Airship raid on Theatreland

On the evening of 13 October 1915 the German naval airship L 15 of Kapitänleutnant Joachim Breithaupt flew over the very centre of London. At about 9.35 p.m. it began dropping bombs around Covent Garden and the Strand, in the heart of the theatre district. One bomb fell at the junction of Wellington Street and Exeter Street, in front of the Lyceum Theatre, and killed 17 people. It was the deadliest airship raid on Britain in 1915. In England it went down in history as the “Theatreland raid”.

Five airships

According to the British official history of the war in the air, the German command intended to use the dark October nights above all for an attack on Liverpool. On 13 October, however, the weather was judged too uncertain for so long a flight, and five naval airships, L 11, L 13, L 14, L 15 and L 16, were sent against London. It was the largest airship expedition against the capital since the first raid in May. They took off around noon from bases in northern Germany. The British knew of them soon after 5 p.m. thanks to their radio direction-finding stations. Four airships crossed the Norfolk coast at about 6.30 p.m., the fifth, L 11, only at about 8.25 p.m.

London’s defences were already stronger than in the spring. In September, after Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Mathy’s raid on the City, Admiral Percy Scott had taken charge of the capital’s anti-aircraft artillery. Guns appeared at new sites, and a 75 mm gun on a motor chassis was brought over from France. The airship commanders reported on their return that the anti-aircraft fire had been much fiercer than before. Not a single airship was hit, however.

From the Strand to Aldgate

L 15, for which this was the first flight over England, attacked most effectively. Breithaupt skirted the city to the west so as to cross it with the wind, and, finding his bearings by Hyde Park and the Thames, began bombing near Charing Cross. Bombs fell in turn on the Strand, Aldwych, the seats of two of London’s Inns of Court, Lincoln’s Inn and Gray’s Inn, Chancery Lane, Hatton Garden, Farringdon Road, and further on Finsbury Pavement, Aldgate and the Minories. In Aldwych three or four people were killed and 15 injured. The historic stained glass of Lincoln’s Inn chapel was damaged. The British counted 30 bombs from L 15 in London. They killed 28 people and injured 70.

Breithaupt later described how over the City the searchlights lit up the airship “as bright as day”, while shrapnel burst all around it. He also saw aeroplanes trying to close in on him and dropped all his ballast to climb out of their reach. In reality, because of the fog, only five Royal Flying Corps pilots took off. One of them, Second Lieutenant John Slessor, spotted the airship in a searchlight beam but lost it in the clouds. Three pilots crashed their machines on landing in the fog.

Woolwich, Croydon and Hertford

The other airships struck mainly the suburbs and the provinces. L 14 of Kapitänleutnant Alois Böcker strayed far to the south and at about 9.15 p.m. bombed the Otterpool army camp near Hythe in Kent. Fifteen soldiers were killed there, most of them Canadian gunners. L 14 then turned north and at about 11.20 p.m. dropped bombs on a residential district of Croydon, killing nine people, among them three brothers aged between 10 and 15.

Mathy’s L 13 first strayed over Guildford, and shortly before midnight bombed the artillery barracks and the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich. Thirteen men were injured, one of whom later died, but there was no serious damage, and Mathy believed he had attacked the Victoria Docks. L 16 of Oberleutnant zur See Werner Peterson mistook the River Lea for the Thames and bombed Hertford, where nine people were killed. L 11 dropped its bombs on fields in Norfolk. All the airships returned to Germany.

The toll

According to the British official history, 71 people were killed and 128 injured in the raid as a whole. In relation to the number of airships and bombs, these were the heaviest casualties inflicted by any airship raid of the war. The damage was estimated at about £80,000. The British chronology of the war gives a rounded figure of about 200 casualties, combining killed and wounded.

The raid accelerated the build-up of the defences. Two rings of searchlights were set up around London, and some of them were mounted on trams that could be quickly sent to designated positions. It was the last airship raid on England in 1915. The next expedition set out only on the night of 31 January to 1 February 1916, and its target was the Midlands.