A Higher Form of Killing (11 page)

However, on November 1, 1911, an Italian pilot demonstrated the airplane’s potential. In the world’s first bombing raid Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti dropped four five-pound bombs over Turkish lines near Tripoli in Libya during an Italo-Turkish conflict. The next day, patriotic Italian papers rejoiced in exaggerated headlines such as
AVIATOR LIEUTENANT GAVOTTI THROWS BOMB ON ENEMY CAMP. TERRORISED TURKS SCATTER UPON UNEXPECTED CELESTIAL ASSAULT
. The Turks claimed wrongly that the bomb hit a hospital. Italian pilots went on to conduct the world’s first night bombing. In Morocco in 1912 the French dropped bombs from airplanes as did pilots during the 1912–13 Balkan conflicts. Aware of the limited effects of such bombings and planes’ obvious vulnerability to ground fire, Britain concentrated on building large, slow-flying, stable craft suited to the reconnaissance role that they and most other governments, including Germany’s, saw as their most promising application. In 1914, General Douglas Haig, who at the end of 1915 would become commander in chief of British forces in France, was still unconvinced airplanes were even useful for reconnaissance: “There is only one way for a commander to get information . . . and that is by the use of cavalry.”

Churchill worried about Britain’s vulnerability to air attack and supported the Aerial League of the British Empire set up by those who believed that, just as Britannia ruled the waves, so it must rule the skies. League members, who included H. G. Wells, highlighted the potential risk to London from enemy aircraft, identifying the Houses of Parliament as a likely target. Lurid German publications depicting airships laden with explosives crossing the North Sea to hover menacingly above the capital fed public fears. In June 1914, an author claiming to be a former member of “the German Secret Service” described a fleet of zeppelins waiting to attack England: “huge cigar-shaped engines of death . . . ready to drop explosives to the ground.” “Picture the havoc a dozen such vultures could create attacking . . . London. They don’t have to aim. They are not like aviators trying to drop a bomb on the deck of a warship. They simply dump overboard some of the new explosives of the German government, these new chemicals having the property of setting on fire anything that they hit . . . They do not have to worry about hitting the mark . . . If they do not hit Buckingham Palace they are apt to hit Knightsbridge.”

As Churchill later wrote, at the time he did not rate airships highly: “I believed this enormous bladder of combustible and explosive gas would prove to be easily destructible. I was sure the fighting airplane . . . would harry, rout and burn these gaseous monsters.” He did his best “to restrict expenditure upon airships and to concentrate [Britain’s] narrow and stinted resources upon airplanes.” Nevertheless, recognizing that even if Britain was wise not to invest in airships it needed to guard against the zeppelin threat, he encouraged experiments with devices like the “Fiery Grapnel”—a four-pronged grappling hook loaded with explosives to be swung by airplane pilots against the sides of airships—and “flaming bullets.” Test flights were made with a semiautomatic cannon mounted on a plane. However, the gun’s powerful recoil when fired caused the plane to stall and plunge five hundred feet. Dropping small explosive or incendiary bombs on airships seemed more promising.

As the war began, Britain’s meager air power was divided between the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) for which Churchill and Fisher were responsible, and the army’s Royal Flying Corps (RFC). (The two air arms would not combine into the Royal Air Force until April 1918.) The RNAS had more than 90 planes, 53 of them seaplanes, and 7 small airships. The RFC possessed 190 planes. However, many of the planes of both services were unairworthy.

With all the RFC’s serviceable airplanes dispatched to France, on September 3, 1914, Churchill and the Admiralty accepted responsibility for the air defense of Britain from the army. Two days later Churchill announced his strategy. The RNAS would establish a forward line of defense in France and a second line somewhere between Dover and London. Other measures included ordering and siting antiaircraft guns and searchlights and laying out floodlit landing strips in London’s parks for British fighters. By the end of 1914, Churchill’s plans had crystallized into a two-tier system; aircraft stationed inland should receive sufficient warning of zeppelins approaching London to get airborne to intercept them while planes nearer the coast would be waiting to attack returning zeppelins. In practice, however, he knew that all planes then available would struggle to reach the height at which zeppelins flew.

From October 1 the government imposed a blackout—limited at first but soon extended. The tops and sides of streetlamps were painted black to mask their radiance from above and people were asked to draw their curtains tight. In these early weeks anxious Londoners scanned the night skies but no zeppelins came. During the first days of the war the German army lost three zeppelins on the western front. French shell fire brought down the first two while the third was fired on initially by German soldiers in error, then by Allied troops who shot off its rudder leaving it to drift helplessly before plummeting into a forest. However, any hopes that airships might not be as menacing or effective as feared were extinguished when zeppelin attacks in August and early September on Liège and Antwerp in support of the German advance killed a number of civilians.

Believing the best place to attack a zeppelin was on the ground, Churchill ordered an RNAS raid on zeppelin sheds in Cologne and Düsseldorf. On October 8, 1914, two British pilots took off from Antwerp just as British troops were about to pull out of the city in the face of a German advance. One headed for Cologne where he was unable to find the sheds. However, Flight Lieutenant Reggie Marix in a Sopwith Tabloid reached Düsseldorf and finally located a shed further outside the city than his map indicated. Swooping low, he released his two bombs: “As I pulled out of my dive, I looked over my shoulder and was rewarded with the sight of enormous sheets of flame pouring out of the shed.” After landing his bullet-riddled plane north of Antwerp because his fuel was running out and finally catching up with the retreating British forces by means of train and bicycle, he learned that he had destroyed a brand-new airship.

