Why the British Army shelled London and other English cities between 1915 and 1918
That English cities and town were shelled by their own army during the First World War is not generally known
It seems quite incredible today, to imagine a that the British government a little over a century ago, would authorise its armed forces to use heavy artillery to shell English cities. Nevertheless, this is what they did, although the intention was of course not to inflict damage on buildings and cause the death of civilians. That though was the effect, which was, in retrospect, inevitable.
The situation relating to the military use of aeroplanes at the beginning of the First World War may be briefly summarized in this way. They had been found useful in the first instance for carrying out reconnaissance. An observer, hundreds or thousands of feet in the air, can see far more of what an enemy is up to than can somebody on the ground. They were sometimes called, for this reason, ‘the eyes of the army’. Aeroplanes had also been used to drop bombs on both battlefields and strategic targets, that is to say places not on a battlefield but which might help an enemy’s war effort, railway lines or factories, for instance. In this sense, they were seen as being like very accurate artillery. Instead of trying to guess where enemy assets might be hidden and then doing one’s best to calculate the range and direction of fire needed from the ground, an aeroplane could fly over enemy-held territory, identify targets and then swoop down and drop a bomb right on top of them. This at least was the hope.
As was quickly discovered in the early days of military aviation, soldiers on the ground were in the habit of firing rifles and machine guns at enemy aircraft and so any bombing mission could not be conducted too close to the ground. To evade small-arms fire, an aeroplane really needed to fly at a height of at least 3,000ft or so. This introduced two difficulties, one for the attacking plane and one for those on the ground hoping to destroy it. If a bomb, or any other object, is dropped from a moving aeroplane, it will not fall straight to the ground and onto the point above which it was dropped. Instead, it will move forward at roughly the same speed as it was travelling when leaving the aeroplane and so strike the earth or sea some distance from the point over which the plane was travelling when the object began to fall.
In practice, aiming bombs onto one particular spot when travelling at a great height is all but impossible. A real-life examples of the difficulties experienced by the Germans involved in bombing London during the First World War will perhaps make things a little clearer. The first air raid on London by an aeroplane showed the problem which was described above, that of dropping a bomb when one is actually above the intended target. At about midday on 28 November 1916, a single German aeroplane flew up the River Thames and when it was over Central London, at a height of 13,000ft, released six bombs. The bombs were dropped when the plane was right above the Admiralty in Whitehall. Causing explosions at such a hugely symbolic location would have been a great propaganda coup for the Germans. The pilot though had not thought matters through. Because of the factors at which we have just looked, the bombs did not simply drop straight down onto their target. Instead, they kept moving forward at almost a hundred miles an hour as they fell. The result was that they landed not in Whitehall, but around Victoria Station.
The same problem arises when somebody is trying to shoot down an aeroplane. If a man with a First World War rifle, a .303 Lee-Enfield for example, fires at a plane flying 3,000ft above him, which is travelling at 100 miles per hour, then if he is aiming straight at the aeroplane, it will have travelled over 100 feet by the time the bullet arrives. If the aeroplane is travelling at a height of 10,000 or 15,000ft, not at all uncommon at that time, then these margins of error when dropping bombs or trying to shoot anything down will be greatly multiplied. All this is hugely relevant to the methods developed both for bombing and anti-aircraft guns. For bombing, it meant that hitting a specific target such as a railway line or a particular building was all but impossible, unless one was prepared to fly very low indeed and risk being shot down. For those trying to hit aeroplanes as they flew overhead, it became clear that bullets alone were not an effective means of achieving this end. Above 3,000ft, machine guns or rifles were useless, for that is about as high as ammunition at that time would reach, and even lower than that, hitting the aeroplane was a very uncertain business.
One particular aspect of this is very relevant to our investigation into the deaths on the ground from AA fire and that is this. In addition to the fact that many artillery shells in both world wars were defective, those which were being fired at aircraft had to have a time fuze set. In the heat of battle, this fiddly job was one which was often done hurriedly or skipped entirely. This of course increased the chances that the shell would not explode where it was wanted, which was thousands of feet in the air, and would instead plunge to earth and detonate in the street.
The implications of all this were that those dropping bombs from aeroplanes or airships came to realize that they were bound to miss their target more often than not and that their bombs would consequently be unlikely to land where they had been aimed. The same applied to anybody hoping to hit anything thousands of feet overhead; the chances of doing so were negligible. For those wanting to shoot down aeroplanes, a means was needed that would increase the chance of damaging the aeroplane at which one was aiming, other than by being fortunate enough to score a direct hit. The answer was to use artillery shells, which might bring down a plane or Zeppelin if they exploded near enough.
