Zeppelin Raid on
Naples!
Headline from March 13, 1918:
"Useless Barbarism—
Enemy dirigible bombs Naples"
When my mother-in-law told me many
years ago that she remembered Naples being bombed by
a German Zeppelin in the First World War, I was
skeptical. I knew that the Germans and English had
traded dirigible attacks during the Great War over
distances of a few hundred miles, but Naples was a
thousand kilometers from the enemy Zeppelin airfield
in Friedrichshafen, Germany. And a round-trip? It
was out of the question.
No, it wasn't. The old lady was right. Zeppelin
enthusiasts even today still speak of the
"legendary" German naval airship, the L59 —the
so-called "Africa Ship". L59 was not meant to join
the shorter-range fleet of German bomber blimps in
the north; she was meant as a long-range ship to
resupply troops in what was then the German East
Africa colony (present-day Tanzania). In that part
of the world, the daring German colonel, Paul von
Lettow-Vorbeck (from all accounts, a sort of
Lawrence of Arabia with a bit of Garibaldi and Jeb
Stuart thrown in), with a force of a few hundred
men, was tying down 130,000 British troops who might
better serve on the crucial battlefields of the war
in Europe.
Construction began on L59 (photo,
right) in Friedrichshafen, Germany, in August,
1917. This behemoth of the air (225 meters/740
feet long!) would have to fly from the airfield
in Yambol (in Bulgaria, a German ally in WW1), the southernmost
European airfield under German control,
all the way to the
Makonde plateau in east Africa.
After a shakedown cruise from Friedrichshafen to
Yambol in early November, L59 set out from
Bulgaria on November 21 with a crew of 22 under
the command of Kapitänleutnant
Ludwig Bockholt. Over Khartoum (in the Sudan), the
flight was aborted, apparently due to a message to
the ship to turn back because, said the message,
the German forces in Africa had just surrendered.
(The message was a fake, sent most probably by
British intelliegence. In reality, Lettow-Vorbeck
didn't surrender until late November of 1918, well
after the armistice in Europe.) Thus, what would
have provided a strategic and psychological boost
for Germany's war effort turned into simply the
first intercontinental airship flight, for after
returning to Yambol, L59 had covered almost 7,000
km (4,350 miles) non-stop in 95 hours,
an incredible, unique
feat at the time, and one that paved the way for
the global airship
flights of the 1920s and 30s.
L59 was then converted into a bomber Zeppelin to be
used in the Mediterranean against British targets,
for example, in Malta and Port Said, and against
targets in Italy. The airship went into battle
service in February, 1918.
The city of Naples was totally
unprepared for an attack. The city was not even
blacked out, for no one had seriously considered the
possibility of aerial bombardment. Zeppelin raids
such as those in northern Europe were already less
effective than they had been in 1915, when the first
Zeppelins had bombed London. By 1918, airships had
become increasingly vulnerable to improved
anti-aircraft artillery and to being shot down by
fighter planes. Also, there were, by that time, very
functional bomber airplanes. These planes, however,
couldn't reach Naples from Germany. And it was
implausible that a German airship could fly 1,000
kilometers over enemy territory, Italy, to attack
Naples.
Yet, L59, indeed, came in —but from the airfield
in Bulgaria (about 1,000 km away)— and on the night of March
11/12 bombed Naples. According to a German source,
the airship successfully bombed the naval port and
the gas works in Naples, as well as the steel mill
and port in Bagnoli.
It was a high-altitude attack, with L59 staying well
above 10,000 feet.
The Naples daily paper, il Mattino, devoted more than half
the front page (photo, above) the next morning to
the raid. The paper said that the raid had started
at one o' clock in the morning and lasted for about
40 minutes. In all, about 20 bombs had fallen. None,
according to the paper, had hit a military target;
all had fallen to the north of the port in the
center of town, killing 16 civilians and injuring
more than 40. The paper made no mention of a raid on
the steel mill in Bagnoli. Most of the rest of the
coverage is rhetoric about the barbarism of Italy's
WW1 enemies, Germany and Austria. Add Naples, said
the paper, to the list of heroic cities such as
London, Paris and Venice, all of which had had to
withstand such Teutonic savagery. In the days
following the attack, the paper reported that the
officer in charge of anti-aircraft defence in Naples
had been relieved of his command.
The raid on Naples was a
one-time affair. Less than a month later, on April
7, 1918, L59 exploded mysteriously in mid-air over
the straits of Otranto in the Adriatic. There was
speculation that it had been hit by "friendly fire"
from a German U-boot that had mistaken L59 for a
British airship. Some German reports of the day said
that the airship had been shot down by enemy fire.
Neither scenario seems to have been the case. The
exact cause, probably a technical mishap that ignited
the highly flammable hydrogen in the gas bags,
remains
unknown.
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