Zeppelin airships were used by Germany to attack its enemies on all fronts during the First World War (1914-18). Bombing raids, usually conducted at night, targeted key infrastructure like railways and docks, dropping both explosive and incendiary bombs. For the first time in warfare, it was possible to bypass a nation's armed forces and attack the civilian population directly, opening up a new 'front', what became known as the Home Front. The bombing raids caused damage and 4,000 casualties, but, due to technical and numerical limitations, and the threat from ever-improving airplanes, the Zeppelins, despite all the propaganda issued throughout the conflict, actually did little to reduce the enemy's war production or seriously affect civilian morale.
Masters of the Air
The Zeppelin was a category of rigid airship first designed and built by the company founded by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (1838-1917) in Germany. The idea was that several expandable gas-filled balloons could be held within an outer skin which was itself held rigid by a frame (hence the common name 'rigid' airship). The first Zeppelin airship, LZ 1, flew on 2 July 1900 at Friedrichshafen, home of the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin Company. More models soon followed, and Zeppelins became so successful that the name was widely applied to any type of airship, even if built by a rival company. Count Zeppelin became the figurehead of DELAG (Deutsche Luftschiffahrts Aktien Gesellschaft), founded in 1909. Another major German manufacturer of airships was Luftschiffbau Schütte-Lanz, which innovated a more streamlined design and a stronger, double-framed hull.
Most Zeppelins had a rigid metal frame of duralumin, giant hydrogen-filled gas cells, and water tanks for ballast, which could be emptied when required. The skin envelope was usually made of cotton, with later models using lighter silk. Engines and crew were housed in gondolas suspended underneath the airship. Zeppelins grew in size in the pre-war years, most measuring around 140-150 metres (460-492 ft) in length and 15 metres (49 ft) in diameter. The Zeppelins had several inherent problems: their structures were fragile and easily damaged in collisions, high winds made them very difficult to navigate, and the hydrogen gas they were filled with was highly flammable. As a consequence of these defects, there were many setbacks and disasters, but persistence paid off, and Zeppelins became both a viable form of transport and a potentially lethal weapon of war.
Silent Bombers
During the First World War, airships were sometimes used to support land forces and even naval ships, and they were used for reconnaissance purposes, flying over 1,000 such missions. It was as a bomber, though, that the German high command hoped to use this new weapon to best effect. Zeppelins were used by Germany right through WWI to bomb targets in France, Belgium, Great Britain, Russia, and Romania. The German Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859-1941) gave his consent to the bombing raids provided major monuments of cultural significance were not targeted, nor any of the enemy's royal palaces.
The German Navy only had one airship and the army four when war broke out in 1914. Zeppelin L3 bombed targets in Antwerp on 25 August, the first of many bombing raids to come. L3 also bombed Britain on 19-20 January 1915, hitting several towns in Norfolk and killing four people. L3 was almost 158 metres (518 ft) long and had a crew of 16. The airship had a range of 1,000 km (683 miles) and was powered by three 200 hp Maybach engines. The top speed was 80 km/h or 50 mph (later wartime models reached 96 km/h or 60 mph). Some models had a small observation car (Spähkorb or 'sub-cloud car'), shaped like a bomb for better aerodynamics and to prevent spinning. Lowered on a steel cable up to 750 metres (2,460 ft) long, this car contained a single person, who could observe the ground target while the airship remained safely hidden in cloud cover. The observer could communicate with the captain of the airship above using a telephone. The job of volunteer observer was a popular one amongst the crew since "it was the only place they were allowed to smoke" (de Syon, 104).
The first raid on Paris took place on 29 August 1914; in all, the French capital would be hit with 30 bombing raids during the war. The first Zeppelin raid on London was carried out by LZ 38 on 31 May 1915. Targets included docks and railway terminals. Raids went deep into Britain, attacking not only London but also targets in the Midlands, Yorkshire, Tyneside, and even Scotland. Zeppelins were sometimes deployed in large groups, such as the raids on London at the beginning and the end of September 1916, which involved 16 and 12 Zeppelins, respectively. Different areas could be bombed on the same night, such as the simultaneous attacks on London, Norwich, and Middlesbrough on the night of 7 September. LZ 74 was part of that raid, and below is an extract from the captain's combat report:
Departure 19.27 in the evening…LZ 74 crossed the British coast north of the Thames near Foulness Island. Only a few pale lights were visible on the ground and only a pale glow in the direction of the city of London when approaching at an altitude of about 3,200 m. All the suburbs over which the airship passed were completely blacked out. Following the direction of the wind, and bearing in mind the known positions of British defences, the order was to attack London from the north when LZ 74 reached Brentwood-Woodford. Meanwhile the first searchlights were noticed…It was impossible to avoid contact with the searchlights…however, it was very dusty over London and thus the beams did not have a very great range. Although more than ten large lights were trying to pinpoint the airship it was only possible to hit LZ 74 for a few seconds…[After dropping its bombs] Large fires were visible from the sky. Between 12.54 and 01.50 the airship was engaged by several batteries, but without any success.
(Stephenson, 16-17)
For defence, some Zeppelins carried two machine guns mounted on the front of the upper hull. As the war went on, design improvements resulted in much larger airships, often called 'Super Zeppelins' and capable of flying at higher altitudes and carrying much larger bomb loads than previously possible. A typical mid-war Zeppelin bomb load included a combination of explosive bombs (2 x 100 kg and 2 x 50 kg) and up to 90 incendiary bombs. In total, during the war, 208 Zeppelin raids were made against Britain. In all, Zeppelins dropped 5,907 bombs on Britain, with 528 civilians killed and 1,156 injured (Stephenson, 36).