Of course, artillery barrages during the First World War did not need to be all that accurate on the battlefield, because wherever the shells landed, they were inflicting damage on the other side. Things change a little when you are firing almost vertically into the air! In such a case, falling shells or pieces of shells are likely to land on your head or the heads of those nearby, who are most likely to be on your side. Doing this in your own country is almost bound to end with injuries and deaths among your own people.
Another problem when trying to shoot down aeroplanes with artillery is that not only are you now dealing with three coordinates instead of two, your target is also moving quickly and often changing both direction and height unpredictably. On land, the enemy is usually in one place, while you are somewhere else. At sea, warships move relatively slowly and so not too much adjustment needs to be made for their positions as they move through the water. Ships of course also move, like targets on land, in two, rather than three dimensions. Aeroplanes though move very fast, travelling at hundreds of miles an hour. Their height changes too. To hit an aeroplane with an artillery shell means knowing how far away from you it is, what direction it is and also how far above the earth. It is also helpful if the aeroplane maintains a steady and reliable speed and height, which is by no means always the case. Not only that, you must be able to calculate where it is likely to be in the future, otherwise, your shell will explode too far away to cause any harm.
Having worked out all this in the middle of a bombing raid, you must then find some way of ensuring that your shell explodes at the right time. There is no point using a shell which will only explode on contact. The chances of that happening are miniscule. The best that one can hope for is that the plane will be a few feet from the explosion and that some fragment of the shell will damage a vital part of the plane. Of course, the more powerful the explosion, the further away will damage be caused. This in turn means that the accuracy of the gun can be less.
All the above factors are of importance when dealing with the bombing by, or shooting down of, aeroplanes. The first serious bombing raids on Britain were of course carried out not by aeroplanes but by the great airships known, after their inventor, as Zeppelins. It might have been thought that such large, slow-moving and unwieldy craft would be easier to shoot down from the ground than aeroplanes, but this was not really the case. They flew very high and it was only when the British began to use fighters to attack them that the Zeppelin menace was brought to an end.
Once the British and German armies became bogged down in the area which was to become known as the Western Front, the search was on by both sides for a means of breaking the deadlock which did not entail a costly, frontal assault on the fortified positions of the other’s forces. The British tried various ways to open up another front, in Turkey and the Middle East for instance. The Germans hit upon the idea of attacking Britain directly by using airships to fly across the ocean and drop bombs on strategic targets. This was the theory, but in practice it proved impossible to distinguish between military and civilian assets, which was to become something of a leitmotif in both world wars. An attack on some specific, strategic target inevitably resulted in what the Americans are pleased to call ‘collateral damage’ to those living and working nearby.
The occasional bomb had been dropped by aeroplanes in the opening months of the war, but the first major air raid on Britain took place on 19 January 1915 and entailed two Zeppelins bombing the Norfolk coast. One of the targets was quite legitimate, the radio station at Hunstanton, but the end result was death and destruction in various villages and towns ranging from Brancaster to King’s Lynn. The raid caused no damage to anything other than people’s homes and the only casualties were civilian.
Kaiser Wilhelm, the German emperor, had certain scruples about air raids being carried out on London, not least because the British Royal Family were relatives of his, but in the summer of 1915 he authorized the bombing of the docks, providing that no bombs were dropped west of the Tower of London. This pusillanimity did not last though and the capital was soon being bombed anywhere that the Zeppelins could fly over. Since most of the British aeroplanes were being used to prosecute the war in France, it was thought that the best defence against attacks from the air would be to use artillery to try and shoot down the airships now threatening south-east England.
The first anti-aircraft guns used by the British in the defence of their country were the so-called pom-pom guns, which fired a rapid succession of shells, each weighing 1lb (0.5kg). These shells were very light, compared with the average artillery piece. As early as 1912, the British set up guns of this kind in the Kent town of Chatham, where the Royal Navy had an important base which they hoped to protect against aerial attack. When the war started in 1914, it did not take long to work out that these small weapons would be quite inadequate for tackling any kind of aircraft at a reasonable height. The decision was accordingly taken to start using heavy artillery in and around British military bases, factories, cities and towns. It was thought that field artillery and naval guns would have sufficient range to reach the Zeppelins, which were flying thousands of feet above Britain.
