Why Airships Never Took Off. Part 4: The Kaiser's Airships Go to War

In previous articles we saw how originated in France and later reached practical implementation the idea of ​​a controlled balloon, also known as an airship. And also how Count von Zeppelin, after much effort and failure, managed to convince the Kaiser, the military and society that the German Empire Airships are definitely needed, especially combat ones. By the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, the German military departments and the civilian company DELAG possessed the world's only fleet of huge rigid airships. By this time, the total number of von Zeppelin airships built had reached 25, and some of them had already died in accidents and disasters. With the outbreak of the Great War, as it was called by contemporaries, the unique military zeppelins would be considered an important trump card of the German Empire both from the point of view of its leadership and from the point of view of its enemies - and the British in the pre-war years would develop a real collective fear of airships. The second half of 1914 will become the time of baptism of fire for military airships - where tragedies, mistakes and oddities will be mixed.

Table of contents:

• Part 1: from hot air balloon to bomber for Borodino

• Part 2: the birth and death of French airship construction

• Part 3: the birth of the German Zeppelins

• Part 4: The Kaiser's skyships go to war

Unlike the French ones, German airships from the very first idea of ​​Count von Zeppelin were supposed to become primarily air combat vehicles. And this could not help but worry its neighbors, especially the British: their historical invulnerability, ensured by the huge royal fleet, was in question. Airplanes were still primitive, flew close and could only lift small loads. But a huge German airship of rigid construction is a completely different matter. As German airship construction developed, these fears grew, and in 1910 a real “Zeppelin panic” began in Britain. The newspapers were filled with gruesome headlines and pictures, and the authors spared no effort in describing the terrible destruction of the future bombing of cities by the armadas of the Kaiser's airships. There were reports of sightings of German airships from Sheerness, Portland, Dover and Liverpool, although none had actually crossed the sea before the outbreak of the war.  

The famous science fiction writer Herbert Wells was partly to blame for the panic. In 1908, he published, as they would say now, a techno-thriller called “War in the Air.” In it, he described a future world war with the use of airships on an almost apocalyptic scale, at the same time laying down many tropes about the gloomy German military-technical genius, the wunderwaffe and cunningly hidden military installations of colossal proportions. For example, this is how a secret megabase with a huge fleet of Zeppelins, accidentally discovered by one of the characters, is described:

He saw a huge space illuminated by the dim evening sun, where secret work was in full swing and where airships lay like grazing monsters. On the territory of the park, stretching to the north as far as the eye could see, numbered hangars, gas holders, barracks and warehouses were located in strict order, connected by monorail lines, but not a single wire was visible anywhere. Everywhere one could see the black, white and yellow colors of the German Empire and black eagles stretched their wings. But even without this, Germany could be recognized by its extraordinary and pervasive neatness. Below, many soldiers could be seen - some, in white and gray work uniforms, were fussing around the airships, others, in dark gray uniforms, were engaged in exercises; Here and there the gold of ceremonial uniforms glittered.

As it turns out, the insidious Germans, dreaming of world domination, led by the Vader-like Prince Charles Albert, decided not to compete with the British and Americans at sea, relying on total air supremacy - until the rest of the great powers became concerned about the same. Their secret program to build a huge fleet of airships included monstrous flagships over 600 meters long - in reality, the largest in history, the LZ-129 Hindenburg and LZ-130 Graf Zeppelin, measured 245 meters from stem to stern. At the same time, the monsters described by Wells also carried squadrons of drachenflieger airplanes on board, which would later be put into practice, but at the time the book was published it was not implied even in the most daring projects.

