THE FLATPACK BOMBERS : THE ROYAL NAVY AND THE ZEPPELIN MENACE

A word from the author :

The reason I wrote The Flatpack Bombers was because the daughter of Flight Lieutenant John Babington* gave me, from her family papers, his first - hand account of the 1914 raid on the Friedrichshafen Zeppelin factory. I had met her father 40 years before, but he was old, and I was young, and I had no idea then of what he had done. But as soon as I read his account, I wanted to write about it. The more I studied and the more I wrote, the more I realised that the significance of this raid had been missed by historians. The Friedrichshafen Raid, the Düsseldorf Raids which preceded it, and the Cuxhaven Raid which followed it, were the first strategic bombing raids in history, and the Cuxhaven Raid was the first real aircraft carrier strike in history. These raids were the genesis of every strategic bombing raid, and every aircraft carrier strike, since. No - one had drawn these threads together and described the importance of these events and that is what I set out to do.

Reply from Ian Gardiner to Mehdi Schneyders,

November 24th, 2020.

*Air Marshal John Tremayne Babington K.C.B., C.B.E., D.S.O., D.L. ( 1891 - 1979 ).

In 1908, H.G. Wells wrote his science fiction thriller The War in the Air in which a fleet of Zeppelin airships crossed the Atlantic and devastated New York. When war broke out with Germany in 1914, many people in Britain feared that London would be laid waste by German airships as soon as the Kaiser gave the order. Zeppelins also meant that the British Navy could do nothing in the North Sea without the risk of being spotted. This " menace ", which no aircraft could match, spurred the British government into creating the Royal Flying Corps. It also led Winston Churchill and the Royal Navy to set about bombing these airships on the ground in 1914. Thus it was that the Royal Naval Air Service, with IKEA - style flatpack aeroplanes, pioneered strategic bombing which led to the Blitz and the massive raids on Germany and Japan in the Second World War. Moreover, the Royal Navy extended its striking range by developing the first aircraft carriers in order to destroy Zeppelins in their bases many miles from the sea.

This is the extraordinary story of those first bombing raids. It describes the technical innovations that made them possible, the thrilling exploits of the pilots, and the courage and endurance of their adversaries, the German Zeppelin crews. It also explains why the British nightmare never came about.

Every bomber raid, and every aircraft carrier strike operation, owes its genesis to those early naval flyers, and there are ghosts from 1914 which still haunt us today.