A Higher Form of Killing (40 page)

In February 1917 the German naval air service took delivery of a new lighter zeppelin, the “Height-Climber,” that could reach twenty-one-thousand feet—higher than any British fighter plane—and that Strasser hoped would perform better. However, several Height-Climbers broke up in the strong winds encountered at high altitude. Their crews also struggled to cope in the thin air and bitter cold. Officer Otto Mieth recalled, “We shivered even in our heavy clothing and we breathed with such difficulty in spite of our oxygen flasks that several members of the crew became unconscious.” Disappointed with the Height-Climbers’ performance, the kaiser concluded that “the day of the airship is past for attacks on London.” The last raid on the city was on October 19, 1917, when a 660-pound bomb hit Piccadilly Circus. Strasser himself died on the last airship raid of the war on Britain—shot down in August 1918 as his zeppelin approached the Norfolk coast.

Since the first attack at the end of May 1915, German airships had targeted London twenty-six times and on nine occasions bombed its center, killing nearly two hundred Londoners, injuring more than five hundred, and causing one million pounds of damage. Overall their raids on Britain had killed more than 550 and injured some 1,350. The attacks had both fascinated and frightened the population and forced the British authorities to commit scarce resources to home defense.

However, well before the zeppelin assault ended Londoners were subjected to another aerial threat. On November 28, 1916, a single German plane dropped six twenty-two-pound bombs on London—a harbinger of what was to come. Since the war started, German engineers had striven to develop heavy bombers capable of reaching London, while in occupied Belgium the German army had created an elite cadre of pilots to fly them, code-named the Brieftauben Abteilung (Carrier Pigeon Unit), to deceive enemy agents about its purpose.

By early 1916, the first long-range heavy bombers capable of reaching London from Belgium—Gothas IVs—were available to the German fliers. However, the first planes were deployed to the fighting around Verdun and on the Somme. At the year end, with continuing stalemate on the western front, the German high command decided that some of the Gothas should conduct large-scale bombing raids on London to create massive firestorms in pursuit of the Feuerplan which the zeppelins had left unrealized.

The German army assembled an “England Squadron” of Gothas and their crews. With their seventy-eight-foot wingspan and two six-cylinder 260-horsepower Mercedes engines, these white biplanes were the largest aircraft yet built in Germany. (Their wingspan exceeded that of any German airplane sent against Britain in the Second World War.) Their range was over four hundred miles; they could reach 16,500 feet; and, with a top speed of eighty-seven miles per hour, they were as fast as most British fighters. They could carry eleven hundred pounds of bombs of two types—28-pound
Splitterbomben
, fragmentation bombs, packed with phosphorous and TNT and 110-pound high-explosive bombs. The steel noses of the latter five-foot-seven-inch-long missiles were designed to punch through roofs, letting them tumble down through a building before exploding, thus creating maximum damage. The Gothas carried a three-man crew—the pilot; the observer who, sitting in the nose, commanded the plane and was responsible for navigating, bomb-aiming, and operating a 0.311-inch machine gun that fired armor-piercing Mauser ammunition; and a rear gunner manning two further machine guns.

At two o’clock on the afternoon of Friday, May 25, 1917—the Whitsun holiday weekend in Britain—Gothas of the England Squadron, led by Hauptmann Ernst Brandenburg, took off for London. However, encountering heavy cloud and mist coming up from the west, Brandenburg diverted to attack secondary targets on the Kent coast. In the port of Folkestone, filled with holidaymakers, the drone of the approaching Gothas made people look skyward. To many the white planes were like giant seagulls or snowflakes. Then the bombs fell—thirty
Splitterbomben
and twenty high-explosive bombs. They ripped two girls to pieces and blew a man across a street to be impaled on railings. A nine-year-old boy watched as another man’s “head rolled . . . into a gutter.” The civilian casualties were the worst of the war so far—ninety-five killed and 195 wounded. Just as with the
Lusitania
victims, mass burials were held.

