Loss of Zeppelin L 20

Before noon on 3 May 1916 the German naval airship L 20 of Kapitänleutnant Franz Stabbert appeared over the south-west coast of Norway. It was returning from a raid on Scotland, but after hours of wandering in snowstorms and fog it had run out of fuel for the journey to Germany. The commander decided to land in a neutral country. The airship, which at the beginning of the year had bombed Loughborough in the Midlands, ended its last flight wrecked in a fjord near Stavanger, and its crew went into Norwegian internment.

The raid on Rosyth

L 20 was one of eight naval airships that took off on 2 May for a raid on the north of the British Isles. According to the British official history of the air war, The War in the Air, the main target was the fleet base at Rosyth and the Forth Bridge railway bridge over the Firth of Forth. About 160 kilometres from the Scottish coast the airships met a head wind and most turned back towards alternative targets in northern England. Bombs fell on the Yorkshire moors, where the airmen took burning heather for an ironworks, and the only town seriously attacked turned out to be York. Nine people were killed there and 27 wounded. Only L 14 and L 20 flew on to Scotland. L 14 mistook the Firth of Tay for the Firth of Forth and dropped some of its bombs near Arbroath.

Stabbert crossed the coast at Lunan Bay and flew inland across Forfarshire. In the snow and fog he lost his bearings. He repeatedly asked by wireless for a bearing, but none of his calls reached the German stations. Shortly after midnight, when he glimpsed the ground for a moment, he was already near Loch Ness, far outside the blackout zone. On the way back to the sea he dropped six bombs on the lit-up Craig Castle in Aberdeenshire, damaging its windows and roof, and eight more on fields. No one was killed. At about 2.40 a.m. L 20 left Scotland near Peterhead.

Landing in Norway

At 5 a.m. the crew of a British trawler saw the airship about 150 kilometres east of Aberdeen. The flight over the Caledonian Canal had taken it beyond its range, one of its four engines was faltering, and a strong wind was carrying it north. Stabbert judged that he would not reach Germany and headed for the nearest land, Norway. According to Norwegian accounts the airship flew low along the coast of Jæren and at about 11 a.m. tried to settle on the water in a fjord south of Stavanger, near Sandnes. The British official history gives 10 a.m.

The landing failed. When the gondola touched the water, Stabbert ordered his men to jump. Two officers and several sailors jumped and were picked up by a fishing boat. Lightened, the airship rose again with the rest of the crew on board. The anchor caught on a rock, and with the jolt one of the gondolas tore off and fell to the ground with its men. Finally L 20 came down in the Hafrsfjord and broke in two. The last airmen were taken off by a Norwegian torpedo boat. Accounts of casualties differ. A Danish description based on local sources speaks of several badly bruised men but no dead, while some works state that three men were killed. The next day the wind pushed the wreck ashore. The British official history writes that the crew completed the destruction of the airship. According to Norwegian sources it was ultimately Norwegian soldiers who did so: on the afternoon of 4 May they fired on the remains and the hydrogen exploded.

Internment

Norway was a neutral state, so under the law of war it had to intern soldiers of a belligerent who found themselves on its territory. According to Norwegian accounts the crew numbered 18, and all were taken to a camp at Madla near Stavanger. Several of them, five or six according to different accounts, were soon released as shipwrecked men picked up from the sea outside Norwegian territorial waters. The others were later transferred to the German ship Berlin, interned in the Trondheimsfjord since 1914, where some remained until the end of the war. Stabbert escaped after about half a year and at the end of 1916 returned to the airship base at Tondern.

For the commander of the German naval airships, Peter Strasser, it was the second loss that year of a new airship that failed to return from a raid because of breakdowns and weather. Three months earlier L 19 had been lost in the North Sea for similar reasons. The May raid was also the last before a long pause: according to the British official history of the war at sea, the next airship expedition against England was undertaken only in the last week of July.