Airship LZ 85 shot down

In the early hours of 5 May 1916 the German army airship LZ 85 flew over Salonika, the main base of the Entente forces on the Salonika front, for the third time. This time Allied warships were waiting for it in the harbour. The searchlight of the British battleship Agamemnon picked the airship out of the darkness, and the ship’s guns soon hit it. LZ 85 came down in the marshes at the mouth of the Vardar, and its crew, after a brief flight through the swamps, were taken prisoner. That was the end of airship raids on Salonika.

Airships over Salonika

LZ 85 belonged to the German army, which, alongside the navy, had its own fleet of airships. In the autumn of 1915 it operated on the Eastern Front, where it bombed railway lines and bridges in the area of Dvinsk, Riga and Minsk. At the beginning of 1916 the Germans sent airships against Salonika, where the French and British were landing troops and supplies. According to the British official history of the air war, The War in the Air, the first of them, LZ 81, operated from Temesvár in southern Hungary with orders to destroy the port installations, but was dogged by engine failures. It was replaced by LZ 85 under Oberleutnant Ernst Scherzer.

On the night of 31 January – 1 February 1916 LZ 85 bombed Salonika for the first time. An incendiary bomb hit the warehouses of the Banque de Salonique and burned goods worth, according to the British official history, three million francs. Another bomb fell next to a British transport that was unloading ammunition and killed several Allied soldiers and Greek dock workers. The airship repeated the attack on the night of 17 March. The British official historian of the Macedonian campaign, Cyril Falls, wrote that the raids did some damage, but there were few civilian casualties. The Allies feared, however, that fear of bombs would paralyse the life of the port, on whose work and trade the supply of their armies depended.

The last flight

The third raid ended in disaster. The airship appeared over the harbour at about 2.15 a.m. on 5 May and at once was caught in the beam of Agamemnon’s searchlight. The old battleship opened fire and, according to British accounts, quickly scored a hit. Falls writes that the airship dropped no more bombs and drifted low over the boom defending the harbour entrance. There the British torpedo boat No. 18, on guard at the boom, put three more shells into it. LZ 85 fell in the marshes near the mouth of the Vardar, west of the town. The crew, according to some studies twelve men, tried to slip away through the swamps, but were surrounded and captured by French troops, according to Falls cavalry. Rumours circulated in the camps that some of the airmen had managed to escape.

The wreck quickly became an attraction for soldiers and nurses from the camps around Salonika, who waded to it through the mud. Allied soldiers dragged the metal framework out of the marshes and assembled it on the quay by the White Tower, where it was put on public display. Part of the wreckage was later taken to England by the British ship Canning. The British official history regarded the shooting down as more than an episode: it ended the airship raids that had unsettled the multinational population of the town and threatened the work of the port.

The success raised morale in the Allied camp at a time when the situation in Macedonia was becoming increasingly tense. Re-formed units of the Serbian army were arriving at Salonika from Corfu, and the Bulgarians and Germans, expecting an Entente offensive, were preparing to enter the territory of neutral Greece.