From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 23 January 1915:
WE have written elsewhere of the raid by German airships on Tuesday night, but may mention here the bare facts. The airships, of which there were apparently three, were seen at 1.30 in the afternoon off the Dutch coast, and they must have reached England after dark. Their presence was unsuspected till bombs began to fall on Yarmouth about 8.30. Considerable damage was done to houses, but some of the bombs did not explode. One bomb actually went right through a house without injuring anybody. A men and a woman, however, were killed. Later King’s Lynn was visited by the airships, which on the way dropped bombs near Brancaster, Heacham, Snettisham, and Sandringham. Hunstanton escaped, having probably been overlooked as it was in darkness. It is suggested that Heacham was mistaken for Hunstanton. At Lynn a boy and a woman were killed, and about one hundred and fifty houses were damaged. It cannot, of course, be pretended that any of the towns or villages bombarded were fortified places. At Lynn there is no gun of any kind, and not even a Coastguard station.
From ‘The Air Raid’:
If the fear of a Zeppelin raid threw the people of this country into a condition of panic, it might be worthwhile for the Germans to keep us in a state of perpetual alarm. Such a condition might conceivably incline us to make peace on easy terms. Again, by weakening the national spirit, panic-producing raids might interfere with our preparations for attacking Germany.
It is obvious, however, to the whole world that even on the East Coast, and in the places most likely to be affected by future air raids, such as London, Portsmouth, Southampton, Dover, Hull, and the big Northern towns, people do not display the slightest indication of panic. On the principle that the unknown or the unexperienced is the thing most dreaded, one might have supposed that the population of London would be more excited than that of places like Yarmouth and King’s Lynn, which now know what it is to have bombs falling from the sky in the darkness, and have found that it means very little.
Yet the people of London, and, indeed, of the whole of these islands, are fully prepared for an air raid, and, strange as it may seem, a great many of them, probably the majority, though of course they would not say so, would in their hearts like a raid to come. They feel that there is something a little humiliating in knowing nothing of the horrors and realities of war, while all Belgium, and very much of France and Russia, are suffering so terribly in the common cause. They feel it a kind of reproach that any one should be able to say to them: “You know nothing of the miseries of the struggle, but sit at ease as if you were in the stalls of a theatre watching the agonies of the world.” Of course, such a temper is in reality foolish and quixotic, for, bomb the Germans never so fiercely, and be their airships never so daring, what this country can suffer from their raids cannot by its nature be comparable to what is experienced by one village in Belgium, Poland, or France that is occupied by German troops. Sudden death by bomb is a light thing compared to the degradation of the man dragged off to be shot as a hostage, or of the woman whose home is held by drunken soldiers against whose deeds there is no appeal. It is quite certain, then, that no one hero is going to show panic, even if the Zeppelins become frequent visitors, and if the destruction by the raiders is a thousand times more terrible than that wrought on Tuesday night in Yarmouth and King’s Lynn.
Curiously enough, the practical impossibility of doing anything to resist attack from the air prevents anxiety. The ordinary man and woman feel about such attacks just as they feel about lightning. The “all dreaded thunder stroke” cannot be averted by any human agency, and therefore we all accept it as part of life—a prick against which it is useless to kick. So now with the Zeppelins. Since we know that it is impossible or very difficult to destroy them either by anti-aircraft guns, or by launching a counter-attack by our own aircraft, when they seek the curtain of the night, we have just got to grin and bear it.
Two practical results are certain to follow from the raid. The first is a greater determination than ever to end the war by the only way in which it can be ended—by the creation of an army which in co-operation with our allies will he able to break through the German resistance on land. The raid will either put such vigour into the voluntary system that there will be no need to talk about compulsion for another six months, or else, which is quite as likely, it may very greatly hasten the time when compulsion may be adopted as the only just and equitable way of imposing upon all the obligation which all are beginning to feel—the obligation of defending their country under arms.
The second thing the Zeppelin raids will undoubtedly do for us is to make this country realize that we cannot be content with the command of the sea, but must add to it the command of the air. Without the command of the air that insular position which has been the secret of our whole strength and free- dom as a nation will be imperilled, if not lost. The command of the sea will, of course, still be essential to us, but it will not be maintainable unless there is added to it the command of the air. No doubt it will be a long time before invasion in force by aircraft is possible; but no one who remembers what the development of aircraft has been during the last six years, and still more in the last six months, will doubt that in ten years from now he who commands the air will command the sea, and that no island will be an island for naval and military purposes unless its people possess air fleets powerful enough to drive off and destroy the aircraft of their enemies.
Comments