On 25 May 1917 the England Squadron’s Gothas, turned back from London by cloud, unloaded on Folkestone and the army camp at Shorncliffe instead. Around 95 people were killed, many of them civilians queueing outside shops. It was a brutal introduction to a new kind of war, and a warning of what was coming to the capital three weeks later.

Fourteen or so Gothas reached London on the morning of 13 June 1917 and bombed at will. Around 160 people were killed and over 400 injured, the highest toll of any air raid on the city during the war. The bombers turned for home almost untouched. The sight of enemy aircraft over London in broad daylight, unpunished, did more political damage than the bombs themselves.

The bomb passed through the upper storeys of the Upper North Street School in Poplar and burst in an infants’ class on the ground floor. Eighteen children died and many more were injured. The funeral drew huge crowds, and the deaths became a symbol of the raids’ cruelty and of the government’s failure to defend the capital. It is remembered as one of the most poignant civilian tragedies of the British home front.

On 7 July 1917 another daylight formation struck London. This time defenders were up in numbers, but coordination was poor and the Gothas again escaped with light losses. The raid confirmed that piecemeal defence was not working and hardened the case for a unified command. Squadrons were recalled from the Western Front, to the dismay of commanders in France who needed every aircraft.

From September 1917 the England Squadron flew mainly at night, using moonlit periods for navigation. Night raids were less accurate but far harder to intercept, and they prolonged the campaign into 1918. Londoners took to the Underground stations for shelter in scenes that prefigured the Blitz of the next war. The psychological effect of repeated night alarms, sirens and blackouts was out of all proportion to the tonnage dropped.

The arched tunnel through the Gotha’s rear fuselage let its rear gunner fire down and back at aircraft climbing beneath the tail, the classic blind spot of every large bomber. British and Commonwealth pilots learned to respect it. A slow, ungainly bomber that could shoot at what was under it was a far tougher target than its performance figures implied, and the tunnel is one reason the Gothas were not swept from the sky as quickly as their speed suggested they should have been.

Nose-heavy, with its engines set well back and a tendency to nose over, the Gotha was notoriously difficult to land, especially at night and when tired crews returned from a long raid. Later variants added an auxiliary nose wheel to reduce the risk of tipping. A large share of the Gothas lost during the England campaign were destroyed in accidents and crash landings rather than by British guns or fighters, a sobering reminder of how dangerous early aviation was even without an enemy.

The raids were flown by Kagohl 3, the unit remembered as the England Squadron, based around Ghent in German-occupied Belgium. From there the Gothas had just enough range to reach London and return, weather permitting. The squadron’s story is one of ambition stretched to the limit of the machines: long over-water flights, uncertain navigation, and the constant threat of running out of fuel or being caught by the weather on the way home.

So closely was the type identified with the raids that Gotha became the generic British term for any large German bomber. The far bigger Zeppelin-Staaken R-planes, the Riesenflugzeug Giants that flew some of the same raids, were routinely called Gothas by the press and public. The name outlived the aircraft: for a generation, a Gotha meant the threat from the sky.

Germany also fielded the Riesenflugzeuge, giant multi-engined bombers such as the Zeppelin-Staaken R.VI, which flew a number of raids on Britain alongside the Gothas and carried heavier single bombs. They were far fewer in number and are a story in their own right; this page is about the Gotha, the aircraft that carried the weight of the campaign and gave it its name. But it is worth remembering that the Gotha was the workhorse of a broader effort, not the whole of it.

Under the pressure of the raids, Britain created the London Air Defence Area, coordinating fighters, anti-aircraft guns, searchlights and an observer network into a single system. Pilots flying Sopwith Camels and S.E.5a fighters gradually made the daylight sky too dangerous for the Gothas, and night defence improved through 1918. The organisation and doctrine built to stop the Gothas became the direct ancestor of the integrated air defence that would win the Battle of Britain in 1940.

By mid-1918 the raids had largely petered out as losses mounted and priorities shifted. In all, the German aeroplane raids on Britain killed roughly 850 people and injured close to 2,000, figures that vary by source and should be read as estimates. The physical damage was slight next to what aircraft would do in later wars. The lasting legacy was strategic and institutional: a new independent air force, a template for air defence, and a permanent lesson that no city was now beyond reach.