Failing Assessments

The strategic bombing campaigns, that were largely aimed at France and the United States, were an attempt to convince the civilians populations of the high cost of war. In that respect they were terror raids, plain an simple. To be fair to the governments of the Confederate States and of Imperial Germany, they did do their best to restrict the target lists to the military and industrial. In the case of Joe Wheeler’s administration in Richmond, the limits of Zeppelin technology was simply avoided in discussions and a lot of nodding and winking was going on. In the case of Kaiser Wilhelm, he absolutely forbid attacks on civilian targets and was quite resolute that his orders be followed on the matter. The German high command, fully understanding the limits of their airships, got around this problem by simply lying to their monarch.

The fact was that navigation and bomb sighting was not up the task of what is called, in the modern world, surgical strikes. It is true that the airship crews were sent out to find and destroy military or economic targets. That was true of the attack on Philadelphia, witnessed by Roosevelt, in the early hours of New Years Day. The Confederate target, on that night, were the naval yards and the support structure around it. They easily spotted the city, from up high, due to the celebrations and the many lights that were on for that purpose. Unfortunately that was all they really could see, the lights. They dropped their bombs when they thought they were over the target, as per their navigational estimates. The pilots of the Confederate Air Forces were completely wrong.

What the Confederate flight crews did figure out, from the lighting beneath them, was the location of the Delaware River. Naturally, and in contrast to the land, the river was not lit and they had a good view of the outline, however, not a single bomb fell on the naval yards or, even in the city of Philadelphia. Most of their bombs landed on the eastern shore of the river in Gloucester City. Not a single military facility, or even factory, was hit. Most of the destruction was limited to civilian homes. Three days later this fact was well known to the crews who were given the best possible intelligence, all courtesy of William Randolph Hearst and his newspaper empire, that wrote and fanned the details of the attack for all that it was worth.

After the next set of raids on Cleveland, Pittsburg, and Indianapolis, the enflamed rhetoric from the newspapers abruptly ceased. That was because someone at Fort Lincoln had finally figured out that the newspapers were giving the Confederates something that any bombing campaign needed, bomb damage assessments. This squashing of news stories was only the first of many countermeasures, against the raids, that were in the pike. They were also one of the easiest.

One thing is very clear about the raids in North America. The US Army was caught completely off guard. Just the fact that it took them weeks to realize that the newspapers needed to be censured, is a clear indication of this and, also, it would appear as if they had no plans at all to deal with the problem. One would think that since they had already been subjected to the raid on Cincinnati, during the previous year, that someone might have considered such a move by the CSA, yet, this was apparently not the case. There was definitely panic at Fort Lincoln.

Ultimately, the US would have to adopt something that their allies had already developed. It does not speak well of the US Army on this subject when you consider the lethargic attitude of the French military in dealing with the airships, yet, somehow, the French had managed to produce a viable countermeasure before any serious raids had begun on their cities. Fortunately for the US, the conversion of an artillery piece to anti-aircraft gun was a fairly straightforward process even if the Americans ignored some hard won lessons that the French had already been taught.

One might consider that the main reason the US Army did not take the airships seriously was because they did not think them that big of a threat. From a technical stand point their risk assessment seemed to be valid enough in that even the large scale raids were not producing any significant damage to the wartime infrastructure but, the military planners suffered from some very fundamental, in the box, thinking errors in that they had never considered the fact that their civilian population would suddenly be in harms way or, at least, not to this degree. They had failed to consider that fact and had to come to grips with the primary purpose of having a military, to protect the civil population.

Of course, the rapid deployment of anti-aircraft batteries did little to solve this problem and, in fact, it made it worse. The airships were now forced to fly at higher altitudes and this made their already haphazard aim even more so. This did manage to give more protection to critical industry, rail lines, and military targets since now their chances of being hit were the same as anyone else’s, even if they were the primary targets of the raids. What this meant was that more bombs were going to fall on what the army was calling, in their official reports, “non critical targets.” A translation for this euphemism would be civilian’s homes and businesses. This much was understandable but, it was also not the only problem being caused by the countermeasures.

