First daylight aeroplane raid on London

On 28 November 1916, just before noon, six bombs suddenly fell on the western part of London. No alarm had been sounded and at first nobody knew where the attack had come from. They had been dropped by a single German aeroplane flying high in a hazy but clear sky. It was the first aeroplane raid on London and at the same time the first daylight attack on the capital. Until then London had been bombed only by airships, at night, since the first raid by LZ 38 in May 1915. Only a few hours earlier, at dawn the same day, British airmen had shot down the airship L 21 off the Suffolk coast.

The aeroplane from Mariakerke

The aeroplane was a two-seat LVG, according to some studies of the C.IV type, with a Mercedes engine of about 225 hp. It belonged to the German naval air service in Flanders. It was flown by a warrant officer (Deckoffizier), Paul Brandt, and the observer was Lieutenant Walther Ilges. According to the British official history of the air war, H. A. Jones’s The War in the Air, they took off in the morning from the airfield at Mariakerke near Ostend to bomb the Admiralty building in Whitehall. On the way Ilges took some 20 photographs of airfields, military camps and munitions factories.

German aeroplanes had attacked the English coast before. The first bombs fell into the sea near Dover in December 1914, and in 1916 single machines from Flanders had several times dropped bombs on Dover, Margate and other towns in Kent. These, however, were short forays over the coast. London lay at the limit of the range of the aircraft of the day, and its defences, prepared for night visits by airships, did not expect an attack by day.

Bombs over Knightsbridge

The LVG flew so high that, according to Jones, only two people saw it on the way and neither recognised it as an enemy machine. The anti-aircraft defences did not notice it at all. Its presence was discovered only when the bombs began to explode. Six 10-kilogram bombs fell in a strip from Brompton Road in Knightsbridge to the area around Victoria station. Instead of the Admiralty they hit streets and houses a kilometre or two further west. The damage was slight, but according to Jones ten people were injured.

The crew did not get home. On the return flight the engine began to fail. The airmen threw the camera and plates overboard, and Brandt put the aeroplane down near Boulogne-sur-Mer, on the French side of the front, where both airmen were taken prisoner. The photographs were never developed.

A herald of a new air war

Militarily the raid was of no importance, but it was an unpleasant surprise for London. It showed that a lone aeroplane could reach the capital unnoticed and drop bombs with impunity in broad daylight, and that the defences, built against night raids by airships, had no answer to it. It was the last air attack on Britain in 1916. In the spring of 1917 the German army air service began daylight raids by twin-engined Gotha bombers. On 13 June 1917 their raid on London killed more than 160 people and became the deadliest single raid on the capital of the whole war.