A Higher Form of Killing (41 page)

The plan was that Giants and Gothas should conduct joint raids. At present, however, there were not enough planes. The first Giants had been deployed to the eastern front to back up the German forces’ successful attempts to take advantage of the weakness of Kerensky’s Russian government and of its armies. What’s more, a shortage of raw materials like copper and rubber caused by the British blockade hampered production so that not until July 1917 did the England Squadron acquire even one. While the squadron waited for Giants and also for improved Gothas, the existing Gothas were painted gray and black and sent over London on night raids when the risk of being shot down was less but so was the chance of precision bombing. Just as Londoners had learned to fear zeppelin attacks on dark nights, so they grew to fear what moonlight—“aider and abettor” of the “more deadly aeroplane” according to a
Times
journalist—would bring.

The first Gotha night raid on September 4, 1917, killed nineteen and began a terror campaign that Londoners would call “the Blitz of the Harvest Moon.” In six raids over eight days, Gothas dropped eleven thousand pounds of explosive and incendiary bombs, killing sixty-nine people and maiming hundreds more. The raids caused such panic that people were crushed to death in stampedes into the cellars of public buildings and underground stations. A Londoner thought it “pitiful to see the people trying to get into the already crowded station. There were brave mothers with their little children clinging to their skirts; sometimes a kiddy would be seen carrying a bird in a cage.” Inside the stations, with no sanitation the stink of urine and feces was so strong that people fainted. Soldiers home on leave thought the conditions worse than the trenches. At night more than a million citizens routinely left their homes to find somewhere safer to sleep, even if it was only beneath railway arches or out in the open. A survey of the Woolwich arsenal in September 1917 showed only a third of the night shift turned up for work for fear of the bombs. Meanwhile rumors spread that the German forces were using poison gas in their bombs—even dropping poisoned sweets on the city. Rioting broke out and a British pilot believed the raids were coming close to “cracking the morale of London. The ‘stop the war’ cry was heard . . . frequently.”

On December 6, 1917, in the thin light of a new moon, Giants first attacked London when two accompanied Gothas on a raid. Between them the planes dropped nearly four hundred incendiaries—the largest number in any raid so far—causing several serious fires and killing eight people. Twelve days later fifteen Gothas and a Giant tried again, bombing London while the House of Commons was in session and causing the greatest property damage so far. The House of Commons suspended its sitting though some MPs objected. A
Times
journalist heard one complain that they “had been put into the humiliating position of having to desert their posts of duty and retire in the face of the enemy to the cellars. In other countries, he said, “men are shot for leaving their posts.” Once again, the bombers raised no firestorms in the city while for the first time a British fighter pilot—Captain Gilbert Murlis-Green, flying another new model of fighter, a Sopwith Camel—shot down a Gotha.

A further raid by Giants on London on January 29, 1918, again brought terror. One plane dropped a 660-pound bomb on the Odhams Press building near the famous fruit and vegetable garden at Covent Garden killing thirty-eight and wounding one hundred. A Mrs. McCluskey sheltering in the basement recalled “a flash, followed by an explosion . . . The force . . . blew my baby out of my arms and it was never found again. I had all the fingers blown off one hand, a leg taken off . . . and my body burnt all over. I am just a piece of the woman I was before the air raids came.”

However, analyzing the results of the recent raids, the German authorities realized that many of the incendiary bombs had not detonated. Even when they had, they had failed to cause the desired massive fires. The development of more effective incendiaries accordingly became the priority and for the moment German bombers dropped only conventional bombs, though with sometimes devastating results. In mid-February 1918, a Giant released a twenty-two-hundred-pound high-explosive bomb on the Royal Hospital in Chelsea while five smaller bombs hit the Midland Grand Hotel by Saint Pancras Station. An eight-year-old girl who had taken refuge with her brother nearby recalled “a sound that, even now, in my memory, turns me sick. It was a whizzing, cutting sound, almost as if a huge knife was being sent through the air. A woman screamed, ‘My God! They’ve got us!’ There was a terrified rush to the doors . . . I struggled to get away, to run anywhere. The air was full of screams and children crying.”

