The Incredible Tale of History’s Only Real Sky Pirates

Ah, pirates! As fellow YouTuber The History Guy so famously stated: don’t all good stories involve pirates? For hundreds of years, these raiders of the waves have struck fear into the hearts of sailors and captured the popular imagination with a romantic image of freewheeling, swashbuckling adventure. But while the world of fiction abounds with tales of pirates commandeering all manner of vehicles – from airships to spaceships – real-life piracy has largely been confined to the high seas or the seedier corners of the internet. But in April 1917, at the height of the First World War, a German naval zeppelin did something rather unique in the history of aviation. This is the badass story of history’s only true sky pirates.

When the First World War broke out in August 1914, the state of the art in aviation technology was the zeppelin. Named after Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, who began perfecting the technology in 1900, zeppelins were rigid airships with aluminium frames held aloft by cells filled with buoyant hydrogen gas. Though often dangerous to operate in heavy winds and prone to bursting into flames, zeppelins could fly higher, farther, and carry much heavier loads than the relatively primitive heavier-than-air craft of the time, making them nigh-unstoppable weapons of war – at least at first. Strangely, it was the German Imperial Navy and not the Army who operated the largest and most effective zeppelin fleet of the war. This was largely due to the relentless leadership of Kapitän zur See Peter Strasser, Germany’s main architect of zeppelin warfare. Another factor was the blockading of the German High Seas Fleet by the British Royal Navy, leaving zeppelins as the Imperial Navy’s only means of striking back at the enemy.

At first, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s blood ties to the British Royal Family made him hesitant to launch air raids against the United Kingdom. But in January 1915 he changed his mind and authorized a massive strategic bombing campaign against southern England to destroy vital war industry and demoralize the British populace. The first of these raids took place on January 19, 1915, when two zeppelins – the L.3 and the L.4, dropped high-explosive and incendiary bombs on Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn, destroying a handful of buildings and killing four people. While the damage inflicted was minor, the raid had a profound psychological impact on the British people, who had until that point considered their island nation immune from enemy attack. British propaganda dubbed zeppelins “Baby Killers” and decried them as symbols of Teutonic barbarism. But worse was yet to come. On May 31, 1915, German zeppelins attacked London for the first time, setting 41 fires across the city, killing 7 civilians and injuring 35. This was later followed by a September 8 raid which killed 71 and injured 128.

However, the “Baby Killers’” reign of terror was short-lived. Right from the start, long-range zeppelin raids against the British Isles were precarious affairs. For one thing, missions could only be flown during two narrow windows in the early spring or late fall; summer nights were too short for missions to be completed under the cover of darkness, while winter weather made flying unacceptably dangerous. Mechanical breakdowns often forced many raiders to turn back, while fog and clouds made navigation difficult, causing zeppelins to miss their targets by miles. And while initially their altitude made zeppelins largely untouchable, Entente defensive technology quickly caught up, and following the introduction of higher-performance fighter aircraft and machine guns firing incendiary ammunition, from late 1916 onwards increasing numbers of German raiders began going down in flames. In response, the Germans developed more advanced “height climber” zeppelins capable of flying above the 13,000 foot ceiling of Entente fighters, but this tactic came with its own problems, including bitter cold and oxygen deprivation that could completely incapacitate a crew. Worse, extreme altitudes made navigation and bomb aiming even more difficult, rendering the height climbers largely ineffective. For this reason, in 1917 the German Army abandoned zeppelins in favour of bomber aircraft like the Gotha G.IV, which were faster and harder to shoot down than their lumbering lighter-than-air brethren. Meanwhile, naval zeppelins were largely relegated to flying reconnaissance patrols over the North Sea.

So it was that in the early hours of April 23, 1917, the German zeppelin L.23 took off from the Imperial German Navy airship base at Tønder, Denmark, under the command of Kapitänleutnant Ludwig Bockholt. Heading southwest at an altitude of 1,000 feet, the L.23 soon reached the Dogger Bank off the Dutch coast, where it encountered a large fleet of foreign ships. Bockholt ordered the crew to prepare for action, but the ships were soon identified as neutral fishing boats, all flying the appropriate identification flags. But among the various steamers, lookouts spotted an anomaly: a large schooner sailing west. As a crew member identified only as “Petty Officer K” later recalled in 1934:

“The telegraph apparatus passed the word round: ‘Full speed ahead with full throttle!’ We wanted to overhaul that schooner because such a craft in such latitudes was bound to be an object of suspicion. Our propellers hummed as we approached our quarry. Through our binoculars we saw that her crew were getting her boats out and making ready to abandon ship. What did it all mean? Then we noticed that the men down below appeared in a mighty hurry to get their boats out. Very curious, it seemed. One of the boats was ready in the water. The remainder of the crew were apparently in too much of a hurry to let the next boat down in orderly fashion; they simply bumped it into the water, scuttled into it head over heels and began pulling away from the schooner as if Old Nick [the Devil] himself was after them.”

