Any mention of The Blitz generally conjures up images of He111s and Ju88s dropping loads of bombs night after night out of a searchlight-crossed sky as the hardy residents of London sheltered, but not cowered, in the Tubes of the Underground and other “bombproofs” in the dark, uncertain days of 1940 and the Battle of Britain.

Similarly, question nearly anyone about Zeppelins and, if one gets any answer at all, it will contain a reference to one of two things, either the hard rocking Led Zeppelin led by Plant and Page or, if they are more historically minded, the ill fated Nazi passenger airship Hindenburg which famously erupted into an inferno over a New Jersey airfield in 1937.

However, during the Great War, Germany, in an effort to launch some sort of offensive to break the stalemate of the Western Front, began experimenting with the rudiments of what we call today strategic bombing. Beginning as early as January 1915, the ponderous steel-framed hydrogen filled products of Herr Von Zeppelin’s genius and factories glided silently across the English Channel under cover of darkness to drop some unexpected explosive surprises on the unwitting population of Britain.

After several aborted attempts, a successful raid finally launched on 19 January 1915. Two Zeppelins slipped across the Channel bound towards England and guided mostly by the glow of the city in the distance. Reaching what they deemed to be their targets, they dropped their small payload of bombs and turned back towards home. While four people were killed and 16 injured in this first raid, it highlighted what would plague the bombing campaign throughout the war.  First, several earlier raids had been forced to abort because of weather. High winds at altitude would render the earlier airships almost unmanageable and a strong headwind could lengthen the outbound trip long enough for the Zeppelin to lose cover of darkness and woe betided any poor Zeppelin crew caught out in daylight.

Any storms in the region would also cause a mission to abort. These airships floated on hydrogen gas bladders. As anyone who has ever seen footage of the Hindenburg explosion can attest to, hydrogen is wildly flammable. Even scarier, a pure hydrogen flame is invisible! If an incendiary round punched into a Zeppelin gas bladder, the resulting fire would be unseen until it reached the skin of the ship and cloth with rubberizing began to burn. More than the bullets, however, the crews feared lightning. A direct strike could, and did, ignite the volatile suspendent and send the crew to a flaming, crashing demise.

Another weakness the crews detected early on was the total inaccuracy of their bombing. At night, most brilliantly lit cities looked alike. As a result, it was not at all unusual for bombs to drop miles off target. Whereas in World War 2, any attack on London was likelier than not to actually hit London, some Zeppelins attacked “London” only to discover later their bombs had fallen on the city of Hull a mere 154 MILES away. Furthermore, all the bombing crews aimed at a “target” in the largest possible sense of the word. Bombs either dropped from crudely fashioned racks below the gondola or else were hurled out the windows by the crew. Neither method came near to anything one might consider precision. The deadly iron hail fell where it would and often where it eventually landed had no connection with the military whatsoever. The very first bomb dropped on London by Zeppelin landed in a flower garden. The tendency for bombs to go off target led to mostly civilian casualties. Even though these deaths were unintended, the term collateral damage had yet to be invented. British press made propagandizing hay with every non-combatant’s death. Londoners referred to the giant airships as “baby-killers.”

Ironically, the bombings proved so inaccurate Kaiser Wilhelm refused to allow the Army or Navy air arms to target London for months after the raids began. After all, he had several beloved cousins and other family living in London . . . most of them at Buckingham Palace . . . and he didn’t want to risk them being harmed.

While people on the ground obviously feared the Zeppelins, the German crews who flew and maintained the beasts didn’t exactly live the life of Riley either. The airships had around a twenty man crew who, like the later submariners, were all volunteers, and who, again like their brethren under the sea, suffered much greater casualties. Over 40% of the aircrews perished during the course of the war.

Fully half of the crew was devoted to maintaining and repairing — often mid flight — the four or six giant engines of the craft. This job had its perks, first among them being the warmth of the engines. These craft were flying at altitudes where the temperature was a balmy -20F even in the summer so a sustained heat source was a true pleasure. This boon came at a cost, however. The engines were atrociously loud and during each flight, the engine compartment quickly filled with a noxious mixture of fuel fumes and exhaust. The other crew members such as the officers, defensive gunners, and radiomen had a much quieter ride, but the mountain of garments they were obliged to wear made them look for all the world like Randy, Ralphie’s young brother in A Christmas Story. Regardless of where a man was on the craft, however, the fears gripping their hearts were the same — crashing, enemy bullets, getting lost, but most of all burning to death in a tangle of cloth and metal hurtling earthward. Being a Zeppelin crew member was not a job for those faint of heart.

While Zeppelin raids went on right up until the Armistice in 1918, they must be deemed a colossal strategic failure. In the course of the war, airships made 51 bombing raids on England. These killed 557 and injured another 1,358 people. More than 5,000 bombs fell on towns across Britain, causing £1.5 million in damage. 84 airships took part, of which 30 were lost, either shot down or lost in accidents with an accompanying death of over 600 men.

In the end, and quite ironically, probably the worst damage the Zeppelin raids would do would come during the Second World War. The German High Command greatly overestimated the psychological effect the bombing of civilian centers would have on Great Britain. In their turn, the Allies would adopt the same philosophy as the Germans and as a result, civilian casualties in World War 2 dwarfed those of World War I as each side tried valiantly to “bomb them back to the stone age.” Unfortunately, in an all out war scenario, governments — even the vaunted democracies, much less the totalitarian states — aren’t great at listening to their populations. In a real sense, the feeble and largely unsuccessful Zeppelin raids of World War I sowed the seeds which led directly to the atrocities of the Blitz, Dresden, Tokyo and other failed attempts by the powers to bomb each other out of World War 2.

