Destruction of airship L 23

On the morning of 21 August 1917 the German naval airship L 23 fell in flames into the North Sea off the western coast of Jutland. It was shot down by a single-seat Sopwith Pup fighter that had taken off from a platform on the British light cruiser HMS Yarmouth. It was flown by Flight Sub-Lieutenant Bernard Arthur Smart. The airship’s whole crew was killed. This is thought to have been the first time an aircraft flown off a ship at sea destroyed an enemy aircraft.

L 23 had been in service since April 1916 and was one of the fleet’s busiest airships. According to German records it made several dozen reconnaissance flights over the sea and three raids on England. In April 1917 it became famous for an unusual feat: it stopped the Norwegian sailing ship Royal, carrying timber for England, put a prize crew aboard and sent her to Germany. Naval airships such as L 23 were the eyes of the High Seas Fleet. They watched for British ships and scouted ahead of every operation. The Grand Fleet was therefore looking for a way to destroy them far from the English coast, beyond the range of land-based aircraft and flying boats.

An aircraft on a cruiser

The answer was to be light fighters on ships. On Yarmouth a makeshift platform was built over the conning tower and the forward gun, giving an aircraft a take-off run of about six metres. According to the British official history of the air war by H. A. Jones, in June 1917 Flight Commander F. J. Rutland took off from it for the first time in a Sopwith Pup. The aircraft could not return to the ship. After the fight the pilot was to ditch beside a destroyer and hope to be picked up.

On 21 August Yarmouth, with the 1st Light Cruiser Squadron, was covering a minelaying operation off the Danish coast. In the morning the ships were spotted by a German reconnaissance seaplane, and at about 5.30 a.m., after it had flown off, an airship appeared on the horizon. The force held its course northwards to draw it as far as possible from its base. Shortly after 6.30 a.m. the ships turned into the wind and Yarmouth was ordered to launch her aircraft. Smart had never taken off from a ship before, but he got the machine into the air without trouble.

The attack

The airship at once began to make off and was already 15–25 kilometres away. Smart climbed to about 2,700 metres and gave chase. When he was a few hundred metres above L 23, he dived and fired incendiary ammunition into it from so close that at the last moment he had to swerve sharply to avoid a collision. Fire engulfed the airship’s stern; it reared up nose first and burned in the air. Smart saw one airman jump with a parachute, but he too died in the sea. According to Jones, before it fell L 23 managed to send a signal: “Pursued by enemy forces”. German aircraft sent out to search found only a patch of oil and a charred propeller blade in the afternoon. The commander, Oberleutnant zur See Bernhard Dinter, and the whole crew were killed. Sources differ as to its size. In the following weeks the sea washed the airmen’s bodies up on the Danish beaches.

After an hour in the air Smart found his force and ditched ahead of the destroyer HMS Prince, whose boat picked him up. The aircraft was abandoned. For this flight he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. The success influenced the Admiralty’s decisions. According to Jones, a few days earlier it had already been decided to fit take-off platforms to one light cruiser in each squadron of the Grand Fleet, and the shooting down of L 23 accelerated the development of shipborne aviation. In July 1918 Smart led aircraft from the carrier HMS Furious against the airship base at Tønder, in one of the first raids by land aircraft taking off from the deck of an aircraft carrier.