time, nearly all the anti-shipping assets the Luftwaffe had in the west were relocated to Norway, where they would strike the Allied arctic convoys. KG 40/I and its Condors were relocated to Trondheim, and KG 40/III, still at  Bordeaux, began trading their He 111s for Fw 200s. Beaufighters had started to patrol the Bay of Biscay – and shot down a Condor on January 2nd – but it was hoped that a new Condor wing could continue in reconnaissance - even if Fw 200s over the Bay of Biscay now had to be escorted by fighter wings of Ju 88s. Reconnaissance continued through 1942, though the low level bombing attack that characterized the happy time of the Fw 200 was actually forbidden by command, to preserve Condor numbers.

This was also around the time two extra crewmen were added to man defensive emplacements full time. Not an assignment I'd relish if I were a airmen - 'Yeah, our planes are very vulnerable to enemy aircraft and keep getting shot down! We need you to man a gun turret on one of these planes which will hopefully help the situation.'

In Norway, KG 40/I Fw 200s reverted to it's original mission of scouting the seas, and did very little attacking. For a time, flights were made to recon Reykjavik harbor and its regular convoy departures. Predictably, this didn't take long to go wrong - a Fw 200 became the first plane shot down by the USA in the European theater, when a C-3 on the Reykjavik run was intercepted and shot down by a P-38 and a P-40 . KG 40/III meanwhile, spent early 1942 on training missions. In May, they started operations against the Gibraltar convoy. Like the Condors in Norway, they restricted themselves to recon, and did not attack. As summer started, it seems everyone had written off the Condor as a second-line aircraft. Letters from KG 40 and Fliegerführer Atlantik to central command all say “don't bother developing the Fw 200 anymore; just give us the replacement.” And frankly, they had a point. If a Condor was caught by a fighter, only handy cloud cover would let the Condor survive.

A Condor C-8 with distemper camo and radar in Norway, 1944.

The Condor had help in the recon role in Norway, frequently being assisted by the Blom & Voss 138 'Sea Dragon.' With three diesel powered engines and a look that gave the BV 138 the nickname 'the flying clog', it was one of Blom & Voss's more sedate designs.

In the fall of 1942, KG 40/I began to receive He 177s – but they were so unreliable that the wing was forced to stick with their  Fw 200s. The other potential replacement, the Ju 290, took its first flight in August, and it looked like everything Fliegerführer Atlantik had been dreaming of. The militarized version of the Ju 90 airliner Petersen looked at way back in 1939, the Ju 290 had double the range of the Condor and a 100 km/h faster speed. Perhaps most importantly, it had been properly modified for military flying. But once again, the plane-jane of the Luftwaffe was to have her heart broken: the first 10 Ju 290s were finished as unarmed transports. In the escalating military crisis the Third Reich found itself in, transport capability was so critical even the original Ju 290 prototype was pressed into service for evacuations.

    A slight consolation was the introduction of the C-4 variant in that same fall of 1942. In addition to the new bomb-sight, radar was finally being introduced to Condor units – though the same dearth of resources affected even that upgrade. KG 40 Fw 200s had been trying prototype radars for most of 1942 - even using a set salvaged from a crashed allied plane - but in the fall of 1942 at least half of the Big Birds at Bordeaux were still without radar. The U-boat campaign had moved far beyond the range of the Condor - first to America's east coast, then onto the Caribbean – which meant even recon missions were far less needful. This bordering on obsolescence is perhaps why KG 40/III would be remarkably aggressive in the attack role.

        In December 1942 KG/III used it's new C-4s on a daring bombing raid. By this time Operation Torch had started, and the United States had invaded West Africa. Despite command officially rejecting the plan, one plucky Major sent 11 C-4s from Bordeaux to attack convoy UGS 3 arriving at the port in Casablanca. Eight Condors made the harbor, a distance of some 2000 km from Bordeaux, and bombed ships there, though little damage was done. Flak damaged three Condors, one of which crash landed in the Canary Islands, with the other two wounded birds running out of fuel and landing in Spain. The crews were returned, minus their aircraft. (Quite a few Condors ended up crashing or landing on the Iberian peninsula. Initially, crews and aircraft (when possible) were returned to German hands. As the war began to go poorly for the Nazis, only the crews came back.)

A Condor C-4 with radar and the later turret; two C-4s start a convoy attack on the front of a model kit box.

