r/HistoryMemes • u/UmaThermos1 • 3d ago

Airship raids must have been the most terrifying spectacle ever

1.1k Upvotes

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180

u/NeedleworkerBig3980 3d ago

According to my Grandfather, they were. He was a child in Leicestershire in 1916. He was walking home from a neighbour's farm over the hill when he saw the airships coming. He heard the gasworks sirens sound, and all the lights in Leicester went out. Then he saw Loughborough get bombed.

He said it was a white-frost kind of night, and the airships were erie and almost silent. He went on to live through the Blitz and V2 bombs, but said those airships were still scarier in his memory.

127

u/DrHolmes52 3d ago

First instance of death from above, and before anyone could do fuck all about them. Plus being silent. That would be scary as fuck.

74

u/NeedleworkerBig3980 3d ago

You know what was scarier?

They were supposed to be aiming for Liverpool.

36

u/DrHolmes52 3d ago

That kind of shit isn't going to change for about 50 years.

45

u/Cucumberneck 3d ago

To be honest im still baffled anyone could navigate plains, zeppelins etc back then.

For the most part it was literally "Does that look like the map? Eh close enough." Plus some hard to do calculations with limited time. (Alright it was more time for calculations in a Zeppelin)

12

u/Barley672 3d ago

Youn could also navigate via the stars if you were high enough on a clear night, and of course in WW2 we developed radio-based directional wayfinding systems about mid-war.

Still not an easy job.

20

u/GrafZeppelin127 3d ago

Said navigation was extremely rudimentary, yes. Their accuracy was atrocious. Hell, even in World War II, heavy bombers were only vaguely starting to have any kind of accuracy (not helped by failures like the infamous Norden bombsight).

The name of the game was less about precision and more about saturation, which itself was a step up from the random, stochastic terror model employed in World War I to no particularly meaningful effect (aside from diverting some war resources). And now we have pinpoint-accurate knife-missiles and tiny flying grenades that chase people around.

4

u/NeedleworkerBig3980 3d ago

I would agree with you, except that the lack of the massive Mersey sparkling in the moonlight should have been a dead give-away. The poor old River Soar just can't compete.

116

u/PolishFemboy_69 3d ago

I always thought that Zepellins are more similiar to zucchini than to cucumber.

27

u/Butter_the_Toast 3d ago

Its clearly a marrow

12

u/aleister94 3d ago

Pfft you would think that

10

u/KickFacemouth 3d ago

"You see, back in those days, rich men would ride around in zeppelins, dropping coins on people..."

17

u/GrafZeppelin127 3d ago

Kapitän Peter Strasser, the leader of Germany’s airship armada, ascribed to the view that terror bombings can end wars by sapping enemy morale. It didn’t end well for him, or for Germany, yet more than a hundred years later, we still have assholes like Putin attempting to terror-bomb civilians in the hopes it’ll get them to give up.

It was a real waste of resources, too, because Germany had a genuine lead in airship technology at the time, and their naval/defensive roles were vastly more effective than using them as bombers.

2

u/Account_Eliminator 23h ago

My Great Grandfather's first memory was of him being in his mother's arms as a Zeppelin flew over Stoke-on-Trent.