This entire armada is sent on a heavenly blitzkrieg against the United States, the main potential adversary as a superpower. Wells was able to predict, long before many military personnel and experts, the future threat of carrier-based aircraft to even the largest warships. At the decisive moment, his airplanes of the German air fleet intervened in the grandiose naval battle of the American and German fleets, giving the dreadnoughts of the US Atlantic Fleet a beating no worse than what happened in our reality to the Japanese super-battleships Yamato and Musashi. After which Prince Charles Albert leads the sky fleet to New York, and after the citizens refuse to capitulate, he demolishes and burns the metropolis along with its skyscrapers with carpet bombing from zeppelins. Then American planes with Tesla guns appear, the sky fleets of the Japanese-Chinese alliance join the show, landing “small sabotage groups of a million people,” and the world finally plunges into chaos and post-apocalypse to the extent of “Mad Max” with literally wasteland raiders in the place of once advanced states.

The author does not spare any color in describing the macabre scale of destruction and casualties as a result of the carpet bombing of cities, which in our history will only be realized at the end of World War II by an armada of American heavy bombers. But then humanity had already become accustomed to many things, and the “ordinary” bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, comparable to the results of nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, did not make too much of an impression on contemporaries, especially since they were aimed at the cities of the Axis countries. And in the world of the belle epoque before the First World War, these scenes made about the same impression as descriptions of a full-scale atomic war on people from the 50s to this day. But the Americans will be confident for a long time that their territory is inaccessible to enemy bombers, which will change only with the beginning of the Cold War - but the British in the late 1900s lost the sense of the fundamental invulnerability of their cities from the air, and this was an extremely uncomfortable feeling for them at the level of the entire society. Other future opponents of the Second Reich, such as the French Third Republic and the Russian Empire, bordered Germany directly - and were much more afraid of the Kaiser's conventional armies. Which, indeed, can only be “gored” by the long joint efforts of the entire coalition, and even without the US breaking into the war, the ending of the war for the Entente could have been much less rosy.

How did things really go with German military airships on the eve of the First World War? It must be said that it was incomparably more modest and sad for the Germans than the British were afraid of and other neighbors of the Germans were afraid of. Let's start with the Kaiser's army, which, as we told in the first part, received its first military zeppelin LZ-3 / Z-I back in 1908. This device was successfully used for crew training and was quietly written off due to wear and tear and obsolescence of the relatively new models in 1913. The second army airship was the LZ-5, which received the Z-II index in the army. It made its first flight in May 1909, managing to collide with a tree along the way, was put into service and transferred to a new military airship base near Cologne. However, in April 1910, he made a hard landing due to a storm. No one died, but the device could not be restored. 

The following Zeppelins from LZ-6 to LZ-8 went to the civil airlines of the DELAG company, which brought von Zeppelin and the company a good income, and the German military - right in the middle of the “Zeppelin panic” that was seething in Britain - had to be content the only one, the rapidly becoming obsolete and purely training LZ-3 / Z-I. The successfully damaged Z-II will receive a replacement only in April 1912 in the form of the LZ-9, which the army called not Z-III, as it should have been, but Z-II Ersatz (“replacement for Z-II”). It will also be used mainly for training purposes. After the release of two more passenger zeppelins LZ-10 and LZ-11 for DELAG, it will be joined by the LZ-12, which received the index Z-III.

But the ending of the history of Z-II Ersatz and Z-III in German and French sources is “slightly” different. The Germans prefer to limit themselves to their general formal write-off “due to wear and tear” exactly on the first day of the war, August 1, 1914. But the French continue the story. On August 14, 1914, two Voisin III light aircraft of the French Army, not yet too far removed from the first whatnots of the Wright brothers, under the control of Lieutenant Cesari and Corporal Prudhomeau, carried out one of the first successful bombing missions in history. They dropped small incendiary bombs on the slipways of the Z-II Ersatz and Z-III airships at the Metz-Frescati military base in the then German part of Lorraine. According to the French version, both aircraft burned to the ground, according to the German version, the boathouses received minor damage, and the airships were written off anyway. Be that as it may, they did not take part in the war.