Other types of guns were also used against aeroplanes and Zeppelins which were bombing Britain at that time. They included French 75mm QF ‘auto-cannons’ (mounted on trucks) and also 3-pounder British guns. Lighter weapons of this kind were found to be hopelessly inadequate for the job. Even the 12lb (5.4kg) shells fired from the 3in naval guns were too small and later in the war, 16lb (7.2kg) shells were used instead. Obviously, the heavier the shell, then the more powerful the explosion and the greater the range at which damage could be caused and aircraft brought down.
It seemed quite logical during the First World War that the Royal Navy should take the lead in anti-aircraft defence. After all, it was the navy which traditionally defended Britain from attack by foreigners. The army was used abroad, fighting in other people’s countries, but it was the navy which defended the country from invasion, by means of warships and coastal artillery. There was of course another and more practical reason that the defence of the country from attack by aeroplanes and airships was entrusted at that time to the navy and that was that the army was stretched to its utmost limit on the Western Front. It was easier to spare a few men of the Royal Navy than it would have been to remove troops from the battlefields of France.
One type of artillery used for anti-aircraft work was the QF 3in gun whose shells each weighed 12lbs (5.4kg). This was based upon a design which came into service in 1894 and was widely used on ships of the Royal Navy. For firing on a battlefield or at sea, this is an excellent weapon. If it was fired at an enemy vessel and the target was missed, then the shell would splash harmlessly into the water. This useful naval gun was the artillery piece which became the favoured anti-aircraft gun of the First World War. Why anybody would think it a good idea to unbolt such a weapon from its concrete emplacement, fix it to the back of a lorry, drive to London with it and then fire it vertically into the air, is an intriguing point.
It was remarked earlier that when you are lobbing shells in the general direction of an enemy on a battlefield, then it is not really a disaster if your aim is a little inaccurate. After all, the shells you fire are sure to do some damage or cause casualties. If nothing else, then they will make the enemy feel vulnerable and tense, which is no bad thing when you are fighting a war. Firing artillery on a battlefield in somebody else’s country is one thing. There are no discernible disadvantages to doing this as often as you please. Undertaking the same operation in the middle of your own cities is something else again. It is not easy to explain why anybody would have thought this a wise or desirable course of action and the answer can only be that such a decision was taken as a result of the so-called ‘appeal to desperation’.
The appeal to desperation is also known as the politician’s syllogism. It runs like this:
Something must be done.
This action is something.
Therefore, this is what must be done.
Nothing else can explain the sheer folly of setting up artillery in centres of population and hoping that using it 14,000 times in 24 hours, as the British did in their own country in 1917, will not have as a natural consequence many casualties among your own civilians. Still, there was no doubt that something had to be done. For the first time in a thousand years, a foreign enemy was striking at the heart of the capital. The physical effects of the few bombs dropped from Zeppelins may have been relatively insignificant, but the psychological impact was immense. Governments have fallen for less than this.
There may, in some remote corner of the multiverse beyond our reach and comprehension, exist an alternative world in which the firing of thousands of heavy artillery shells into the skies above one’s own cities will not end badly. In our world though, the results of such an action are not difficult to foresee. Apart from any harm caused to airships or aeroplanes, people on the ground will be killed, either by red-hot chunks of metal falling to earth or by shells which explode not in mid-air, but when they land in a street or on a house. In short, such a strategy will inevitably result in civilian casualties. How many casualties were caused in Britain during the First World War by shelling the civilian population in this way? Perhaps an expert might give us some idea, somebody like J.B.S. Haldane.
Haldane was a biologist, known for his original work in fields as diverse as statistics and genetics. He is chiefly remembered today for his reply when asked what insights, if any, his studies in biology had given him about the nature of the Creator. He supposedly replied that the Deity displayed ‘An inordinate fondness for beetles’, due to the enormous variety and sheer number of such insects to be found on the Earth. Haldane fought in the First World War and some years after it ended was invited to join a Cabinet Committee which was investigating the future prospects for aerial warfare, which was an important topic at that time. From 1924 he was a member of the Air Raid Precautions Sub-Committee of the Committee for Imperial Defence. As such, he was privy to a great deal of secret information, so much so that when in 1938 he wrote a book on the subject, his signing of the Official Secrets Act in connection with his previous work in the field, prevented him from exploring some aspects of the topic in detail. Nevertheless, in his book he made several revealing, one might say shocking, statements.
