Part of Wings of War — From Zeppelin to Sixth Generation, our series on the great turning points of military aviation.

It is just after two in the morning on 3 September 1916, and the night sky over the fields north of London is on fire. Thousands of people — woken by the guns, standing in their gardens and on rooftops in their nightclothes — are watching a vast burning shape fall slowly out of the darkness, lighting the clouds orange for fifty miles around. And they are cheering.

What they are watching die is a German airship, brought down in flames over the village of Cuffley by a 21-year-old pilot named William Leefe Robinson. He had climbed his frail little biplane to 11,500 feet, emptied his guns into the monster’s flank with a new kind of incendiary bullet, and watched it catch. It was the first German airship ever destroyed over Britain, and within 48 hours Robinson had the Victoria Cross — the fastest ever awarded. For the terrified civilians below, it was the night the bogeyman finally bled.

The count’s impossible machine

The airship was the obsession of one man: Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, a retired German cavalry officer who became convinced that the future of flight belonged to rigid ships lighter than air. His first machine, LZ 1, lurched into the sky over Lake Constance in 1900 — a 420-foot cylinder of aluminium girders and hydrogen gasbags. It was fragile, underpowered and barely controllable, and most experts thought him a crank.

His obsession nearly ruined him. The turning point came in August 1908, when his airship LZ 4 was wrecked by fire after an emergency landing at Echterdingen, before tens of thousands of spectators. It should have been the end. Instead an extraordinary wave of national feeling swept Germany: ordinary people, moved by the old count’s persistence, sent in unsolicited donations — the “Zeppelin offering of the German people” — that within a day covered the cost of a new ship and eventually passed six million marks. The disaster, remembered as the “Miracle of Echterdingen,” turned the Zeppelin into a symbol of national pride and handed the count the fortune he needed to build a fleet.

He was not. Over the next decade the Zeppelin grew into one of the engineering marvels of the age: airships more than 600 feet long, driven by multiple engines, able to cross hundreds of miles and carry tonnes of load. When war came in 1914, Germany had something no other nation possessed — a fleet of giant aircraft that could fly all the way to England.

Terror from the unseen

The first airship raid on Britain came on the night of 19 January 1915, when Zeppelins bombed the Norfolk towns of Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn. It was the first time in history that civilians far from any battlefield were killed from the air in their own homes — and it caused a particular kind of horror. The raids came at night. The airships were invisible above the clouds. You could not see them, only hear the engines and wait. The British press, raging, called the crews “baby killers.”

Through 1915 and 1916 the Zeppelins came again and again, reaching London itself. Over the course of the war the airships flew some fifty-one raids against Britain, killing around 557 people and injuring well over a thousand — a small toll by the standards of the slaughter to come, but the psychological effect was enormous. Whole cities were blacked out night after night; people learned to dread clear, still evenings as “Zeppelin weather.” For the first time, a nation’s home front was also a target. War had slipped its old boundaries and floated up into the sky.

The hydrogen death-trap

For all their menace, the airships carried their own doom inside them: thousands of cubic metres of hydrogen, the most flammable gas there is. Early in the war, British fighters could empty an entire drum of ordinary bullets into a Zeppelin and watch it fly serenely on, the holes too small to matter. The breakthrough was ammunition designed to set the escaping gas alight — incendiary and explosive rounds. The moment a pilot could reliably ignite the hydrogen, as Leefe Robinson did over Cuffley, the Zeppelin stopped being a terror weapon and became a flying funeral pyre.

The Germans fought back by stripping their airships down to fly ever higher — the so-called “height climbers” that reached above 20,000 feet, into thin, freezing air that tormented their crews. But it was a losing game. As losses mounted, the airship campaign against Britain withered, and the Germans handed the job of bombing England to a new machine: the heavier-than-air Gotha bomber, whose first devastating raid fell on the seaside town of Folkestone in May 1917. The age of the war airship was already ending.

The airship’s strange afterlife

The military airship did not quite die with the First World War. In the 1930s the United States Navy built two of the largest aircraft ever flown, the USS Akron and USS Macon — rigid airships so big they served as flying aircraft carriers, launching and recovering their own tiny fighter planes in mid-air. Both were lost in storms within a few years, and the idea died with them.

And then there was the Hindenburg — the largest aircraft ever built, a flying ocean liner that crossed the Atlantic in luxury. When it burst into flames at its mooring in New Jersey in 1937, on live radio and newsreel, the 34 seconds of its destruction ended public faith in the airship forever. The future, everyone could now see, belonged to the aeroplane.

How Britain learned to kill them

Stopping the airships took years. At first Britain had almost nothing that could reach them: home-defence pilots clawed up into the freezing dark in flimsy biplanes, often unable to climb high enough, and when they did get close their ordinary bullets simply punched harmless holes in the gasbags. The answer was built from the ground up — a ring of searchlights and anti-aircraft guns around London, a proper chain of home-defence squadrons, and, decisively, new ammunition. British engineers produced three different special bullets — the explosive Pomeroy, the Brock, and the phosphorus-filled Buckingham — and loaded them in alternating mixes so that a single burst would both tear the gasbags open and set the escaping hydrogen alight. It was that mixture that let Leefe Robinson burn SL 11 out of the sky over Cuffley.

Even then the airships did not surrender the night easily. The Germans drove their fleets ever higher, and in October 1917 a force of raiding airships was caught by a fierce gale at altitude and scattered across France, several lost in a single night, blown helplessly off course in what became known as the “Silent Raid.” As for Leefe Robinson himself, the hero of Cuffley, his own war ended badly: shot down and captured in 1917, he endured rough treatment as a prisoner, came home broken in health, and died in the influenza pandemic on the last day of 1918, aged just 23.

What the Zeppelin left behind

The airship was a dead end as a weapon. But the idea it carried was not. In just a few years over the towns of England, the Zeppelin established the single most consequential principle of twentieth-century air power: that war could be carried, deliberately, to an enemy’s civilians, far behind the front, in their own beds. Everything that followed — the Gotha, the Blitz, the bomber fleets of the Second World War — was built on that foundation.

The cheering crowds at Cuffley thought they were watching the end of something. They were really watching it change shape.

Sources: Imperial War Museum; RAF Museum; Royal Aeronautical Society; standard histories of the WWI air raids on Britain.