French air raid on the Krupp works

On 24 September 1916 two French aircraft bombed the Krupp armaments works in Essen, in the heart of the Ruhr. The British chronology of the war records it briefly: “Krupp’s works at Essen bombed by French aeroplanes”. Behind this sentence lies a daring raid by two airmen: Captain Louis Robert de Beauchamp, commander of escadrille N 23, and Lieutenant Pierre Daucourt. They flew single-seat aircraft from the airfield at Lemmes, south of Verdun. According to French studies, the whole route, there and back, was about 700 kilometres.

Modified Sopwiths

Escadrille N 23 fought in the Battle of Verdun as a fighter and reconnaissance unit. It flew Nieuports, and in mid-1916 it also received three British two-seat Sopwith 1½ Strutters, which the French designated Sopwith 1A2. Beauchamp, a pre-war cavalry officer and pilot, had taken part in May in a rocket attack on German observation balloons over Verdun. Now he decided to make use of the Sopwiths’ long range and speed. He had them converted into single-seaters: instead of an observer and armament, the aircraft carried more fuel and bombs. After brief bombing trials he took off together with Daucourt, according to one study at about 11 a.m. Daucourt was a well-known pre-war sporting aviator who in 1912 had won the Pommery Cup for a flight from Valenciennes to Biarritz.

Each aircraft dropped six bombs on Essen. Sources differ on their weight: according to some they were 120 mm artillery shells with a total of 60 kilograms of explosive, according to others 50-kilogram bombs. French accounts stress that the Germans did not expect aircraft so far from the front, which was more than 250 kilometres from Essen in a straight line. Both airmen returned unharmed. The available sources do not say whether the bombs hit the works or what damage they did. A dozen bombs, however, could not threaten the production of a great concern.

Bombing in crisis

From the beginning of the war Essen had been a symbolic target for the French. As early as 1914 and 1915 politicians and aviation enthusiasts, such as the mathematician and politician Paul Painlevé or the deputy Pierre-Étienne Flandin, argued that mass bombing of the Krupp works could paralyse German war production. Reality proved otherwise. After heavy losses in 1915, the French bomber groups in 1916 largely gave up daylight raids deep into Germany and switched to night raids. There was also a lack of aircraft with sufficient range. The joint raids with the British from Luxeuil, too, were aimed at targets in Baden, much closer to the front. The raid by Beauchamp and Daucourt was thus more a display of courage and of the capabilities of the new aircraft than part of a planned campaign. The Royal Naval Air Service, which was forming a wing to raid the Ruhr, considered Essen too distant to attack from England.

Beauchamp repeated his feat a few weeks later. On 17 November 1916 he flew alone over Munich, dropped bombs there, and since he did not have the fuel to return, flew over the Alps and landed in Italy, near Venice. He was killed in an air fight near Verdun in mid-December 1916.