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| The L 64, a good example of the late war R-class. |
That said, Zeppelins were clearly not the threat they used to be. The reduction in airship production and the losses of the Silent Raid in 1917 had made Strasser risk-averse. As far as raiding Britain went, Stasser face the difficult choice of either raiding on clear nights (and risk casualties now that could not be replaced) or attacking on overcast nights, which was safe, but also very unlikely to accomplish anything. Strasser choose the latter, and so raids that actually managed to do something worth mentioning are few. Still clinging to his faith that Airships could bomb Britain to defeat, it is safe to say Strasser was alone in this conviction by 1918.
A Bad Day at Ahlhorn
1918 came in like a lion on the North Sea, with a full gale keeping the Zeppelins in their sheds. The bad weather stuck around, and January 5th dawned grey and drear; there would be no flights today. At the Ahlhorn naval air station, the captains and crews busied themselves with routine maintenance. L 58 captain Arnold Schutze consulted with his XO and his machinist about preparation for the next raiding period, which was soon to start. Later, around 5 PM, Schutze stopped by the administration building to talk to Strasser. They both happened to be looking out the windows of Strasser's office when the disaster happened.
The Ahlhorn aerodrome had four double sheds, which housed five airships. Shed I house L 47 and L 51; Nearby shed II housed L 58. Sheds III and IV a half-mile away contained two more airships, SL 20 and L 46. As Strasser and Schutze looked out, a bright orange flame suddenly shot out of the shed I, and before the men could even react, a second jet of flame shot out of a second hanger. As they were (presumably) running outside, two enormous, earthshaking explosions rocked the aerodrome. Outside, the two men expected enemy planes, but the low overcast sky was empty.
Total chaos greeted them. Shed I was a raging inferno, and the Zeppelin inside Shed II had exploded. Worse, Sheds III and IV were reduced to fiery ruins, having destroyed themselves in violent explosions. Strasser ordered the base sealed to keep potential saboteurs from escaping, and then attempted to help the wounded. While the men near Sheds I and II had time to flee, the collapse of Sheds III and IV had buried several people alive. By the time the winter dusk had turned to darkness, 10 men were dead, 30 badly injured, and scores more had minor injuries. Among the severely injured was Kptlt. Hollander, who's leg was shattered by falling derbies. He spent the rest of the war in a hospital.
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| Ahlhorn base post-explosion. Barely visible at the top of the photo is the administration building. |
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| I bet you need good boots to walk through that stuff without cutting yourself |
Like a lot of other hydrogen airship accidents, no firm causes were ever established, and the Ahlhorn disaster remains something of a mystery to this day. All accounts agree the fire started in the hanger containing L 47 and L 51. That shed had lost its roof thanks to an explosion from L 47, but the walls and doors were relatively undamaged. Shed II had taken similar damage. Shed III had only a single wall standing after the Zeppelin inside it exploded, and Shed IV had been completely obliterated. Maintenance men had been working on L 51 when the fire started, and managed to flee the hanger before the fire became catastrophic. In the aft gondola at the time, the men heard an explosion like the sound of a car backfiring. The fire seems to have started below L 51; the original cause of the disaster was likely spilled gasoline that somehow was set alight.
That explains the first fire: but what about the others? Strasser knew that L 47 exploded thanks to being next to the burning L 51: the heat expanded her lifting cells, and (in their millionth appearance in horrible hydrogen accidents) the pressure relief valves vented hydrogen. When the flames reached the oxygen-hydrogen mixture, the result was an explosion. Then in his report to HQ, Strasser had to fall back on speculation and theory that would make for a good episode of Mythbusters. Strasser then speculated that the explosion's shock wave tore the lifting cells of L 63 in shed II -releasing much more hydrogen- which then detonated. (The official inquiry later speculated bits of shed roof might have fallen through the airship, striking sparks.) This created a larger shock wave, which added to the process in shed III, and when shed III exploded, this added even further to the process in shed IV, which resulted in the final, most violent explosion.
Sabotage is also possible, though there's no good evidence of any. A petty officer confessed to the doing sabotage many years later, saying he had been paid 100,000 pounds to do so, but the airship men interviewed for my primary source dismissed him as a drunken liar. If the British accomplished this astonishingly successful feat of sabotage, they are still mum about it. My personal view is that even if it was sabotage, (after all, the accident started in the one shed with two Zeppelins inside) the saboteur was aiming for just the airships in that shed; after that, the fickle nature of several million cubic feet of hydrogen did the rest.
