A Higher Form of Killing (36 page)

Reporting the outcome to London, Sir John French claimed the attack had “met with a marked success, and produced a demoralising effect in some opposing units.” Foulkes had certainly succeeded in his aim of surprising the enemy. Gas had helped the British right wing capture Loos and take the German first line. Bernhard Kellermann, war correspondent of the
Berliner Tageblatt
, described how “behind the gas and smoke cloud there suddenly emerged Englishmen in thick lines and storming columns. They rose suddenly from the earth wearing smoke masks over their faces and looking not like soldiers but like devils.”

However, as with the German gas attacks at Ypres, the British failed to capitalize on their success for reasons admitted by Lieutenant Ashley: “The artillery, with insufficient shells, had not cut the barbed wire defences effectively at many points and the infantry had been held up. Reserves had been held too far back to exploit the initial success.” Within a week, and despite further use by the British of gas, the Germans had retaken all their lost ground. Furthermore, two thousand British troops were reported to have been gassed by their own chlorine. Fifty-five were in a serious condition and ten died. The casualties included men of the Special Companies. As the chlorine had blown back on the British trenches, a sergeant saw “a gas officer in the trench. He looked ghastly and all the buttons on his tunic were green as if they were mouldy.”

*
Though wounded, Piper Laidlaw played on. He was awarded the Victoria Cross.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Zepp and a Portion of Clouds”

Following the September zeppelin raids, the British authorities had worked to improve London’s artillery defenses, then consisting of eight three-inch guns, four six-pounders with inaccurate gun sights, and some superannuated one pounder “pom poms” from the Boer War. Two days after Mathy’s September 8 raid, First Lord of the Admiralty Arthur Balfour appointed sixty-two-year-old Admiral Sir Percy Scott to take charge. Scott had served under Jacky Fisher and been one of the few to perceive the submarine’s destructive potential. Revered as the “father of naval gunnery,” his appointment reflected the Admiralty’s view that guns, backed up by searchlights, were a better defense against airships than air patrols.

One of Scott’s first acts was to obtain a modern French seventy-five-millimeter mobile gun—the “auto-cannon”—from France where it was being used in the defense of Paris and to order thirty more. The gun fired a high-explosive shell with a time fuse up to twenty-one thousand feet. Scott also acquired additional guns wherever he could and mounted them on lorry chassis for mobility, as well as setting up fixed gun positions linked to searchlight stations. He concentrated his greatest fire power on the coast, while positioning backup guns along the approaches to London and within the city itself. Their number and locations were kept secret so that some Londoners soon got a surprise. A man walking along Grosvenor Place reported: “I was almost blown off my feet by the gun which fired from just over the wall in the garden of Buckingham Palace.”

On the night of October 13 zeppelins returned in strength. Strasser sent five—
L11
,
L13
, and
L14
together with two new airships,
L15
and
L16
, fitted with 240-horsepower engines rather than the 210-horsepower engines of their sisters, and capable of sixty miles an hour. The airships were to rendezvous over the North Sea and then proceed together.
L11
arrived too late to do more than follow, drop several bombs over rural Norfolk, and return home where her captain claimed he had bombed Woolwich. The remaining four, under the overall command of Heinrich Mathy again aboard
L13
, approached the Norfolk coast at around six twenty
P.M.
Naval lightships in the North Sea had already reported their presence and a zeppelin warning had gone out to airfields around London. Due to thick ground fog only five planes took off. Just one, that piloted by eighteen-year-old Second Lieutenant John Slessor, would even sight a zeppelin that night.

As the four airships continued inland, machine guns—part of the new first line of defense—opened up from the ground but to no effect.
L16
soon fell behind and after dropping some bombs on the town of Hertford returned home, though its commander claimed to have bombed east London. Meanwhile, the remaining three zeppelins split up. Kapitän-Leutnant Alois Bocker, aboard
L14
, veered away for the Thames estuary and a little later Mathy departed to circle round and approach London from the southwest, leaving Kapitän-Leutnant Joachim Breithaupt, commanding
L15
, to come in from the north.

