While the Blitz and the Battle of Britain are well documented and constantly appraised, people rarely talk about the ‘First Blitz’, the Zeppelin bombardment in World War One. But Dr Hugh Hunt, a Cambridge professor of engineering and the presenter of Channel 4's documentary Attack of the Zeppelins has been investigating it. As a story, he believes it is quite extraordinary.
When the First World War bombing began, the threat of aerial bombardment even seemed more like a story than reality. In 1907, HG Wells had published a science fiction novel called The War in the Air. In it, the Kaiser of Germany launches ‘a huge herd of airships’ in a surprise bombing raid against the United States. Their largest craft, the Vaterland, Wells imagined as a 2,000 foot-long leviathan.
At the time, these were fevered imaginings. When Wells’s novel came out, airships had never yet been used in combat. Germany had military Zeppelins, but only two, whose size and speed were a quarter of the novel’s Vaterland.
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