The Deadly Gasbags

It is a grim fact of life that most scientific developments are sooner or later put to military use. Chlorine, used extensively for water purification and bleaching, was first used as poison gas by the German army at Ypres in 1915. Lasers have brought immense benefits to medicine, notably in eye surgery, but soon after their first appearance in the 1960s they were being used to guide bombs accurately to their targets.

So it was inevitable that the rigid airship, first built in the early 1900s by the German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, was employed as a means of bombing enemy territory. A few Zeppelins had carried passengers, on what was the world’s first commercial airline, between 1912 and 1914. But then, of course, came the Great War.

By January 1915 the first air raid in the history of warfare was under way, and the small scale of the attack was more than made up for by its frightening novelty. The sight of German airships over Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, must have struck terror in the local people. Flying high, well out of artillery range, the huge sausage-shaped Zeppelins were able to cross the North Sea and drop their lethal cargoes at will. This raid killed four, injured sixteen and destroyed a small number of buildings.

Subsequent attacks left the civilian population in a state of heightened fear. In one raid on London in September 1915, nearly two tons of bombs caused more than 100 casualties and enormous material damage. Military response, led by the future Prime Minister Winston Churchill, was swift. Bombers were sent against Zeppelin bases in Germany, destroying several airships at their moorings. Anti-aircraft guns were installed in key locations, along with searchlights and crude listening devices – rather like early record player horns – to detect the sound of the Zeppelins’ engines.

These limited measures resulted in some success for the British. A few airships were shot down or forced to turn back, but most of their failures in late 1915 and early 1916 were caused by bad weather. From the crews’ point of view, the prospect of drowning in the North Sea after a crash landing was infinitely preferable to burning to death after being shot down by incendiary shells. The airships were filled with highly-inflammable hydrogen, rather than the much safer but costlier helium.

Another hazard faced by Zeppelin crews was that of simply getting lost, the result of unreliable navigation methods. The commander of one raid early in the war had no idea which English town he’d bombed until he eventually found his way back to base and read about it in the local newspaper.