Defence Strategies
Defence strategies against the Zeppelin threat to Britain and its allies included searchlights, anti-aircraft guns, and barrage balloons. Britain also built its own rigid airships, some of which had a single biplane, such as a Sopwith Camel, suspended beneath them. The plane could be released in the air and so reach the same high altitude of the attacking airship. German designers copied the idea for LZ 80 in 1918 with an Albatross D-III fighter attached to its underbelly, but the scheme was not expanded to other airships. For both sides, attaching a biplane of the period to an airship had two major drawbacks. First, the pilot had to sit in the plane from the airship's take-off, and second, he had to keep his engine running during the entire flight.
Following many failed attacks on airships, aircraft machine guns were eventually fitted with a mixture of explosive and incendiary rounds, the former to create holes in the skin of the airship under attack, releasing the flammable hydrogen within, and the latter to then ignite the escaping gas. The first Zeppelin brought down by an Allied aircraft was LZ 37 on 7 June 1915. The British pilot, Lieutenant R. A. J. Warneford, was awarded the Victoria Cross medal for the feat. Another defensive strategy was to target the airship sheds in Germany or occupied territory. This approach was taken early in the war when sheds in Düsseldorf were hit in October 1914, which was even before the first Zeppelin had bombed Britain.
Damaged Zeppelins were sometimes forced to land in enemy territory (Germany lost seven in this way), and so their design features could be copied and incorporated into Allied airship designs. Two notable losses were the L 33, brought down in Essex, England, in 1916, and the L 49, which was forced to land near Bourbonne-les-Bains in France in October 1917. Both these airships were captured virtually intact. Sometimes parts of downed airships were cannibalised for use in new airships, such as the British R 9, which used an engine from the stricken Zeppelin L 33. Vulnerability to attacks from biplanes led Zeppelin designers to up their own game, and by 1917, such airships as the L 43 could fly at an altitude of 5,500 metres (18,000 ft). This put the airship out of range of airplanes and ground guns, but air currents at that height were very unpredictable. Ironically, L 43 was shot down off the Dutch coast in July 1917 at the lowly height of 460 metres (1,500 ft). By 1918, Zeppelins could fly at a height of nearly 7,000 metres (23,000 ft) and had a range of 12,000 km (7,500 miles).
German airships caused around 4,000 casualties on all fronts during WWI. Despite their inherent structural fragility and vulnerability to attack, of 117 airships in service, only 39 'Zeppelins' were ever shot down in the air during the war, while 42 were lost to accidents of one kind or another, particularly when landing (de Syon, 107). The threat of airplanes did seriously reduce the number of Zeppelin raids launched in the last years of the conflict. Rapid developments in airplanes ensured that the airship, at least as a weapon of war, was practically obsolete by 1918.
A Propaganda Opportunity
Germany had hoped to strike terror into the civilians of enemy states, but the Zeppelin raids (and those made by other aircraft) were, in reality, sporadic and not strategically effective. As the historian A. Bruce notes: "The effect of strategic bombing during the First World War was very limited; there was no significant loss of war production and no evidence of any real effect on civilian morale" (11). Although consistently accurate bombing proved to be an elusive objective, this did not stop the German Airship League from printing thousands of souvenir postcards to commemorate successful raids.
Although the perception of danger was certainly felt by civilians, the British government quickly turned the Zeppelin raids into a propaganda tool. The Zeppelin threat had been hyped up even before the war had started, and this only deepened as the conflict dragged on, creating a sort of Zeppelinitis hysteria. As the historian G. De Syon notes, "Propaganda played a substantial role in this process, masking failures on both sides while exaggerating meager successes" (71). While Germany celebrated each successful bombing raid, stories of successful attacks on Zeppelins were run in Allied news reels and captured in art. Posters were put up in Britain which encouraged men to enlist in the armed forces rather than passively sit at home and risk being killed in a bombing raid. There was even a campaign to raise funds for the Red Cross by selling pin badges and cufflinks made from pieces of the metal frame of shot-down Zeppelins.
Legacy
After the war, which ended with Germany's defeat, nine Zeppelins were transferred to the Allies, and others were provided as part of the peace agreement. The air war had driven fast developments. Near the end of the conflict, Zeppelin L 59 was intended to fly long-range from Bulgaria to the eastern coast of Africa to support besieged German colonial troops there as they desperately tried to cling on to Germany's last colony on the continent, Deutsch-Ostafrika (German East Africa). Not just loaded with supplies and ammunition, the intention was to allow the German colonial troops to reuse the airship's engines for generators, fabricate tents from the outer skin, and make clothing from the linen gas cells. The airship made it as far as Sudan before turning for home on news that the German army to the south had already been defeated. The uninterrupted round trip lasted an impressive 95 hours, and, with the airship covering some 4,225 miles (6,800 km) or roughly the distance from Friedrichshafen to Chicago, it was a signal of things to come for intercontinental air travel.
The design evolution of Zeppelins during the war meant that rewards were reaped in civilian life in the 1920s, with the construction of Zeppelins capable of crossing the Atlantic Ocean as passenger liners. The Transatlantic Zeppelins provided the very height of luxury air travel. One airship to make the crossing was LZ 126, renamed Los Angeles ZR3 by the United States Navy. This Zeppelin was subsequently filled with much safer helium gas, then only available in the United States. The giant LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin, which had a volume of 105,000 cubic metres, even managed to circumnavigate the globe in August 1929. Following the Hindenburg disaster of May 1937, when Germany's hydrogen-filled LZ 129 Hindenburg burned in the air, killing 37 people, airship travel fell out of official and public favour, to be replaced after WWII by commercial airplanes.