No Crying over Spilled Gasoline
The Ahlhorn disaster combined with the silent raid took a huge toll on Zeppelin numbers. Ten airships lost from October to January was comparable to the grim time in 1916, (if we are just counting airship hulls, and ignoring that most of these losses fortunately didn't kill crewmen). But with the curtailed reinforcements, this all but guaranteed the marginalization of the Zeppelin's usefulness. Understandably, airship activity was low until March. March 1918 saw the launch of a last desperate series of offensives on the Western Front, now collectively know as the 'spring offensive.' The name aside, this newest offensive was fairly original. New elite troops known as 'storm troopers', the best of Germany's infantry, infiltrated allied trench networks and bypassed strongly defended areas. Meanwhile, these strong points were isolated, and could be defeated in detail by heavier forces following behind. It was the most dynamic thing to happen on the western front since 1914, and the offensive initially gained a lot of territory. It also got near enough to Paris that the legendary Big Bertha cannon could rain shells down on the city.
Possibly in support of this new offensive, on March 12th, a raid on the midlands was organized. Five airships took off, and all returned, but the thick overcast kept any useful bombing from happening. L 53 had some trouble landing. On her first approach, she came in much too fast, despite her engines being throttled back. On a collision course with the revolving shed, L 53 had to pull up so sharply that she struck her rear gondola on the ground, shattering her propeller. After going around and missing again thanks to the wind shifting 180 degrees, she managed to land, where then somebody noticed the rear gondola was not answering her telegraph. With her shattered propeller now spinning uselessly, the rear gondola was opened. Inside the four machinist mates were sprawled. Two were revived with liquid air, but two were dead from carbon monoxide poisoning.
Another raid was organized the next day. Three Zeppelins took off but were recalled over the North Sea. Two airships turned around; the L 42 did not. Captained by Kptlt. Dietrich, the weather in his area was fine and England was in sight, and so he ignored Strasser's order. Determined to make a good showing (now that he would be run out of the service otherwise) Dietrich stood off the British coast until complete darkness fell. The British had been foxed by the recall notice, and towns were lit up as in peacetime. Dietrich found a town (West Hartepool), dove to a modest 15,000 ft, dropped his bombs, and then climbed back to a safe altitude. L 42's aim was true, with all of her bombs hitting the town, destroying many buildings and killing eight. His attack bounce over, Dietrich headed out to sea.
Landing the next morning, Dietrich was warned by Von Lossnitzer, Strasser's adjutant, that the commander had hit the roof, and he should expect at a minimum to be confined to quarters for a few days. “It was worth it to be able to make an attack on England”
With that start, modest but good, the airships returned on the next raiding period. On April 12th, five Zeppelins set out, and all five made landfall. Three of the ships, finding overcast over Britain, tried to bomb targets using only the radio signal for navigation, and surprise, surprise, missed. The two other airships had a more interesting time of it. L 62 was to spend 6 hours over Britain, searching the spring murk for targets. Trying to find Birmingham, L 62 managed to drop her entire bomb load on nothing of importance, despite the fact that Coventry and Birmingham were both nearby (and blacked out.) After dropping her bombs, L 62 was intercepted by RFC fliers in a F.E.2b. After a half hour chase, the RFC plane was close enough to open fire. The mechanics in the rear gondola responded with their machine gun, and manage to wound the pilot in the head. The RFC plane was forced to break off and land. This is the only time in World War 1 where a defensive machine gun on a Zeppelin claimed a victory over an airplane.
L 61, the other interesting raider, came even closer to scoring a major victory and only by chance failed to do so. L 61 was determined to bomb a midlands city – hopefully Sheffield. Through miscues in navigation, L 61 found herself on the outskirts of another city – Liverpool. Often ordered as a target by Strasser, Liverpool had been a goal often missed by the Zeppelins. L 61, right on the cusp of finally bombing the docks and warehouses of Liverpool, turned north at Liverpool's edge to bomb a lit iron smelter. The bombs did damage, but on the nearby town of Wigan, and not the smelters themselves.
April was also the time of a short burst of activity from the Kaiser's war fleet. Adm. Scheer decided to raid the Scandinavian convoy. Running from the Shetlands to Bergen in Norway, it was escorted by British battlecrusiers, so Scheer deployed nothing less then his entire fleet to attack it. Once more, the Imperial Navy sallied forth to sit astride the convoy's route, with Adm. Hipper controlling the advance fleet of battlecrusiers. Arriving in Norwegian waters, the fleet braced itself for battle... and then, nothing. Embarrassingly, the convoy was not scheduled to sail that day. This lapse of intelligence was taken to be a result of the lack of Zeppelin scouting missions. Scheer's operational security was much better than it had been, though, and the Royal Navy knew nothing of the Imperial sortie until a German Battlecrusier suffered a breakdown and had to radio for a tow.