On page 17 of Haldane’s book A.R.P., published in 1938 by Victor Gollancz, is a section headed, BRITISH ANTI-AIRCRAFT SHELLS, which contains the following sentence: ‘They killed a number of Londoners in 1916–1918. In some raids they caused as many casualties as the enemy bombs.’ This is a truly startling admission, that British artillery operating in Britain sometimes killed and injured as many people as the German bombs falling on the country from Zeppelins and aeroplanes. Remember, having served for years on the government committee responsible for examining this very question, Haldane was in the best possible position to know what he was talking about.
As a matter of fact, the situation with civilian deaths from British artillery shells during the First World War was at times even worse than Haldane had said in his book. Perhaps if we look at a fairly typical air raid during that war, we will be able to see precisely who died and the exact causes of their deaths. This is not always possible when hundreds or thousands of people have been killed, but when only a few dozen are involved, it is much easier to establish just what happened.
Let us now look at account concerning the bombing of Britain by German Zeppelins during the First World War. The Wikipedia article on German Strategic Bombing During World War I,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_strategic_bombing_during_World_War_I#1915,
tells us, apropos of a certain type of Zeppelin, that:
The Army received the first of these, LZ 38, and Erich Linnarz commanded it on a raid on Ipswich on 29–30 April and another on Southend on 9–10 May. LZ 38 also attacked Dover and Ramsgate on 16–17 May, before returning to bomb Southend on 26–27 May. These four raids killed six people and injured six, causing property damage estimated at £16,898.
The source given for this is a standard and authoritative work on the air defence of Great Britain from 1914 to 1918. Similar accounts may be found in many books, internet sites and magazines. We are plainly expected to assume that the six deaths mentioned were caused by enemy action. Let us look in detail at what happened during one of these raids, that on Southend on the evening of Wednesday, 26 May 1915. As readers are aware, Zeppelins were enormous and slow-moving airships.
LZ 38 crossed the Essex coast at about 10:30 that night, having crossed the North Sea. After passing over Clacton, it arrived at the seaside town of Southend at 11:15 and proceeded to drop sixty bombs. Of these, forty-seven were incendiaries and the rest were high explosive. Little damage was caused and few fires started. One boy suffered burns when an incendiary struck his home and a man’s wrist was cut after he broke a window in order to rescue his son from a fire caused by another of the incendiaries.
The only real victim of the bombing was a seven year-old girl called Marion Pateman, who was asleep in her bed when an incendiary bomb crashed through the roof and sprayed burning oil over her bedclothes. The screaming child was rescued by her parents and sister, but succumbed to her injuries two days later, dying in hospital. All things considered, Southend had got off lightly from the sixty bombs, but there was another factor at work, which made things worse. At nearby Shoeburyness, a piece of artillery had been set up to guard the Thames estuary. This gun was used to fire thirty-seven shells up into the air over Southend that night in the vain hope of hitting the Zeppelin. None of them hit their intended target, but the shelling of Southend caused two tragedies.
When artillery shells are fired thousands of feet into the air from one of the three-inch guns being used at that time, one of three things can happen. The shell might explode in the air, raining down hot fragments of metal, some of which can be quite sizeable. If the fuze fails to work as hoped, then the shell will fall to earth, where it will either explode on impact or the 12lb mass of steel will crash to the ground at high speed.
One of the shells fired that night from Shoeburyness exploded high above Westcliff, which is a suburb of Southend. William Fairs, a dentist from London, owned a holiday home in Westcliff. His wife and daughter and daughter-in-law were staying at the bungalow, called Fairdene, during the week of the Whitsun holiday. May Fairs, his 35-year-old daughter, had just got off a tram that night when a chunk of metal from an anti-aircraft shell, which had exploded overhead, struck her on the head, killing her instantly. A few streets away, Florence Smith was standing at the front door of her house in Westminster Drive. A shell landed in the road, 30ft from her, and exploded. Pieces of shrapnel scythed through the air, slicing through Florence Smith’s breast and cutting her head open. Although for a time it looked as though she might recover from her injuries, Florence died in hospital a fortnight later. This was an unremarkable air raid in which two thirds of the deaths had been caused not by bombs but by British artillery.
