A Higher Form of Killing (31 page)

That same day—just as they had when news of the
Lusitania
sinking broke—angry crowds attacked shops thought to be owned by Germans. Victor McArdell, a child at the time, recalled how in Shoreditch “an angry mob gathered outside a house the occupants of which, according to rumour were German spies and furthermore someone had looked through the letter-box and had seen saucers of blood in the hall-way . . . No enormity, committed by a German, was too great for people to believe. In this case, the completely innocent occupants were eventually saved from a nasty mauling by the intervention of the police.” As news spread of where the bombs had fallen, sightseers—“well-dressed people in motors, journalists, photographers, high military officials, Red Cross nurses . . . travelers from all over the world”—toured the areas of the East End damaged by those the press was now calling “the baby killers.”

Though British journalists were constrained in describing the bombings in detail, they could cover the inquests on the various victims. On June 3, 1915, the
Guardian
reported the coroner’s comments on the deaths of Henry and Caroline Good that “It is not desirable . . . to make much commotion about this matter. We do not want alarm to spread around the Metropolis, which has, up to the present, taken this act very quietly and coolly, although we all stand in danger” and that “the Government will not allow numerous details to be published in the Press.” However, readers learned how a doctor called to the scene “found the dead couple in a back room on the first floor. Both were kneeling beside the bed and were naked. All the man’s hair had been burnt off. The room was in ruins . . .The woman had a large piece of hair in her right hand . . . The man’s arm was around the woman’s waist.”

The press also reported how the coroner in summing up said:

It was not so very long ago that the whole procedure of naval warfare had been disturbed by the advent of armed submarines. In this war armed submarines had attacked peaceable passengers . . . Recently we have experienced the first example of the results of aerial warfare. Aeroplanes and Zeppelin airships have created a new sphere for military genius to act in defence and attack. While armed airships [are] the proper means of attacking armies and navies, it [is] an entirely new and barbarous practice to use them as weapons of aggression against defenceless civilians in their beds in the undefended suburbs of our cities, seaside and health resorts and country villages.

Remains of some of Linnarz’s bombs—described as “large metal instruments resembling stable lanterns . . . over one foot in length and very heavy”—were produced for the jury to examine. Their verdict, in line with the coroner’s guidance, was that the Goods had died “from suffocation and burns, having been murdered by some agent of a hostile force.” At the inquest into the death of three-year-old Elsie Leggatt held later that afternoon the jury learned that the incendiary bomb that killed her “bore the label of Krupps, Essen.”

Britons already felt battered by bad news. A London woman wrote to her sister, “This last week we have had . . . more diabolical devilish horrors hurled at the nation—[I’m] bewildered with all the awful happenings . . .
Lusitania
being torpedoed . . . the news of the ghastly effects of that awful gas the wretches had sent out over the trenches . . . We went to St. Paul’s on Monday night for the service held in memory of the Canadians who so gallantly fell at Ypres.” A man wrote from Ayrshire to a friend: “What a terrible business this torpedoing of the
Lusitania
 . . . That . . . and asphyxiating gases have just about ‘put the lid on’ and shown up these truculent Prussians in their true light. Pirates and murderers!”

Allied to news of other recent German “frightfulness,” the raid on London encouraged people to join the Anti-German League formed that summer with the aim of enrolling one million members and achieving a total boycott of German goods—like the Rhenish wines taken off the
Lusitania
’s wine list and children’s toys such as teddy bears and metal cars, and mouth organs then manufactured almost exclusively in Germany. The Trading with the Enemy Act of 1914 had already made conducting business with any person of “enemy character” an offense. However, plenty of German-made stock imported prewar remained. “When offered goods bearing the mark of the beast,” a league leaflet appealed, “think of the vast army of phantom dead, of the poor breastless women, of the outraged girls . . . of our brave soldiers with their faces beaten to a pulp as they lay wounded, and of the sinking of . . . the
Lusitania
with hundreds of helpless victims sacrificed to the bloodlust of the Butcher of Berlin.”

