Shooting down of airship L 31

On the afternoon of 1 October 1916 eleven German naval airships took off from their bases on the North Sea to attack London and the Midlands. A week earlier the same fleet had lost the airships L 32 and L 33 in a single raid, and their crews already knew that night fighters with incendiary ammunition could destroy even the newest “super-Zeppelins”. That night the most famous of the commanders, Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Mathy, was killed. His L 31 was shot down just after midnight by Second Lieutenant Wulstan Tempest and fell in flames near Potters Bar in Hertfordshire, north of London. None of the crew survived.

The road to London

According to the British official history of the air war, H. A. Jones’s The War in the Air, only seven of the eleven airships crossed the coast. Most of them achieved little. L 14, L 16 and L 21 dropped bombs on the fields of Lincolnshire, killing only cattle, and the newest, L 34, fired on by a gun at Corby, dropped its bombs on the woods and fields of Northamptonshire. L 24 reached a point west of Cambridge and dropped all its bombs on a lit landing ground near Hitchin, killing a soldier on guard there. Its commander was convinced he was bombing north-east London.

Mathy came in over land north of Lowestoft at about 8 p.m. and, as usual, headed straight for London. At 9.45 p.m. a searchlight caught him over Kelvedon Hatch in Essex. Mathy evidently changed his plan then. He turned north-west, flew almost as far as Buntingford, swung back in a wide arc south of Hertford and Ware, and from there set off south at high speed to attack the capital from the north. He soon came under heavy anti-aircraft fire. He gave up the attack on London and got rid of his bombs over Cheshunt. According to Jones, 30 high-explosive bombs fell there, including at least five of about 300 kilograms each, and 26 incendiaries. They damaged more than 300 houses and destroyed nearly three hectares of glasshouses, but only one woman was injured.

Duel over Potters Bar

The airship turned sharply west and began to climb, but the searchlights did not let it out of their beams. It was spotted by four airmen patrolling over the aerodromes north and east of London. The first to catch it was 25-year-old Second Lieutenant Wulstan Tempest of the Royal Flying Corps, of No. 39 Squadron, the same squadron in which William Leefe Robinson, the destroyer of the airship SL 11, and Frederick Sowrey flew. Tempest had taken off at about 10 p.m. from North Weald aerodrome in a B.E.2c. In his report he described how at about 11.45 p.m., at a height of some 4,400 metres over south-west London, he saw at the apex of a “pyramid” of searchlight beams a small cigar-shaped object a dozen or more miles away. To reach it he had to fly through a “perfect inferno” of bursting shells from his own artillery. On the way his fuel pump failed, so he had to pump fuel by hand with one hand.

When he got close, the airship was already at about 4,500 metres and climbing fast. Tempest dived at it, firing his machine gun, passed underneath it, then positioned himself under its tail and kept firing. As he wrote, the airship began “to go red inside like an enormous Chinese lantern”, and a flame burst from its forward part. The burning hull fell straight towards his aircraft. Tempest put the machine into a spin and only just escaped from under the falling wreck. By his watch it was about 12.10 a.m. Exhausted and frozen, he found the aerodrome in the fog with difficulty, crashed on landing and cut his head on his machine gun.

The burning L 31 fell into a field on the edge of Potters Bar, and its remains hung from a great oak. The entire crew of 19 was killed. Some of the airmen, Mathy among them, jumped from the burning ship. According to some accounts Mathy was found still alive, pressed into the ground a short distance from the wreck, but died moments later.

Mathy

Heinrich Mathy was born in 1883 in Mannheim and had served in the navy since 1900. At the beginning of the war he commanded a torpedo boat, and in January 1915 the commander of the naval airships, Peter Strasser, brought him over to his service. In a year and a half Mathy bombed England many times, and during the night of 8–9 September 1915, in L 13, he caused the greatest material damage in London of any airship raid of the war. The British knew his name from an interview he had given to the American press. Jones called him “the greatest airship commander of the war”. He added that had Mathy not turned over Kelvedon Hatch he would probably have survived, because the first aircraft took off near London only five minutes after that turn.

Mathy’s death, a week after the loss of L 32 and L 33, was a heavy blow to the German airship service and to the morale of its crews. Tempest received the Distinguished Service Order for shooting down L 31. Mathy and his men were buried with military honours in the cemetery at Potters Bar, beside the crew of SL 11. In 1962 their remains were moved to the German war cemetery at Cannock Chase.

Strasser did not give up the raids, but he directed the last airship attack of 1916, at the end of November, at the north of England, away from London’s strong defences. From then on the British capital was effectively beyond the reach of airships. Only one of them bombed it again, in October 1917. From mid-1917 the raids on London were taken over by German bomber aircraft such as the Gotha G.IV.