Last Zeppelin raid

On the afternoon of 5 August 1918 five German naval airships took off from bases in northern Germany: L 53, L 56, L 63, L 65 and L 70. They were to bomb the English Midlands. On board the newest of them, L 70, flew Peter Strasser himself, the commander of the Naval Airship Division. It was the first airship raid on England since the raid of 12 April and, as it turned out, the last of the war. That night the bombs fell only into the sea, and L 70 was shot down in flames off the coast of Norfolk. The whole crew and Strasser were killed.

A raid in bad weather

H. A. Jones, the author of the British official history of the war in the air, points out that the weather did not favour a raid. The pressure was falling, the sky was overcast and it was raining over land. Never before had airships set out for England with the barometer so low. L 70 was then the newest ship of the naval airship fleet. She had entered service on 8 July, and her seven 290-horsepower Maybach engines made her the most powerful Zeppelin built during the war. She was commanded by Kapitänleutnant Johann von Lossnitzer, but his superior was on board. Strasser often flew over England with his airships in person.

The naval airship fleet was by then weakened. On 19 July British Sopwith Camels from the aircraft carrier HMS Furious had bombed the base at Tondern in Schleswig and burned two airships, L 54 and L 60, in their shed. British air defence, meanwhile, was much stronger than in previous years. Since April it had come under the new Royal Air Force, which had many aircraft on the east coast capable of climbing to the heights at which the airships now flew.

The shooting down of L 70

At about 8.10 p.m. three airships, L 70, L 53 and L 65, were sighted from the Leman Tail lightship off the Norfolk coast. The other two were flying closer to the shore, further south. At 9.05 p.m. a two-seat Airco DH.4 took off from the airfield at Great Yarmouth. It was flown by Major Egbert Cadbury, and in the observer’s cockpit at the Lewis gun sat Captain Robert Leckie. Both had fought airships before. Cadbury had taken part in the attack on L 21 in November 1916, and in May 1917 Leckie had piloted the flying boat that destroyed L 22. According to later accounts Cadbury climbed into the only machine ready literally at the last moment, straight from a charity concert.

Above the clouds visibility was exceptionally good. Cadbury at once spotted the three airships, about 40 miles to the north-east, flying in formation. He chased them for over an hour, climbing all the while. As he reported on his return, at 10.10 p.m. he had one of the airships about two thousand feet above him. At 10.20 p.m., at a height of about 16,400 feet (about 5,000 metres), the DH.4 attacked it head-on. Leckie aimed his fire at the underside of the airship’s hull. The incendiary bullets tore a hole in the envelope and started a fire that quickly engulfed the whole ship. The airship raised her nose as if trying to escape, then plunged down as a blazing mass. According to Cadbury’s report she burned out in less than a minute. It was L 70. She fell into the sea north of the small town of Wells-next-the-Sea, close to the schooner Amethyst. Everyone on board was killed, 22 men according to most sources, 23 according to some.

L 65 saved by chance

The two other airships turned east at full speed. Cadbury caught up with one of them, Kapitänleutnant Walter Dose’s L 65, and again attacked head-on. Leckie saw fire break out in the midships gondola, but then his gun jammed, and in the darkness the jam could not be cleared. Cadbury was already at the ceiling of his machine and could not use his forward gun. For about five minutes he flew alongside the airship, then turned back and at 11.05 p.m. landed at the landing ground at Sedgeford. Only long after the war did it emerge that the “fire” on L 65 had been a flash of light when a curtain in the gondola was suddenly raised. The bullets from the DH.4 had, however, riddled the airship’s gas cells. L 65 returned to base.

The remaining airships did no damage. According to Jones, their commanders, misled by radio bearings, believed they were further west. They reported attacks on batteries near Grimsby and King’s Lynn and on Boston and Norwich, but all the bombs fell into the sea. L 56 stayed longest; at about 11.45 p.m. she dropped her bombs into the sea off Yarmouth and then, unknowingly, flew over Lowestoft. Neither guns nor searchlights opened up on her, which probably saved both towns. Peculiar acoustic conditions meant that the explosions at sea were heard even more than 150 kilometres from the coast. An alarm was therefore raised across much of the Midlands, and many airmen took to the air. The defence lost three aircraft that night: one pilot was killed in a crash, and two naval machines failed to return from a patrol over the sea and were written off. Cadbury and Leckie received the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Strasser’s death and the end of the campaign

Peter Strasser was born in 1876 in Hanover. From 1913 he commanded the naval airships, and from November 1916, as Führer der Luftschiffe, he directed their whole war against England, which had begun with the first raid in January 1915. In August 1917 he received the Pour le Mérite. To the end he believed that the great airships could bomb Britain effectively, even though aircraft and anti-aircraft guns were destroying them ever more easily. Jones, who wrote of him with respect, judged his death at the head of his squadron “a fitting end”. He called Strasser a good organiser and a born leader who had created the naval airship service and inspired it with his own spirit.

Without Strasser the German navy made no further attempt at airship raids on England. Bombing by aeroplanes had ceased even earlier: the last bombs fell in May, and the last German aircraft appeared over England on 20 July. In August, according to Jones, the German Supreme Command ordered an end to the bombing of London and Paris altogether.

The British chronology of the war summed up the campaign in a footnote to this day. By its count the airships made 51 raids against the British Isles in which bombs were dropped, plus 8 attempts in which they did not reach the coast or failed for other reasons. Aircraft made 59 raids with bombs and 11 reconnaissance flights. In all there were thus 110 raids in which bombs were dropped. Other tallies count them somewhat differently. According to British figures the airship raids alone killed more than five hundred people in Britain.