Destruction of airship L 48

At about 3.30 a.m. on 17 June 1917 the burning German naval airship L 48 fell on a field of Holly Tree Farm near the village of Theberton in Suffolk. The glow was reportedly seen from several dozen kilometres away. Sixteen men were killed, among them the commander, Kapitänleutnant Franz Georg Eichler, and Korvettenkapitän Viktor Schütze, who according to Jones commanded the North Sea airship division and was flying in L 48 as commander of the raid. Three members of the crew survived the fall. That rarely happened: from airships shot down in flames over England usually nobody escaped.

A short night

L 48 was a brand-new ship. It belonged to the latest type of airship, the so-called height-climbers, lightened so that they could fly at more than 5,000 metres, beyond the reach of guns and most aeroplanes. It had first gone up on 22 May and this was its first raid. On the afternoon of 16 June four airships set out from their bases in northern Germany to bomb London. According to H. A. Jones’s British official history of the air war, it was clear already at take-off that in so short a summer night, with only four hours of darkness, they would not be able to fly far inland. A headwind meant that only two reached England. At about 2.05 a.m. L 42 bombed Ramsgate, where one of the bombs blew up a naval ammunition store in the harbour. Three people were killed and sixteen injured.

L 48 cruised off the coast for some time and only at about two o’clock crossed the shore south of Orford Ness. According to the testimony of its second-in-command, it had engine trouble for an hour and a half. It dropped about 24 bombs, which fell on fields without doing any damage. When it approached Harwich, anti-aircraft guns forced it to turn away. The night was exceptionally clear, and although the airship was flying at about 5,000 metres, it could be seen in the sky. In the searchlights it attracted several British airmen. According to local researchers, the crew believed they were heading east, out to sea, whereas in reality, because of a frozen compass, they were steering north along the coast.

Three airmen, one victory

The first to attack the airship was Lieutenant E. W. Clarke from the experimental station at Orford Ness, but he fired four drums of ammunition from long range without visible effect. Then a two-seat F.E.2b from the same station, with Lieutenant F. D. Holder and Sergeant S. Ashby, closed to a few hundred metres and fired into the airship’s tail until the gun jammed. At the same time Captain Robert Saundby attacked in an Airco DH.2 fighter. From the direction of Harwich came Lieutenant Loudon Pierce Watkins, a Canadian of No. 37 Home Defence Squadron, in a B.E.12. According to his report the first two drums had no effect, so he closed to about 150 metres below the airship and fired a third. Fire took hold of the tail, spread along the hull, and L 48 began slowly to fall. Jones writes that Saundby and Watkins attacked simultaneously and that Watkins dealt the decisive blow. He was also officially credited with the victory, although some later researchers believe that the fire was more likely started by the shooting of Holder and Ashby. Saundby received the Military Cross for this flight.

The survivors

The airship came down slowly, tail first, while the forward part of the envelope acted like a parachute. According to Jones, Eichler and four men jumped from the burning ship and were killed outright. The airship’s gondola survived the impact well enough for three men to get out of the wreck: the badly injured second-in-command, Leutnant zur See Otto Mieth, who was pulled from the flames by a local policeman, and two petty officer mechanics, Heinrich Ellerkamm and Wilhelm Uecker. In the morning the bodies were recovered from the wreck. The sixteen airmen were buried at Theberton, and British airmen placed on their grave a quotation from the Epistle to the Romans: “Who art thou that judgest another man’s servant? To his own master he standeth or falleth.” In the 1960s the remains were moved to the German war cemetery at Cannock Chase.

Men surviving the downing of an airship over England were nothing new: in September of the previous year the whole crew of L 33 had landed in Essex and been taken prisoner. But as far as is known, nobody had yet come out alive from a burning airship that fell on British soil. For the German navy the loss was a painful one. The newest type of airship, built precisely to escape the fighters, had fallen victim to aeroplanes on its very first raid. Also killed was Schütze, one of the most experienced airship commanders and one of the closest associates of Peter Strasser, the commander of the naval airships. It was the only airship shot down in 1917 by the home defence squadrons over England itself.