Given the ubiquity of air travel today, it can be difficult to imagine the awe and fear that the sight of zeppelins plodding overhead must have evoked when they first appeared in the skies over England in the spring of 1915 to attack the country. For the next three years, the zeppelins made regular appearances in an effort to rain down devastation on the cities, towns, and farms of Britain. Though their effect was pitifully small when compared to that of the strategic bombing campaigns conducted by heavier-than-air craft later in the war and in the 1940s, the images of zeppelins spotlighted as they floated over buildings remain iconic images of the conflict, reflecting their continuing impact upon their imagination.

Though the zeppelins have never been forgotten, there has been a recent surge of works about their bombing campaign against England. Among them is Neil Storey, a specialist in local history whose book chronicles every zeppelin attack on Britain during the war. Drawing primarily upon Intelligence Section reports of the raids undertaken by the British government (which he states have been underutilized since their declassification in 1966), he offers a raid-by-raid account that details the zeppelins involved, their attacks on their targets, and the casualties and damage inflicted. These are summarized rather than analyzed, and are supplemented with a generous selection of photographs, postcards, and excerpts from firsthand accounts that were printed after the war.

In this way Storey has provided his readers with a useful resource for anyone seeking to look up the details of a given raid and the fate of the zeppelins involved. As a history of the raids, though, it falls lamentably short. While Storey’s use of the official reports is commendable, he doesn’t take the additional step of examining documentation from the German Federal Archive in Freiberg or the information contained in the German official histories. His employment of English-language secondary sources is equally sparse, with the absence from his bibliography of Douglas Robinson’s books on rigid airships especially unaccountable, depriving the text of any sort of context or broader consideration of the purpose of the campaigns, their role in the overall conflict, or their impact on the conduct of the war. When added to his occasionally inaccurate statements of fact (to say, for example, as Storey does that the 1909 German film Der Luftkreig der Zukunft is “regarded by many to be the very first film of the science fiction genre” speaks more to the unfamiliarity of those unidentified many with the work of Georges Méliès than to Storey’s point), it makes for a book of limited utility that is best treated as a sourcebook of information rather than as a history of the campaign in its own right. ( )

Airships have an aura to them – majestic cruisers of the sky, a staple of steampunk, and a subject for authors as diverse as H.G. Wells and Thomas Pynchon. Flammable and fragile, unfortunately. As weapons of war, I’ve read a couple of books that were disappointing ((Zeppelins of World War I and The First Blitz) Neither is really satisfactory, and neither is this one (Zeppelin Blitz, by Neil R. Story). Although copiously illustrated, there’s only one map – bomb hits in London – which means all the Zeppelin raids are described by text. For example:


“L-10, under Kapitänleutnant Klaus Hirsch, was sighted between 9.35 and 9.55 p.m., south of the Sunk lightship, by four armed trawlers Resono, Lord Roberts, Cygne, and Zephyr - the later opening fire on the Zeppelin. At 10.45 p.m., she was between Gunfleet and Foulness, going south-west toward Shoeburyness.”


Unless you are a UK native and/or intimately familiar with local geography, this isn’t much use. All of the raid descriptions are like that – paragraphs of text reporting a Zeppelin’s location at various times, with now and then a mention of bombs dropped. A map would make everything much clearer.


There’s a little from the German side - a few sidebars describing missions - but very little description of how Zeppelins worked. They rise from sheds on the German coast, fly to England, drop some bombs, and go home. One thing that is clear is the Zeppelins usually had no idea where they were, other than somewhere over England (and sometimes not even that). The coast was apparently obvious, as were major rivers, but the blackout was very effective (there were various rumors of signal lights on the ground supposedly guiding Zeppelins, and innocent motorists or even bicyclists were sometimes accused of guiding Zeppelins with their headlamps. Most Zeppelin navigation was done by dead reckoning, which lead to bombs being dropped on farmer’s fields or in the ocean because the crew was under the impression there was some sort of important target below. It’s interesting that a lot of the accounts have the Zeppelins bombing anything that showed a light – the flashes from antiaircraft guns, the glow from furnaces or foundries, or even slag heaps. Now and then they would hit a town or city – seemingly more or less by accident. The military value of the Zeppelin raids was probably worse than negligible – they cost Germany more in blood and treasure than anything destroyed on the ground.

The threat came to an end once the Royal Flying Corps had an effective incendiary bullet, even though there were some “death ride” raids late in the war (the head of the German airship service, Kapitän zur See Peter Strasser, was killed on the last Zeppelin raid).

As mentioned, lots of detail that would have been better covered with a few maps. Contemporary illustrations, usually of bomb damage – it was pretty hard to get a photograph of a Zeppelin in flight. A short bibliography. I’m still waiting for a definitive book on the WWI air raids on England. ( )