First Blitz

[Halder]

Sometimes it's an absolute pleasure to come to work. Today I've been paid to read a first-rate WW1 book (which makes up for some of the not-so-good efforts which cross my desk!). Anyway, herewith the review which will be appearing in the July 2008 edition of Navy News.

HISTORY invariably falls into two categories: academic and narrative.

The former is usually detailed, offers unique insights and can be as dry as the Sahara in a drought.

The latter normally rattles on at a cracking pace but rarely skims the surface of serious research.

To marry the two is a rare art – and it is an art Neil Hanson has mastered.

After first-rate histories of the Spanish Armada and the Great Fire of London, Hanson has turned his attention to the Great War in the Air in First Blitz (Doubleday, £17.99 ISBN 978-0385-611701)

There is a smattering of books on the ‘first Blitz’ as it became known (only after ‘The Blitz’ Blitz a generation later) – but almost all of these focus on the raids of 1917.

A year later, a far more destructive series of raids were planned, however – a story which is the hub of this work – which would have been a mirror image of what Londoners would face in 1940. But there are echoes of WW2 throughout this volume.

Blackouts – limited initially – were imposed in the autumn of 1914. Street lamps, bright shop signs, bus headlights were all dimmed. Black curtains were the rule in every window. The darkness exacerbated people’s panic and fear – and sparked an upsurge in criminal activity.

There were (nonsensical) inter-Service rivalries. The Royal Naval Air Service would defend dockyards and naval facilities but would only operate over the hinterland when German bombers or Zeppelins crossed the coast. Soldiers manned anti-aircraft guns (or ‘archie’) in ports, while naval guns ringed London to defend the capital.

In the early days of the war it was the RNAS which dictated Britain’s aerial strategy, not the Royal Flying Corps; it attacked Zeppelin sheds up and down the German frontier, including the works at Friedrichshafen. Naval bombers violated Swiss airspace to attack the factory and, protested the Germans, dropped their loads “in a barbaric manner upon innocent civilians”. This from the nation which had jackbooted through Belgium and put civilians to the sword…

Major Wilhelm Siegert was gripped by no such feigned outrage. He assembled Germany’s finest aviators in the innocuously-sounding Breiftauben Abteilung (Carrier Pigeon Unit) and began to wage war against Allied strategic targets.

The ‘carrier pigeons’ did not achieve a great deal with their pinprick raids but they did, the Allies press protested, cause “the death of that standard trinity: women, children and old people”.

But as 1917 dawned, a new breed of pigeons was arriving at front-line units. Little more than a dozen years after man had taken to the skies in heavier-than-air craft, German industry was producing machines beyond the wildest imagination of the Wright Brothers.

The Gotha IV could carry a payload in excess of 1,000lb; its successor, the Gotha V, could drop bombs twice as heavy on its target.

Such payloads paled when compared with the Riesenflugzeug (literally ‘huge aircraft’, or in common parlance ‘Giants’) which could carry up to 4,400lb of bombs – similar to Hitler’s principal bomber, the Heinkel He111 a generation later.

And the Gothas and Giants set out to do just what the Luftwaffe attempted in 1940: to raze London and bring Britain to her knees.

Only the resources available to the German Air Force in 1917 were rather meagre. Luckily for them, so too were the resources of the defenders.

In the spring of 1917 as the Gotha campaign against London – Turkenkreuz (Turk’s Cross) – began, there were barely 70 pilots defending the skies of Britain, and archie wasn’t allowed to open fire at anything in the skies, friend or foe.

The first significant blow was struck not against the capital, but Folkestone in May 1917, a raid which served as wake-up call to Britain’s defenders. The Press was indignant at the Hun ‘babykillers’ who’d been dragged out of the Belgian and French brothels where “they spent most of their time” to bring misery to Britons.

And bring misery to Britons they did. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1917, the Gothas and Giants raided London. The death and destruction caused, however, was rather less than the panic. The attacks unsettled Londoners. They vented their anger by smashing shops with German-sounding names, forced their way into the homes of ‘Germans’ and ransacked them. Such riots invariably sparked widespread looting.

