Night raid on Dover

On Sunday 2 September 1917, at 11.05 p.m., low-flying German aircraft appeared over Dover. They dropped their bombs and vanished before the searchlights and anti-aircraft guns could go into action. The town received no warning at all. H. A. Jones’s British official history of the air war regards this brief attack as the start of the German “moonlight campaign”, the night raids by aeroplanes on England that replaced the daylight attacks abandoned after 22 August.

A side target

This was not yet an attack by the Gotha squadron that had been bombing England since the spring. That night German bombers from another unit, Kagohl 4, which usually attacked targets behind the Allied lines in France, were raiding Calais and Boulogne. Calais was bombed about half an hour before the attack on Dover. Jones supposed that the raid on Dover was merely an addition to that operation. Sources differ on the number of attackers: according to British reports two aircraft came over Dover, according to German ones only one.

Bombs over the town

The aircraft came in from the north-east, and the first bombs fell near Dover Castle, on the military camp at Northfall Meadow. They destroyed a hut and killed Second Lieutenant Henry Larcombe of the 6th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, wounding another officer and two privates. Jones counted fourteen bombs. Two of them were 9.84-inch heavy trench mortar shells converted into aerial bombs, each weighing 91 kilograms. One such shell fell in the grounds of the Castlemount hospital and did not explode. The other blew a large crater behind the Angel Inn in the High Street and damaged the backs of nearby houses. Other bombs brought down the wall of a house in Castlemount Road, wrecked the attics of two houses in Leyburne Road, tore the roof off a sawmill in a timber yard and started a small fire, which the fire brigade put out. The last few only gouged craters on the Western Heights, and one fell into the sea.

According to Jones, the raid killed one officer and wounded ten people: an officer, three soldiers, four women and two children. The material damage was put at £3,486. The defences did not fire a single shot. One Royal Flying Corps aircraft took off from Dover only at the moment of the attack, and a second twenty minutes later, when the raiders were already on their way home.

A foretaste of the night raids

The raid itself was small, but it revealed the weakness of a defence geared to fighting by day. In bright moonlight a bomber could easily find a target on the coast, while at night fighters and guns were almost helpless. At the same time Captain Rudolf Kleine’s Gotha squadron was finishing its training in night flying. The following night, in equally fine weather, its bombers set out for the naval base at Chatham.