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    Zeppelin Blitz: The German Air Raids on Great Britain During the First World War
    Unavailable
    Zeppelin Blitz: The German Air Raids on Great Britain During the First World War
    Unavailable
    Zeppelin Blitz: The German Air Raids on Great Britain During the First World War
    Ebook545 pages4 hours

    Zeppelin Blitz: The German Air Raids on Great Britain During the First World War

    By Neil R Storey

    2.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    In 1907, H.G. Wells published a science fiction novel called The War in the Air. It proved to be portentous. In the early years of the First World War, German lighter-than-air flying machines, Zeppelins, undertook a series of attacks on the British mainland. German military strategy was to subdue Britain, both by the damage these raids caused and by the terrifying nature of the craft that carried them out. This strategy proved successful. The early raids caused significant damage, many civilian casualties and provoked terror and anger in equal measure. But the British rapidly learnt how to deal with these futuristic monsters. A variety of defence mechanisms were developed: searchlights, guns and fighter aircraft were deployed, the British learnt to pick up the airships’ radio messages and a central communications headquarters was set up. Within months aerial strategy and its impact on the lives of civilians and the course of conflict became part of human warfare. As the Chief of the Imperial German Naval Airship Division, Peter Strasser, crisply put it: ‘There is no such thing as a non-combatant any more. Modern war is total war.’ Zeppelin Blitz is the first full, raid-by-raid, year-by-year account of the Zeppelin air raids on Britain during the First World War, based on contemporary official reports and documents.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe History Press
    Release dateJan 5, 2015
    ISBN9780750963213
    Unavailable
    Zeppelin Blitz: The German Air Raids on Great Britain During the First World War

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    Reviews for Zeppelin Blitz

    2.5/5

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    • 2/5
      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.