A Higher Form of Killing (30 page)

This was not Linnarz’s first flight to England. Having taken delivery of
LZ38
, the German army had been probing London’s eastern defenses. On May 10—the day of the first mass burials of
Lusitania
victims in Queenstown—Linnarz had dropped incendiary bombs on the seaside town of Southend and also thrown out a large piece of cardboard upon which was written: “You English. We have come and will come again. Kill or cure. German.” He had indeed returned, bombing Kent on May 17 and Southend for a second time on May 26, proving a raid on London was viable.

Now that the much-anticipated takeoff time had come, ground crew, holding the lines beneath the bow and stern, released them as Linnarz’s mechanics kicked the engines into life. As darkness fell Linnarz set course for the English coast. He recalled how as it came in view “suddenly we had a queer feeling as if our nerves were tightening in an almost joyous anticipation. Would we succeed in breaking through the chain of coastal batteries and remain unobserved or at least undamaged?” He searched “for a cloud behind which we could slip through the English coastal defence. Under us, on the shimmering sea, cruised enemy patrol-boats; I prudently ordered the lights out. The airship became a ghostly apparition. In the control-car, the only light was on the dial of the machine telegraph. In his narrow cubicle the radio operator sat with his headset over his ears, listening to the confusion of signals and voices whispering in the infinity of space . . . The antenna followed the airship like the spawn of a mother fish.”

Shortly before ten
P.M.
, he was over the seaside resort of Margate where Petty Officer Edwin Oak-Rhind, stationed on lookout, logged
LZ38
’s height at some five thousand feet. Linnarz then piloted his ship through the darkness across the Thames estuary and headed westward toward London. “At high speed we steer for their city,” he later wrote. Reaching northeast London an hour later he found “little effort to dim the city.” Instead “London was all lit up and we enjoyed total surprise.” Minutes later, he prepared to drop the bomb that would shatter forever the invulnerability of what was then not only the world’s most populous city but its most important financial center and capital of a global empire.

Linnarz joined his bombardier who was already lying on his stomach on the catwalk by a bomb hatch, “ready to spill his murderous load overboard.” Linnarz described the moment he gave the command. “ ‘Let go!’ I cry. The first bomb is falling on London! . . . What a cursed long time it takes between release and impact while the bomb travels thousands of feet! We fear that it has proved a dud—until the explosion reassures us. Already we have frightened them; away goes the second, an incendiary bomb, thrown out by hand, a pin being removed to make it ‘live.’ ”

Linnarz’s bombs tumbled on to unsuspecting Londoners thousands of feet below and unable to hear the rhythmic throbbing of the zeppelin’s engines. An incendiary crashed through the roof of a Victorian terraced house, 16 Alkham Road, in Stoke Newington, a crowded, modestly prospering district of neat two- and three-storied houses, due north of the Tower of London. As the house’s top floor immediately burst into flames, the occupants—clerk Albert Lovell, his wife, children, and two guests—scrambled out into the street unharmed. Meanwhile the
LZ38
dropped further incendiaries on nearby Dynevor Road, on an outbuilding behind a pub in Neville Road—though this bomb failed to ignite—and on 27 Neville Road, gutting the house.

The airship then passed over Stoke Newington High Street before heading south toward the working class district of Hoxton, described in a survey a few years earlier as “one of the worst parts of London, where poverty and overcrowding are characteristic of practically the whole district.” The Smith family were in bed in their house in Cowper Road when they heard what sounded like “a terrible rushing of wind” and people shouting “Fire” and “The Germans are here.” Running outside Mr. Smith saw that the second floor of the house of his neighbor, Samuel Leggatt, was on fire. Leggatt and his neighbors managed to reach the bedroom where his five children were sleeping and, despite being burned themselves, to rescue four. But in the confusion the youngest—three-year-old Elsie—was left behind in the mistaken belief that someone had already carried her to safety. A policeman later found her charred body huddled beneath a bed. That night, as a Russian night watchman fled the burning bamboo furniture warehouse he had been guarding, angry Hoxton residents, convinced he was German and must have started the fire, attacked him.

