The Lance


   It was only a little over a month after the LZ-4 had made her first combat patrol, over the city of Nancy, that an even larger force, with much larger Zeppelins, penetrated deep into France. It looked to many, the Kaiser included, that Von Zeppelin had pulled off a miracle. The truth was that there was nothing magic about the sudden increase in the number of airships available to the German war machine. It had simply been foresight and careful planning. As the Germans had toyed with their prototypes, they were also setting up the machinery and organization, along with gathering the raw materials, to make many more. The only thing that held them back was a successful field test and, after LZ-4, they assumed that they had one.
LZ-4 would make three more combat missions before she was finally retired, scrapped, and her material reused to make other airships. While none of her missions resulted in anything that would alter the balance of the war, the Germans were gaining invaluable knowledge in powered flight and what to do with it. They were also taking every scrap of data, in flight characteristics, and putting it immediately to use. The engineers at their drawing boards, back in Bavaria, were quite often getting their data even before Schlieffen was getting his combat reports. Every new Zeppelin, that the factories were turning out, were much different and more advanced than the last one that proceeded it out the hangar door.
It seemed rather odd, at least too the civilian populace of France, that the French military virtually ignored the German Zeppelins. Every Zeppelin attack made far more headlines than it did damage so this is somewhat understandable. On the other side of that coin, and quite uncharacteristically, both Boulanger and his leading military commanders were in complete agreement on this matter. They considered the Zeppelins to be nothing more than a “German toy” and their effects on the front as being militarily negligible. So far, as the facts seemed to indicate, they were correct in their assessment.
The fact that, quite often, one airship looked completely, if not radically, different from another, seemed to have left the French General Staff with the impression that they were all being hand made and had no real central coordination. The fact that the bombing capacity and range were proving to be extremely limited gave the impression of impotency. So, for Boulanger and his advisors, it appeared as if the Germans were wasting their time and resources and they were more than welcome to do so.
What they failed to see was that the Germans were testing their weapon to see what it was really capable of. The French failed to see that the rapidly increasing numbers proved that these weapons were not being haphazardly produced. The single biggest thing they failed to see was, the future, and the potential of airpower. This was all despite the fact that France was also working on it’s own military air project. It was something that, so far, Boulanger had paid as little attention too as he did the zeppelins. The raid of May the 11th would change all of that for everyone. It’s ramifications would be felt globally.
It is fair to say that the military significance of the air raid on Paris was much the same as the earlier raids at the front. There was very little in Paris that would hamper the war effort in general and, because of this, many have labeled the attack as a terror raid. In some respects this is true but, the Germans confined their attacks to militarily significant targets, most of which were various ministry buildings. They had yet to single out or attack any factories because they did not believe that they could currently deliver enough damage to make it worth the effort.
Of course, two factors played into reasoning behind the label of terror attack. The first was the simple fact that only one Zeppelin actually hit it’s target. The Germans had learned a great deal about making bombs in the intervening month and were now setting up factories to manufacture ordinance specifically for a later generation of airship. On May 11th, they were still using artillery shells but, had learned how to begin modifying them to make for better accuracy. They were also using larger shells since even with the modifications, and the improved bomb sighting techniques, accuracy was still minimal at best.
The most serious improvement, and the one that gets the least attention, is the fact that the airships could even reach Paris in the first place. This was not only due to improved designs on fuel storage capacity and a general increase in engine performance but, German navigation skills, over unfamiliar terrain, were getting better as well. Still, they were not perfect and this seems to have been the main reason for the target selection of both Paris, and what to hit when they got there. The City was impossible to miss or mistake from the air. The targets selected were reasoned to be the most easily recognizable and biggest. Yet, despite this, almost all of the bombs missed their marks and most of those landed on civilian homes and businesses.
One might think that this was the reason for the terror label but, in fact, newspapers outside of France, almost entirely ignored the plight of the average Parisian. The terror label came from the one bomb that did hit and it likely found it’s mark simply because it’s target was impossible to miss. Most people were also completely unaware that the Eifel Tower was a legitimate military target even if it was far from an important one.
The tower was just over ten years old at this point and most had thought it would come down after the worlds fair it was built for. It seems hard to believe today since the tower has become such an iconic landmark but, in the 1890’s, it was at the center of a raging political firestorm. The simple fact was that a good number of Parisians considered it an eye sore and a few of those even went so far as to consider it an insulting monstrosity that was not only offensive to France but, even god. Strangely enough, the one group that harbored most of it’s detractors would be the one that saved it from the wrecking ball.
