Like War in Heaven: How the Zeppelin Terror Over London in 1915 Changed the World Forever (and created women's pajamas!)

 

“Nowadays there is no such animal as a noncombatant.  Modern warfare is total warfare.”  -German Zeppelin Corp Commander Peter Strasser (1915)

Some claim that they can hear an eerie throbbing sound in the skies above London that night.  A few look up and can faintly make out a large cigar shaped shadow slowly drifting across the night sky high above the city. 

The police have been forewarned.  Observers had spotted the massive airship floating over the coast of England only mere moments before.  The enormous hydrogen filled zeppelin, over 650 feet in length, is flying at approximately eighty miles per hour at an altitude of 16,000 feet.  An altitude too high for any anti-aircraft fire to reach.

All that the police can do is to frantically pedal bicycles through the streets of London, blowing on whistles as they go, and shouting, “Take cover!  Take cover!” to passersby.  Some heed the warnings and huddle in basements.  Those that haven’t got basements head for cover in the tube stations underground. Many do nothing and turn in for the night.

The night is still and moonless.  The late spring weather is warm and the German zeppelin, the largest flying craft ever constructed at the time, is terrifying and untouchable,

About an hour and a half before midnight on May 31, 1915 a specially designed trap-door opens in the bottom of the German airship and soldiers begin to drop the first of 120 twenty-five pound incendiary bombs on London that night.

        This is the first ever targeted strategic bombing from the air of a civilian population in human history.  It is designed to cause panic and fear among the British people.  Germany hopes that this bombing will break the stalemate on the Western Front and drive Great Britain out of the war.  

For the British, May 31, 1915, will be remembered as the start of what Londoners  dub the Zeppelin Terror.  

The bombs that the Germans dropped by hand that night are composed of a mixture of combustible flammable metallic powders called thermite and wrapped in ropes soaked in pitch.  These thermite bombs ignite as they float down to earth and soon the sky above London is filled with tiny flaming specks of death that implacably fall to the streets below.

The first of the bombs lands at 16 Alkham Road, in the neighborhood of Stoke-Newington, right on top of the home of thirty-nine year old shop clerk Albert Lovell.  Lovell and his family escape but his house is instantly engulfed in flames.

Within minutes the zeppelin will claim its first life--three year old Elsie Leggett who is incinerated by flames while asleep in her bed.

        During the course of the night the German zeppelin, using the reflection off the River Thames and the Tower of London for navigation will wreak havoc and terror all across the city.  Over the course of less than two hours the zeppelin will kill seven innocent civilians and seriously wound twenty-two others, but the psychological trauma and terror caused by the raid of May 31, 1915 and the subsequent German zeppelin bombing campaign will be almost incalculable.

Writing about that first zeppelin raid on London in a letter to a friend famous author D.H. Lawrence will say, “Then there was war in heaven.  I cannot get over it.  It seems like the zeppelin is the zenith of the night; golden like the moon, having taken control of the skies.”

The giant hydrogen airships are the invention of a German army officer named Count Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin.  He invented the large aircraft three years prior to the invention of the first airplane in 1900.  Before the start of World War One in 1914, Germany used zeppelins for pleasure travel among the rich as a sort of  ocean liner of the sky, but with the onset of the war, Germany quickly discovered the military possibilities inherent in the large airships.

In 1914 the Germans used their zeppelins in attempts to bomb military targets in Belgium and France, however, given the fact that bombs are simply tossed out of the craft by hand, their practicality as a weapon of war is limited.  But as the bloodshed in the trenches drags on into 1915 Kaiser Wilhem II gives the go ahead for the German army to begin using their zeppelins as weapons of terror against allied civilian populations.  The Kaiser’s first target is London.

The Zeppelin Terror over London begins on the last night of May 1915 but it doesn’t end there.  When it begins there are no aircraft yet in existence that can fly high enough to reach the German airships and the bombings over London instill panic in the city’s population.  There are anti-German riots in the street and frantic calls for some type of air defense.

With the death of three year old Elsie Legget, and other small children as the result of zeppelin raids, the press and public begin a propaganda war that denounces the giant airships as “Baby Killers”.

On September 8, 1915 an enormous German zeppelin flew right over St. Paul’s Cathedral and dropped a 660 pound bomb that killed more than twenty people including six children in an instant.  

        The British public is incensed and demands retribution.  The government institutes nighttime blackouts across the city so that the airships cannot use the reflection of lights off the water of the Thames to guide them to their targets.

The press is censored from reporting on the specifics of zeppelin raids by the government to keep panic from overwhelming the city and to keep up public morale.  All through 1915 and into the next year the Zeppelin Terror over London continued.

At one point the Germans are manufacturing so many airships that they are forced to temporarily halt most sausage production because the intestinal linings of cows are used to construct the leak proof linings that encase the woodwork frames of the zeppelins and can no longer be spared to encase sausages.

Although the death toll exacted by the Zeppelin Terror is low when compared to the battlefield carnage of the First World War, and almost nothing when compared to the number of casualties caused by bombing campaigns in later wars during the twentieth century, it shocks the citizens of London.

Londoners spend sleepless night after sleepless night huddled below ground and listening intently for the low droning sound of an approaching German zeppelin followed by the loud crash of exploding bombs.  

At a time when it was rare for any woman to wear pants under any circumstances the Zeppelin Terror popularizes the idea of pajamas for women because so many ladies are forced to take cover in the middle of the night and be seen out in public by their friends and neighbors.

In August 1915, when speaking of the new trend in ladies nightclothes The Guardian reports, “Zeppelin pyjamas can be made of honest flannel, though very much more often they are made of crepe de chine, or failing that, of Japanese silk.”

Silky pajamas aside, for a time in 1915 and 1916, the German Zeppelin Terror over London was deadly serious.

In total, during the course of the First World War, bombing raids on London by German zeppelins would claim nearly 800 lives and cause millions of pounds worth of damage to civilian property.

However, with improvements in anti-aircraft weaponry and an increase in fixed wing aircraft capability, the tide would slowly turn against the German zeppelin as a weapon of terror.

Zeppelins, filled with easily combustible hydrogen, become vulnerable to anti-aircraft guns which by 1916 can shoot higher and more accurately than they ever could before.  With the development of effective British fighter aircraft by the end of 1916 the zeppelin’s days as a practical weapon of war were all but numbered.

German terror bombing of London would continue for the duration of the war but by 1917 most German bombing raids would be carried out by the Gotha triplane bomber which was much more maneuverable and capable of defending itself against British aircraft than the enormous lumbering zeppelins.

        Though short in duration the Zeppelin Terror over London in 1915-16 is important because it shows us that terror in the twentieth century has a beginning.  Today, all of us remember the Nazi blitz of London in 1940 or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.  In the year 2020 we are all well aware of how terrifying and destructive man can be towards his fellow man on an international scale, but it is important that we never forget the fear, panic and novelty of the Zeppelin Terror of the First World War so that we can better understand where we might be headed in the future and how we as a civilization got to where we are today.