As
L15
flew through clear starlit skies a thirteen-pounder antiaircraft gun attacked it. Breithaupt’s response was to drop three bombs which he thought destroyed the gun. He then steered toward central London. Two searchlights pinpointed his airship and another antiaircraft gun opened fire. Many people ignored whistles and shouts from policemen to take cover to stare fascinated at what a reporter described as this “thing of silvery beauty sailing serenely through the night.”

Arriving over Charing Cross, Breithaupt dropped further bombs. London’s nearby music halls, theaters, and restaurants were doing good business. A Londoner recalled how “during this period no restaurant keeper would be surprised if you ordered ‘Zepp and a portion of clouds’ . . . He would serve you without question with sausage and mashed potatoes.”
Tonight’s the Night
, a popular American musical comedy, was being performed at the Gaiety Theatre while
Potash and Perlmutter in Society—
a comedy by Charles Frohman’s friend Charles Klein, who had died with him on the
Lusitania—
was also being performed. Breithaupt’s first bombs hit the corner of the Lyceum Theatre where
Between Two Women
was playing. It was the interval and people were strolling outside or having a quick drink at the nearby Old Bell pub.

A member of Lyceum staff recalled seeing the zeppelin “as pretty as a picture up there . . . even afterwards, when I saw the dead bodies and the terrible injuries and helped with the wounded, I could not believe somehow that she had done it.” Seven people were killed, twenty-one injured, and a gas main fractured. The next bomb landed close to the Strand Theatre where people were watching
The Scarlet Pimpernel
. Breithaupt, in his control gondola high above, found the scene “indescribably beautiful—shrapnel bursting all around (though rather uncomfortably near us), our own bombs bursting, and the flashes from the anti-aircraft batteries below.”

Continuing down the Strand to the Aldwych, Breithaupt dropped two more bombs, killing three more people and wounding fifteen. An army officer, on leave from the western front, was in a taxi when his driver suddenly halted, jumped out, and ran away. He also got out and saw “right overhead . . . an enormous Zeppelin. It was lighted up by searchlights and cruised along slowly and majestically, a marvellous sight. I stood gaping in the middle of the Strand, too fascinated to move. Then there was a terrific explosion, followed by another and another.”

Breithaupt’s next bombs hit the nineteenth-century Royal Courts of Justice and Lincoln’s Inn—the oldest of London’s four Inns of Court—destroying the seventeenth-century stained glass window in the Inn’s chapel and damaging the walls of the late eighteenth-century Stone Buildings, the world’s oldest purpose-built offices where shrapnel holes are still visible. They also hit Chancery Lane, Gray’s Inn, and Hatton Garden, the latter two bombed in the raid a month before. Breithaupt headed next toward the financial center of the City. Meanwhile, Sir Percy Scott’s deputy, Lieutenant Commander Alfred Rawlinson, had been rushing the new French seventy-five-millimeter auto-cannon across London to the City. He was just in time to have the gun set up, estimate the airship’s height at eleven thousand feet, and give the order to fire as
L15
appeared. The high-explosive shell, detonating at seventy-two hundred feet, fell short but Breithaupt realized something more powerful than the usual antiaircraft guns was attacking him. Swiftly dropping two further bombs, he ordered his crew to jettison water ballast and ascended. When Rawlinson was ready to fire again,
L15
was already beyond his reach.

Having raided the heart of London with little opposition, Breithaupt set course for home. Apart from Rawlinson’s mobile cannon, no guns had troubled him. Neither had any aircraft. Young pilot John Slessor recalled the frustration of spotting
L15
while being unable to attack her. He had just pulled off his boots to lie down on his camp bed at his airfield when told that zeppelins were heading for London. He was to take off and patrol at ten thousand feet for as long as his fuel lasted: “The lights of the capital presented a wonderful spectacle. They did more. They illuminated quite effectively the great silver shape of Zeppelin L15 . . . Long before I had reached my patrol height I saw above me its impressively vast bulk like a cod’s eye view of a liner apparently stationary and clearly visible in the glow from the lights of London.” He tried to climb above her but was still one thousand feet below when he saw “streams of sparks as [
L15
’s] engines opened up. The great bulk swung round and then . . . cocked its nose up at an incredible angle and climbed away from me . . . The great shape diminished and grew . . . indistinct as she drew away from me and from the lights of London. Finally I lost her altogether in the cloud—and then I found that I had also lost myself.”

