Airship (Zeppelin)

An airship is a lighter-than-air craft held up by a lifting gas and driven by its own engines and rudders. In the First World War the word means above all the great German rigid airships, called Zeppelins after their designer. The Germans used them for reconnaissance, especially at sea, and for the first raids in history on cities hundreds of kilometres behind the front.

Construction

Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin enclosed separate hydrogen cells in a rigid metal frame and fixed gondolas with engines to the hull. His first craft rose into the air in 1900. A rival firm, Schütte-Lanz, built frames of wood and plywood that suffered from damp, but in everyday speech all rigid airships were called Zeppelins. During the war the airships grew from year to year: according to the tallies, the Zeppelin company built 84 of them in those years, and the largest had as many as six engines and carried several tons of bombs.

Army and navy

The army and the navy each had their own airships. From the first days of the war the army sent them over the front, and as early as August an airship bombed Liège. Flying low and by day, however, the giants proved an easy target even for infantry, like Z V near Mława. The navy, which had most of the airships, used them above all for reconnaissance over the North Sea and the Baltic. In the last phase of the Battle of Jutland, on the morning of 1 June, airships sighted British squadrons but had no influence on the course of the battle.

Raids

At the beginning of January 1915 Kaiser Wilhelm II agreed to the bombing of the British Isles, and on 19 January naval airships dropped bombs on England for the first time. In March they reached Paris, and on 31 May the army’s LZ 38 bombed London. The naval raids were directed by Peter Strasser, who believed to the end that the great airships could be effective.

The airships flew by night and often did not know which town they were over, and their bombs fell on random houses. According to British figures, some 50 raids killed more than 500 people in Great Britain (tallies give 557) and wounded more than a thousand. The military damage was slight, but the raids forced the British to keep at home men and equipment needed at the front.

Defence and end

The hydrogen that lifted an airship caught fire easily. In June 1915 Reginald Warneford destroyed LZ 37 over Ghent with bombs dropped from an aeroplane, and later night fighter aircraft were given explosive and incendiary ammunition. From the autumn of 1916 they began shooting airships down one after another, starting with SL 11 at Cuffley, the first German airship destroyed over British soil. After this loss the army practically gave up raiding England.

The navy introduced height-climbing airships that flew above 5,000 metres, but up there the crews lost their way and gales drove them off course, as in the “silent raid”. The last raid, on 5 August 1918, ended with L 70 shot down and Strasser killed. According to one tally the Germans lost more than half of the 125 airships they used in the war. As early as 1917 bombers had taken over the main burden of the raids on England.

According to German figures, the longest flight in aviation history up to then was made by L 59, which in November 1917 carried supplies from Bulgaria for Lettow-Vorbeck’s troops in East Africa and turned back over the Sudan on orders, after some 95 hours in the air. After the war the Treaty of Versailles forbade Germany military aviation and airships, and on 23 June 1919 crews destroyed many airships in their sheds so as not to hand them over to the victors.