Zeppelin raid and the shooting down of L 34 and L 21

On the afternoon of 27 November 1916 ten German naval airships took off from their bases on the North Sea. It was the last great airship raid of the year. After the losses of September and October, when the London defences had shot down L 32 and L 33 and then Heinrich Mathy’s L 31, the commander of the naval airships, Peter Strasser, sent them this time away from the heavily defended south, against the industrial districts of Yorkshire, the Midlands and the Tyne area. Caution did not help. According to the British official history of the air war, H. A. Jones’s The War in the Air, that night showed that the defences outside London too “had now the measure of the Zeppelin”. The Germans lost two airships with their entire crews.

L 34 over Hartlepool

The raiders were L 13, L 14, L 16, L 21, L 22, L 24, L 30, L 34 and two new “super-Zeppelins”, L 35 and L 36, on their first flight over England. L 30 turned back halfway because of engine failure. The rest came in in two groups: five airships between Scarborough and the mouth of the Humber, four towards the Tyne.

The first of the northern group, Kapitänleutnant Max Dietrich’s L 34, crossed the coast of County Durham at about 11.30 p.m. Dietrich was an experienced commander: in January, aboard L 21, he had caused the most casualties in the raid on the Midlands. Now, over Castle Eden, a searchlight caught him. The airship dropped thirteen bombs near the searchlight, doing no damage, but in its beam it was spotted by Second Lieutenant Ian Pyott of No. 36 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps, who had been patrolling the sky for an hour in a B.E.2c from the airfield at Seaton Carew. Pyott attacked from below and then flew alongside the airship for about eight kilometres, firing 71 rounds into it. First he saw a small patch on the envelope glowing where the rounds had struck. He took it for machine-gun fire, but the patch spread rapidly and a moment later the whole airship was ablaze.

Just before catching fire, L 34 dropped sixteen bombs on West Hartlepool. They destroyed many houses, killed four people and injured eleven. The burning wreck fell into the sea at the mouth of the Tees and was still burning when Pyott landed at midnight. The whole crew was killed. The fall was seen by airmen patrolling over Melton Mowbray, more than 200 kilometres away, and also by the crews of the other airships. L 35, which was just crossing the coast, turned back without dropping its bombs, and the commander of L 36 got rid of his over the sea and headed home. According to Jones, the destruction of L 34 “effectively killed” the attack on the north.

Bombs on Yorkshire and Staffordshire

The southern group ventured further inland, but its commanders were plainly nervous. L 14 circled for an hour over the East Riding of Yorkshire, avoiding aircraft, searchlights and guns, and dropped its bombs in open fields. L 22 was hit by anti-aircraft shells and barely made it back to base with about 150 holes in its envelope. L 13 reached York, but under accurate gunfire scattered its bombs over the eastern suburbs, injuring two people, and turned back. L 16 dropped bombs on the West Riding of Yorkshire without causing any damage.

The longest journey was made by L 21 under Oberleutnant zur See Kurt Frankenburg, whose name is also sometimes spelled Frankenberg. It crossed the coast near Hornsea at about 9.20 p.m., was driven away from Leeds by guns, turned south, passed over blacked-out Barnsley and Macclesfield and reached the Potteries around Stoke-on-Trent. There it attacked the only lights it could see: blazing furnaces at Chesterton and colliery spoil heaps. The bombs killed nobody. According to Jones, the towns of the district were saved above all by an effective blackout. At about 1.30 a.m. L 21 set off for home.

The death of L 21 at dawn

The return flight across eastern England lasted several hours. North of Peterborough and near East Dereham in Norfolk aircraft caught up with it, but each time the skilful commander managed to slip away. On the morning of 28 November the airship appeared over Great Yarmouth; fired on by guns, it flew along the coast towards Lowestoft, and as day was breaking three Royal Naval Air Service pilots from the Yarmouth station went after it: Egbert Cadbury, Gerard Fane and Edward Pulling. Cadbury fired four drums of ammunition from his Lewis gun into the airship’s stern, as yet without effect. Fane closed to about 30 metres, but his gun jammed because the oil in it had frozen. Pulling came within a dozen or so metres, under fire from the airship’s machine guns, and managed to fire two shots before his gun too jammed.

Almost at once L 21 caught fire and within a few seconds became, as Pulling reported, “a fiery furnace”. The airship’s gunners kept firing until the flames engulfed them. L 21 fell into the sea about 13 kilometres east of Lowestoft and sank, leaving only a patch of oil. The whole crew was killed. For this victory Pulling received the Distinguished Service Order, as did Pyott, while Cadbury and Fane received the Distinguished Service Cross. According to British tallies the raid killed four people in all and injured 37.

Two airships lost in one night, two months after the loss of L 31, L 32 and L 33, confirmed that aircraft armed with incendiary ammunition had taken away the airships’ impunity over northern England as well. Strasser did not give up the raids, but in 1917 his ships had to fly ever higher, where frost and thin air were almost as dangerous to the crews as the defences. The main burden of the attacks on England was soon to pass to aeroplanes. The very next day, 28 November, a single German aeroplane bombed London in broad daylight.