Then, the Condors of KG 40/III – in fact, all the Condors the Luftwaffe could get into the air – were then sent to the Stalingrad airlift. Sending modified airliners through winter storm and stiff enemy defenses went as well as you can imagine, though Fw 200s did manage to bring in 36 tons of supplies, and evacuate 136 very lucky troops before the main airfield at Stalingrad was lost. After this, Condors dropped bomb-like resupply canisters by parachute. When Stalingrad fell at the end of January 1943, some Condors were used as deep-interdiction bombers, flying far behind enemy lines to bomb bridges and railways in a desperate bid to slow down the implacable Soviet advance. The Soviets around this time captured a Fw 200 on the ground, and put it on display in Moscow. The technical analysis of the Fw 200 left the Soviets somewhat disappointed – they noted the similarities between it and the DC-3, which they already had access to having licensed the design in the 1930s – and also noted that it was not what they were hoping for: a German B-17. The Germans could sympathize.

To be honest, Condor production should have ended at this point, at the end of 1942, when the Fw 200 served beside its replacements at the Stalingrad airlift. That it didn't was a common story in Nazi war production: by that time the need to make up losses was so desperate that obsolete designs were kept in production. The Ju 290 never materialized fully as a replacement. By the later part of '43, the battle in the Atlantic had swung decisively against the Germans, and Adm. Donitz wanted Ju 290 production prioritized. Donitz had gotten the Hitler fully on his side, and both of them requested more Ju 290s for maritime recon. Goering stood firm against production increases, essentially holding the Ju 290 hostage for petty political reasons. Goering wanted 'overall precedence in armaments production' which his rival, minister of armaments Albert Speer didn't want to do – at least with Goering in charge. When Hitler and Speer declined Goering's condition to do this, production was kept at a minimum, (only 50 throughout the war) and the Luftwaffe itself had many uses for the innovative transport. In fact, Ju 290 production was stopped at the same time as the Fw 200, for the same reason the Fw 200 was drafted in the first place: bad  planning. In 1944, Luftwaffe losses fending off Allied strategic bombers skyrocketed to untenable levels, and too late, aircraft production was shifted to fighters.                     

              

The End of a Fw 200, in the second picture: literally. I wasn't kidding about the tail tending to fall off.

Don't Call it a Comeback

    Back to 1943. After Stalingrad, the Condors returned to the Atlantic, though KG 40/I was now starting to get the hang of the He 177. Though the Norway wing of KG 40 would retain some Condors for scouting (using them operationally as late as 1944), they would be replaced by the 'Grief' heavy bomber.  KG 40/III at Bordeaux would become the primary Condor operator. The focus in 1943 was to be on the Gibraltar - Liverpool convoy, to try and disrupt the increasing Allied strength in Africa. No coincidentally, this convoy also ran the furthest from Allied air cover – while escort carriers and long range patrol planes could appear, most of coastal command was now focused on sinking U-boats crossing the Bay of Biscay.

    Returning to ship strikes in March 1943, the Fw 200 began to score kills again off the Portuguese coast.  A new tactic had been devised by the officers of KG 40/III: using the C-4's upgraded bomb sight, Fw 200s would attack from medium altitudes – about 10,000 ft. While bombing ships from 3000m sounds daft, even a near miss from a bomb could be fatal to a merchantman who's damage control abilities were marginal at best. The sinking of a 6000 ton freighter was the first kill a Condor had achieved in over a year. Several more cargo ships were sunk over the next two months by the birds from Bordeaux. The Fw 200, however, was not the only one who had gotten a radar upgrade; convoys now frequently had radar, and escort carriers could now detect the lumbering Condors with enough time to dispatch interceptors. KG 40 was scoring merchant ships, but was often trading ships for aircraft. In 1943, Fw 200s would sink eleven merchant ships...at the cost of 18 Condors shot down.  Beaufighters, carrier-borne Seafires, and for the first time, Mosquito fighter-bombers all claimed Condors. The Allies had more or less perfected their inter-service cooperation, as well. Signals intelligence officers were stationed aboard Navy warships, monitoring KG 40 radio traffic and passing early warning to Coastal Command.  The biggest success in this period was KG 40's attack on the “Faith” convoy. “Faith” was the codename for a fast convoy of three large troopships and three escorts. Condors attacked and managed to set on fire two of the three troopships, with 1,500 troops being transferred to the third vessel when the first two were abandoned. The third ship tried to make Gibraltar, when more Fw 200s returned to finish the job. Only the appearance of two PBY Catalinas drove off the attackers, saving at least 2000 troops in the process.

     For the rest of the summer of 1943, Condors continued to raid convoys and sink ships, but unlike the last period of success, these raids caused little panic among the allies. Increased air cover was recognized as the right solution, and Coastal Command now had Beaufighter Xs, Mosquitoes, and B-24s to do just that. In an example of how badly the Fw 200 was outclassed at this point, the B-24 became an effective interceptor of the Fw 200, as it was nearly 100 km/h faster than the Fw 200, stoutly built, and bristling with machine guns. On anti-submarine patrol off of Portugal, B-24Ds of the USAAF 480th Antisubmarine Group engaged Fw 200s seven times that summer, shooting down four. By the end of the summer of '43, Condor attrition was such that KG 40 was down to a dozen Fw 200s, and KG 40 threw in the towel. Long range naval recon would be done from now on by the newly formed Fernaufklärungsgruppe 5 (FAGr 5) equipped with the vastly superior Ju 290. This was not the end of the Condor's combat career: developments in other fronts had given the Germans new ideas as to what the fragile aircraft could do.

