Destruction of airship L 7

On the morning of 4 May 1916 the British light cruisers Galatea and Phaeton sighted the German airship L 7, which had come in from the direction of the land to reconnoitre the British warships cruising off the coast of Schleswig (PL). After a few shots at long range the airship was hit and began to fall. It was finished off by the British submarine E31, which picked up seven surviving airmen from the sea. The shooting down was the only success of a large operation in which the British tried to lure the German High Seas Fleet out of its ports.

The operation was prepared after the bombardment of Lowestoft and Yarmouth at the end of April. Seaplanes from the converted ferries Vindex and Engadine were to bomb the airship sheds at Tondern, today’s Tønder in Denmark. The British hoped that a raid on the German coast would provoke the German fleet into coming out. During the night of 3–4 May two minelayers mined the exits from the German swept channels near Borkum and the Vyl lightship, and submarines waited nearby. Admiral John Jellicoe led the Grand Fleet out towards the Skagerrak, and the battlecruisers of Admiral David Beatty took up position to the south of him. Matters were complicated by a German airship raid on northern England and Scotland during the night of 2–3 May, after which L 20 crashed in Norway. The British expected the Germans to send ships to help the returning airships, but the German battlecruisers had already returned to port on 3 May.

The raid itself failed. After 3 a.m. the carriers lowered Sopwith Baby seaplanes onto the water off Sylt. According to the British official history of the war in the air, of eleven machines only three got off the water. The others broke their propellers, had engine failures or capsized in the wash of the destroyers. One pilot struck the aerial of the destroyer Goshawk and was killed, another turned back with engine failure. Only one reached Tondern, but the sheds were shrouded in mist and his two bombs missed.

At about 9.30 Galatea and Phaeton, steaming on the western wing of the cruiser screen, spotted L 7 to the south. She was one of the oldest airships of the navy, in service since November 1914, and had been sent off hastily from Tondern to look for the British ships. Ten days earlier she had provided air cover for the battlecruiser Seydlitz, damaged by a mine on the way to Lowestoft. British sources describe her end differently. According to the official history of the war at sea, the only shell from the cruisers to hit struck the fuel tanks and started a fire which destroyed the airship within minutes, and E31 could do no more than rescue the survivors. The official history of the war in the air says that the stricken airship came down on the water and E31 approached and set her on fire with her gun. The submarine picked up seven men. The rest were killed: eleven airmen according to German sources, thirteen according to the British official history, which speaks of a crew of 20.

Jellicoe waited for the High Seas Fleet until 2 p.m. and then turned back to his bases. The Germans did not put to sea, and E31 narrowly escaped being rammed by a German cruiser on the way to Harwich. The Admiralty concluded, however, that the threat of an attack on the German coast might induce the enemy to leave port. Admiral Reinhard Scheer, meanwhile, was preparing a sortie of his own. Less than four weeks later the two fleets met off Jutland.