It’s now springtime in 1916 and away from the battlefields of Europe people looked to
the skies to see the sun shining brightly above, and this week, if you were in England,
you also saw something else, for this week the skies were alive with German zeppelins.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week the French and the Germans kept duking it out at the western edge of the Verdun
battleground, a Russian offensive was halted by spring thaws in the northeast, but not
before the Russians took tens of thousands of casualties for pretty much no territory,
and civilians and medical staff were being torpedoed and drowned at sea.
But this week saw a lot more in the skies than at sea.
A series of zeppelin raids daily from March 31st to April 5th blanketed just about the
entire eastern and northeastern coast of England, and even reached as far as Leith and Edinburgh
in Scotland. Nearly 100 civilians were killed and over 200 more were injured. The Story
of the Great War has this to say about the raid, “...there is every reason to believe
the main object of the raid was to discover the whereabouts of the main British battleship
fleet. However the airships seem to have returned southward before locating the fleet. The German
admiralty never gave up hope of locating the main base with certainty, for many zeppelin
and submarine raids were made with no other object in view. Had the ships succeeded, there
is no doubt that all available submarines would have been dispatched to the spot, ordered
to lie in wait, and then entice the fleet out by offering a couple of older ships as
a sacrifice. The plan did not work out to the satisfaction of the German navy heads,
but it still remains one of their pet hopes.”
But it wasn’t just the skies over Britain that were alive.
On April 4th, a huge aerial battle took place over Ancona between more than 20 Austrian
and Italian planes. Three Austrian planes were shot down, and two Italian planes were
severely damaged. The next day the Germans issued a resumé of March aerial action, claiming
that 44 British and French planes were lost that month, and only 14 German.
And on April 7th, Bulgarian and Austrian planes bombed Salonika, causing great damage to the
French and Australian camps where large fires broke out. Actually, last week on March 27th
seven German planes had attempted a bombing run on British and French warships at Salonika
harbor, but allied guns shot four of them down. They did drop some bombs though, and
20 Greek civilians were killed.
This provoked huge anti-German sentiment throughout Greece, and anti-neutrality editorials in
the press, and at the funerals of the victims large crowds chanted, “down with the Germans.”
Martial law was even considered. But Greece WAS in a state of mobilization, and it had
some real negative side effects. Former Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos had this to
say, “By keeping this country in a state of chronic peaceful war through purposeless
mobilization, the present government has brought Greece to the verge of economic, material,
and moral bankruptcy.”
Here’s a related quote, that has to do with the economic situation in Greece at the time,
made to a press correspondent by a government official, “Greece is much more likely to
be starved into war than Germany is to be starved out of it.” It’s true that the
Greek budget for the year had expenditures that were twice that of revenue. The streets
of Athens were now crawling with beggars, and inflation was rampant. The mobilization
had also caused unforeseen problems like that with the fishermen- since most of them were
with the armed forces, fish, normally one of the main food supplies, was now too expensive
for tens of thousands of families.
Meanwhile far to the east, it was soldiers that were going hungry.
Specifically, the British and Indian troops under Charles Townshend, who had been under
siege at Kut since December. The continuing relief attempts were now under General George
Gorringe, and he was even harder pressed for time than his predecessor Fenton Aylmer had
been- the besieged couldn’t hold out much longer, and the rains had begun flooding the
Tigris River. On April 5th, Gorringe made a frontal assault on the east bank of the
river with the newly arrived 13th division. First they broke through the trenches at um-el-Hanna
and then the Ottoman lines at Fallahiyeh. This was closer to Kut than they’d made
it in the last four months but the enemy had a surprise. See, the Ottomans had not really
resisted at um-el-Hanna and had fallen back, willing to give up some territory in order
for Gorringe’s carefully planned attack on um-el-Hanna to not really take place. At
Fallahiyeh, where the Ottoman forces did fight back, they lost their trenches but inflicted
high casualties on the 13th Division. So on April 7th, Gorringe sent the 7th Indian Division
forward to take Sanniyat, the next line of defense, but this was a slaughter. There were
even apparently lines of khaki clad Indian bodies where the assault had broken down.
And at the end of the week, there the relief force remained, with Townshend’s forces
still starving in Kut, just a few miles away.
And starving civilians in Greece or bombing victims weren’t the only civilians dying
this week. There were also two notable executions.
In Beirut, there was a Mennonite Christian named Yusuf al-Hani who had sought out French
help for an independent Lebanon before the war. He got together a bunch of people to
discuss the idea of inviting the French to come now as protector. They hadn’t done
anything more than discuss the idea when they were arrested. Yusuf al-Hani was hanged April
5th in Beirut.
At dawn April 1st, in German occupied Belgium, a Belgian woman, Gabrielle Petit, was executed.
She was one of the distributors of the underground newspaper Libre Belgique. At her trial, she
confessed to smuggling prospective Belgian army recruits across the lines to the Belgian army.
And let’s look a few dozen kilometers south from Belgium to Verdun, where the battle has
raged for six bloody weeks.
This week, on April 1st, the Kaiser declared, “The decision of the war of 1870 took place
in Paris. This war will end in Verdun.” But you know, there’s something we see now
at Verdun that’s new- exhaustion among the German attackers. Commanding officers even
had heart attacks, and the German medical staff had serious concern about the troops.
For the first time, you had German soldiers refusing to go over the top, and many surrendered.
Letters home told tales of being almost the sole survivor of a unit, but the grievously
wounded were considered the lucky ones. And the German command had a habit of keeping
divisions in the lines for long periods, and just topping up the losses, but after a while,
you start running out of veterans, and now you see 18 year olds fresh from the parade
grounds fighting, and they were just not going to be up to the demands of a battle like Verdun.
Still, there were two important German gains at the western edge of the salient where the
battle was fiercest- on the 5th Haucourt fell, and Bethincourt the 8th.
And the Russians were still making gains in Anatolia.
On the 2nd, they crossed the Upper Chorok River, and took the fortified Ottoman positions
there, and on the 6th, they drove the Turks across the Kara Dere River, just 30 kilometers
east of Trabzon, while behind the Russian lines, 22 transports escorted by warships
landed 5,000 Cossack infantry to help with the advance on Trabzon.
And that brings us to the end of another week of war. Bombing raids on England, Scotland,
and Salonika, a dogfight in the Italian skies, British despair in Mesopotamia, hunger in
Greece, a Russian advance on the Black Sea Coast, German gains at Verdun, and civilian
executions.
Dogfights in the skies. Ah, the war in the air. You know how it was- the Red Baron, René
Fonck- true gentlemen who waged a war of honor far above the trench lines. Isn’t it romantic?
Duels in the air? Isn’t it romantic that one man in a machine could kill 60, 70, even
80 other men just like that? Isn’t it romantic that silent graceful airships could glide
smoothly across the skies and rain fire and death upon civilian populations and strike
terror into their hearts? And even if you were neutral you were still at risk? No, it
isn’t romantic and it never was. That’s a myth, a lie, and the reality was anything
but romantic; it was murder.
If you are as fascinated by Zeppelins and airships as were are despite their deadly
nature, click here to watch our special about their use during World War 1.
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