Meanwhile, Heinrich Mathy’s
L13
, carrying the heaviest bomb load of the night, had navigated westward around London, got lost, but then made for central London, in the process sighting Alois Bocker’s
L14
. After crossing the Thames estuary Bocker too had missed his way. Finding himself almost out over the English Channel he had returned inland, dropping some of his bombs before spotting
L13
close by to his south. The two airships exchanged signals. Mathy then headed north to attack Woolwich in mistake for the Royal Victoria Dock while Bocker bombed the prosperous London suburb of Croydon twelve miles south of the capital and described in the late nineteenth century as a place where “handsome villas spring up on every side tenanted by city men whose portly persons crowd the trains.”

The raid killed 71 people and injured 128 (47 of the fatalities and 102 of the injured were in the capital). Total damage was around eighty thousand pounds. Major Cuthbert Lawson wrote to his mother that the zeppelins “seem to have pretty well put the wind up the population.” At a public meeting held the next day at the Cannon Street Hotel, speaker after speaker criticized London’s defenses and accused the government of keeping the public in the dark. To loud cheers Lord Willoughby de Broke demanded that “the kind of thing that happened last night has got to stop.” Member of Parliament William Joynson-Hicks said that “all knew now that the shores of England were not inviolate. Every man and woman cried aloud for vengeance.” A resolution was carried overwhelmingly calling for “a declared policy of air reprisals for Zeppelin raids on London and other open cities.” together with a demand for Britain to build “a fleet of large aeroplanes capable of offensive warfare.” Three men who objected were “roughly handled and forcibly ejected” while a vicar told the meeting, “Let us have done with soft and silly presentiments of Christianity.”

The German high command again assessed the raids. Der Feuerplan had not yet succeeded. London had been attacked but not yet significantly damaged. Its citizens, though angered and shocked, had not buckled under the psychological pressure of aerial attack. Many, including Strasser, believed the pressure must be intensified and that coordinated and concentrated zeppelin attacks would deliver the best results. However, there were obvious problems. In the latest raid two airships had nearly collided. Furthermore, communications were poor—Mathy’s radio operator, crouching in the tiny wireless cubicle in the control gondola, had lost radio contact with the other airships as they crossed the English coast. Navigation was also imprecise. The airships’ liquid magnetic compasses, despite the addition of alcohol, frequently froze at subzero temperatures. Instead, commanders relied on dead reckoning at sea and identifying landmarks on the ground, leading to frequent failures to attack the right target.

However, Strasser placed his faith in a new generation of six-engine “super-zeppelins” already under construction with the first to be delivered in mid-1916, still in time, he hoped, to strike a decisive blow while London’s air defenses remained embryonic.

In Britain, the government knew through its agents that upgraded zeppelins were coming and debated how best to respond. Sir Percy Scott’s measures had had only limited effect and in the Houses of Parliament MPs reflected public anger and disquiet, asking, “Have the military authorities permission to fire at hostile aircraft?” and “Is the Home Secretary aware that during the last raid many motor cars with powerful lamps were observed in the main streets?” Scott himself blamed insufficient resources and interference from a bureaucratic Admiralty, writing to Balfour: “I must have a free hand to procure what is wanted, and how best I can, and not be handicapped by Admiralty red-tapism.” The War Office view, as opposed to the Admiralty’s, remained that the best—indeed only—way to defeat the zeppelins was to attack them in the air with airplanes. Thus the priority was to build more and better night fighters.