Zeppelin Z V shot down near Mława

An old British chronology of the war records under 29 August 1914 the shooting down of the German army airship Z V near Mława. The airship, hit by fire from the ground during a raid on the local railway junction, had to make a forced landing in territory held by the Russians, and its crew was taken prisoner. Most modern studies, including German ones, give 28 August as the date of the incident, and some Polish sources even point to the morning of 27 August. The discrepancy probably arises from news from the front reaching the press with a delay.

An airship over the Kingdom of Poland

Z V (works number LZ 20) was one of the German army’s airships built at the works of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. It was filled with hydrogen, held in a series of gas cells inside a rigid frame. After the outbreak of war it was sent to the Eastern Front, where it carried out reconnaissance over the Russian part of the Polish lands and bombed Russian positions. It was commanded by Captain Grüner of the Württemberg army.

At the end of August the Battle of Tannenberg was under way in southern East Prussia. Mława, in the Płock Governorate of the Kingdom of Poland, right on the border with Prussia, was one of the main supply points of General Samsonov’s Russian Second Army. Through the town ran the railway line from Warsaw to the Prussian border at Działdowo, along which the Russians brought soldiers and supplies to the front.

The raid and the fall

Z V attacked the railway station at Mława in daylight, at low altitude. According to accounts published soon afterwards in the Russian press, the bombs fell on the platform where soldiers were detraining and on a train standing there. Several people were killed and many were wounded. The Russians opened fire with rifles and guns. The bullets and shells holed several gas cells, and the airship began to lose height rapidly. According to German sources, it made a forced landing a dozen or so kilometres west of Mława.

The Germans tried to set fire to the wreck so that it would not fall into enemy hands, but Russian cavalry, most likely Cossacks, quickly arrived and took them prisoner. According to Russian reports, of the eight-man crew one was killed and two were wounded. According to a local eyewitness, Russian soldiers enraged by the bombing beat the prisoners severely. According to German sources, the airship’s commander, Captain Grüner, later died in captivity, in a camp near the Russian–Chinese border.

Significance

The loss of Z V confirmed what the shooting down of the airship Z VIII in the Vosges had shown a week earlier. Large, slow airships flying low and in daylight over enemy troops were an easy target even for ordinary infantry. In the first month of the war the German army lost or badly damaged several of its airships in this way. Later they were used mainly for night bombing and reconnaissance over the sea.

For the inhabitants of Mława the raid was one of their first encounters with modern warfare. It was not the last: in the following months the town found itself on the front line several times, and heavy fighting went on in its vicinity until the summer of 1915.