Let's go back to pre-war times. The LZ-15 was handed over to the army in January 1913 and received the Z-I Ersatz index: at first, the German military clearly wanted to ensure that they always had all the numbers starting from one, and tried to assign old indices to new vehicles to replace those that were written off or lost. It was based in the town of Baden-Oos, not far from the Rhine and the French border, and did not serve long: already in March, during its next flight, it encountered strong winds and made an emergency landing at a military base in Karlsruhe. The storm intensified, and the crew and the local garrison were only able to dismantle the equipment and engines while the dome was uncontrollably and irreversibly destroyed.

The next army airship to enter service before the outbreak of World War I was the LZ-16 / Z-IV. During the transfer from the factory in Friedrichshafen to the base in Baden-Oos in March 1913, nature also played a trick on it, and somewhat more subtle than with its predecessor. It landed in low clouds with a strong east wind - and when the crew finally landed on a suitable field, they found themselves in the middle of a military base at Lunéville in the French part of Lorraine. The crew was temporarily isolated for investigation, and in the days that followed, French officers, engineers and intelligence officers carefully studied the German airship. Along the way, the Z-IV was carefully filmed, including on film, and the film about the structure of the German airship was very popular among the French and British public, including those who had a professional interest in the issue. Then the French released the zeppelin and its crew, although for some time they debated whether to accuse them of espionage. After which the command sent the embarrassed crew along with the ship to Eastern Front the other side of the empire, to Königsberg. And this will be the first German airship in production that will “survive” the First World War as an active unit and take part in hostilities. 

Next was the LZ-19, which received the Z-I Zweiter Ersatz (“second replacement Z-I”) index, which was furious even by the standards of the German military bureaucracy. He was accepted into the army in June 1913, and in April 1914 he repeated the fate of a considerable number of Zeppelins: an emergency landing in a thunderstorm and storm, the hull was not subject to restoration. The LZ-20 joined the Kaiser's army in July 1913: as we see, not without difficulty, but the process of German airship construction began to take on quite industrial proportions. He, under the index Z-V, will live to see the world war, and will also meet its beginning near the border of the Russian Empire. Behind him, four more would have time to enter service: LZ-25 / Z-VI, LZ-22 / Z-VII, LZ-23 / Z-VIII and LZ-25 / Z-IX, none of which the Germans would finally manage to lose until August 1914. Thus, by the beginning of the First World War, the Kaiser’s army would have 6 combat-ready Zeppelins in service, and additionally, after the outbreak of hostilities, it would include three surviving DELAG liners: LZ-11 Victoria Louise, LZ-13 Hansa and the newest and largest LZ-17 Saxony. As a result, at the start of the World War, the Kaiser’s army was armed with 9 zeppelins of a rigid design: solid, considering that no one else in the world had machines of this class, but nothing even close to the armadas of airship-bombers that frightened the British. 

What’s worse—for the Germans—is that even this small number began to quickly dwindle with the outbreak of hostilities. As often happens, the realities of war turned out to be very different from the teachings and pre-war ideas. An airship, especially one of rigid construction, is a huge thing, and getting into it at a low altitude is not that difficult even for fighters who are not trained to shoot at air targets. And the command, naturally, from the first days began to demand immediate and impressive results from the unique wunderwaffe, sending them on reconnaissance and bomber raids with minimal interruptions. 

The first to die for combat reasons was LZ-21 / Z-VI with the personal name “Cologne” at its location. It is already August 6, less than a week after the declaration of war, and he also has the dubious honor of ushering in the era of indiscriminate bombing of cities. The German armies tried to bypass the main forces of the French, and to do this, in violation of all treaties, they invaded neutral Belgium. However, it didn’t turn out to be a very easy and quick walk: the small Belgian army tried to put up stubborn resistance, and the main stumbling block to the entire German blitzkrieg plan was the city of Liege with its powerful fortress. Without its speedy capture, movement further to Paris was almost impossible. The Belgians, unexpectedly for the Germans, met the evening assault on August 5, which was intended as a surprise, in full readiness. The attacking units wedged between the forts found themselves under powerful crossfire, and some were killed to the last man. 

