Destruction of airship L 43

On the morning of 14 June 1917 the German naval airship L 43 fell in flames over the North Sea, near the Dutch island of Vlieland. It was shot down by a twin-engined Curtiss H.12 “Large America” flying boat from the naval air station at Felixstowe. The whole crew was killed, together with the commander, Kapitänleutnant Hermann Kraushaar. It was the second airship destroyed in this way within a month. On 14 May a flying boat from Great Yarmouth had shot down L 22 off Terschelling.

L 43 was a new ship, which first took to the air in March 1917. She served mainly for reconnaissance over the sea. On 4 May she bombed, without success and from a great height, a British force including the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney, which in turn fired at the airship without success. On the night of 23/24 May she took part in a raid on England. According to H. A. Jones’s British official history of the air war, she dropped 38 bombs on fields and villages in Suffolk and Norfolk, killing one person. Kraushaar was an experienced commander. According to German records he had made several dozen flights in various airships, and in the autumn of 1916 he had bombed Nottingham in L 17.

On 14 June H.12 flying boat No. 8677 was patrolling off the Dutch coast in search of airships. Its pilot was Basil Hobbs, a naval air service officer born in England but brought up in Canada. At about 8.40 a.m. the crew sighted the airship, according to Jones at a distance of five miles. L 43 was flying at about 450 metres, the same height as the aircraft. Hobbs climbed another 150 metres and dived to attack. The flying boat passed diagonally over the airship’s tail. First the wireless operator H. M. Davies or the engineer A. W. Goody fired a burst of tracer from the position amidships, and then the second officer, Robert Dickey, raked the airship from the bow Lewis gun with Brock and Pomeroy incendiary ammunition. L 43 at once burst into flames. Jones noted that three men fell out of her as she fell, and that the wreck went on burning on the water for a long time. No one survived. Sources give 24 or 25 airmen killed.

Soon afterwards Hobbs received the Distinguished Service Cross. For the German airship command it was the second such lesson within a month. From then on airships could no longer patrol safely low over the sea. According to Jones, the same crew that had destroyed L 22 met airships five more times in June and July, but each time they were flying high and escaped above the flying boat’s ceiling of about 3,600 metres.