The scale of the attack surprised the British authorities. Since the successful shooting down of zeppelins the previous year, they had reduced home defenses. Almost half the pilots serving in England had been redeployed to the western front and some antiaircraft guns reallocated to merchant ships for defense against U-boats. To protect against the new menace the government ordered more raids on German airfields in Belgium and stationed more antiaircraft observers in the Thames estuary and along the east coast. However, many thought the steps wholly inadequate, including Sir John French, now commander in chief of forces in Britain, who predicted “disastrous results” if more was not done.

By June 13 the weather was good enough for another attempt on London by the England Squadron. As the Gothas were readied, “the thundering roar of the wonderful Mercedes engines filled the air . . . Engineers hurried back and forth as everyone strove to solve even the smallest glitches in the planes to which we were entrusting our lives,” an airman recalled. Pilots gave instructions to the mechanics, and observers tested their bomb-release levers and navigational instruments. Shortly before ten
A.M.
, Brandenburg gave the order to take off. Half an hour later twenty Gothas approached the English coast. They overflew a convoy of merchant ships protected by naval torpedo boats and destroyers which, spotting the Gothas, began zigzagging. Three Gothas peeled off to conduct diversionary attacks but seventeen flew on until, as one airman described, “the green countryside faded and a dark expanse, black and grey,” appeared which “as our nerves tensed . . . gradually increased in size until it filled the horizon. Houses rose up in their thousands, hundreds of streets, squares and parks—boundless . . . the colossal city of London.”

As the Gothas reached London, antiaircraft guns opened fire: “The blasts of the explosions were so loud . . . that sometimes they drowned out the noise of our engines and forced our aircraft temporarily to scatter.” The observers peered through the Gothas’ bombsights trying to identify targets before releasing their bombs. Some of them landed on Barking and more on nearby East Ham. A commercial traveler warned by a policeman to take cover instead looked up to see “what looked like large white butterflies . . . Soon came the frequent dull boom, then a horrid crash . . . I ran across the road. Three people were laid out at my feet. The gutters were running red.” In Stoke Newington—bombed by zeppelins in 1915—schoolchildren looked out to see “tongues of flame” leaping in the air while, as an onlooker recalled, “the continued crashes told of targets found—houses, schools, factories. Across the road lay a horse writhing in its death throes. Its driver was buried beneath the splintered wood debris of the cart. Screams of terrified children mingled with the moans of the wounded.”

Over Liverpool Street Station the Gothas dropped seventy-three bombs. A crewman heard the “tremendous crash” as they struck “the heart of England.” It was “a magnificently terrific spectacle . . . The earth seems to be rocking and houses are disappearing in craters and conflagrations in the light of the glaring sun.” Bombs hit several trains and passengers trapped in them were burned alive. Officer and war poet Siegfried Sassoon who was in the station saw “an elderly man, shabbily dressed and apparently dead” laid out on a luggage trolley: “In a trench one was acclimatised to the notion of being exterminated. But here one was helpless; an invisible enemy sent destruction spinning down . . . Poor old men bought a railway ticket and were trundled away again dead on a barrow.”

The Gothas attempted to attack the Tower of London but though a bomb landed in the dry moat it failed to detonate. Another bomb crashed through five floors of a nearby school but again did not explode. Pupils of the two-story Upper North Street School for children of the poor in the East India Dock Road were not so fortunate. At eleven forty
A.M.
all were at their desks when a 110-pound high-explosive bomb smashed, as it was designed to, through the roof of the building to the basement where sixty-four of the youngest children had been making paper lanterns. When the raid began, their teachers had encouraged them to sing but as one recalled, “the noise of the anti-aircraft guns and the detonations of the enemy’s bombs became audible above even our shrill voices.”

As the bomb came through the ceiling, teachers and children heard a metallic click just before it exploded, blasting a six-foot crater in the basement’s concrete floor where the mangled remains of five-year-old Florence Wood were later found. A child saw two classmates “driven like stakes into the earth” while Ivy Major was the sole survivor out of a row of twelve children. A soldier who rushed into the bombed basement to help found “many of the little ones . . . lying across their desks, apparently dead, and with terrible wounds on heads and limbs, and scores of others were writhing with pain and moaning pitifully . . . We packed the little souls on the lorries as gently as we could.” Sixteen children, nearly all five or younger, had been killed instantly; two more died later of their wounds; and thirty were badly injured.