Meanwhile Linnarz took
LZ38
south dropping further incendiaries, including two that destroyed 187 Balls Pond Road, a three-story house belonging to builder Thomas Sharpling. A policeman heard “the sound of machinery in the air” then saw the house suddenly burst into flames. The Sharplings managed to get out and one of their lodgers leaped from a window into a blanket held out by rescuers, but two others—forty-six-year-old laborer Henry Good and Caroline his wife—burned to death.

Dazed citizens looked out of their windows to see roadways that had become “a mass of flames” and a sky “red with the light of flames.” Arriving above Shoreditch—home in Elizabethan England to the country’s first theater where Shakespeare’s plays were first produced in London and in 1915 still a center of entertainment rivaling London’s West End—Linnarz dropped three incendiaries on the Shoreditch Empire music hall, where a late-night performance was under way. Astonishingly no one was hurt and the orchestra played on while the audience was evacuated into the street. After setting a railway goods station alight, Linnarz headed southeast to bomb Spitalfields, long settled by refugees from persecution, from Protestant French Huguenot silk weavers in the 1680s to eastern European Jewish immigrants in the nineteenth century.

Next Linnarz steered for nearby Whitechapel, a poverty-stricken, densely packed area of slum lodgings and sweatshops described by Charles Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, as “the Eldorado of the east, a gathering together of poor fortune seekers; its streets full of buying and selling, the poor living on the poor.” In 1888, the notorious Jack the Ripper had murdered his victims there. Linnarz’s bombs hit a synagogue, a whiskey distillery, and a street still filled with people. One killed eight-year-old Samuel Reuben, on his way home after seeing a film at Greenberg’s Picture Palace. His body was found with his entrails spilling out. Another injured a young woman so badly she died within a few hours.

Turning northeastward, Linnarz’s explosive and incendiary bombs fell on Stepney, another area of overcrowded slums where east European Jews, Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, and Chinese lived side by side, many employed in the nearby docks. Reaching Stratford—home of the Eastern Counties Railway’s main locomotive and rolling stock works and where many worked on the railways—at around eleven thirty
P.M.
he dropped an incendiary on 26 Colgrave Road. As it smashed through the house, it narrowly missed its occupants, Peter Gillies and his wife, lying in bed. A neighbor heard the droning of engines, then saw a dark object fall through the Gillies’ roof. Linnarz dropped his final bombs on the nearby suburb of Leytonstone, then released water ballast to rise higher and turn away from the capital where his raid had lasted barely half an hour, and return safely to base at Evere.

The London Fire Brigade, whose fighters had been called to more than forty fires, counted the remains of ninety-one incendiary bombs and twenty-eight explosive bombs and estimated damage to property at £18,596. The human cost was seven dead, all civilians, including four children, and thirty-five civilians injured. Sylvia Pankhurst—daughter of suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst and friend of
Lusitania
survivor and fellow suffragette Margaret Mackworth—was nearly among the casualties. Having set up the East London Federation of Suffragettes, she had gone to live in the area and had been working at her desk when “huge reports smote the ear, shattering, deafening . . . An air raid! . . . The angry grinding . . . pulsated above us. Again that terrific burst of noise; those awful bangs, the roar of the falling buildings . . . What a burst of sound, tremendous; the very earth shook with it!”
*

The raid had brutally exposed the difficulties of protecting civilian populations against aerial attack. Despite the highly colored accounts Linnarz subsequently gave to the press describing “searchlights reaching after us like gigantic spider’s legs; right, left and all around,” a “storm of shell and shrapnel” and sixty searchlights “still stabbing the darkness” as
LZ38
departed, not a single searchlight had caught the zeppelin in its beam, not a single gun had fired on it, and indeed in the dark scarcely anyone had caught even a glimpse of it. Of the British planes sent up to attack
LZ38
, only one sighted the zeppelin but engine trouble forced the pilot to turn back before he could attack.

