On 19 January 1915, the German armed forces executed the first major strategic bombing raid against Great Britain. Proposals for such an operation had been made as far back as August 1914, and had been backed by AdmiralsPaul Behncke and Alfred von Tirpitz. Initially, these proposals were vetoed by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had reservations about bombing Britain due to the presence of German family members in the British Royal Family in and around London, however he ultimately approved the first strategic bombing operation in history on 7 January 1915, with the stipulation that the German armed forces avoid bombing London, as the Kaiser had no wish to harm the British Royal Family.
In modern times, such an order for strategic bombing would result in the high command ordering assets from their air force's bomber fleet to a target location. To expedite the process, the weapons would be loaded on jet bombers, which would take off and fly to a given location, drop their ordnance with aid of computerguidance systems, and then return home. In 1915, however, the idea of strategic bombing was in its infancy and the finer details had not yet been worked out, leaving the Germans to plan and execute the world's first such raid based on available technology and weapons capabilities. The aircraft chosen to carry out the first strategic bombing operation was the Zeppelin, the only airborne craft at the time that possessed both the range and the necessary payload to conduct such an operation. The first bombs used by these airships were allegedly artillery shells, since no proper bombs as we understand them today existed. Armed with these, the Germans inaugurated a new age in warfare with the first successful strike against Great Britain with Zeppelins on 19 January 1915. Unfortunately for the Germans, the lack of airborne navigational and bombing apparatus technology made these early raids little more than propaganda points for the German press. All the same, the airships had proved that large aircraft could carry sizeable payloads over enemy territory and drop them, which was an improvement over the tactic used up till that time in which small aircraft would drop a handful of bombs over hostile territory in so-called "annoyance bombing" raids.
A Boeing B-52 Stratofortress releasing its payload during the Vietnam War. Strategic bombers such as the B-52 trace their linage to the air raids of World War I, but share little in common with the aircraft used by the belligerents of the time.
The success of any new weapon or tactic may be measured not only in its effective use by the side employing it but in the reactions to the new weapon or tactic by the side receiving the attack. In this measure, then, the Germans had far greater success with their Zeppelin raids as weapons of psychological warfare than in the actual bombing results. Much as the German battleship Tirpitz would do during World War II, the Zeppelin raids resulted in a push to hoard necessary military war material - in this case, anti-aircraft resources - to protect the home front, which in these early days meant using antiquated anti-aircraft guns in an attempt to strike at the German airships. These early attempts were not terribly successful, but as the British began to roll out incendiary weaponry and better home-based aircraft to attack the incoming German airships the advantage the Germans had initially enjoyed in air superiority began to evaporate as the new shells employed by the British in their AA guns had a tendency to ignite the hydrogen gas used to make the airships of the time lighter than air, resulting in the loss of several Zeppelins. To offset this the Germans tried flying higher, but this only resulted in poorer performance during bombing raids since accurate bombing technology had not yet matured enough to allow for the airships to fly high enough to avoid the danger of ground based AA-gun fire and still drop their payloads with any kind of accuracy.
The lasting legacy of the Zeppelin raids on Britain survives today in the Royal Air Force, which was formed by merging several air units - including those that had engaged the German airships during the course of World War I - into the world's first single, cohesive, and independent air force. Another lasting legacy of these attacks is the idea of strategic bombing, which would be extensively adopted and combined with better military doctrines by several Allied and Axis powers during World War II and into the Cold War, where the airborne theater would play a vital role to both NATO and Warsaw Pact nations from start of the Berlin Airlift in 1948 to collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990-1991.
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First published in 2006, the Bugle is the monthly newsletter of the English Wikipedia's Military history WikiProject.