To the Gotha airmen, three miles above the sunlit streets, the carnage was remote. “In the excitement we scarcely thought about the people living in this giant city—people just like us and of our blood,” one wrote. “It was war, pitiless war, demanding our utmost strength.” The first Gotha raid on London had lasted an hour and a half during which four tons of bombs had fallen, killing 162 civilians and injuring more than 400. Returning to their airfields in Belgium, the airmen “sated our hunger, not forgetting to quench our thirst with a bottle of wine, as we discussed our unique experiences on this first London flight” and celebrated “a great success.”

Public reaction to the raid and in particular the “murders of the innocents” was immediate and bitter. Again people with German-sounding names were attacked and their houses and businesses looted. Member of Parliament William Joynson-Hicks once more demanded immediate reprisals, suggesting that for every raid on London British bombers should “blot out” a German town. The
Daily Mail
produced a “Reprisal Map” identifying suitable targets. Lord Derby, who had replaced Lord Kitchener as minister for war after the latter had drowned in 1916 on a mission to Russia when HMS
Hampshire
struck a free-floating German mine, argued that “it would be better to be defeated, retaining honour, chivalry and humanity, rather than obtain a victory by methods which have brought upon Germany universal execration.” His views found little support among a public incensed by the “Hun baby-killers.”

Prime Minister Lloyd George favored a reprisal attack on Mannheim where chemical factories using Fritz Haber’s process were producing large amounts of nitrates as well as poison gases under his direction. However Sir Douglas Haig and others opposed retaliatory bombing because it would divert planes from the western front, and Britain had few long-range bombers. The authorities eventually agreed to relocate one fighter squadron temporarily to England to strengthen London’s defenses, to launch more bombing raids on the Gothas’ airfields, and to increase the size of the Royal Flying Corps.

In Germany, when the news of the attack on “fortress London” broke, the reaction was jubilant. One paper compared the commander of the England Squadron, Ernst Brandenburg, to Hannibal while the
Berliner Morgenpost
assured its readers that “the English government is seriously considering moving the seat of government from London.” Brandenburg was awarded Germany’s highest military honor, Pour le Mérite, also presented that summer to Walther Schwieger, former commander of the
U-20
, for his achievement in sinking 190,000 tons of Allied shipping including the
Lusitania
. Schwieger was killed two months later when his new U-boat,
U-88
, was lost at sea probably after hitting a British mine.
*

The Gotha raids on London continued throughout 1917, unnerving many of its inhabitants. The War Cabinet devised a five-minute warning system using sirens but until it was in place citizens relied on policemen on foot or on bicycles wearing placards on which was written in large red letters
POLICE NOTICE—TAKE COVER
. After the Upper North Street School tragedy, even a rumor of a raid was enough to send parents rushing to schools to retrieve their children. During attacks, people crammed into underground [subway] stations and cellars of public buildings or tried to protect themselves in their own homes. A Londoner described how his family took refuge in their dining room where his brother “had made a little dug out of his own” between a sofa and an armchair where he was “snugly ensconced with our pet hedgehog . . . The rest of us huddled underneath the big dining room table, which was padded round with mattresses and had on top . . . some baths of water. The idea was that any bomb which hit the house would fall clean through the roof and top storey into the baths of water and so be put out!”

Londoners were shortly to face a new and even larger German bomber. At the start of the war Count von Zeppelin, aware of the limitations of his airships, had advocated the development of
Riesenflugzeugen—
“Giant” planes. The first of these gray-and-black-painted biplanes, constructed of wood, aluminum, and steel, were ready by the late summer of 1916. Its 138-foot wingspan was nearly double the Gotha’s and only three feet shorter than that of the American B-29 Superfortresses that in 1945 dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The new planes were fitted with up to six engines producing over one thousand horsepower and were the first planes equipped with a supercharger—an air compressor designed to increase oxygen flow to the engine and thus power—giving them the ability to reach nineteen thousand feet. They cost over half a million marks each and only eighteen were ever built, but they could carry nearly two tons of bombs.