The Silent Raid

On 19 October 1917 eleven German naval airships took off from their bases in northern Germany to raid the industrial towns of the Midlands and the north of England. They were L 41, L 44, L 45, L 46, L 47, L 49, L 50, L 52, L 53, L 54 and L 55. Two more could not be taken out of their sheds at Nordholz because of a crosswind. It was one of the largest airship raids of the war and also the last airship raid in which bombs fell on London. The English called it the “Silent Raid”.

Most of them were so-called height-climbers, lightened so that they could fly at more than 5,000 metres, out of reach of the guns and of most aircraft. Over the North Sea the weather seemed calm. According to H. A. Jones’s British official history of the war in the air, however, over England the airships climbed so high that they ran into a gale blowing from the north. On the ground they could hardly be heard. Many people concluded that the Germans had switched off their engines and drifted with the wind in order to pass unnoticed. Jones points out that at such an altitude switched-off engines would have frozen at once. The noise of the engines was simply drowned by the wind. In addition, London’s anti-aircraft guns did not fire a single shot, because nobody saw the airships. Hence the name of the raid.

A bomb on Piccadilly

The gale pushed the airships southwards, and their crews, suffering from the cold and from altitude sickness, usually did not know where they were. Most of the bombs fell in open country. The most damage was done by Kapitänleutnant Waldemar Kölle’s L 45. At about 10.50 p.m. it dropped bombs on Northampton, killing a woman and two children. The crew were sure they were bombing Oxford. The wind then carried it over London, which, as one of its helmsmen recalled, surprised the crew themselves. Before midnight L 45 dropped seven bombs on the capital. One exploded in Piccadilly Circus, in front of the Swan & Edgar department store. A long time had passed since the warning had been given and people had already come out into the streets, and nobody had seen or heard the airship. Seven people were killed there and eighteen injured. 300 kg bombs also killed ten people in Camberwell and fourteen in Hither Green. It was the first airship raid on London for more than a year, since the September raids of 1916. According to Jones, 36 people were killed and 55 injured in the raid as a whole.

The British defences were helpless. Seventy-three aircraft went up, but none could reach the airships flying at that height. Only over the mouth of the Medway did a Royal Flying Corps pilot, T. B. Pritchard, fire at L 45 from below. The airship escaped upwards and turned south, and this, in Jones’s view, sealed its fate.

Four airships over France

Only L 54 returned home directly across the North Sea. Two airships reached Germany over the Netherlands, and four flew over France and the front lines, L 55 being badly damaged on landing in Thuringia. On the morning of 20 October the remaining four, L 44, L 45, L 49 and L 50, found themselves deep over France. Kapitänleutnant Franz Stabbert’s L 44 was hit by French anti-aircraft artillery near Lunéville at about 6.15 a.m. The airship burned and its entire crew was killed. L 49 was forced down by five French Nieuport fighters near Bourbonne-les-Bains. The exhausted crew failed to set it on fire, and the French captured one of the newest German airships intact. After the war the Americans built their first rigid airship, the Shenandoah, on its pattern.

L 50 tried to land next to L 49. On touching down its gondola caught on trees and was torn off, and most of the crew jumped out. Lightened, the airship soared upwards with four men on board, five according to some sources. The wind carried it out over the Mediterranean. It was last seen in the evening over the sea near Fréjus. L 45 passed over Lyon at 8 a.m., and at about 10 a.m., with the last of its fuel, tried to land in the bed of the river Buëch near Sisteron in Provence. The crew finally managed to jump out, set fire to the wreck and gave themselves up to the French. One of the airmen recalled that in less than a day he had flown “from Denmark to the Riviera by way of London and Paris”.

Of the eleven airships, five were destroyed or damaged. Almost all of this was the work of the weather, not of the defences. Jones admits that but for the gale the airships could have bombed unhindered and returned with impunity, and the British would have had to equip the whole of home defence quickly with the best fighters. The Germans did not give up airship raids, but after this night England was harried mainly by aeroplanes. No German airship ever bombed London again.