Raidin' Ain't Easy, but it's Necessary
But where were we? Right: frantic activity. After the 'big week' raids of March 31st-April 6th 1916, most of the Zeppelins were held back for scouting. An airship raid was staged as part of a larger distraction operation the German Navy had cooked up. Around this time Ireland revolted against British rule, and the Germans were sending an Irish revolutionary leader back to the Emerald Isle in a submarine. To cover this a squadron of Dreadnoughts were to bombard Lowestoft, in addition to the airship raid. On April 24th, 7 airships took off for southern England. The wind was against them once the squadron made the coast, and the visibility was so bad that most of the participating ships brought their bombs back with them. One disturbing thing: despite the bad visibility, all the airships were fired on with some very accurate anti-aircraft fire, aimed by sound. While no ship was seriously damaged, it was clear that after a year of raiding, the South of England was ready for airship attacks.
Even as the air squadron was retreating, the German Naval fleet closed on Lowestoft, and spent 6 minutes shelling the town. The force was accompanied by L 7 and L 9, who performed some useful naval recon by spotting the Harwitch force (a squadron of cruisers and destroyers positioned in the south of England) moving to intercept. As the fleet retreated L 9 itself was intercepted at just 2600 ft by two BE 2's. Caught at a height disadvantage, L 9 ran for it while the two aircraft buzzed and swooped above, like two angry sparrows attacking a crow. The executive officer was sent to the upper deck, letting the bridge know via telephone when it would be a good time to dodge a bomb run. As with earlier close encounters with airplanes, L 9 was saved by the BE 2s being equipped with bombs and not machine guns.
As the German fleet returned to its anchorage in the Jade, the Army dispatched its own wing of airships to bomb London that night. Of the five that departed, only one, LZ 97 managed to find the city. LZ 97, a Q-class airship, was commanded by Major Linnaeus, who you may remember as the first airship commander to bomb London. The second attack was to be less smooth than the first. After bombing some towns north of London, LZ 97's crew was dazzled with the many spotlights in operation. A Lieutenant on-board LZ 97 said the spotlights "reach(ed) after us like gigantic spiders legs; right, left and all around." Then the new heavy guns opened up. Skirting the east side of the city (and the heavy guns), LZ 97 dropped only a single bomb, and then retreated...right between two of the new airfields the RAF set up. A Captain Harris (who was later an Air Marshall who acquired the nickname 'Bomber') was already in the air, and really struggling at 12,000 feet when LZ 97 flew by, some 2000 feet over him. Equipped with brand-new explosive bullets, he hoped for a lucky hit at long range, but his machine gun almost immediately jammed. Harris then maneuvered behind LZ 97 and cleared the jam, only to have his gun jam again almost instantly. Another pilot armed with the same ammo managed to get a good firing position three times, but each time had his gun jam on him. Later, that same Lieutenant aboard LZ 97 would write 'It is difficult to understand how we managed to survive the storm of shell and shrapnel.” It's not really clear if LZ 97 knew she was being stalked by aircraft.
So, another close escape for a Zeppelin. On May the second, the Navy tried raiding again, with eight airships taking off to attack the British fleet an anchor in the Firth of Fourth. With the wind initially at their backs, the airships made fifty knots, but as the squadron made landfall, the south wind freshened, and a new low pressure system seemed to be moving in over Britain. All Zeppelins except for L 14 and L 20 decided to aim for the midlands instead.
An odd accident was to stymie the midlands raiders. The first ship inland, L 23, dropped a incendiary bomb on Danby high moor, starting a fire amid the heather. 20 minutes later the fire was burning merrily, and L 16 came along and dumped most of her bombs on it. Peterson, the captain, reported “well placed hits on buildings at the site of the fire, as well as clearly recognizable railroad tracks and embankments.” L 17 also dumped some bombs on the fire, as did L 13. So, er, not the best performance for the airship raiders. Though it must be said that it was another miserable old night in the midlands, making navigation and target finding even more challenging than they usually were. L 14 got to Scotland and reported seeing some battleships, dropped a few bombs on them, and rather optimistically assumed the ships were sunk. L 20 was to have a somewhat more complected time of it.
The captain of L 20, Stabbert, had gotten a pretty good navigation fix while still over the north sea at 7 pm, which seemed to show a east wind. Several hours later, flying through snow and solid cloud layers, he used the beacon system, which seemed to indicate a north-west wind. The weather was so bad that ballast and some fuel was jettisoned. Then, the radio antenna was coated with ice, and for several hours, L 20 was flying completely blind. Stabbert was determined to get to the Firth of Fourth, and kept flying toward Scotland. At 1 am, the snow clouds cleared, and Stabbert was dismayed to discover he had not only reached Scotland, he had almost flown past it! L 20 was over Loch Ness, far up in the Scottish highlands, and many, many miles north of the Firth of Fourth. Turning around, Stabbert set a course for the coast, hoping to make it before dawn. Along the way, he saw some lights that he thought was a mine, and dropped most of his bombs. Thus, Craig Castle became the first and (I assume) only castle ever bombed by airship. (Windows were broken in the Craig, but that was the extent of the damage.)
