Last daylight raid on England

Shortly before noon on 22 August 1917 German Gotha bombers attacked England in broad daylight for the last time in the war. They bombed the seaside towns of Kent: Margate, Ramsgate and Dover. This time the defences were ready. Anti-aircraft fire and dozens of fighters forced the bombers to change their plan, and three of them were shot down. Twelve people were killed. After this raid the Germans switched to night attacks.

Captain Rudolf Kleine’s bomber squadron took off from airfields around Ghent at about 9 a.m. with fifteen Gothas. Some of the machines turned back with engine trouble. According to H. A. Jones’s British official history of the air war, there were four of them. The British historian of the raids Ian Castle writes of five, including Kleine’s own machine. Ten or eleven Gothas thus reached England. According to the testimony of an airman taken prisoner, the formation was to split up over the North Foreland: some were to fly along the Thames estuary to Sheerness or Southend, and the rest to Dover.

Bombs on Thanet

At about 10.30 a.m. the Gothas crossed the coast over Margate and dropped five bombs, which injured no one. From the first moment they came under accurate anti-aircraft fire, and fighters were already climbing from the nearby naval air station at Manston. The bombers therefore turned south-east and dropped 34 bombs on Ramsgate. According to Jones, seven of them fell on hospitals and others on shops and houses. Nine people were killed, among them two soldiers and a child, and about twenty were injured. Jones supposed that the airmen, under fire, dropped their bombs without choosing targets, thinking above all of their own safety.

Two Gothas came down over the Isle of Thanet. One crashed in flames in fields near Margate, between Westgate and Ramsgate, and its three-man crew was killed. The other fell into the sea. Of its crew only the gunner was rescued. Jones credits both kills to the guns, later researchers largely to Royal Naval Air Service pilots flying Sopwith Camels. The remaining bombers turned back out to sea and crossed the coast again near Deal. At about 11.10 a.m. six of them dropped nine bombs on Dover, destroying several houses, an inn and a school. Three people were killed there, two soldiers and a woman.

The end of the daylight raids

Over Dover and further out to sea, as far as the Belgian coast, the Gothas were pursued by pilots of the navy and the Royal Flying Corps. The third was shot down into the sea, most probably by the naval pilot E. B. Drake. In all, not counting the machines from Dunkirk, 17 naval pilots and 120 Royal Flying Corps pilots went up against the bombers. Of the nine airmen of the three Gothas shot down, only one survived. Altogether the raid cost twelve lives, and according to Castle 27 people were injured.

The defences proved quite different from those of June and July, when the Gothas had twice bombed London almost with impunity. After those raids modern fighters had been brought to England, and the network of observers, guns and airfields had been reorganised. The Germans concluded that daylight raids deep into England no longer paid. The German historian of these expeditions, Major von Bülow, later wrote that the switch to moonlight raids was due not to a loss of fighting spirit but to technical reasons and to the improvement of the British defences. As early as the beginning of September the Gothas returned over England by night. Jones notes that a squadron which never gathered even thirty aircraft for a single attack forced the British to bring fighters back from the front and to rebuild the whole of the country’s defences.