Airship raid on the Midlands

On the evening of 31 January 1916 nine German naval airships appeared over England. Their target was Liverpool on the west coast, but in the fog and cloud none of them got there. The bombs fell on the industrial towns of the Midlands, which had until then been considered out of range of air raids and were not blacked out. According to the British official history of the war in the air, 70 people were killed and 113 injured. It was the first airship raid on England since the raid on London in October 1915.

Lost airships

The airships L 11, L 13, L 14, L 15, L 16, L 17, L 19, L 20 and L 21 took off at about midday from their bases at Nordholz, Tondern and Hage. Aboard L 11 was Korvettenkapitän Peter Strasser, commander of the whole naval airship service. The British had intercepted German wireless signals and knew of the raid, but thick fog along the coast prevented the anti-aircraft ships and trawlers from putting to sea. Over England the airships ran into cloud, rain and snow. Ice on their envelopes weighed them down so much that they could not climb higher than about 2,000 metres, and three had engine trouble, so their commanders gave up the flight to Liverpool and looked for targets nearer the east coast.

The commanders navigated mainly by wireless bearings, which proved unreliable. On their return they reported having bombed Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Nottingham and the Humber ports. In fact not a single bomb fell on any of these cities, and the furthest west the airships reached was the area around Shrewsbury. Strasser, who could make out no clearly military target below, brought all his bombs back.

Tipton, Walsall and Burton

The most casualties were caused by L 21 of Kapitänleutnant Max Dietrich. Dietrich took the lights of two towns on a river for Liverpool and Birkenhead, but he was in fact over the densely built-up area between Wolverhampton and Birmingham. Bombs from L 21 fell in turn on Tipton, Bradley near Bilston, Wednesbury and Walsall. Thirty-three people were killed and 20 injured. In Walsall Julia Slater, the wife of the town’s mayor, was fatally wounded. At about midnight the same area was bombed again by L 19, this time without casualties.

Three airships attacked Burton upon Trent, the brewing town, one after another. Fifteen people were killed there and 70 injured. Earlier, L 20 had dropped bombs on Loughborough, killing ten people, and on the Stanton ironworks near Ilkeston, where two workers were killed. L 14 bombed the Midland Railway workshops in Derby, and L 13 of Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Mathy, convinced that it was attacking works near Goole, hit the steelworks at Scunthorpe. In all the British counted 205 high-explosive and 174 incendiary bombs. The material damage was not great compared with the number of casualties.

The defenceless Midlands

The defences practically did not exist. Only a few dozen shots were fired at the airships, and a dozen or so pilots of the Royal Flying Corps and the naval air service took off from airfields in the fog. None saw the enemy, several aircraft crashed on landing, and two RFC majors died of their injuries. The raid caused outrage and fear in the Midlands. Many towns had not been subject to the blackout regulations, and the warnings did not arrive in time because the telephone lines were jammed by private calls. On 8 February the government extended lighting restrictions to almost the whole of England, and the authorities began organising a warning system for the industrial districts.

One of the airships did not return. L 19 of Kapitänleutnant Odo Loewe, which had circled over England the longest, lost more engines on the way back and was fired on over the Netherlands. On 2 February its wreck, drifting on the North Sea, was found by the British trawler King Stephen. The skipper refused to take the Germans aboard, fearing that his small crew would not be able to cope with the more numerous prisoners. All the airmen of L 19 died.