The command of the Kaiser's army realized the growing crisis and decided to use all possible means to influence Liege. Among them was an urgent flight from Cologne Z-VI with a load of bombs for a night attack on the city. Having reached the goal at three o'clock in the morning, when fighting was still in full swing on the outskirts, the zeppelin brought its cargo down onto the roofs of Liege houses. Nine civilians were killed and several more were injured, houses were destroyed and damaged. This did not have the slightest military effect on the course of the ongoing assault - except that the zeppelin diverted the attention of some of the Belgian soldiers and militias, who began to shoot at it with everything that was available. The cylinders were damaged by bullets and shrapnel, the crew was able to reach the German city of Bonn and make an emergency landing, but as a result the Z-VI was beyond repair. However, there were more Germans near Liege, better weapons, higher training and morale, and after a series of new attacks and military tricks, the city and its citadel were taken on August 7. The forts of Liege resisted until August 16, surrendering or falling only under the crushing fire of siege weapons, including the super-heavy 420-millimeter Big Berthas.

The end of August was a dark time for the German military aeronauts, when they lost three airships in a matter of days. Two of them died on the Western Front. LZ-22/Z-VII was sent on 21 August for reconnaissance and random bombing of enemy targets in the Vosges, where the French were attempting to launch a counter-offensive. It was difficult to look for enemies among the low mountains overgrown with forests; the crew descended less than a kilometer - and finally found the French. They joyfully filled his cylinders with bullets. Having dropped bombs wherever necessary, Z-VII took the opposite course - and also did not reach the base, being declared beyond repair after an emergency landing. 

Almost the same fate, but according to a slightly harsher scenario, awaited the LZ-23 / Z-VIII in the same place and at the same time. He was also sent to look for French troops in the Vosges, and he also found them - after miraculously surviving shelling from the German troops. It seemed to be able to bomb the enemy positions, with unclear results, but this airship also received more return fire. Its cylinders were pierced and its control system was damaged, after which the out-of-control airship was blown away by the wind and landed behind the front line. The crew tried to destroy all documents and equipment, set fire to the dome and moved towards the front line, hiding from French mounted patrols. Eventually they managed to cross the front line.

Less fortunate was the crew of the LZ-20 / Z-V, which caught the beginning of the war in the east. On August 28, he was sent to bomb the railway junction in Mława, in the rear of the Russian Imperial troops advancing on East Prussia. He bombed the station, killing several soldiers, but on the way back he very “luckily” came across a Russian cavalry brigade on the march. Her gunners quickly figured out what to do, deployed their guns and opened fire with shrapnel shells. Let’s give the floor to the Petrograd magazine “War” about the details:

1914. A German Zeppelin was shot down near Mlawa.

Early in the morning, a zeppelin began to circle near the town of Mlawa. Stopping over the Mlava railway station, he began throwing bombs, and one of them hit the first class lounge, pierced the roof and exploded. Another bomb was thrown onto the railroad bed, at the landing site of one of the trains. There were several corpses on the spot, and some had their arms and legs torn off. A total of ten bombs were thrown. After this, the zeppelin flew to the northwest and came under our artillery fire. One shell exploded near the stern end, and the zeppelin became almost vertical, and then leveled out and smoothly sank to the ground. The Germans tried to burn it, but our soldiers stopped fire and used some parts and 50 pounds of gasoline. There were eight passengers on the zeppelin: one was killed, another was wounded, and the third was mutilated during the descent. Five were taken prisoner by the Cossacks who arrived in time.