The French Army found a use for the tower. They had turned it into the single largest signal tower in the world. After the war broke out, huge semaphore flags were specifically manufactured for use on Eifel’s grand vision of peace. They were constantly being hoisted and lowered at the top and, with a good telescope, could almost be seen as far as the front lines. This was not exactly a military secret to anyone. It was just a dull little detail that the papers never picked up on and, as a result, almost no one outside of the French Army knew about it. Even pedestrians in Paris pretty much ignored the flags they saw flying from the tower. They certainly did not think about them when German bombs were falling on the city.
Fortunately for the tower, while it might be an easy target to recognize, it was an extremely difficult target to hit. There were sixteen German zeppelins that made the raid. Only thirteen actually reached Paris and, of those, three had been assigned to bomb the tower. One of those, never even got to a position of being able to release it’s payload. Winds and the other two Zeppelins kept getting in it’s way. They would eventually ditch their bomb on the way home.
The other two Zeppelins would unleash their full arsenal on the tower. They dropped over twenty high explosive shells that were converted munitions from a naval sixteen inch gun. They left a good number of horrific looking craters around the tower, that were highly photographed and widely distributed. It would be these craters that so horrified the civilian populations of the world. It was another great irony that the only bomb that actually hit the tower was virtually ignored because, like most of the ordinance, it failed to detonate.
Even if that bomb had gone off, it is very doubtful that it would have brought down the tower. It has even been speculated that the reason it buried itself in the ground, beneath the base, was because it hit some of the steel girders on the way down and that damaged the bombs ignition cap and spring. This will never be known for certain but, what we do know is that the tower itself was it’s best defense. The very nature of the tower makes it very difficult to actually hit a critical load bearing member and the skeletal structure allows for the concussive force of the blast to by pass anything vital.
Of course the Germans did not seem to care about this or, perhaps, they were simply unaware. There could also be another reason and what happened after the bombing seems to suggest this. After LZ-19 expended her ordinance, the captain of the airship wanted one of the huge semaphore flags, flying atop the tower, as a war trophy. The flag itself seemed to give him the very data he needed (wind direction) in order to maneuver alongside. At worst he figured he could get a piece of it and, if he was lucky, he could land some crewmen on the platform and steal the entire thing.
It did not quite go as planned. The French soldiers on the tower began shooting at LZ-19 as soon as it got within range and, this little bit of unnecessary bravado, almost cost Germany one of her Zeppelins. Despite the failure, of LZ-19, the little game of real life capture the flag indicates that the attack on the tower was more geared towards delivering a blow to the morale of the French populace than being a strike of military importance. If this is the case then it failed. The city of Paris had never truly been a center of support for either Boulanger or what most Frenchman thought of as “Boulanger’s war.” Once they were attacked, personally, that began to rapidly change.
Another sudden realization struck the civilian populations of the world and this was as true in Allied countries as it was in those of the Entente. Germany had invented a weapon that was a lance that could not only penetrate national defenses but, ignore them altogether. This weapon could strike right at the heart of any country. How long would it be before every nation possessed this technology?
Even the French General staff could no longer ignore the zeppelins. More importantly was the fact that they no longer ignored their own project, the railroad engineer Chanute’s attempt to build a heavier than air flying machine. It would seem that this aerial-plane, a name that most generals had a hard time understanding the origins of, was the logical defense against zeppelins. The real question that they were asking was, if the technology was even viable?
No one outside of the only two experimental airplane projects in the world knew the answer to that. In many ways, even those men did not. Chanute’s attempts to achieve sustained flight in his base of operations, near Lyons, had failed to deliver anything close. His counter part in the United States, Samuel Langley, had started out in Baltimore but, eventually relocated the American project to Wichita, Kansas. He seems to have been slightly ahead of Chanute in that his people had actually been able to get a prototype to stay in the air for all of twenty seconds, under it’s own power. The problem was that they had not been able to reproduce their success and were not even sure how they did it in the first place.
The sudden panicked calls on both Chanute and Langley stressed the urgency of the new situation and one that neither man was able to do anything about. At least in the case of Langley, he did receive a substantial boost in actual support and funding. He was also promised anything and anyone he needed to get the job done. The reaction of the American government was not misplaced either. The fears that this technology would find it’s way across the Atlantic were not just unwarranted, they were a little too late.