First German air raid on Paris

At about noon on 30 August 1914 a German aircraft appeared over Paris. The Taube (PL)-type machine, flown by Leutnant Ferdinand von Hiddessen, dropped several small bombs and leaflets on the city. It was the first air raid on the French capital.

Bombs in the 10th arrondissement

The Taube, German for “dove”, was a light monoplane with distinctive wings resembling a bird’s. The bombs fell in the 10th arrondissement, near the Gare de l’Est. They weighed about 2 kilograms each. They landed on the rue des Marais, rue des Vinaigriers and rue des Récollets and on the Quai de Valmy by the Canal Saint-Martin. They shattered windows and damaged several buildings.

Accounts of the casualties differ. Contemporary Paris sources mention two women wounded, while later studies give one or two dead and several wounded. The raid of 1 September, by contrast, certainly caused deaths, when bombs killed several people.

Besides the bombs, the airman dropped a message to the inhabitants. It ran roughly as follows: “The German army is at the gates of Paris. You have no choice but to surrender.” It was signed by Leutnant von Hiddessen.

“The five o’clock Taube”

The raid had no military significance. It was above all a demonstration and an attempt to intimidate Parisians at a moment when the German armies were approaching the city. In the following days German aircraft returned over Paris almost daily, usually in the late afternoon. Parisians called them “the five o’clock Taube” and, instead of hiding indoors, often went out into the streets to watch them through binoculars. The French organised the first armed air patrols over the capital. The raids stopped when the Battle of the Marne began in the first days of September and German aviation turned to reconnaissance.

Some sources, including Barbara Tuchman’s well-known book “The Guns of August”, date the first raid to 29 August. Most studies, however, including French archival sources, give 30 August.

Ferdinand von Hiddessen was shot down in 1915 and spent the rest of the war as a French prisoner. After the war he joined the NSDAP and in the 1930s sat in the Reichstag.