The Hun protested at their treatment. Captured German airman did not “go to war to kill women and children,” they told their interrogators. “Such things happen accidentally in war.”

Or perhaps not. For in the summer of 1918 Major Wilhelm Siegert set out to systematically destroy the capital of the British Empire.

That he could do so was thanks to the perfection of the incendiary – the Elektron fire bomb – by German industry.

With Germany on the cusp of losing the war on the Western Front – the great spring offensives had run their course – she planned massed raids against Paris and London; the latter city would be engulfed in flames “the likes of which had not been since the Great Fire of London some 250 years earlier.” Five heavy bombers could drop 5,000 incendiaries on the city, sparking 800 blazes which fire-fighters would be unable to deal with.

They were all lined up to do so. More than 80 aircraft were lined up on German airfields on September 23 1918 to strike at London and Paris.

They never took off. The de facto head of the German military, Erich Ludendorff, forbade the raids. Publicly he said he could not permit “destruction for its own sake”. Privately, Germany’s leaders feared Allied retaliation; they were right – a combined Anglo-British-French-Italian bomber force was being formed whose might would have eclipsed anything the Reich could throw at Paris or London.

Six weeks later, Germany sued for peace. The Elektron bombs were tossed in the Scheldt, the aircraft earmarked to carry them scuttled by their crews. The men of the Gothas and Giants, liked their comrades on the ground, struggled to accept defeat. “In our innermost beings we wanted nothing but to be warriors for Germany,” one lamented.

These warriors for Germany had raided Britain for just shy of a year. They killed fewer than 1,000 Britons and caused damage valued at £1.5m (over the same period rats, Hanson pointed out, destroyed crops and other material worth nearly fifty times).

This is a compelling story compellingly told. The author has made full use of published and unpublished sources, British and German and knitted a gripping narrative using them.

It is a story of brave men on both sides, Army, Navy and – latterly – RAF aviators who took to the skies to defend Britain against German airmen equally determined to bring the Empire to its knees.

With hindsight, the ‘first Blitz’ was neither as potent nor as destructive as contemporary accounts on both sides proclaimed. The Giants and Gothas were unreliable. Rarely did raids involve more than 20 aircraft – and all failed utterly in their aim: to demoralise enemy morale such that he would sue for peace.

Two decades later, airmen would climb into more reliable bombers and fighters and do the same again. They failed again, but not without razing much of Western Europe.

[stripeyman]

Thank you for this appraisal, I will have a look at this..............

However is there nothing that is inaccurate in the book ?

Bob Grundy

[Guest]

In case your interested Tesco has this book on offer for £10 rather than the list price of £17.99 at the moment.

[Halder]

Sorry, I'm not enough of an expert of WW1 aerial warfare to say whether there's nothing inaccurate within, but a trawl through the references and bibliography certainly make it seem a comprehensive work. The narrative is pretty much split 50/50 between attacker and defender and there are certainly many sources used which I've not seen in English before. From what I've read on the 1917-18 raids in the past the emphasis has been very much on the defenders/victims.

[Roxy]

Halder,

Thanks for that review. I had noticed this in Tesco - I now might slip it between the veg and bog roll!!

Roxy

[kenf48]

Now out in paperback, I can only endorse the positive comments made above. One of my relatives was killed in a bombing raid (on Etaples - not London) and it was really interesting to read the German aircrew account which is so often missing from English language histories. A feature of this book is the courage of both the German crews and their British adversaries is acknowledged without over statement but by the end my admiration was for both sides. At times some of the accounts of the typical Cockney reactions to the raids made me laugh out loud e.g. 'I shut my lot in the kitchen but they got out through the window" and although serious the official efforts to combat this new threat seemed to draw present day parallels to their futility. It paints a vivid picture of life on the home front and I really enjoyed it. It was a refreshing change to read a modern 'popular' or 'populist' story of the Great War that was well researched but was not in the unattributed diary genre.

In my edition, apart from the well chosen historical photos, the pictures in each chapter heading added to the charm of this book.

Recommended, a cracking story well told and I learned something, what more could you ask?

Ken

[Dolphin]

Another review and discussion about the book is at: http://1914-1918.invisionzone.com/forums/i...;hl=first+blitz

Gareth