The trouble for L 20 deepened. At sunrise, L 20 crossed the coast at a point that put her some 100 miles north of the Firth of Fourth. Another radio bearing put her at the same latitude as the Orkney Islands. Stabbert in desperation descended, and by shouting down at a passing freighter, was able to get an exact nav fix. This confirmed Stabbart's fears: no matter how he economized, L 20 didn't have the fuel to return to Germany. Radioing for help, he was told cruisers and destroyers would be dispatched to find him off of Denmark. Then, more bad news: the wind was freshening to the south-east, and it would take L 20 some 10 hours to get to the Northern Tip of Denmark, 5 more hours than L 20 had fuel for. So, with that, (and the machinists informing Stabbert that two of the four engines were on their last legs,) the decision was made to steer for Norway.
At 11 AM, just off of the Norwegian coast, I can only imagine the mood in the control car was tense. The secret documents had been thrown overboard, and some two hours of fuel remained, but the downdrafts coming off the mountains were making L 20 nearly uncontrollable. After what happened to the L 4 the previous year, Stabbert didn't want to risk landing on the beach, so the plan was to open the gas valves and then escape out the windows. Bringing L 20 down in a fjord, she came in too fast and struck hard, shattering the struts of the forward gondola. While the bridge dangled by a few cables, the ship began to drift toward a 150 foot cliff. Eight members of the crew (including Stabbert and his XO) leapt for it. With the elevator man now the sole occupant of the bridge, L 20 then drifted away from the cliff and over a tongue of land, and had its rear gondola torn from the hull by an inconvenient rock, spilling out more of the crew. With the keel snapped, the three remaining crew managed to slash the gas cells and bring L 20 down into the sea. In a weird wrinkle in neutrality, crewmen recovered from the water by fishermen were considered shipwrecked mariners (and thus returned promptly) while the crewmen found on land were interred. Stabbert was one of these; several months later he escaped from the internment camp and managed to get back to Germany.
Strasser declared the raid a success despite the loss of the L 20, thanks to 'the extensive damage done to factories.' History shows that 9 were killed and 12,030 pounds of damage was done, versus an airship that cost about 72,000 pounds. While the rest of the airships were fighting their way home through heavy weather (one Zeppelin couldn't retract her radio antenna and had electricity arc off it for hours, a ready made Jacob's Ladder), the British attempted to riposte all this recent activity by staging their own aircraft raid. The idea was to provoke the Imperial fleet into sailing, but like the previous attempts, it failed due to mechanical problems with the aircraft. Of the 10 Sopwith 'Baby' seaplanes, eight failed to get off the water, and one took off and flew into a destroyer, killing the pilot. The final pilot flew over land at a great altitude, dropping his bomb on Danish soil before returning to the fleet.
It also failed because sending out the Zeppelins to scout before deploying any surface assets had become the standard response in the Imperial Navy. L 7 and L 14 were dispatched to search for the now retreating British forces. L 7 found the two seaplane carriers, and was chased by two cruisers for half an hour. The cruisers gave up the chase and turned to return to the fleet only to see L 7 explode and plunge into the sea. (Amazingly, L 7 fell near a submerged British submarine, who surfaced and rescued seven survivors.) L 14, too, was nearly lost thanks to a control cable breaking. Both elevators jammed in the full down position, and only quick action on the bridge halted L 14 200 ft above the sea. A bodge repair was performed (which involved sending men out onto the horizontal fins) and L 14 managed to limp home.
The Battle of Jutland from the Admittedly Esoteric Perspective of the Men in the Rigid Airships
The rest of May proved lousy weather for flying, and this produced a temporary pause in activity. Admiral Scheer worked out a new plan, where the Imperial fleet would raid Sunderland. He drew up a plan with Zeppelins scouting, and an alternate plan in case the weather was against flight, sticking close to the Danish coast to guard against nasty surprises. The most exciting new development was that Zeppelins were now to seek the enemy out instead of being an extra high crow's nest for the fleet, a task that the long endurance airships were ideally suited for. When May 30th came, the weather was still lousy, so the alternate plan was used. Thus, the absence of Zeppelins determined where the battle would take place.
The battle of Jutland itself started on May 31st, and for our purposes, let me say that the battles of Jutland were characterized by bad visibility making for many surprise clashes among the two fleets. The battle came about as Scheer was going to deploy the entire Imperial fleet as part of his defeat-in-detail plan on May 30th. The British, with their superior intelligence service, knew something was going to go down with the great increase in wireless activity detected. So, when the Imperial Fleet eventually sailed, the Royal Navy was waiting for them. The Royal Navy Plan was to close and to destroy the Germans in a decisive naval battle, the kind of which the Japanese would seek in vain from the Americans twenty years later.
