A Higher Form of Killing (34 page)

LZ77
soon turned back;
SL2
and
LZ74
fared better. The former arrived above the Millwall Docks in London’s Isle of Dogs just before midnight. Here its commander, Hauptmann von Wobeser, dropped eleven bombs, damaging the docks, destroying houses, and injuring several people. Next he took
SL2
south across the Thames toward Deptford, where Henry VIII’s fleet once lay in the Royal Dock and his daughter Elizabeth I inspected Francis Drake’s
Golden Hind
. Here he hit a British army depot, destroying supplies of tea and salt. Soon after, another of his bombs killed fifty-six-year-old William Beechey, his wife Elizabeth, and their three children in their nearby home. Continuing,
SL2
bombed Greenwich, home of the Royal Naval College, and finally Woolwich, where the antiaircraft battery managed to fire off four rounds at it only two minutes after being alerted to its approach. However, the gunners had no time to switch on their searchlight to pinpoint the airship, which they estimated was flying at around eight thousand feet between fifty and sixty miles per hour. It was soon beyond their range and heading home undamaged.

LZ74
, commanded by Hauptmann Friedrich George, approached London from the north. To lighten his craft he dropped thirty-nine bombs on what he mistakenly thought was Leyton but was in fact the town of Cheshunt in Hertfordshire, fifteen miles from central London. George headed due south toward the City, bombing a warehouse in Fenchurch Street before sailing over the Tower of London and taking a southeasterly course, dropping bombs as he went.

The raid by the two airships killed eighteen civilians, including three children, injured twenty-eight, and caused ten thousand pounds worth of damage. A young nurse wrote to her mother:

I have lived through an air raid . . . Fancy an air raid on London—an epoch making event . . . I flew out of bed . . . I saw the small luminous patch on which the searchlights were playing which was the Zeppelin . . . We saw the luminous cloud and the shrapnel bursting a good deal short of it . . . All this time our guns were firing like mad and the sirens were hooting, the whistles blowing and now we heard the fire engines racing to the scene . . . This is the nearest I have ever reached to being under fire and very exhilarating it was too. One of the patients said it was like being at the war again.

The next evening, September 8, with clear skies and a new moon, Strasser dispatched three naval airships to the capital. Engine trouble soon forced two back so
L13
commanded by Kapitän-Leutnant Heinrich Mathy continued alone. Thirty-two-year-old Mathy, who boasted to the
New York Times
’ Berlin correspondent that he would bomb London three times in succession or die in the attempt, had already made one hundred zeppelin flights. He dropped twelve bombs damaging three houses in Golders Green, a suburb northwest of the city, before, guided by the lights of Regent’s Park’s Inner Circle, which he described as “lit as in peacetime,” heading toward central London at eighty-five hundred feet.

Here Mathy dropped an incendiary—the first bomb to fall on central London—on Woburn Square in Bloomsbury near the British Museum. Nearby in Holborn, he dropped incendiary bombs and an explosive one. The latter struck a lamppost, detonated in midair, and dismembered a man standing outside the Dolphin Public House. After bombing Gray’s Inn—one of London’s four Inns of Court first established in the fourteenth century to enroll and teach lawyers—Mathy continued toward London’s financial heart, the City. Still aboard
L13
was the largest bomb yet carried by a zeppelin—660 pounds. Its manufacturer had presented it to Mathy as a
Liebesgabe
, “Gift of Love,” to London.

Mathy dropped his
Liebesgabe
close to London’s oldest hospital, Saint Bartholomew’s—founded eight centuries earlier by a monk who, taken ill while on pilgrimage to Rome, vowed to found a hospital in London on his return—and neighboring Smithfield, London’s largest meat market. The bomb blew an eight-foot crater in the road, destroyed a printing works, and shattered windows for hundreds of yards around. Mathy reported: “The explosive effect of the 300-kg [660 lb] bomb must be very great, since a whole row of lights vanished in its crater.” Two men who had just left the Admiral Carter pub spotted the airship and tried to run for cover but were “blown to pieces.” Thirteen-year-old Violet Buckthorpe, who lived nearby, bravely scrambled up the stairs of her shattered home to rescue her two-year-old sister.

Passing the vast dome of Sir Christopher Wren’s Saint Paul’s Cathedral—though embargoed as a target by the kaiser it must have made a useful navigation aid—Mathy dropped bombs around the Guild Hall, where the City of London’s Lord Mayors are elected, but failed to damage it. Others of his bombs landed close to the handsome eighteenth-century premises of the Bank of England—the most potent symbol of all of the “huckster nation” derided in the German press—which was also unscathed.

Many Londoners heard and saw the attack as it progressed. Elizabeth Tregellis and her family were just sitting down to supper when “suddenly there was a loud bang. My mother ran up to the door and saw the Zep, so did the others, but I stayed downstairs and turned the lights out. When all the commotion was over I found myself trembling and so were all the rest of us.” A nurse lying in bed in Saint Thomas’s Hospital, herself awaiting an operation, recalled how “the Zeppelin Raid sent nearly all the other patients into a panic. All day nurses . . . came down to the wards to soothe the patients.” To a woman watching from her porch in hilly Hampstead,
L13
was “a wonderful sight . . . like a silver cigar and we could literally see our guns attacking it, for all the searchlights were concentrated on it, and it was something like looking at a magic lantern . . . One realises how helpless one is against a new horror of that sort and yet it did hold one fascinated to actually see that fight in the sky.”