Just as the British government tried to downplay the raid, the German government naturally promoted reports of massive destruction in London and encouraged Linnarz’s interviews with American and other neutral newspapers to feed them. The German public responded with enthusiasm to the raid on the city described in one paper as “the heart of the money world.” The Leipzig
Neueste Nachrichten
declared:

England [is] no longer an island. The City of London, the heart which pumps the life-blood into the arteries of the brutal huckster nation, has been sown with bombs by German airships, whose brave pilots had the satisfaction of seeing the dislocated fragments of docks, banks and many other buildings rise up to the dark skies in lurid tongues of flame. At last the longed-for punishment has fallen on England, this people of liars and hypocrites—the punishment for the overflowing measure of sins of ages past. It is neither blind hatred nor raging anger that inspires our airship heroes, but a solemn and religious awe at being the chosen instruments of the Divine wrath. In that moment when they saw London breaking up in smoke and fire they lived through a thousand lives of an immeasurable joy which all who remain at home must envy them.

Meanwhile, Londoners braced themselves for more attacks. A
Times
editorial of June 2 warned that “it is reasonably clear that the visits of the German airships have been in the main of an experimental character . . . They have not yet attacked in strength, but are still practising . . . Their principal object is extremely simple and thoroughly German. They wish to kill as many people and destroy as much property as they possibly can . . . Zeppelin attacks have become unpleasant realities and for technical reasons are exceedingly difficult to repel.” People worried that German spies were in place in the capital, ready to direct incoming zeppelins to their targets with clandestine signals, even hanging out washing in a particular way as a coded message. They also worried that zeppelins would come on nights when the moon was full, though one woman assured her son that “the War Office had produced a black searchlight that would ‘black out’ the moon.” “It was useless,” her son recalled, “saying that was an impossibility.”

The next raid on London was intended for June 4, when the German navy dispatched its new zeppelin,
L10
, commanded by Kapitän-Leutnant Klaus Hirsch.
**
However, shortly after reaching the Thames estuary a shift in the wind led him to attack the naval base at Harwich in East Anglia rather than London. He later reported dropping thirty high-explosive and ninety incendiary bombs that “all exploded and all caused fires . . . Judging by an especially violent explosion, one of the hits must have been on some gasworks or an oil tank.” In fact, he had mistakenly bombed the town of Gravesend on the Thames estuary, hitting a military hospital.

Two nights later the German army and navy sent airships in a combined operation. The three army airships—
LZ38
, again captained by Linnarz,
LZ37
, and
LZ39
—fared badly. Early engine problems forced Linnarz back to his base at Evere. The remaining two zeppelins sailed on but, meeting thick fog above the North Sea, were ordered to return to their base at Gontrode. A British listening post at the Hunstanton coast guard station on the Norfolk coast picked up the German signals to the airships and four RNAS pilots based at Furnes in Belgium were sent out. Flight Sublieutenants Reginald Warneford and John Rose, flying Morane-Saulnier Parasol monoplanes equipped with a Vickers machine gun and six twenty-pound bombs lashed beneath the fuselage, were ordered to try to intercept and destroy the returning zeppelins. Flight Lieutenant J. P. Wilson and Flight Sublieutenant J. S. Mills in Henry Farman biplanes, also armed with machine gun and bombs, were to attack the zeppelin sheds at Evere.

The ground crews had already run Linnarz’s
LZ38
into its shed at Evere when Wilson arrived. Challenged in the darkness by a German searchlight he had the presence of mind to flash back with a pocket lamp. His signals deceived the Germans, enabling him to approach and drop three bombs on
LZ38
’s shed. Aware now what was happening German ground crew fired on Mills following behind, temporarily driving him off, but he circled and came in again to drop four bombs on the same shed, which burst into flames destroying
LZ38
. Linnarz and his crew only just got out in time.