We must, before going any further, make two points clear. The first is that artillery-fire at an object moving thousands of feet above the ground was, before the development of radar and the proximity fuze in the 1930s and 1940s, horribly inaccurate. In September 1940, the first month of the Blitz, the head of Britain’s anti-aircraft force estimated that it took 20,000 shells to bring down one German plane. This meant that the tactic developed in the First World War and used also a little over 20 years after that war had ended was to fire as many shells as possible at a target, knowing that the great majority of them would miss. However, the higher the rate of fire, the more likely that by chance alone, one shell might explode near enough to the aeroplane or airship to inflict some damage upon it. This brings us neatly to our second point, which is the confused impression which many people have about the nature of what are usually called ‘anti-aircraft guns’.
When we talk of firing ‘guns’ at targets, we tend instinctively to think of pistols and rifles being aimed at something which is either struck or missed. Of course, if you are firing an air rifle at a row of mechanical ducks in a fairground range, then it really does not matter how often you miss. Nor does it matter in the least if you are firing a shotgun at clay pigeons, whether you hit or miss your target. No harm is done in either case. It is these images which are subconsciously summoned up when people talk of ‘anti-aircraft guns’, rather than heavy artillery. A moment’s thought will of course tell you at once that missing your target above a city when you are using a naval gun firing a shell weighing 80lbs (36.3kg) is likely to have the most serious consequences. This terminology probably lies behind the indisputable fact that few people ever consider the frightful cost in property and lives which the use of anti-aircraft guns wrought in Britain during the two world wars. Experts in the field may talk and write of anti-aircraft artillery, but for the man and woman in the street, they were just ‘guns’.
Having cleared up this point, we must bear in mind that we are not talking of ‘guns’ at all, but rather the kind of artillery used on battlefields to inflict as many casualties as possible when their shells explode. The aim, obviously, is that the shells will only explode near to enemy troops, emplacements, ships or vehicles. On the ground or at sea, this is fairly easy to accomplish, always provided of course that your aim is accurate. A shell can be fired up into the air and will then fall down onto the target, where it will explode on impact. The case is altered when firing at aircraft. Since the odds of actually hitting an aeroplane with one of your shells is vanishingly remote, you must try and get the shell to explode when it is approximately in the vicinity of the aircraft. This was most commonly achieved during both the First and Second World War by setting a timer, a device which caused the shell to detonate at a certain height, in the hope that it would be close enough to an aeroplane to cause serious damage.
There were, during the First World War, two methods used to cause a shell to detonate at a predetermined time. Some work had been done on clockwork timers, but these were not in general use, at least at the beginning of the war. The tried and tested means of getting a shell to explode at a set time was by a gunpowder fuze. These fuzes, known technically as igniferous, worked by a train of powder in the nose of the shell being set alight when it was fired. It would take a certain length of time for this powder train to reach the fuze magazine, whereupon the shell would explode. There were two problems though with using such devices when firing a barrage above your own cities.
Using a train of burning gunpowder to set off an explosion can be a chancy business at the best of times and under ideal conditions. When millions of shells are being produced and used, conditions are not really ideal. Many of them were defective and this meant that they either did not explode at all or exploded at the wrong time. To this day, there are estimated to be many millions of items of unexploded munitions on the site of Western Front of the First World War for this very reason. In the case of shells fitted with a time fuze and used against aeroplanes, the situation was even worse. The speed that a narrow thread of gunpowder will burn had been calculated precisely, but the figures so obtained were only accurate at or near ground-level. Once you ascend a few thousand feet into the air, the temperature drops and the atmosphere is less rich in oxygen. This has implications for the speed at which something will burn.
Shells fired 10,000ft or more into the air often fell back to earth and either exploded or sometimes failed to explode there. This was because of the conditions high in the atmosphere, which had not been taken into account when calibrating the time fuzes. Sometimes the powder train would burn more slowly, at others, it would halt entirely, dying down to a glowing ember, before starting again when the shell landed. Gunpowder fuzes are famously unreliable, which of course accounts for the advice given about fireworks which appear to have gone out after the fuze has been lit. One is advised that under no circumstances should you go and examine the firework, because the fuze might splutter into life again, even after a few minutes.
It might have been thought that the great airships which were sailing above Britain and dropping bombs in the early years of the First World War would have been as easy to hit with shells as a battleship, but this was not at all the case. Anti-aircraft fire proved very ineffective and it was fighters which finally began to shoot down the Zeppelins, so causing the Germans to abandon their use for bombing. They began instead to use huge aeroplanes.
