First aircraft attack on a merchant ship

On 15 March 1915 a German seaplane attacked the small British steamer Blonde off the east coast of England, near the North Foreland in the county of Kent. It dropped five bombs, but all of them missed. The British chronology of the war records this event as the first attack by an aircraft on a merchant ship.

Blonde, a steamer of 613 gross register tons, was sailing in ballast, without cargo, from Cowes on the Isle of Wight to the mouth of the Tyne. According to the British returns of merchant shipping losses and damage, she was about three miles east of the North Foreland when the second officer spotted an aircraft approaching from the east. The master ordered full speed ahead, a zigzag course and the siren sounded. The five bombs fell close alongside but did no damage. Soon an armed vessel of the patrol flotilla from Ramsgate came up. According to the British Naval Staff monograph this was the drifter Paramount, which fired a shot from her small gun, and the attacker flew off to the east and vanished into the mist.

Aircraft over the shipping lanes

The seaplane most probably came from one of the German naval air bases on the occupied coast of Flanders, at Zeebrugge or Ostend. Since December 1914 German aircraft had been appearing over Dover and the Thames estuary, and on Christmas Day the Germans had tried to bomb the British ships taking part in the Cuxhaven Raid. In the second half of February 1915 aircraft several times attacked warships and vessels in the Thames estuary, among them a patrol destroyer, minesweepers and a fleet auxiliary. On 26 February bombs also fell on ships near the Shipwash lightship off the Suffolk coast. The sources do not make clear whether merchant ships were among the targets of those raids, and the British chronology regarded only the attack on Blonde as the first such case.

According to British returns, in March and April 1915 German aircraft bombed about ten ships, mainly near the North Hinder and Galloper lightships in the southern North Sea. The attacks, however, were not very effective. The aircraft could carry only a few small bombs, and an accurate drop on a moving ship was very difficult. The airmen rarely scored hits, and for a long time attacks from the air remained a far smaller threat to shipping than mines and submarines.

The new form of warfare nevertheless caused alarm, in the neutral countries too. On 28 April 1915 a German aircraft attacked the American ship Cushing. Washington cited this incident alongside submarine attacks in its note of 13 May 1915, sent to Berlin after the sinking of the Lusitania.