This was of a piece with the Spring offensives. By the end of April, the real danger of collapse to Allied lines had past. Germany had two options on the western front: either drive the British Expeditionary Force into the sea (which would cause France to surrender) or drive France to surrender directly. Both goals had been pursued off-and-on despite the fact that they were for several reasons mutually exclusive. Making matters worse, the Storm Troopers had been the cream of the German infantry divisions, and while effective, had of course suffered disproportionally high casualties, being in the leading edge of the attack. Lacking tanks and cavalry, the Germans lacked the mobility to really cause chaos during the breakout, and when their momentum waned, they were left holding a new salient, surrounded on three sides by enemy strongholds. And just to add to the pile of problems, a new virulent strain of the flu was taking a heavy toll on German soldiers. Malnourished compared to their allied brethren, German soldiers were proving especially vulnerable to the new outbreak.
Airship scouting till the end of April had been very light, but now regular flights resumed. With the most dangerous airspace nearest to Great Yarmouth being patrolled by flying boats, the naval airships resumed patrols elsewhere, though they still flew high to protect themselves from interception. With the regular flights came renewed British interest in blowing up naval airships.
The HMS Furious
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| The HMS Furious. If that flight deck looks goofy now, consider that this is the *revised* plan; the first version just had the foreword part as a flight deck.The first man to make a successful landing on a carrier deck three attempts later became the first person to die while trying to land on a carrier. |
The lighter forces of the Royal Navy patrolled the north sea, keeping an eye on mine-layers and on the now vast minefields. The previous year, the RN scored a success by mounting Sopwith Pups on catapults mounted on the turrets of their cruisers. One of these Pups had shot down L 23, who had incautiously approached the scouting fleet assuming that (just off of Denmark) there was no danger from aircraft. This success lead to more experimentation: by May 1918 Cruisers sometimes towed lighters behind them, each with one large flying boat. The HMS Furious had also joined the fleet. She started life as a light battlecruiser, but had been modified while being built so that she could launch and recover aircraft: the world's first aircraft carrier. At first only her forward deck was a flight deck, but after this proved tricky to land on (aircraft having to swerve around Furious' stack and superstructure) her rear deck was converted to another flight deck. (History nerds take note: at the time Japan was allied with Britain, and had officers on exchange with the Royal Navy. British experiments with carriers were viewed with great interest by these officers, who would continue them in Japan after the war.)
So the now familiar game of Zeppelins scouting the North Sea and the British trying to figure out ways to blow then up started again. Though when dealing with hydrogen-filled airships, sometimes nature does the blowing-up for you. On May 10th, L 56 and L 62 took off for a routine scouting mission. A half-hour later, L 62 was seen by a German patrol boat as she flew into a towering cumulonimbus cloud. Shortly after there was an explosion, and the flaming remnants of L 62 fell into the sea. Like lots of other similar disasters, it's unknown what caused L 62's destruction, but a strong bet would be a sudden pressure change caused her to vent hydrogen. L 56 was intercepted by a flying boat, but now wary of aircraft, she dropped ballast and climbed away from the lumbering aircraft before she was in any danger.
This missed interception once again showed that flying boats couldn't shoot down a wary Zeppelin. Somebody at the Royal Navy decided a new tactic was needed. Having already tried (and failed) many times to lure airships into traps and then shoot them down, it was decided to use HMS Furious to attack the Zeppelins while still in their sheds. The world's first carrier strike was in motion, though it would be July before it actually occurred.
Meanwhile, a new Zeppelin had arrived at Nordholz.
L 70 was the final evolution of the R-class: she was a height climber with six of the new altitude engines and extra displacement amidships, essentially what Strasser had wanted to do with the L 59. Nearly 700 ft long, altitude trials showed that should carry 8,000 lbs of bombs to 20,000 ft with just static lift, or to 23,000 ft dynamically. She could also reach 81 mph, which isn't too shabby for something 700 ft long, 80 ft wide, and with a crew of 25! First flying at the start of July, L 70 was soon in service, and instead of being assigned to one of the veteran airship commanders, she was given to Kptlt. von Lossnitzer. Lossnitzer, Strasser's new right hand man, had gotten the position by being just as passionate in his belief of the offensive capabilities of Zeppelins as Strasser himself. While eager to prove himself, his experience, however, was limited: most of his war flight experience had been in the Baltic.
