Airship L 39 destroyed

On the morning of 17 March 1917 French anti-aircraft artillery (PL) shot down over Compiègne the German naval airship L 39, which was returning from a raid on England. The burning wreck fell in the town itself, in the gardens by the avenue Gambetta, and the whole crew was killed together with their commander, Kapitänleutnant Robert Koch. She was a new, large ship, commissioned in December 1916. She should not be confused with the army’s LZ 39, lost on the Eastern Front in December 1915. Nine days earlier the creator of these ships, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, had died.

A raid scattered by the wind

On 16 March five of the navy’s newest airships, L 35, L 39, L 40, L 41 and L 42, set out for southern England. The main target was London. Aboard L 42 flew the commander of the naval airships, Peter Strasser. It was the first airship raid since the end of November 1916 in which bombs fell on England. As the ships approached the coast, a depression moved in over the North Sea from Iceland and the wind at about 450 metres rose to some 65 kilometres an hour. Thick cloud hung over Kent and northern France, the airships could not see the ground, and their wireless gave them little help. According to the British official history of the war in the air, the commanders thought they had crossed into England further north than they really had.

L 39 appeared first, at about 10.20 p.m. over Margate. She flew over Kent via Ashford towards Bexhill and at about midnight went out to sea over Pevensey Bay. Her six bombs damaged two cottages on land; others exploded in the sea. The other ships dropped their bombs mainly on fields in Kent and East Sussex. The British counted 79 bombs, 33 of them incendiaries. No one was killed, and the damage was estimated at about £160. The defence achieved nothing either: because of the clouds 16 pilots went up, but none of them saw an airship, and one crashed and was killed.

Shot down

The strong wind carried L 39 southwards. At about 3 a.m. she was west of Dieppe, and then she flew over France towards Paris. Short of Mantes she turned and headed east, towards the front line. The British official history surmises that Koch shut off his engines in order to drift silently over the trenches with the wind. At 5.25 a.m. she was spotted over Estrées, and a few minutes later French gunners at Compiègne saw her outline in the half-light. The airship was almost stationary, perhaps because her engines had frozen. For a quarter of an hour the guns fired more than a hundred shells at her. According to French accounts, at about 5.50 a.m. she was hit, caught fire and crashed to the ground, in view of the German trenches.

Witnesses saw four airmen jump from the burning ship. The rest burned in the wreck. According to French sources 17 men were killed. They were buried first at Compiègne and later moved to the German military cemetery at Vignemont.

The other airships returned, though with difficulty. L 35 flew over Calais and Belgium and, with one engine out of action, landed only at Dresden. L 40 and L 41 flew over France and returned to Germany across the front lines, while L 42 with Strasser turned back off the coasts of Holland and Belgium without reaching England. The raid showed the same as the autumn raids of 1916, when L 34 and L 21 were lost: airships could survive only high up and in the clouds, and from there they could neither find their target nor return safely.