The Gotha was the world’s first long-range bomber and came into service in early 1917. These twin-engined planes could fly at 15,000 feet, carrying 660lbs (300kg) of bombs. After some tentative raids on southern England, the first air raid on London with these aeroplanes was conducted on 13 June 1917. It was a brilliant success. In broad daylight, a formation of fourteen Gothas crossed the Channel from airfields in occupied Belgium and flew to London. Once there, they dropped 118 bombs, killing a total of 162 people. Despite almost 100 fighters taking off to attack them, all the German bombers returned safely to their bases. Illustration 10 shows an ordinary home in London which was all but destroyed by one of the bombs.
If the Zeppelin raids had caused panic, it was as nothing to the reaction of Londoners to this new threat. Prime Minister Lloyd George swiftly took two actions. The first was to bring fighter aircraft from the Western Front to England and assign them to protecting London from this new menace. The second of his actions was a gambit still familiar and much-used today: he ordered an enquiry. The man chosen to head this was General Jan Smuts, formerly a commander in the Boer army during their war against Britain, but now a member of Lloyd George’s War Cabinet. Before Smuts had been officially appointed to investigate the bombing of London by German aircraft, another raid took place, also in daylight and with even more aeroplanes, twenty-two this time. We shall look closely at this air raid, because it will shed light upon the subject which we are investigating, the death of civilians as a result of their own army’s activities.
On the morning of 7 July 1917, twenty-two German bombers passed over Essex and approached London from the north-east. Anti-aircraft guns opened fire as the raiders split into two groups. One headed to Hendon and the other turned south to fly over Central London. The 2,000 shells which the British artillery hurled into the air did no harm at all to any of the Gothas, but caused havoc on the ground. The bombs dropped by the German planes fell in an arc from Chingford, Tottenham and Edmonton, all the way to the City of London. In all, 44 people were killed and 135 injured by the German bombs. Another ten people were killed and fifty-five injured by falling anti-aircraft shells which exploded in the streets. In short, almost a quarter of the deaths and over a third of the injuries were a result of the British army, rather than the German air force.
Under the headline ‘SATURDAY’S RAID OVER LONDON; DANGERS OF THE STREETS’, a newspaper at the time reported an inquest into the death of one of those killed by artillery that day:
The Coroner for North-East London to-day held inquests upon nine persons killed in Saturday’s air raid. In the case of Simon Percival Noads, 32, export packer, the Coroner said the deceased was struck down near a railway station by a piece of shrapnel apparently from our own guns. It was stated that Noads was in the act of taking cover when he was hit in the chest and wounded in the region of the heart. A verdict of death by misadventure due to his being struck by a piece of shell fired at hostile aircraft was returned.
After bombing London, the German planes turned for home, heading east along the Thames. As a parting shot, they dropped a few remaining bombs on the docks in the Isle of Dogs. These caused no casualties and hardly any damage, other than a barge which was sunk in one of the docks. An anti-aircraft shell though, fired by the British defences, had a defective fuze. It soared thousands of feet into the air and then plummeted down and landed on Strafford Street, in the Millwall district of the Isle of Dogs, where it exploded on impact, killing four people and injuring seven more. They were the only victims of the air raid on the docks that day. All this was bad enough, but it was not the end of the casualties inflicted on their own side that day by the British artillery.
Not a single German aeroplane was hit by the British AA fire. A total of seventy-nine planes of the Royal Flying Corps took off across London and the Home Counties to try and tackle the raiders. One of the bombers was indeed shot down over the Channel, but most of the British planes found that either their guns jammed or that their machines were not powerful enough to climb as far or fly as fast as the Germans. One of these planes, a Sopwith 1½-Strutter belonging to No 37 Squadron, was hit by friendly fire. One of the anti-aircraft shells fired by the ground defences exploded near the plane, bringing it down with the loss of two lives. Both the pilot, 2nd Lieutenant J.E.R. Young, and Air Mechanic C.C. Taylor were killed.