Strasser, of course, thought the L 70 model was the answer to all of his problems. Exhibiting those now familiar traits of wishful thinking and chronic underestimation of the enemy, Strasser assumed that the L 70 was all but invincible from enemy fighters, and that this was the final type of Zeppelin needed. The Navy evidently disagreed, and over Strasser's objections laid plans for a new type of airship. Called the L 100, it was to displace 2.6 million cubic feet and be 750 ft long. The goal was to get a high a ceiling as possible; the design goal was 27,000 ft. Like some late World War 2 aviation projects, very little physical work was ever done on L 100.
July also saw the German Army pushed back to where they had started the spring offensives. Now the crisis began: the Kaiser and the heads of the German military now saw the war as unwinnable, and began to seek ways for peace. The common soldier, exhausted after many years of war was demoralized, as their foe was being reinforced with fresh troops from America. They (understandably) saw the war as lost, and began to surrender in massive numbers for the first time. Both their hopelessness and their flu had begun to spread back home to Germany. The Allies at the same time launched the "100 days offensive", an offensive against the now demoralized Germans that would last until the armistice.
On July 19th, the Furious and her small wing of Sopwith Camels were finally ready to strike. Equipped with two 50 lb bombs, seven Camels took off to attack the Zeppelin base at Torden, the world's first carrier strike. Approaching at 1000 ft, the base was easy to find: the giant sheds were unmistakable even from a large distance. The primary target was the 'toska' shed, where L 54 and L 60 were berthed. RN intellegence had also no doubt discovered that the base's defense airplanes, old Fokker D.IIIs, had been withdrawn some months ago. The first three Camels bombed the Toska shed, and set both L 54 and L 60 alight. Then the next three Camels arrived and attacked the other large shed at Torden, which held just the local captive balloon. While two more airships were wrecked, the Toska shed itself was undamaged, save only some holes in the roof. The return proved more difficult for the camels. Two ditched in the sea after being unable to land on Furious' awkward landing deck, four landed in neutral Denmark, and one Camel crashed in the sea, killing its pilot.
This attack gave the airship men one more thing to fear, as only the Ahlhorn base (now somewhat rebuilt) was far enough away to avoid the danger of carrier strikes. Fortunately for them, the British did not repeat the maneuver. The Furious was used for the rest of the war for carrying kite-balloons only.
On July 31st, three Zeppelins covered a sortie by the high seas fleet, which left port to protect its North Sea mine-sweeping operations. By coincidence, Harwich Force had chosen to sortie the same day. The Zeppelins had been assigned patrol routes forward and on the flanks of the imperial navy force. Despite her 15,000 ft altitude, L 56 spotted Harwich force at 8 AM, but was unable to make much out, thanks to towering Cumulonimbus clouds obscuring the view. (The same force had been spotted two hours earlier – by a German Seaplane scouting further west.) L 70, north of L 56, turned south to see if she could get a better view. At 8:50 AM Lossnitzer spotted a kite-balloon at 2000 ft, but couldn't spot the ship that was towing it. A few minutes later, L 70 came under anti-aircraft fire from some destroyers, and boldly turned to attack, dropping a few bombs on Harwich force. Since Lossnitzer was bombing from some 15,000 ft, no damage was done.
The Last Raid of the Giants
A few further patrols followed (and once again the British tried intercepting Zeppelins over the North Sea, and failed.) Then, on August 4th, the new raiding period had begun, and for the last time, Zeppelins took off to raid Britain. Strasser would be going along in his baby, the L 70, with von Lossnitzer in command. With her was L 53 and L 65, and also participating was the L 56 and the L 63. Oh, Strasser! Even at the end you still held onto hope of a Zeppelin-inspired victory!
It was an unusually warm day at 16,000 ft, which made it difficult for the airships to climb with their load of bombs. Light winds at that level meant that the three ships not only stayed together, they spotted the British coast unusually early, in full light at 6:30 pm. Though they were still 60 miles from the coast, the three skyships were easy to see to any observer. L 56 and L 63 were approaching land 30 miles south of the first three ships, and even at that distance could make out her three raiding companions in the summer evening.