An intense survey of documentation, made after the war, seems to give serious credence to the claim that most of the damage, done from the raids, were not caused by Confederate bombs. Strangely enough, the best reports on this matter did not come from the army, but rather, a collage of insurance claims filed at the time. The army reports on the matter were, at best, vague in their assessments since they seemed to have an interest in keeping these incidents as such. The insurance companies were an entirely different matter since most policies exclude wartime damage from their coverage and quite a few people did their best to claim that their properties were damaged in other ways. This meant that the insurance companies went out of their way to prove otherwise and more than a few of these claims wound up in court.

The overwhelming opinion of the insurance adjusters was that most of the damage that they were seeing was not being caused by the Confederate bombs. They were, however, being caused by falling debris that was the result of artillery ordinance being fired at the Zeppelins. This might have become something of an issue at the time but, as these cases wound their way through the courts the US Government stepped in and offered aid to people who were left destitute by the attacks. Most of the court cases vanished and the story remained silent until well after the war.

In this matter, the US Army cannot be held completely accountable for the problem. The civilian populace of the US shares some blame here as well. It did not take long before it was realized that cities needed to be blacked out at night. Indeed, someone seems to have thought of it the very night of the Confederate raid on Philadelphia. There were several police reports filed, the next morning, claiming that a man, on horseback, was riding through the streets of Camden and shooting out porch lights with a revolver. While this incident seems anecdotal at best it does illustrate a problem that would plague the US for the rest of the war. People simply would not conform to the mass of regulations and city ordinances requiring black outs in urban areas. Apparently, being lined up in a Confederate bomb sight was not enough of a threat to convince a large number of people to put up new curtains or simply unplug their lamp.

In their defense, this was an entirely new situation that had never been faced before. It is quite clear, from a host of private correspondence, that people really had no idea what to make of these attacks. The ranges of attitudes about them were across the board and you had people who thought it all “humbug” and then others who were buying “bomb nets” for the roof of their home. In this much the Confederate war plan seems to have failed because it is quite clear they were hoping for a mass panic in the US and it never materialized. I think it is safe to say that these attacks seemed so fantastical for the time that they hardly felt real, even when explosions were going off across the street from your house.

To the credit of the US Military, however, it was only the army that was unprepared. The Navy was an entirely different matter. They had paid attention to what happened to the French and Italian fleets in the Ionian Sea. They quickly realized the threat this new technology would pose to their blockade of Canada and began preparing countermeasures almost before the smoke cleared in the Mediterranean Theater. That is quite possibly why they would even precede the French in claiming first blood and be the first to intentionally shoot down an airship.

Since mounting new weapon systems on a ship is relatively easy, since it is done all the time, and the Navy already had weapons capable of shooting high enough to, “bust a balloon,” it was not so hard for them to convert several destroyers to exclusively be anti aircraft platforms. It was also not very long before they encountered their first British airship at the mouth of the St Lawrence Seaway. The sudden and violent attack by the DD-405 must have come as something of a shock to the crew of the HMS Tully. The fire they received was not only reaching their altitude but, was extremely accurate. The Tully exploded in midair and nothing larger than the size of a breadbox reached the water.

Like most military technologies, the new airship war became a game of measure and countermeasure. Each side would try new things and their opponents would find a counter, causing the cycle to repeat itself. The ultimate result, that the Entente came to realize very quickly, was that the only way to stay in this game was to have an air fleet of your own. Before the end of 1901 this would be the case and every major belligerent would be deploying their own Zeppelins and bombing each others cities. The real issue remained and this was true for both sides. While they could all effect the bombing raids they had no real way of stopping them. The Zeppelins would always reach their targets even if the damage they did, once there, was minimal at best. Still, little things eventually add up to be big things and this had more than a few key people worried. That was how it all got started.