The Admiralty knew that zeppelins had set out for London because British listening stations had picked up signals from them and passed them to the Admiralty for the Room 40 team to decode. Over the city, twenty crisscrossing searchlights swept the sky while most of London’s antiaircraft guns fired at the
L13
. American newspaperman William G. Shepherd saw one shell explode close to the airship and heard someone cry out, “Good God! It’s staggering.” However, the only damage the antiaircraft shells caused was on the ground from falling shrapnel. A message from the central control room told the gun crews: “All firing too low. All shells bursting underneath. All bursting short.” A later official report stated, “Ideas both as to the height and size of the airship appear to have been somewhat wild.”

Shepherd was one of many to capture the sense of unreality that night:

Traffic is at a standstill. A million quiet cries make a subdued roar. Seven million people of the biggest city in the world stand gazing into the sky from the darkened streets. Here is the climax to the 20th century. Among the autumn stars floats a long, gaunt Zeppelin. It is a dull yellow—the colour of the harvest moon. The long fingers of searchlights reaching up from the roofs of the city are touching all sides of the death messenger with their white tips. Great booming sounds shake the city. They are Zeppelin bombs—falling—killing—burning. Lesser noises, of shooting, are nearer at hand, the noise of aerial guns sending shrapnel into the sky. “For God’s sake don’t do that,” says one man to another who has just struck a match to light a cigarette. Whispers, low voices, run all through the streets. “There’s a red light in the sky over there; our house may be burning,” exclaims a woman, clutching at a man’s coat. “There were a million houses in London; why ours particularly?” he responds. Suddenly you realise that the biggest city in the world has become the night battlefield on which seven million harmless men, women and children live. Here is war at the very heart of civilization, threatening all the millions of things that human hearts and human minds have created in past centuries.

Such apocalyptic reactions were exactly what the German authorities hoped for in their bid to undermine the morale of British civilians.

L13
moved next toward London Wall—the street named for the Roman wall that once encircled “Londinium.” Alfred Grosch, at work in a telephone exchange, looked through the window to see: “A streak of fire . . . shooting down straight at me . . . I stared at it hardly comprehending. The bomb struck the coping of a restaurant a few yards ahead, then fell into London Wall and lay burning in the roadway. I looked up, and at the last moment the searchlight caught the Zepp, full and clear. It was a beautiful but terrifying sight.” Another eyewitness—watching from the roof of the
Morning Post
newspaper building—noted how “for a few minutes the Zepp seemed to float above us, as still as a becalmed yacht. It moved its way in and out of the searchlights as if they and the Zepp were playing a game. When the beams lit up the long, slender cigar shape, the scene might have been a set piece in a Crystal-Palace fireworks display, with the guns as theatrical noises off. It was all spectacularly beautiful, and then, like some silver ghost, she glided away northwards. Next morning I could hardly believe that it had been a murderer in the sky.”

Near Liverpool Street Railway Station, Mathy released his final bombs. His report stated: “Manoeuvring and arriving directly over Liverpool Street Station I shouted, ‘Rapid fire!’ through the tube and bombs rained down. There was a succession of detonations and bursts of fire and I could see that I had hit well, and apparently done great damage.” One of his bombs hit a No. 35 bus. Rescuers found the shocked driver staggering about the road with some of his fingers blown off. The conductor and many passengers were dead and others lay “shockingly injured” on the ground. Mathy’s bombs also destroyed a No. 8 bus and ruptured water, electricity, and gas mains.

Shortly after eleven
P.M.
Mathy steered for home. He had killed twenty-two civilians, injured eighty-seven, and inflicted more than half a million pounds worth of damage—a third of that the entire zeppelin campaign would cause. He had also left behind a memento. Next morning a resident of Barnet in north London found a bag attached to a small parachute. Inside was a ham bone on which was inscribed
ZUM ANDENKEN AN DAS AUSGEHUNGERTE DEUTSCHLAND
—“
a memento from a famished Germany.” Nevertheless, in an interview for the
New York World
Mathy stated that he would “much rather stand on the bridge of a torpedo-boat, fighting ship against ship, than attack a city from the air . . . I want to say that there’s not an officer or man in the aerial fleet who doesn’t feel it deeply when he learns that women and children and other non-combatants have been killed.”

The
Guardian
, reporting the interview to a British readership, was skeptical:

This is an interesting admission and . . . if the maker of it is an honest man he may be advised to go a little further and ask himself what sort of precautions any “officers or men in the aerial fleet” can take when dropping bombs from a great height and in the darkness on a crowded city, in order to ensure that their feelings shall not be “deeply” moved by the news that they have slain children in their beds . . . Obviously they can take no precautions; one of the blackest of the many crimes with which Germany has stained herself during this past year is that she has introduced this inevitably haphazard murder into warfare.

Londoners tried to come to terms with the bombing campaign. Major Cuthbert Lawson, back in the capital, warned his mother, “I don’t think you’d better come to London—all the women are terrified of Zeppelins and of course they’re bound to come again!” People went to inspect the damage. Five-year-old Leila Mackinley, who had been “lifted up to see the Zeppelin fly over London,” was taken by her mother to see the bombed buildings. Newspapers called
L13
’s activities “Murder by Zeppelin” and reported how children had been burned in their beds and men blown to pieces in the streets. People asked why a clearly visible airship had not been destroyed but allowed to travel where it pleased above London. In fact, seven planes had been vainly seeking the zeppelins that night. One pilot died when his plane crashed and exploded while landing in the dark.

Not only were British pilots still inexperienced at night fighting but their planes took far too long to reach the necessary altitude to attack a zeppelin effectively. Even the quickest—the BE2c fighters—took fifteen minutes merely to climb to thirty-five hundred feet and the zeppelins flew much higher. Mathy was absolutely correct in telling an American newspaper: “As to an aeroplane corps for the defence of London, it must be remembered that it takes some time for an aeroplane to screw itself up as high as a Zeppelin, and by the time it gets there the airship would be gone; then too, it is most difficult for an aeroplane to land at night, while a Zeppelin can stay up all night and longer if need be.”