This then was a fairly typical example of a German air raid on Britain during the First World War, over a quarter of the deaths caused not by German bombs, but by British shells. Shocking as this might seem today, when we are familiar only with the bowdlerized version of history which has had removed from it such inconvenient facts, it was widely known during the First World War that the artillery was causing such havoc and death. For it was not only the death toll which was considerable – the shelling of London was also wreaking material damage. During one raid alone, British fire had damaged 300 houses in London, half of them seriously. Londoners were perfectly well aware of what was happening. One man wrote to General Smuts, whose name was associated with the artillery barrage, saying:
As to your defence of London by this Infernal Barrage I do trust you will stop it, as it is a remedy worse than the disease. We have lived under showers of this odious shrapnel (purely home-made) and it is costly in life and property. A woman close to me was killed in bed thereby.
The woman mentioned in this letter was not the only fatal casualty that week of anti-aircraft fire. At least seven other Londoners had been killed by the same cause.
We seldom hear of this aspect of the defence of London from German bombers, either in the First or Second World Wars. Perhaps when a war is over we prefer to focus on the harm done by the enemy and minimize the injury and death inflicted by our own forces. This was not though how matters presented themselves at the time. Nobody was in any doubt during the air raids on London of the First World War that the use of artillery to defend against the aeroplanes was costly in property and life. Nobody living in the city at that time could have been oblivious to this – the evidence was all around them. On the evening of 25 September 1917, for example, a number of Gothas flew over London, dropping high-explosive bombs. Five people were killed during this air raid and greater or lesser damage caused to over 100 homes and business premises. Anti-aircraft artillery fired 2,690 shells, which partially destroyed 56 houses. One shell landed on a ship moored in the Royal Albert Dock, killing three men.
Another raid, also in September 1917, showed the extent of the danger from the artillery barrages. On the evening of Saturday 29 September, two Gothas and an even larger bomber, known as the ‘Giant’, flew over London and dropped twenty-six high explosive bombs and one incendiary. The bombs mostly weighed 50kg each and thirteen people were killed during the air raid. In addition to the bombs which fell though, the police in London also recorded that a total of 276 anti-aircraft shells fell on London at the same time. A swift calculation reveals something quite disturbing and unexpected. The total weight of the bombs dropped by the German aeroplanes was at most 1,300kg or 2,860lbs. Assuming that the shells which fell on London were from the 3in guns which were commonly being used at that time, firing a shell weighing 16lbs, means that the total weight of shells which fell on London that evening would have been 4,416lbs, far more explosives than were dropped by the enemy.
The scars from these air raids are incidentally still visible to this day in London. One of the city’s landmarks is Cleopatra’s Needle, an ancient Egyptian obelisk brought to London in the nineteenth century and erected on the embankment of the Thames. In September 1917 a Gotha dropped its bombs nearby. The stonework nearby is pitted and marked by the force of the explosions and the bronze sphinxes which flank Cleopatra’s Needle have jagged homes gouged right through them. Illustration 7 shows some of the damage to a sphinx.
Civilians were not the only casualties and nor were British fatalities consequent upon anti-aircraft fire restricted to the British Isles. Artillery was also being used on the Western Front to try and shoot down German aeroplanes, often those conducting reconnaissance missions over the British lines. At roughly the same time that the two air raids at which we have just looked took place, there was an unfortunate incident near the Belgian village of Wulverghem, where the 5th Battalion of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry were stationed. On 23 September 1917, German planes had been scouting over the battalion’s headquarters of the and attempts were made to discourage them by firing at the aircraft as they flew overhead. One shell failed to explode at the intended height, plummeted back to earth and, as ill luck would have it, sailed straight through the window of a hut at the spot known to the troops as ‘Canteen Corner’. There were fourteen men in the hut and two of them, Privates Henry Arthur King and Francis Wilcox, were killed immediately when it exploded in the room in which they were sitting. A total of twelve other men received injuries of varying severity. Just as with friendly-fire casualties in Britain, incidents such as the deaths of the two men at Wulverghem often tended to be lumped in with enemy action, both so the victims could be regarded by their families as heroes and also to avoid embarrassment to the army.
We have today forgotten about the days when our army was shelling London, and few now remember the incidents which I have discussed here. It tends rather to complicate history and most of us prefer simple and easily understandable narratives to those where we are killing our own people needlessly in this way.
I find myself astonished that I've not heard them before and that I don't hear anyone else mention them. I could be quite wrong but you seem to be the sole publisher.
A series of fatally reckless and stupid attempts to be seen to be doing something. Easy for me to say in hindsight supplied with this new information of course. Fascinating and horrendous too. Thanks as always for posting these inconvenient truths Simon.