A particular problem was that zeppelins raided by night and as a British observer put it, “Much as we loathe the Zeppelin raiders they must be given credit for their remarkable skill in making night journeys.” The night-fighting skills of British pilots—and the development of suitable planes—were by contrast still rudimentary. To help prevent planes colliding in bad weather or at night, the Admiralty had ordered both the tips of propeller blades and wing struts to be coated with luminous radium paint. To make landing in the dark less hazardous, flares were lit along the airstrips. To enable pilots to judge their distance above the ground they were provided with a makeshift device consisting of a length of weighted string to be dangled fifty feet beneath their plane when coming in to land. The theory was that the weight would strike the ground, triggering a signal in the cockpit. Sometimes the weight simply fell off or else hit an obstacle like a tree.

Matters were not helped by an ongoing debate over the responsibility for London’s air defenses. In late May, following Churchill’s departure from the Admiralty, his replacement as First Lord of the Admiralty, Arthur Balfour, had attempted to shift responsibility from the Admiralty—whose planes, he argued, were needed for anti-U-boat patrols—to the War Office. However, the latter had resisted, insisting it would not be in a fit position to take over the defense until sometime in 1916.

Londoners had been given some warning. On May 23, the
Guardian
and other papers reported advice from Scotland Yard on precautions to be taken “in case of an air raid on London” especially if zeppelins dropped bombs containing poison gas: “It would be well for persons . . . taking refuge (in houses) to keep all windows and doors on the lower floors closed, so as to prevent the admission of deleterious gases . . . The suspicion is quite justified that the Zeppelins, if they get to London, will use bombs containing poison gas. Germany has tried poisonous gas at the front.” Zeppelins might drop poison gases of a yet more “insidious and perilous character” than seen on the western front.

Early on June 1, the Admiralty issued its first communiqué about the raid: “Zeppelins are reported to have been seen near Ramsgate and Brentford and in certain outlying parts of London. Many fires are reported, but these cannot absolutely be connected with the visit of airships. Further particulars will be issued as soon as they can be collected and collated.” This brief and deliberately misleading statement reflected the Admiralty’s concern that zeppelin raids would provoke panic on London’s streets. A “guidance” note to editors, issued shortly afterward, effectively muzzled reporting of zeppelin attacks: “The press are especially reminded that no statement whatever must be published dealing with the places in the neighbourhood of London reached by aircraft, or the course proposed to be taken by them, or any statement or diagram that might indicate the ground or route covered by them. The Admiralty communiqué is all the news which can properly be published.”

Across London rumor and confusion were rife. In the East End, which had borne the brunt of the attack, people assumed the entire city had been bombed. Elsewhere inhabitants had seen and heard nothing. They could learn little from the morning newspapers, which could only refer in the most general of terms to attacks “in parts of London.” A further Admiralty communiqué later that day told people only a little more that was true, and quite a bit that was not:

In amplification of the information which appeared in this morning’s papers, the following particulars of last night’s Zeppelin raid in the Metropolitan area are now available for publication. Late last night about 90 bombs, mostly of an incendiary character, were dropped from hostile aircraft in various localities not far distant from each other. A number of fires (of which only three were large enough to require the services of fire-engines) broke out. All fires were promptly and effectively dealt with . . . No public building was injured, but a number of private premises were damaged by fire and water. The number of casualties is small. So far as at present ascertained, one infant, one boy, one man, and one woman were killed, and another woman is so seriously injured that her life is despaired of. A few other private citizens were seriously injured. The precise numbers are not yet ascertained. Adequate police arrangements, including the calling out of special constables, enabled the situation to be kept thoroughly in hand throughout.

The German authorities also issued a misleading statement, claiming: “We last night dropped bombs on the workshops and docks in London” and also that the raid was “by way of reprisal for the bombardment of the open town of Ludwigshafen.” Reproducing the statement, the
Guardian
added that the raid on Ludwigshafen, carried out by eighteen French planes, had been on “the explosives factory there—one of the largest of the kind in Germany, and the chief source, it is believed, of the poisonous gas used by the Germans.”