Last air raid on Paris

On the night of 15/16 September 1918 the air-raid sirens sounded over Paris for the last time. German bombers broke through over the city and its suburbs and dropped bombs on more than a dozen places. The British newspaper The Times and British chronicles of the war noted that this was the last German raid on the French capital and that the defences shot down two of the attacking aircraft. The British chronology of the war places it under 16 September, and French lists under 15 September, because the bombs fell during the night spanning the two days.

The last bombs

According to the list of hits drawn up by the Paris authorities, bombs fell that night at about twenty points. In Paris they struck mainly the northern and eastern districts: in the 18th arrondissement they exploded, among other places, in the rue de Steinkerque and the rue d’Orsel at the foot of Montmartre, in the La Chapelle goods station and on the great Dufayel department store on the boulevard Barbès. Others fell in the 19th and 20th arrondissements, including on a temporary hospital set up in one of the bastions of the old city fortifications, and also on the western edge of the city, by the boulevards Suchet and Montmorency in the 16th arrondissement. Outside the city limits bombs hit the general stores at Aubervilliers, the Ourcq canal opposite the mills at Pantin, and also Vincennes and Sèvres. According to a contemporary British chronicle of events, six people were killed. More precise figures for the casualties of that night could not be established.

Eight months of raids

Paris had known aerial bombs since the first weeks of the war, when single aircraft dropped them on the city in August and September 1914. Later airships also came over the city. The real bombing campaign, however, began only on the night of 30/31 January 1918, when some thirty aircraft, most of them twin-engined Gotha bombers, flew over Paris. On that occasion 61 people were killed and 198 wounded. From then on Parisians called all German bombers “Gothas”. The bloodiest was the night of 11/12 March. According to the Musée de l’Armée in Paris, more than a hundred people were killed, including dozens trampled and suffocated in a panic at the entrance to the closed Bolivar Métro station. From 23 March the city was also shelled by a long-range gun, and during the German spring and summer offensives, when the front drew closer to the capital, raids recurred every few days.

Between the end of January and mid-September 1918 the Germans carried out about thirty raids on the Paris area. The figures given by French studies vary depending on whether they cover only the raids of 1918 or the whole war, and whether they count only Paris or the suburbs as well. According to the Musée de l’Armée in Paris, over the whole war more than 500 aircraft flew over the city and its surroundings on 44 days, dropping nearly a thousand bombs, killing 255 people and wounding 593. Other studies speak of 33 raids in 1918 and about 787 casualties, counting killed and wounded.

The end of the raids

September 1918 brought a change in the situation at the front. After the German defeat at Amiens the Allies pushed the Germans ever further from Paris. In August the long-range gun stopped firing, and at the beginning of September the German armies fell back to the Hindenburg Line. The bomber squadrons’ airfields were now further from the capital, and aircraft were increasingly needed over the battlefield itself. The Paris anti-aircraft defences, with guns, searchlights and fighters, were also stronger than at the beginning of the year. After the night of 15/16 September German bombers never again appeared over the city. For Parisians, who for eight months had spent their nights in cellars and Métro stations, the war in the air ended nearly two months before the armistice.