Hmmm I Started Typing That 20 Minutes Ago
Then had to reboot my phone, as the battery had died, and wait for it to charge enough to download a picture I'd taken. One more reason to have the Devil's Digital Devices.
ANYWAY I would like to begin with Led Zeppelin. Art!
Allow me to quote a couple of lines of lyrics from the song above.
"Please, Mr. Fireman, won't you ring your bell?
Tell the people they got to fly away from here"
Okay, now that's out of the way, we're very probably going to do the whole blog about Zeppelins and fire, based on a Youtube vlog I found called 'Battle Guide' and their vlog 'The First Pilot To Shoot Down A Zeppelin', as well as corroborating evidence from 'Hell's Angel's', 'Battle' and Bill Gunston's 'Nightfighters'. Thank you to Edna for providing Thinking Time earlier this afternoon.
On the night of September 2nd 1916 the Teutons had sent 14 zeppelins over England, of 16 which had started out. The one that concerns us today was Schütte-Lanz 11, which meant it had a frame made out of wood, not the usual metal, as wooden frames were considerably lighter and cheaper than metal ones, except wood burns and duralumin does not. Art!
The Teuton hope was that bombing attacks on England would panic the civilian population, bring down the government, cats and dogs living together, sue for peace, etcetera. Art!
Reminds me of another nation attempting to terror-bomb another into surrender
Here I would like to introduce a cover illustration. Art!
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| "The baby-killers are coming!" |
Conrad originally thought that Pat Mills (the writer) was egging the pudding by calling the zeppelins by such a pejorative name. I was wrong*. Art!
SL11 had a crew of 16, captained by Hauptman Schramm, mounted 4 Maybach engines and could manage 50 PROUD IMPERIAL MILES in good weather, and important proviso as the gasbags were vulnerable to head or side winds. Defensive weaponry consisted of 6 machine guns. The Teutons had learned the hard way that operating at low level meant the zeppelins were highly susceptible to small arms fire, so in raids over This Sceptred Isle they flew two miles high, or 10,560 PROUD IMPERIAL FEET. Bombing from this height meant being wildly inaccurate and the inability to hit anything smaller than a town.
BG also notes that lifting power on SL11 was provided by 1.3 million cubic feet of hydrogen, contained in 19 cells, a gas with splendid lifting capabilities but which is very, very flammable. Why not use helium instead? Because it may be inert but it is a lot less efficient that hydrogen, and it's a lot more expensive, and the technology to make it did not yet exist. So there. Art!
Thus the Teuton side. We now switch to the British.
In order to counter the threat from hostile zeppelins, the Royal Naval Air Service had various squadrons of aircraft dotted around the countryside, since the Royal Flying Corps was 110% committed to the Western Front. One of these was 19 Reserve Squadron at Sutton's Farm, where the British aviator Lieutenant W. Leefe-Robinson was based, flying a BE2c. Art!
This is a year earlier, where he flew in France as an observer. The huge unwieldy device he's lugging is a camera of the time, for taking photographs of enemy positions. Art!
After training as a pilot, he took part in night patrols from Sutton's Farm in a BE2c as you see above. These were not fun; it took the BE2c up to 45 minutes to reach it's maximum height of 10,000 feet, where he had to patrol for up to three hour, with an open cockpit, no heating and temperatures at zero degrees. A wise pilot would take along a thermos flask of hot tea.
ANYWAY by this time it was 01:10 on 3rd September. Art!
BG does a good job of illustrating the route SL11 took, en route to bomb London. You can see the three airfields of 19 Reserve Squadron, each of which sent up a pilot to patrol a set route, as Leefy was doing. None of them caught SL11 on it's route to London, and Schramm proceeded to drop ordnance on the capital, failing to hit anything military or strategic - the penalty of bombing from two miles up.
HOWEVER - ah my favourite word again! - as Leefy was heading back to Sutton's Farm, he spotted a red glow in the distance, which was caused by the fires Schramm had started. Ooops.
Instead of landing, Leefy became curious and suspicious and headed towards the glow. Art!
Meanwhile, SL11 had been caught by searchlights and every anti-aircraft gun in range opened fire, hinting to Londoners that there were dark deeds afoot, bringing many of them outdoors to see what was going on. Art!
I include this picture to illustrate the scale difference between Leefy's BE2c and the SL11. Yes yes yes it's a Camel not a BE2c but the proportions will be the same.
Our Man Leefy, proving to have cojones the size of Kherson melons, flew through the British anti-aircraft barrage and proceeded to strafe SL11 starboard from stern to bow, then on the port quarter from bow to stern, continually being jostled about by anti-aircraft fire. Having shot off two drums of supposedly incendiary ammunition, he loaded a third and got within 500 feet of the gasbag and began brassing the lower stern.
The 'supposedly' incendiary ammunition then became 'actual' incendiary ammunition and SL11 caught fire.
Art!
There is no film of this event, which is not surprising as it was all over in minutes and film cameras of the time were enormous box units that took an age to set up, so I'm going to use a few stills from 'Hell's Angels' instead. Art!
It's a very realistic scene, done with large-scale miniatures, an oxymoron if ever there was one, and vividly illustrates what the death-dive of SL11 would have looked like, just with no metal superstructure. Art!
Here is what is left of SL11 the next day. The crew all perished, some choosing to jump rather than burn, as parachutes were a distant thought on the horizon. A ghastly little detail that BG relates is the discovered corpse of a dead crew member who had jumped and landed upright, having his femurs (thigh bones) rammed into his collar bones.
Thanks to the preliminary anti-aircraft barrage, half of London saw SL11 go down in flames, and exceedingly happy they were about it, too, getting revenge on the reviled 'Baby killers'.
Art!
Joe Colquohoun did several panels showing the zeppelin being shot down. I've chosen this one since it's a cover illustration in bright colours. Once again, zeppelins being shot down happened at night, but art needs must. One thing I noticed here is that the Teuton crew are all being flung out of their airborne pyre, rather than jumping. One suspects getting a cover illustration showing that would be hard to get past the editor of a comic aimed at young male readers. Pat never mentions this in his Notes at the back of 'Charley's War' so I suspect he knew better than to even script any such.
Late 1916 proved to be a bad year for zeppelins and Schutte Lanz; four more were shot down by the end of the year and such raids dropped off significantly in 1917. They were verrrry expensive gasbags, after all.
Art!
Leefy got a well-deserved Vicky gong.
Okay! That's it for zeppelins, I promise. Probably.
* These raids took place at night, not in broad daylight, but you need artistic drama on a comic cover.