After these failures, the German command realized that at this rate the Zeppelins would soon run out, and decided to limit themselves on land to purely night sorties at higher altitudes. The second German airship on the Russian front, which mistakenly landed with the French LZ-16 / Z-IV, turned out to be more successful and survivable. He made reconnaissance flights from Königsberg to the Osowiec fortress and Siauliai, bombed Warsaw, and repeatedly received noticeable damage from Russian anti-aircraft fire, but made it to the base. Then, due to obsolescence, it was transferred to training and decommissioned only in 1916 due to complete wear and tear. A similar fate awaited LZ-13, a former civilian “Hansa” operating on the Western Front, which did not even receive an army index. It mainly flew for reconnaissance, then became a training aircraft and was also decommissioned in 1916. His earlier sistership LZ-11 Victoria Louise was used exclusively for crew training and was not sent to the front. 

But the last army airship of the pre-war assembly, the newest LZ-25 / Z-IX, the second machine of the first standardized M series, faced a more turbulent and complex fate. It operated on the Western Front, and initially received mainly reconnaissance missions - for the first time in the history of military use of airships, operating in tandem with the former LZ-17 Saxony. However, from August 21, due to the continued resistance of the Belgians, Z-IX and LZ-17 began to receive missions to bomb cities. Each of them could carry more than a ton of bombs, and the main targets of the attacks were residential areas of Antwerp, the largest city in Belgium and the last node of the Belgian defense. 

If the first strike on Liege was impromptu in a critical situation, almost out of desperation of the German command, now the first conscious campaign in history was being carried out to terrorize and demoralize the enemy’s civilian population. The fact is that by the end of August the Germans were extremely angry with the Belgians, who before the war were not considered soldiers at all, and hoped to go through the entire country with its fortresses like a knife through butter. Contrary to expectations, the Belgian troops, outnumbered compared to the Germans, fought stubbornly, tried to hold each fort until it was crushed by siege artillery, and civilians began a guerrilla war - to which the Germans responded with executions, robberies and arson. Night bombing of cities was supposed to be one of the ways to “punish” the rebellious Belgians. The bombing on August 25 immediately claimed the lives of 10 residents of Antwerp, which caused a storm of indignation in the press of the Entente countries. The raids continued until the end of September, when the tightened siege artillery began to crush forts and city blocks without any bombs. The number of civilian deaths is still unknown; hundreds of thousands of citizens fled to the neutral Netherlands. The city finally fell on October 10.

The Zeppelin bombing of Antwerp confirmed the British's darkest pre-war suspicions. Of course, the death toll so far was in the tens of people, not thousands, but only two airships were involved. The British began a targeted hunt for German airships. Already on August 27, a single British aircraft dropped small bombs on the boathouse in Düsseldorf, where the Z-IX was based - but to no avail. After this, the Germans began to equip the boathouses with machine gun emplacements to repel future attacks. The former civilian LZ-17 was damaged in September and was sent for repairs from Cologne away from the front, after which it was noted on the Eastern Front during the bombing of Vilna, and then transferred to naval training. But Z-IX continued to operate from Düsseldorf.

On October 8, the Royal Navy floatplane Sopwith Tabloid reappeared over the same boathouse. The machine guns did not help: the pilot precisely dropped two 9-kilogram bombs into the center of the hangar, and they caused the airship to ignite. One German mechanic was killed, the Z-IX was completely burned out. At the same time, the second Sopwith Tabloid attacked the boathouse in Cologne - but the LZ-17 was no longer there, and the pilot dropped bombs on the station. After this, until the beginning of 1915, German and Austrian airships carried out night bombings mainly against targets in the Russian part of Poland, where the density of anti-aircraft fire was lower. 

Since July 1912, the Kaiser's Navy also created its own airship corps. If the army was mainly interested in the bombing capabilities of sky ships, then the navy primarily needed long-range maritime reconnaissance. The first specially built Zeppelin for Kaiserliche Marine, as well as the first vehicle to exceed 20 thousand cubic meters in volume (the first LZs were half that size), was the LZ-14. In October 1912, the airship flew from Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance, where von Zeppelin had by then transferred production from Konstanz, to Berlin's first airport, Johannisthal. There were already two spacious slipways for airships, which were operated by von Zeppelin's quasi-competitor August von Parseval, who specialized in small soft airships. In the Johannisthal boathouse, the zeppelin and its crew were personally greeted by Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz with a representative delegation of naval officers and engineers. After a thorough check of all systems, the airship was officially included in the fleet under the symbol L-1.

