First night aeroplane raid on London

Shortly after midnight on 6–7 May 1917 the drone of a single engine was heard over north-east London. At about 12.40 a.m. it was heard by anti-aircraft gunners at Wanstead, and a moment later the first bomb fell on Hackney Marshes. Within a few minutes the German aeroplane flew west over Hackney, Stoke Newington, Highbury and Holloway, dropping more bombs. It was the first night raid on London by an aeroplane. Until then only airships had bombed the capital by night, and the only earlier aeroplane attack on the city, on 28 November 1916, had taken place in daylight.

A lone Albatros

The attacker was a two-seat Albatros C.VII reconnaissance aeroplane of the German air unit Flieger-Abteilung 19, which had taken off from an airfield near Ostend. It was flown by Acting Officer (Offizierstellvertreter) Rudolf Klimke, with Lieutenant Walter Leon as observer. Accounts differ about the circumstances of the flight. According to the British historian of the raids Ian Castle, the crew most probably had no official permission for it. According to other authors, the flight was approved by the unit commander, but the airmen were reprimanded on their return all the same. The raid was thus not part of any planned campaign. The British official history of the air war, H. A. Jones’s The War in the Air, notes only that it fell during the full-moon period, which made it easier to find one’s way over the city.

Bombs over north London

The number of bombs varies between sources. Jones writes of five bombs dropped between Hackney and Holloway, some studies speak of five 10-kilogram bombs, and Castle, who went through the police reports, counted six 12.5-kilogram bombs. The first made a crater on the marshes, the next broke the windows of a house and a greenhouse on Stoke Newington Road. Another went through the roof of the Newington Green Mansions block on Green Lanes and exploded in the flat of a sleeping married couple. Frederick Dawson was killed and his wife Annie was seriously injured. Another tenant was less seriously hurt. The next bombs fell in a garden in Aberdeen Park, on Highbury Fields, where they broke a water main, and on a house in Eden Grove in Holloway, which the bomb struck without exploding. According to Castle, the raid cost one life, two people were injured, and the damage was valued at £510.

No answer from the defences

The defences could do nothing. Two Royal Flying Corps aeroplanes took off from the airfield at Bekesbourne and two Royal Naval Air Service ones from Manston, but no pilot sighted the Albatros as it returned over Kent towards the coast. Jones regarded the sortie as an isolated “tip and run” attack, similar to the earlier spring visits of single aeroplanes and seaplanes over Broadstairs, Westgate and Dover, and as an event of no particular significance.

The real change was still to come. Near Ghent the bomber squadron Kagohl 3 was completing its preparations, equipped with twin-engined Gotha G.IV bombers and intended specifically for attacks on England. Its first expedition against London set off on 25 May 1917. Klimke soon joined it, and in July he was over London again, this time in a Gotha crew. Night raids by aeroplanes on the capital began in earnest only in the autumn of 1917, when the Gothas switched to attacks by moonlight.