Pursuing the returning zeppelins, Rose crash-landed in a field. However twenty-three-year-old Warneford, who had only gained his wings three months earlier but already had a reputation for reckless bravado, caught up with
LZ37
near Ghent in Belgium. She was battling strong headwinds but her crew confidently expected to reach their base at Gontrode safely. In the control gondola Alfred Muhler recalled how “we breathed with relief because we thought we were out of danger. I was at my elevator rudder, when the observer on the upper platform reported through the speaking-tube: ‘Airplane two thousand feet aft, above the ship.’ We all knew what that meant; the enemy flier was already in the most suitable position for an attack, for we could not repulse him from the control-car. Without waiting for the command to do so the observer on the back of the airships sent a burst of machine-gun fire at the attacking flier.”

Aware that his single Vickers machine gun was poor protection, Warneford coaxed his red-and-gray fighter, which had a maximum height ceiling of eleven thousand feet, directly above the airship, then dived. “When I was almost over the monster I descended to about 150 feet above it and released six bombs. The sixth struck the envelope of the ship fair and square in the middle. There was instantly a terrible explosion.”

Alfred Muhler, huddled in the forward gondola, recalled feeling “a hit.” Then,

the ship quivered, and my helm turned loosely in the air. It found no more resistance—a sign that our steering mechanism had become useless. The control-car swayed back and forth as if drunk, and I fell. While I was still trying to get to my feet, the entire crew either jumped or were thrown overboard; at any rate, I never saw them again. The whole immense hull above me was ablaze, instantly becoming a roaring, hissing inferno. Instinctively I threw myself flat on the floor of the car and clawed at the rails, desperately trying to avoid the merciless fire roasting down upon me. I wondered how long it took to fall 5,000 feet. I knew this was the end, but I actually welcomed it as preferable to the slow torture of incineration. At last the gondola struck and everything went black.

In fact,
LZ37
had broken up and crashed in flames through the roof of the Convent of Saint Elisabeth in Ghent, setting it ablaze and killing two nuns, a man, and a child. Muhler himself landed on a nun’s bed—the airship’s sole survivor. Meanwhile, the pressure wave from the exploding zeppelin had flipped Warneford’s plane over so that he suddenly found himself flying upside down in the darkness. “The aeroplane was out of control for a short period, but went into a nose dive, and the control was gained,” his battle report described.

I then saw that the Zeppelin was on the ground in flames and also that there were pieces of something burning in the air all the way down. The joint on my petrol pipe and pump from the back tank was broken, and at about 2.40 am I was forced to land and repair my pump. I landed at the back of a forest close to a farmhouse; the district is unknown on account of the fog and the continuous changing of course. I made preparations to set the machine on fire but apparently was not observed, so was enabled to effect a repair, and continued at 3.15 am in a south westerly direction after considerable difficulty in starting my engine single handed. I tried several times to find my whereabouts by descending through the clouds, but was unable to do so. So eventually I landed and found out that I was at Cape Gris-Nez . . . As far as could be seen the colour of the airship was green on top and yellow below and there was no machine or gun platform on top.

I have the honour to be, Sir, Your obedient servant,

R.A.J. Warneford. Flt. Sub-Lieutenant.

That same evening, Kapitän-Leutnant Heinrich Mathy in the navy’s
L9
was to “attack London if possible” with the army airships or else to select a coastal town “according to choice.” Arriving over the Wash estuary in East Anglia and encountering strong headwinds and ground fog, he diverted to the northern England fishing port of Hull on which he dropped over fifty bombs, killed twenty-four, injured a further forty, and destroyed nearly fifty houses and shops before proceeding to the neighboring port of Grimsby and bombing that too. As in London, there were no air raid shelters yet and people had few places to hide. Many were hit as they fled through the streets or were trapped by wreckage. Two parents and their five children who had crouched against the kitchen wall of their house as the
L9
passed overhead emerged to find destruction all around and realized the wall could not have protected them. Luck alone had saved them.