After a series of test and training flights, including with von Tirpitz on board, in April 1913 the L-1 was transferred from Berlin Johannisthal closer to the sea, to a new boathouse on the site of the future Hamburg airport. From here, training flights began for their very intended purpose: in almost always difficult weather conditions over the waters of the North Sea, the main arena of the future confrontation with the British Royal Navy. However, on September 9, 1913, the 68th flight of the L-1 went badly wrong. The zeppelin, having set off for exercises on interaction with fleet ships, flew over the naval base in Heligoland and headed to the rendezvous point at sea. And then the treacherous weather of the North Sea showed itself extremely harshly: a sudden and fierce storm began. L-1 was shaken by gusts of wind so that several people fell out of the gondolas with fatal consequences. The airship then fell almost vertically into the sea. The frame was destroyed, but gas cylinders and shallow water allowed part of the crew to hold out until the rescue ships arrived. Of the 20 crew members, 14 were killed. 

This came as a shock not only to the German but also to the international public: before this, German airships had repeatedly fallen victim to the weather and crashed, but for a long time fate was surprisingly favorable to the crews and passengers. Even when the LZ-7 “Deutschland” fell into a storm over the Teutoburg Forest in June 1910, it managed to very successfully catch on trees at a low altitude during its fall, and all 20-odd crew members and passengers descended safely to the ground. L-1 became the first German airship whose crash claimed human lives, and 14 at once (the French opened a sad account back in 1902 in Paris, but they mostly killed the experimenters themselves on small soft airships, and the victims were isolated).

And that was just the beginning. A little more than a month later, on October 17, 1913, a ceremony was held at Berlin's Johannisthal airfield for the fleet's second airship, the LZ-18/L-2. It was built taking into account the operating experience of the L-1 and the requests of the Navy, had larger dimensions, higher engine power, covered nacelles and additionally reinforced skin for flights in the harsh winds of the North Sea. For the same reasons, for the first time in the practice of the von Zeppelin company, communication between the three gondolas took place through a special passage inside the hull. However, now trouble came for a different reason. When the L-1 took off for the first time that same day with a naval crew, one of the engines stalled and began to smoke, but it was decided to continue the ascent. The decision turned out to be a disaster: the flames spread further and one hydrogen cylinder burst into flames. The flaming ship rushed to the airport ground from a height of hundreds of meters, to the horror of numerous spectators, the fall was accompanied by explosions of the remaining cylinders. 28 crew members died on the spot, another died from burns and injuries in the hospital.

However, based on the experience of operating the L-1, the fleet immediately ordered a new airship, even larger and more powerful. Designated L-3, it became the LZ-24, which ushered in the era of standardized military airships for von Zeppelin's company. Under the general name “type M”, a total of 12 vehicles were ordered, 6 each for the army and navy. Accepted by the Navy in May 1914, the L-3 would become Germany's only naval airship at the outbreak of the First World War on August 1, 1914, but from August to December it would be joined by five more sisterships of the same type, from L-4 to L-8. They were used primarily for reconnaissance flights over the North and Baltic Seas, and for sporadic night bombing missions on the Eastern Front. At the same time, the naval headquarters were much more delighted with them than the army ones: while bombing from zeppelins had a very limited and rather symbolic effect, and were also very risky, then in naval reconnaissance one airship was “worth several cruisers.”

Not a single raid on targets in Great Britain would take place until the very end of 1914. It’s not that the Germans didn’t want to bomb the British, they really did. But even for the remaining M-series airships, the most advanced and powerful at that time, flying through the unpredictable skies of the North Sea to Britain and back remained deadly even without enemy resistance. Yet the British rightly wanted to forestall the threat before it was realized. On December 25, they carried out an operation against German naval zeppelins, known in British military history as the Cuxhaven raid, and in German as the Weihnachtsangriff, "Christmas attack".

