First German air raid on England

On 21 December 1914, at about 1 p.m., a German seaplane appeared over Dover. The crew dropped two bombs, which fell into the sea near the Admiralty Pier, the long breakwater sheltering the harbour. Nobody was hurt and nothing was damaged. Even so, British records of the events of the war noted the day as the first German air raid on England. Reports of air attacks on the British Isles had appeared earlier in the German press, but the British did not confirm them. This flight was the first undoubted air raid on Britain.

The aircraft belonged to the 1st Naval Air Unit (Seeflieger-Abteilung 1) of the Imperial Navy, which was based in the Belgian port of Zeebrugge, taken by the Germans in October. From the Flanders coast to Dover was a little over 100 kilometres, a distance within the range of the seaplanes of the day. It was a two-seat Friedrichshafen FF 29 biplane, number 203, built at the aircraft works in Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance. It could carry only a few small bombs. According to the British historian of the raids Ian Castle, the aircraft was flown by Oberleutnant zur See Stephan von Prondzynski, with Fähnrich zur See Ludwig von Frankenberg as observer. The spelling of the pilot’s name varies in the sources.

The target of the raid was most probably the harbour at Dover, one of the Royal Navy’s most important bases on the Strait. Ships patrolling the English Channel were stationed there, and part of the supplies for the army fighting in France passed through the port. Two small bombs, however, could not have done serious damage even if they had hit. The British failed to intercept the raider, which calmly flew off out to sea.

The raid came only a few days after German warships had shelled Scarborough and Hartlepool and a German airship had been sighted off the mouth of the Humber. The British, who until then had feared above all the Zeppelins, learnt that the threat from the air could also come from German air bases on the Belgian coast. The flight over Dover was a minor episode, but it opened a new chapter of the war, in which the front no longer ended at the line of trenches and the shore of the sea.