Encouraged by what was Britain’s first successful bombing raid on Germany and learning from intelligence reports that two zeppelins had almost been completed at the zeppelin plant in Friedrichshafen, Churchill ordered a further RNAS raid. On November 21 four new Avro 504 biplanes, each armed with four twenty-pound bombs, took off from Belfort in eastern France. Three reached Friedrichshafen and dropped nine bombs but failed to destroy the zeppelins. Two of the pilots returned to base but the third was forced to land near the burning zeppelin sheds where local people attacked him. German soldiers intervened and took him to a hospital. The German government at once accused the British of barbarously dropping bombs on the “innocent civilians” of Friedrichshafen despite knowing the only casualties had been mechanics and crewmen.

In December the RNAS targeted zeppelin sheds at Nordholz on the German North Sea coast. Since Nordholz was beyond the range of any British plane flying from Britain, France, or unoccupied Belgium, the navy converted three Channel passenger steamers into carriers from which seaplanes could be lowered into the water for takeoff. On Christmas Day 1914, seven RNAS seaplanes launched the raid which in foggy conditions failed to locate and destroy any zeppelins but provoked the word’s first air-sea battle as zeppelins and German seaplanes attacked the British seaplane carriers and their naval escort.

The German army and navy both hoped for the glory of being the first to bomb the British mainland. Von Tirpitz wrote in mid-November 1914 of his conviction that “the English are now in terror of Zeppelins, perhaps not without reason.” Though “not in favour of ‘frightfulness’ ” and considering indiscriminate bombing “repulsive” when it “killed an old woman,” he saw the potential that “if one could set fire to London in thirty places then the repulsiveness would be lost sight of,” later adding that “all that flies . . . should be concentrated on that city.” Admiral Gustav Bachmann, shortly to become chief of the naval staff, agreed, arguing that Germany “should leave no means untried to crush England, and that successful raids on London, in view of the already existing nervousness of the people, would prove a valuable means to this end.” However, the army and navy high commands had to contend with the kaiser, who hesitated over what the zeppelin targets should be and in particular whether zeppelins should be allowed to bomb London, where his royal relations lived and of which he had sentimental memories. Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg, a habitual opponent of von Tirpitz’s aggressive policies, whom the admiral would accuse of “lukewarm flabbiness,” was also reluctant.

While the kaiser pondered, German planes conducted three small air raids on England. On December 21, 1914, an Albatross seaplane dropped two twenty-pound bombs that fell into the sea near Dover pier. In the days that followed, a second plane dropped the first bomb to fall on British soil. It landed near Dover Castle, shattering several windows. A third dropped two bombs on the village of Cliffe on the Thames estuary.

Churchill believed from intelligence sources that raids on London itself could not be far away. On New Year’s Day 1915 he told the British cabinet that Germany had approximately twenty airships capable of reaching London “carrying each a ton of high explosives. They could traverse the English part of the journey, coming and going, in the dark hours . . . There is no known means of preventing the airships coming, and not much chance of punishing them on their return. The un-avenged destruction of non-combatant life may therefore be very considerable.” So perturbed was Admiral Jacky Fisher that he suggested Britain inform Germany that any captured zeppelin men would be shot as pirates. When Churchill disagreed with him he threatened to resign but Churchill deftly dissuaded him.

Early in January 1915, the kaiser agreed that zeppelins could attack England but insisted their targets be limited to naval shipyards, arsenals, docks, and other military establishments in the Thames estuary and on the east coast, and that “London itself was not to be bombed.” On January 19 three naval zeppelins took off, aiming to inflict the damage so ardently demanded in a popular German song:

L6
was only halfway across the North Sea when engine trouble forced it back but
L3
and
L4
continued and despite rain, fog, and sleet reached the Norfolk coast. A young man on the ground spotted “two bright stars moving, apparently thirty yards apart”—the navigation lights of the
L3
and
L4
. Once over land, the two zeppelins separated. At eight thirty
P.M.
that evening
L3
dropped nine high-explosive bombs onto Great Yarmouth—the first zeppelin raid on British soil—killing a fifty-three-year-old cobbler and a seventy-two-year-old woman, injuring three people, and wrecking several houses. The
L4
meanwhile headed for King’s Lynn, dropping bombs as it went, killing two and wounding thirteen. A woman who watched it drift overhead called it “the biggest sausage I ever saw in my life” and another witness thought it resembled “a church steeple sideways.”

King’s Lynn was close to the royal estate at Sandringham, which King George V and Queen Mary had left earlier the very day of the attack. The British press speculated whether the
L4
had been sent specifically to attack them and raged against German “frightfulness.” The raid left many Britons fearful and angry about why no advance warning had been given or efforts made to down the airship. Though the
L4
’s commander reported having been heavily shelled and pinpointed by searchlights, the guns existed only in his imagination and the “searchlights” had been the lights of King’s Lynn penetrating the misty skies.

Neutrals like the United States, Holland, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries condemned the attacks as a clear violation of the Hague prohibition on the bombardment of undefended places. The
New York Herald
wondered whether “the madness of despair or just plain everyday madness” had prompted Germany to attack quiet English coastal resorts and asked “What can Germany hope to gain by these wanton attacks on undefended places and this slaughter of innocents?” adding that such behavior was no way to win the good opinion of neutrals.

In Germany the raids were greeted with exultation as confirmation that Britain could no longer look to the sea to keep out the enemy. In their wake, the kaiser agreed, albeit reluctantly, that the London docks be included on the list of targets. While the German army and navy awaited the imminent delivery of a new generation of airships capable of reliably reaching the city, naval zeppelins again attacked England’s east coast, raiding from Tyneside to East Anglia.