The Naval airship division tried their best to support the Imperial Fleet, but the weather was to hamper the strategic scouting that Scheer had envisioned. They did try to form picket lines for observation, which met that the entire fleet of ships was in the air at one time or another, but for the most part, the Zeppelins only caught sporadic glimpses of the enemy. At ten PM the first day, Scheer radioed Strasser to recon the Horns reef, which was an exceedingly dangerous message to send. If the British were to intercept and decode it, (as they did) they'd know the Admiral’s intentions. In a lucky break for the Germans, the British, got no benefit from this intelligence success. The message was never passed on, because the lieutenant in charge was rather new at the job and didn't realize the significance of it.
As the first five Zeppelins returned from the picket during the night, the next five were taking off to assume their stations. Throughout the night, flashes of gunfire could be seen; Captain Dietrich in L 22 could see the searchlights and gunfire in the night from the British destroyer-German Dreadnought night action, and witnessed the enormous flash when the German Dreadnought Pommern was hit by a torpedo and exploded, taking all hands with her. When dawn broke, L 24 sent a stream of vague but alarming reports of Cruisers and fleets maneuvering, completely at odds with the historical record. To counter-balance these useless reports, L 11 managed to pick up a part of the British Armada around 4 am. L 11 correctly reported ship type, dispositions, and directions of travel, staying in contact for more than an hour despite being fired upon, at times, by the entire squadron she was observing. The British, for their part, considered the appearance of L 11 a profound disappointment. With L 11 hovering about, it was clear that Scheer now knew where they were, and thus, would go in the opposite direction. So it's kinda understandable that even the flagship HMS Marlborough took potshots at L 11 with her main armament of 13in guns.
The Imperial Navy in the end made it back to their anchorage, having fought their way out of the British trap with few casualties. The Battle of Jutland remains controversial, and not just internet controversial. Because of its indecisive conclusion, various historians ever since have been arguing about who won. My two cents: it was a draw, or even a tactical victory for the Germans. The Germans managed to sink considerably more ships than the (far larger) Royal Navy did, and German vessels proved resistant to damage, while British Battlecrusiers showed disturbing structural flaws that caused them to explode when hit by enemy fire. But the Germans needed a strategic victory, not a tactical one, and the British clearly won strategically. The blockade against Germany continued, with eventual starvation as the result. As for the airships, Scheer was well pleased, as was Strasser, though it should be said the bar was not set very high: the Zeppelins were sent aloft just in case they could do something useful.
Interestingly, despite this result, Scheer was undeterred, and would essentially try the same operation again soon after, except this time, the weather would favor the airships. Known as the Sunderland Operation, it's something we will be discussing next time.
The New Class
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| L30. |
As if all this was not enough activity, on May 30th the naval airship division was to receive the first “Super-Zeppelin” as it had been dubbed by British spies. The R-class airship was to be (more or less) the final new rigid airship class deployed in World War One, and had been long awaited by Strasser and the Naval airship division. As a design, it was not only successful in Germany, but internationally, as well. The R-class would be copied by the British, studied by all the victorious allies, and even flown by the United States, in the form of the USS Shenandoah, a copy of the R class commissioned by the US Navy in the early twenties.
Some vital stats: displacement was 1.9 million cubic feet, more than twice that of the M class. Length, 650 feet, which is some 60 feet longer than a Typhoon class submarine. Six engines, a crew of 22, and enough endurance to attack anywhere in Britain. A useful lift of 62 tons, which meant 43% of the total lift could do work, a figure that improved as the war went on. A payload of five tons of bombs, more than the B-17 twenty years later could carry. In 1916 aeronautics, it was both metaphorically and literally, huge.
While many things on the R-Class were better, its flight envelope was substantially similar to the P and Q class airships. Defenses in Britain had improved to the point where they regularly threatened to destroy those types, and in an odd coincidence, as the R class was being introduced, so was a new invention of the British. At long last, an incendiary bullet had been perfected, and was being adopted by the squadrons guarding Britain. While the new R class was a sky monster even by today's standards, the Royal Flying Corps now had a silver bullet to kill them. Airship crews were to learn this the hard way.
Note: The L 4 came to a sad end the year before. In February 1915, High command ordered Strasser to scout off the Norwegian coast, as a German freighter was making a supply run to a colony in Africa. While the M class ships had made this flight many times in peacetime, it had always been in summer. L 3 and L 4 were dispatched. Both airships successfully scouted north of Denmark, and saw nothing, but turning around found the wind blowing half a gale right in their return flightpath. In addition to the stiff wind, both airships started to loose engines, and were unable to make any headway. In desperation, both Zeppelins crash landed on beaches. L 3's commander made the crash-landing, evacuated his men, and regretfully set fire to L 3. As L 4 was approaching the beach, a downdraft put the forward gondola right into the surf, and the men spontaneously decided this was the right place to get off. Lightened of men, L 4 lifted off and vanished in the gathering winter darkness. It was only after the crew was on the beach that somebody did a headcount, and discovered that four men had been left behind in the rear gondola, who were to die when L 4 eventually crashed again into the sea.
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| Interior of L 30 minus the lifting cells. The triangular space along the bottom is the keel, inside of which is the main gangway. |
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