Such a bold approach could hardly be missed, and within half an hour the news was flashing up and down the east coast defense network. The Great Yarmouth air station soon had 13 planes in the sky: 10 moving to a land interception position, while three moved to intercept over the sea. The three planes moving out to sea were light bombers, a surprisingly sensible airplane for Zeppelin interception. With larger wings and engines than period fighters, they were much more adept at high altitude flying. The lead plane was a DH4, with twin machine guns and a ceiling of 22,000 ft, and was piloted by Maj. Egbert Cadbury, who had assisted in the end of L 21. His observer was Canadian Capt. Robert Leckie, who also had bagged himself a skyship. The other two planes were older DH9s. As the three interceptors slowly climbed through the clouds, they could soon make out a Zeppelin above them, just visible as an outline in the dusk. Soon, to the pilot's amazement, two more airships in a line-abreast formation could be made out. It seems navigation had once again failed the German airships. They had been meaning to raid the midlands that night, but a wind had pushed them south, to near the Great Yarmouth naval air station, possibly the only aerodrome in the entire world that were specialist-airship killers.
The DH4 choose to attack L 70. From Cadbury's report:
At proximately 21:45, the Zeppelins, which were flying in a V formation, altered course north. At 22:10 Zeppelin abeam 2000 ft above us, at 17,000 ft. At 22:20 we had climbed to 16,400 ft and I attacked the Zeppelin head on, slightly to port as to clear any obstruction that might be suspended from airship. My observer trained his gun on the bow of the airship and the fire was seen to concentrate on a spot under the Zeppelin ¾ way aft.
The (explosive bullet) was seen to blow a great hole in the fabric and a fire started which quickly ran along the entire length of the Zeppelin. The Zeppelin raised her bows as if in an effort to escape, then plunged seaward a blazing mass. A large petrol tank was seen to become detached from the framework and fall blazing into a heavy layer of clouds at about 7000 ft below.
One of the DH9's pilots also observed the L 70's end:
Fascinated by the spectacle of the burning ship we sat watching the progress of the fire. Very gradually our quarry began to sink by the tail, and we could see the flames spreading upwards and forwards towards the bow. A vertical draught, fanned by the falling stern, was fanning the blaze along the whole length of the airship's hull. A few seconds more and the airship's doom was sealed. She had become a roaring furnace from end to end. Her stern sank lower, and the blazing ship assumed a perpendicular position before starting off on her plunge to earth. After swinging my machine off its course, to avoid falling derbies, we sat enthralled at the appalling spectacle.
At the beginning of her dive the now derelict airship broke in two, and her after parts came hurtling down beside us; several portions broke away and continued their headlong career with additional velocity. The forepart of the ship fell more slowly, and as it passed us we could see the burning skeleton of the mangled framework glowing with a terrific heat.
As the blazing mass fell through the upper cloud layers, six thousand feet below us, they threw back immense fans of light, making everything about us as bright as day. Slowly the reflected brilliance faded, until only a pin-point of light, far down in the cloud mass, was left to indicate the course of the falling wreckage.
The two airships with L 70 turned and fled when Strasser's flagship was shot down. Major Cadbury pursued L 65 into the darkness for five minutes, and managed to put a few bullets into her before she vanished. More bullets were put into her by the third airplane – one cell ran empty and several more were only half-full – but the third plane vanished with her crew of 2. The rest of the attacking ships aimed their bombs by radio bearings, and scored several hits on the North Sea.
Thus ended the life of Peter Strasser, leader of airships, in the last Zeppelin bombing raid of World War 1. The combination of a aggressive captain looking to make a name for himself combined with Strasser's belief that the L 70 was invulnerable to aircraft proved a unhealthy combination. If Heinrich Mathy had been the heart of the airship division, Strasser had been the brain and its guiding intelligence, so it won't surprise you to learn that with Strasser's end this tale of airships and heroism is nearly done. The men of the naval airship division had lost the leader who they had idolized, and would try to continue on for the two remaining months of the war.
God help me, Endnotes
(1)One of the initial goals the Nazis had upon coming to power was to make Germany self-sufficient in food production, both to get the rural vote, and to prevent the widespread hunger of 1918-1919 in a possible future war. This was possibly the only policy the Nazis had that was both good and successful: even during the great collapse of 1944-'47, the food situation was nowhere near as bad as at the end of World War 1.
Images
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| A DH4. |
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| An Engine Gondola of L 70 before it is 'skinned' with canvas. You can see the access ladder that leads up into the hull |
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| More shots of L 70. The second shot is her last photo; it was taken as she was departing on her final raid. |
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