Loss of Zeppelin L 19

On the morning of 2 February 1916 the British fishing trawler King Stephen of Grimsby came upon the wreck of the German airship L 19 in the middle of the North Sea. Airmen were crowded on top of the half-submerged envelope, calling for rescue. The skipper, William Martin, refused to take them on board and sailed away. A few hours later the airship sank with its entire crew of 16 under Kapitänleutnant Odo Loewe (Löwe in some sources). The manner of the airmen’s death provoked a controversy that echoed in the press around the world.

The last flight

L 19 entered service at the end of November 1915 and had so far flown mainly on patrols over the North Sea. The expedition against England on the night of 31 January/1 February 1916 was its first raid. The airship circled for a long time over the Midlands and was the last of the nine to set off for home. According to the British official history of the air war, it left the English coast only at about 5.25 a.m. on 1 February, several hours after the others. The naval airships had recently received new Maybach engines, more powerful but still unreliable, and in L 19 they failed one after another. A strong headwind further delayed the return.

On the afternoon of 1 February the airship signalled by radio that its wireless had been working intermittently and that three engines had at times been out of action. It reported that it was near Borkum, but German direction-finding stations established that it was further west, off the Dutch island of Ameland. It flew low over the Frisian Islands of neutral Netherlands, and Dutch troops fired on it and, according to reports at the time, hit it. It then disappeared heading north. The Germans sent aircraft from Borkum and torpedo-boat flotillas, covered by battlecruisers, to search for it, while the British, alerted by a report of an airship in difficulty off Cromer, sent light cruisers and destroyers out of Harwich on the morning of 2 February. A strong wind and then a snowstorm made an effective search impossible. The German ships found only one of the airship’s discarded fuel tanks.

“If I take you, you will take the ship”

According to the British official history, King Stephen sighted the wreck at about 7 a.m. on 2 February, some 190 kilometres east of the Spurn lightship at the mouth of the Humber. The airship’s gondolas were already under water. Some of the crew were sitting in a makeshift shelter on top of the envelope, and from inside came a knocking, as if someone were trying to seal the hull. Loewe, who spoke good English, asked for his men to be taken on board. Martin replied: “No. If I take you, you will take the ship.” He had only nine unarmed fishermen and feared that the more numerous Germans would seize the trawler and force him to sail to Germany. He was moved neither by assurances of good behaviour nor by promises of payment.

Martin later claimed that he had gone to look for a patrol vessel but had not met one. He reported the airship only on the morning of 3 February, after entering the Humber estuary, when it was already too late for a rescue. The British also noticed that the trawler had been fishing in an area closed to fishermen. A journalist who in the 1960s went through the Admiralty files and spoke to surviving members of King Stephen’s crew established that the skipper had concealed this and given the navy a false position for the wreck, so the search could not succeed. A BBC documentary of 2005 suggested that fear of punishment for illegal fishing may have weighed on the skipper’s decision as heavily as fear of prisoners.

The weather was rapidly getting worse, and the airship stayed afloat for only a few more hours. The airmen threw into the sea bottles with letters to their families and with their commander’s last report. A few months later one of them was found by Swedish fishermen near Marstrand. Loewe wrote that he was sitting with fifteen men on the top platform of the drifting envelope without its gondolas, that after three engine failures and a struggle against the wind they had been carried in fog over the Netherlands, where they had come under heavy fire, and that “at about one o’clock in the afternoon” on 2 February their last hour would come. The body of one of the airmen was washed up by the sea on the coast of Denmark a few months later.

The controversy over Skipper Martin

News of the encounter divided British public opinion. Some condemned Martin for leaving men to die; others, including the Bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, praised him for not trusting German promises and for putting the safety of his own crew first. After the raids on towns, the airship crews were called “baby-killers” in England, and part of the press wrote of their death as a deserved punishment. The German press fiercely attacked both the skipper and the bishop. The scene of the trawler and the sinking airship found its way into German propaganda: it was re-enacted in a film, and the medallist Karl Goetz, maker of the famous medal on the sinking of the Lusitania, struck a commemorative medal.

King Stephen never returned to fishing. The navy converted her into an armed Q-ship, which on 25 April 1916 was sunk in a fight with German torpedo boats during the raid on Lowestoft, and her crew were taken prisoner. William Martin died in Grimsby in February 1917. For German naval aviation the loss of L 19 was a painful lesson: the new engines would need a long time of further development before airships could fly safely over England in winter weather.