German airships over Brussels

According to contemporary war chronicles, on the night of 4 August 1914 two German airships flew over Brussels. British lists of the events of the war recorded this as the first hostile act in the air. The details of this flight, however, cannot be confirmed in the sources available today, and reports from the first chaotic days of the war often repeated unverified rumours.

What is certain is that Germany intended from the start of the war to use airships for military operations. In 1914 it had several military Zeppelin-type airships capable of flying at night and carrying a load of bombs. They were regarded as a formidable weapon: they could fly higher and further than the aeroplanes of the day, and many armies did not yet have effective anti-aircraft defences.

The first confirmed air attack came two days later, during the fighting for Liège. The airship Z VI took off from Cologne on the evening of 5 August and at about 3 a.m. on 6 August dropped bombs on the city. Nine civilians were killed. Fired on by the defenders and damaged, the airship lost a great deal of gas and had to make an emergency landing in a forest near Bonn, where it was wrecked.

The raid on Liège heralded a new dimension of war. In the following weeks German airships bombed Antwerp, and from 1915 also towns in Great Britain. For the first time in history civilians far behind the front line were becoming victims of war on such a large scale.