The Giants returned to London on March 7. Later that month the German high command diverted all the Giants and Gothas to support a planned new offensive on the western front. However, thirty-eight Gothas and three Giants again took off for London on the evening of May 19 and half of them reached the city. During the raid they dropped twenty-two thousand pounds of bombs—not all on the capital itself—killing forty-nine and injuring a further 177. Believing this was the start of a fresh series of raids, Londoners braced themselves for further attacks. However, the German bombers were again diverted to the western front. A new series of raids scheduled for July was called off at the last moment.

The reason was that German engineers and chemists were close to perfecting a new type of firebomb—the Elektron bomb—and the high command did not wish to risk its planes until sufficient quantities of the new weapon were ready. The bomb was named for its cylindrical casing of a substance called Elektron, consisting chiefly of magnesium and aluminum. This casing was as light and as flammable as the bomb’s magnesium powder core. The intention was to drop the new bombs in their thousands to ignite on contact and burn at temperatures of up to 3,000 degrees Celsius. The German command planned to use them in a continuous series of fire raids on London in September 1918 that would finally see the Feuerplan achieved. However, Ludendorff called off the raids at the last moment because, with the Allies advancing, he believed they were unlikely to make the enemy “more disposed to sue for peace.” Thus, after May 19, London was not bombed again.

Between them Gothas and Giants had targeted the capital eighteen times. Their raids on Britain had killed more than eight hundred and injured nearly two thousand, bringing total civilian casualties inflicted by German aerial bombing of the British mainland in the First World War to some fourteen hundred dead and thirty-four hundred injured.

As early as January 1915, Winston Churchill while First Lord of the Admiralty had sanctioned the development of a British bomber aircraft by the Handley Page company. Progress had been extremely slow. The Admiralty superintendent of aircraft construction rejected the first design as inadequate, saying “What I want is a bloody paralyser not a toy.” However, by the end of 1917 the British had forty Handley Page bombers. They could each carry a ton of bombs but were slow and vulnerable to attack. Nevertheless, on December 12, 1917, ten Royal Flying Corps bombers finally raided Mannheim’s chemical works—the kaiser had left the city just half an hour earlier aboard his imperial train.

Thereafter, the British bombers would sporadically raid Germany. Targets were formally strategic ones, such as munitions manufacturing facilities, or communications, such as railways, although raids were also designed to damage enemy morale. A British intelligence report noted with approval “the panic created at Cologne” on one occasion. In fact, the effects of the raids were negligible. In May 1918, a British official wrote to one of his fellows that bombing had two possible purposes, “(a) a serious attempt to end the war, (b) merely to keep our own unenlightened populace quiet [by fulfilling the demand for reprisals against Germany].” He clearly considered that because of the limited effect the latter was intended.

Nevertheless, senior figures hankered to damage German morale. Lord Weir, secretary of state for air, on September 10, 1918, wrote to the chief of the Air Staff, “I would very much like it if you could start up a really big fire in one of the German towns. If I were you, I would not be too exacting as regards accuracy in bombing railway stations in the middle of towns. The German is susceptible to bloodiness and I would not mind a few accidents due to inaccuracy.” He never got his wish of a major impact on morale.