    Way back in the start of this story, you may remember the formation of Fligercorps X, the anti ship attack specialists. While they were formed to attack British shipping, most of X's formations seem to have served elsewhere, in the Mediterranean, Baltic and Black seas. In early 1943 in the Mediterranean, Fligercorps X had a string of successes using the first anti-ship missiles. The Fritz X anti naval ship missile sunk the modern Italian battleship Roma, the start of a sea change (if you pardon the pun) in naval warfare. The HS 293 was more of a guided bomb than a missile, and it had taken a heavy toll against Allied invasion ships supporting operations in Italy. Both of these devices had an excellent cost-to-return ratio, and didn't require naval bombers to be very close to their attacking targets.

    Flyer Atlantic looked at these operations and saw a new way to crimp Allied supply lines. With the current generation of U-boats conceding defeat in the battle of the Atlantic, KG 40 dreamed of smashing allied convoys with their rag-tag fleet of bombers, flying boats, and whatever else they had, all mounting the new bombs. As this was a fairly desperate project, any viable airframe would do; and once again, the Fw 200 was needed. Ditching its bombs, the Fw 200 was modified in later 1943 to carry two HS 293 guided bombs in under its wings, and had its gondola extended to handle the controller. It also had to share electricity and engine coolant with the new bombs, to keep the weapon perpetually 'warmed up' while in flight. The flaw in this plan, at least as far as the Condor was concerned, is that this stand-off weapon was not nearly stand-off enough. The Condor's previous attack method at least allowed aiming by radar, which allowed the Fw 200 cover in certain bombing conditions; the HS 293 had to be visually guided in by joystick by the bombardier, which stripped even this meager defense.

 Apparently the only picture extant of the Fw 200 mounting the HS 293s. Below, somebody else's 1/72 model Condor C-8 with HS 293s.

This new upgrade did little to render the Fw 200 a viable combat aircraft again, though as a larger campaign it had the potential to help. It seems that Condors would join massed bomber formations to attack convoys, one or two Fw 200s chucking their glide bombs amid the larger chaos of the attack. Fw 200s on several occasions attacked convoys in early '44 on their own, but the record records few, if any, successes. One problem now was by 1943, the veteran aircrews had decided that the Condor was obsolete, and if they were officers or had decorations, they transferred to more conventional Luftwaffe bombers. Another problem was even more familiar – diversion of scant resources. In early '44, most of the remaining Luftwaffe bombers engaged in anti-shipping operations were drawn into the last London Blitz, flying not against the massing Allied invasion fleet but against London as 'vengeance' for Allied air attacks on German cities. After the Normandy invasion in June, the Third Reich experienced a distinct decline of interest in Naval matters, and remaining Condors sat idle at the edge of airfields until the war's end.  As fuel was now even scarcer than transport missions in the thousand year Reich, quite a few of these idle birds were captured at the end of World War 2.

sad gallery of captured or abandoned Fw 200s. The first is from Norway, the second is a Fw 200B. The third is a C-8 rigged for the HS293, being examined by American troops.

Unlike some other captured warplanes, interest in the Condor was minimal. Western Allies put on display for a time Heinrich Himmiler's personal Fw 200, which apparently had some sort of escape pod rigged on it. The Soviets demonstrated the most interest in captured Fw 200s, using them as transports back in Russia in the late 40s, until accidents or lack of spares rendered them inoperative. Spain also had a small clutch of Condors they had interred when they had landed. Converting them back into airliners, they were used in the late 40s until, like the Russians, they were rendered inoperative due to lack of spares.

    Given the low production and distinct lack of sexiness in its design, it won't surprise you that no Fw 200 survives to this day. Happily, this may soon change: Lufthansa and the German Museum of Technology have been restoring one airplane made from two wrecks found in Norway. While still many years from completion, this one remaining Condor will be remade back into an airliner. That seems fitting. While the Condor as a combat plane had a short period of extraordinary success, this was followed by several years of pain and suffering, as the brief window of events that allowed the Condor that great success closed. Its whole career was an object lesson in both how ad-hoc and badly planned many Nazi procurement decisions were: the Fw 200 was drafted due to bad planning, had the majority of its unit run after it had become obsolete, and had its replacements neglected, simply because the Luftwaffe (particularity Goering) saw inter-service cooperation as a waste of resources. Given all that, rebuilding the last Condor as an airliner makes perfect sense: it is as an airliner alone that the Fw 200 was uniquely successful.