By that time, the Nordholz naval base near Cuxhaven had become the heart of the Zeppelin naval corps. There was a real miracle of gloomy German thought on it: a huge twin boathouse “Nobel” for two airships, rotating on railroad tracks for better orientation in the wind. Other boathouses were simpler, but also impressive in size, and in general the base could simultaneously serve a previously unimaginable armada of 10 zeppelins. Naturally, this object aroused a strong desire among the British to do something interesting and as destructive as possible with it. The ideal would be to approach the target with super-dreadnoughts or at least battlecruisers, and cut everything to pieces with crushing salvoes from the main caliber, but there was a catch: Wilhelmshaven, the main base of the High Seas Fleet, was very close by, and any such raid could end badly for the British. Therefore, we had to come up with something more subtle and unexpected for the Germans. 

Christmas 1914 was not chosen by chance: on a common holiday for the Germans and the British, less was expected to attack, fortunately everyone had not yet had time to become completely bitter, and in some places the famous Christmas fraternizations took place at the front on that very day. The plan called "operation" Y Y" was the progenitor of all subsequent carrier raids, including Taranto and Pearl Harbor: for the first time in history, an attack on ground targets was to be carried out by aircraft launched from ships, because not a single aircraft of 1914 was capable of reaching Nordholtz from British territory and returning back. The main striking force was nine Short Folder seaplanes of the Royal Navy, which delivered three specially converted seaplanes to the launch point in the North Sea. The “proto-aircraft carriers” under the names HMS Engadine, HMS Riviera and HMS Empress were covered by three light cruisers, 8 destroyers and 11 submarines. Before departure, the pilots were carefully briefed by British sailors and pilots, who had managed to familiarize themselves with the surroundings of the base before the war. The main goal was to hit the boathouses with airships with 20-kilogram bombs, of which there were four based in Cuxhaven at that time. The operation was commanded by Commodore Sir Reginald Tyrwhitt.

In the early morning of December 25, the seaplane carriers crept up in fog and darkness to the launch point in the North Sea. The operation began - and both sides were faced with a bunch of emergency situations and idiotic mistakes. Due to once again suddenly deteriorating weather, only 7 out of 9 seaplanes were able to take off. Having received a message about suspicious activity in the vicinity of Heligoland, the battleship Mecklenburg on duty mistakenly fired at German fishing trawlers instead of the departing British. The German submarine and boat that noticed the British ships and planes were unable to report information to the command due to broken radio stations. 

The planes reached the Nordholz base - but due to low clouds and fog they had to fly too low, and they were almost immediately spotted, coming under heavy anti-aircraft fire. Disoriented and forced to maneuver at low altitude, the pilots scattered in all directions, became partially lost, and dropped bombs on the first targets they came across, such as warehouses and ships. Meanwhile, the L-6 airship on duty over the sea noticed the British ships and tried to attack them with bombs and machine guns, but did not hit anything, just like the British did not hit it. Also on patrol, L-5 noticed and attacked a British submarine, and also to no avail. Only three aircraft returned to the “aircraft carrier” squadron, where they were safely picked up. Three more, due to a lack of fuel, went into forced action near a pre-designated island on the Dutch coast, where the pilots sank the planes and evacuated on an approaching British submarine. The last of the pilots was forced to splash down near the German Heligoland, but he was successfully picked up and rescued by a Dutch fishing trawler. 

All sides escaped with slight fear and minimal damage, except for decommissioned British seaplanes and light damage to German objects. However, both of them came to the conclusion that a new era of war in the air in general, and over the North Sea in particular, had begun. Very soon, German zeppelins will make the first “return courtesy call” to British shores - but we will talk about this, the raids on London and the end of the short era of military airships in the next part.

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