In Saint Petersburg in November 1917, the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin had seized power from Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government and immediately asked Germany for an armistice. The peace treaty signed at Brest Litovsk in March 1918 formally removed Russia from the war and cost it a million square miles of territory including Poland and the Baltic states, ceded to its enemies. The area lost was three times the size of Germany and contained a quarter of Russia’s population and industrial resources. In December 1917, battered into submission and having lost nearly all of its territory, just over a year after entering the war, Rumania too asked for an armistice. The removal of both Russia and Rumania, the Italian defeat at Caporetto, and the consequent reduction of pressure on Germany’s enfeebled ally Austro-Hungary, allowed Germany to move forty-four divisions from the eastern to the western front between November 1917 and March 1918. These reinforcements permitted Ludendorff to launch a major offensive on the western front before, as he put it, “the Americans can throw strong forces into the scales.” The first American troops had paraded in Paris on July 4, American Independence Day, 1917, and their numbers had been building since, with some quarter of a million in theater by March 1918. However, many were still training and equipping.

In their massive assault launched in late March, using up to six thousand artillery pieces, the German armies exploited their continuing monopoly of mustard gas, interspersing shells containing the substance with those filled with phosgene or chlorine and sometimes tear gas, the latter designed to penetrate the respirators of Allied troops and cause them to tear them off, exposing themselves to the other gases. The French forces only received supplies of mustard gas in June 1918, the British in September, and the U.S. troops a little later to supplement the phosgene and chlorine gases with which they were already equipped.

The German offensive, which was supported by Gotha and Giant bombers diverted from the Feuerplan against London, had considerable success, pushing the Allies back. German officer Rudolf Binding rejoiced to be in the British rear areas with their plentiful food supplies which he called “a land flowing with milk and honey” compared to the blockade-reduced rations of the German troops. The scale of the continuing German successes caused British commander in chief Douglas Haig to issue a famous order of the day: “There must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one must fight on to the end.” The Allies slowed and eventually stopped the German advance after being pushed back fifty miles in some places. Among the many dogged actions fought by Allied troops was a famous one by U.S. marines at Belleau Wood on June 4.

Despite the stalling of their advance in the west, by mid-July, the German forces controlled more land in both the east and the west than ever before, and with their Austro-Hungarian allies were again attacking on the Italian front. However, even if the kaiser was looking forward with renewed enthusiasm to when a British mission came to sue for peace and he could make it “kneel before the German imperial standard for this [would be] a victory of monarchy over democracy,” this was, as many in the German high command were beginning to realize, a high watermark. Their offensive had cost the German armies eight hundred thousand men, many of them their best troops, with little prospect of significant reinforcements, whereas on the Allied side there were now over one million U.S. troops in France. The front line that the reduced number of German soldiers had to defend had extended in length by over seventy-five miles.

On July 18, the French armies drove the German troops back from the Marne River and Paris as they had in the first battles in 1914. On August 8 the British armies attacked at Amiens, smashing eight miles through the German lines and in doing so exploiting their superiority in tanks, deploying more than 450, and in the air where some nineteen hundred planes were used mainly for artillery spotting. Ludendorff called it “the black day of the German army” when it lost twenty-seven thousand men. Worryingly for their commanders twelve thousand of them had surrendered. Ludendorff wrote, “Whole bodies . . . surrendered to single troopers or isolated squadrons. Retiring troops, meeting a fresh division going bravely into action, shouted out things like ‘blackleg’ and ‘you’re prolonging the war.’ The officers . . . lost their influence and allowed themselves to be swept along with the rest.”

Many further Allied attacks followed and, with the help of American divisions arriving in ever increasing numbers, succeeded in pushing the German armies back toward Germany’s original frontiers. A German soldier wrote of their retreat, “Their aeroplanes were flying very low and seeing everything that we were doing and bombing us . . . We moved to a new line far further back . . . Our losses were enormous and the gas attacks fearsome. The gas stuck into the high grass so that even our horses had gas masks. We realised it was the beginning of the end.”

On September 12, the U.S. First Army under General Pershing’s personal command undertook the first all-American offensive, taking fifteen thousand prisoners and 460 guns at a cost of seven thousand casualties in an action east of Verdun. Six days later, a British and Australian offensive pushed German troops even further back. On September 29, Ludendorff told his superiors that Germany must seek an immediate armistice. On that same day Germany’s ally Bulgaria actually signed one.