ZEPPELINS OVER THE MIDLANDS

In 1916, when the outcome of World War I was still in the balance, the Germans took the offensive to Britian with a series of Zeppelin raids. The author has researched these extensively, not only through previously classified official documents but also by consulting local papers, coroners' reports, cemetery records and speaking to the descendants of eyewitnesses. In Germany, surviving Zeppelin crews were hailed as heroes and became the subjects of many books. The British War Office had a copy of a German codebook and was able to anticipate attacks by these new weapons of war, though not the routes taken. The first raid on 31 January 1916 saw the bombing of Burton-on-Trent, Loughborough, Derby, Ilkeston and Scunthorpe. The most casualties were in Burton, with 15 killed and 72 injured, many of them in the Christ Church Mission Hall which caused particular public outrage. In Derby, the home of Rolls Royce engines, police had been warned at 7 pm of a possible raid and put precautions in place, with works sirens being sounded and trams not running. Four Zeppelins passed by the town as their target was Liverpool, but one, L14, returned in the small hours when street lights were back on and trams running, dropping 21 high explosive and four incendiary bombs. Four railway workers were killed. There was no direct hit on Rolls Royce, though the test track was damaged. Later in the year, the same captain and crew were shot down in a new Zeppelin and interrogated. It emerged that they wrongly thought they had bombed Liverpool on the previous occasion. Zeppelin structure was a streamlined rigid frame covered with cotton fabric, kept aloft by hydrogen filled gas cells, with the "Q" Class carrying about two tons of bombs. By 1917 the Germans were building larger Zeppelins able to operate at 20,000 feet, but they were quickly superseded by aircraft. 206pp, casualty list, maps, photos.