Hope you liked this week’s Great War Wednesday.

Love y’all, and keep your feet clean.

I’ve been looking for ways to post more often about a wider variety of stuff. Earlier this week, I hit upon the idea of re-runs! I’ve made over 300 posts in the seven or so years this blog has been extant and while most of them aren’t all that special, one or two have managed to make people smile or think again and again. With that in mind, on Thursdays I’m going to start rerunning a favorite post of mine or one that has garnered a lot of attention. Today’s Throwback Thursday I originally wrote for one of my former student’s sweet sixteen. She’s just over 21 now, married, two beautiful little girls, and working on becoming a nurse like her own amazing mom. I hope new readers will like this and older readers will remember it fondly.

Originally Published on September 16, 2009

One of my all time favorite kids is turning sixteen tomorrow. She was one of my best customers back when I had a job as a middle school librarian and I wanted to do something for her special day, but as you can imagine, being out of work has seriously cut into the gift giving budget, so I sent her a card and enclosed a two page note that I wish someone had given me when I was turning sixteen. Maybe things would have turned out differently. Do you think I gave her good advice?

Dear _____,
You are turning sweet 16!

Though you may not believe it, what comes next is probably the most important five year period of your life. From 16 to 21, you will make a ton of decisions that will affect the rest of your life. The problem is, you sometimes won’t know that you are about to make such a life changing decision until you look back on that moment from ten or twenty years down the road. For that reason, you must be careful and thoughtful about everything you do. I’ve got a few things to tell you about what’s coming that I really wish someone had told me when I was 16, but no one was around to tell me. Trust me when I say everything I’m going to tell you are lessons I learned the hard way by making mistakes, some of which I am still paying for to this day.

First, sex. Just say no. I realize that is sometimes easier said than done, especially when “everyone is doing it” and every TV show, movie, and song seems to be screaming that it’s okay and you are weird if you don’t sleep with everyone who comes along. Well, take it from me, they are wrong. Having sex too soon is a really good way to train-wreck your life in a hurry. Aside from the obvious fact that you can contract diseases and get pregnant, you can also be devastated emotionally. I promise you, as someone who knows too well, a lifetime of regret and second guessing is not worth a few minutes of what seems like the ultimate pleasure. Also, your generation seems to have trouble sometimes figuring out “what is sex.” This is a simple question. If you have to wonder if what you are thinking of doing is sexual, then it’s sex and don’t do it. It’s just not worth it.

Second, relationships. In the next five years, you’ll cement some relationships that will last for the rest of your life. Oddly enough, some of the people you think you’ll be friends with forever will drift away while some people you never dreamed of speaking to will turn out to be your dearest friends. You won’t make all the friends you’ll ever have by 21, but you’ll get a good start. You’ll also come across a boy or two that you thought at first would make a good boyfriend but after awhile you’ll see that he’s really a great boy who’s a friend. Hold on to those because friends of the opposite sex can give you insight into some decisions that your very best girlfriends can’t.

While I’m talking about relationships, don’t forget the most important relationships of all and that’s family. You will be sorely tempted many times in the next five years to think that your parents are idiots who know nothing and are completely out of touch with reality. However, if you will watch your tongue and try, just try, to listen to them, you will be shocked when you are 30 at how incredibly intelligent they have become. No relationships are more important than family. They are the ones who have been with you the longest and you didn’t get to pick each other – you just got stuck together by Someone who is a lot smarter than all of us. If you break ties with your family, you will live to regret it. Again, I know from experience what I’m talking about. When those family members are gone, you’ll be shocked at how lonely life can be.

College and jobs. Go to college or don’t go to college. You can make it in life either way. Just don’t go to college or pick what college you go to just because “everyone else is going there”. Following what everyone else does is another really good way to train-wreck your life because you aren’t everyone else. When you decide on a career, remember this – you will spend more waking hours at your job than you will anything else in your life. If you think being in school and hating it sucks, you’ve never laid in bed listening to the clock go off and nearly bursting into tears because you hate the thought of going to a job you despise. Find something you love to do then find a way to make a living out of it. That’s what I did and it’s one of the few things in my life that is still regret free.

Jobs lead to money and if you don’t listen to anything else, PLEASE listen to this. Be careful, careful, careful about money. No, money is not the most important thing in the world – far from it – but good money management can make your life go a lot easier. The worst thing you can do is come out of college thousands of dollars in debt with student loans AND credit cards! Avoid credit cards like the plague. Debt is like crack cocaine, it feels so good to buy what you want, but sooner or later, you have to pay. Now, having said all that, don’t hoard money either. Once you have a good roof over your head and the light bill and such are paid, don’t be afraid to live a little. People who hoard up money are just keeping score and money is a very empty way to keep score. Remember this – use things and love people; don’t use people and love things.

Finally, keep one thing in the back of your mind as you go “This too will pass away.” It’s true of everything, bad or good. If you are insanely happy at the moment, don’t get too caught up in it because it WILL pass away. No one can stay on the mountain top forever. At the same time, though, if you are in a dark period of life and it seems like the sun will never shine again, this too will pass away. No one stays in the valley forever, it just seems like a long time sometimes.

So, Sweetie, I hope you can find a nugget or two in the ramblings of an old man who’s seen a bit too much and avoid some pitfalls along the way. Life is a wonderful thing, enjoy it as much as you can, but always remember – this is the journey, not the destination. Enjoy your Sweet 16, _____, and may you have many, many more!

With fond affection,
Mr. S. Wham