Suspecting that the schooner was carrying contraband cargo to Britain, Bockholt ordered the L.23 to circle the ship and dropped a bomb in the water as a warning. Then, as Petty Officer K recalled:

“…the adventurous idea took shape in our heads. What an opportunity, we thought, to make a prize. That would be something to sign a song about afterwards. But obviously the business was not without its risks. It was extremely risky…it meant landing in the water with a wind velocity of 3 to 4 metres per second. That was a feat no naval airship had ever performed of its own accord under war conditions. But the…idea had run like wildfire round the ship. Several members of the crew volunteered to board the chopper. The skipper nodded his consent. ‘So, come on, boys! Get a machine gun ready to take with us!’And then we heard an order issued that was never before and never afterwards given on an airship. ‘Helmsman, prepare to board our prize!’

As the helmsman spiralled the L.23 down towards the schooner, nearly the entire crew volunteered to join the boarding party. However, only three men could be spared, and lots had to be drawn, with the final boarding party consisting of Bernhard Wiesemann, chief mate Ernst Fegert and chief mate Friedrich Engelke. The party was armed with a single machine gun, while the leader, Fegert, carried a flare pistol. Meanwhile, the helmsman succeeded in bringing the L.23 down over one of the lifeboats, from which a member of the schooner’s crew identified the ship as the Norwegian vessel Royal, carrying mining timbers to West Hartlepool. Satisfied that the ship constituted a valid war prize, Bockholt ordered a rope ladder lowered and the boarding party to descend into the lifeboat.

“From the control-car we shouted to the men in the boat – the captain and helmsman were in the second boat, which was pulling away for dear life – to tell us their nationality and destination again. Then we began to climb down from the cabin into their boat, and all the tome they stared at us as if we were ghosts from another world. [Then] something happened which in our hustle and bustle we had forgotten to allow for. The loss of three men’s weight had made the L.23 so much lighter that she suddenly rose into the air and sailed off…luckily our helmsman had the light-pistol hanging round his neck. It was a fearsome-looking monster, but it was the only weapon we had, and the prisoners in the boat were not exactly well-disposed towards us.”

Meanwhile, the crew of the L.23 flew over to the second lifeboat and ordered its occupants by megaphone to row back to the schooner.

“Apparently they did not at once make up their minds to obey, because we suddenly heard the warning ‘tack-tack-tack’ of a machine gun from the airship. Then the second boat’s crew thought they had better do what the L.23 told them.

A couple of minutes later they were all on board again. We locked the captain and helmsman in their cabins, set the sails that had been braced back, and steered a course for German waters… Our helmsman ordered the crew aft, where he told them that their schooner was the lawful prize of a German man-o’-war, and that they were now under martial law. To emphasize the effect of his words he loaded the harmless light pistol before their eyes and said: ‘At the first sign of mutiny I’ll blow the boat sky high and send you all to heaven. Got that into your heads?’ I never yet heard of a ship being sunk by a light-pistol, but the look of the think fairly put the wind up those Norwegians. They told us through a spokesman that they were ready to obey our helmsman’s orders. We had to take the precaution of battening them all below hatches except their helmsman and look-out man because of our lack of arms.”

However, the small prize crew struggled to control the ship, and were forced to release the crew. During the voyage back to Germany, a member of the boarding party attempted to cut away the lifeboats, which were being towed behind the Royal. He was only stopped by the Norwegian helmsman, who rather reasonably asked what would happen if the ship struck a mine – of which there were thousands planted around the North Sea.

On the evening of the 24th, the Royal encountered a small flotilla of German destroyers, who approached to investigate the strange intruder. Upon being told how exactly the schooner fell into German hands, the destroyer crews were incredulous, with Petty Officer K recalling:

“I believe those sailormen took us for the Flying Dutchman himself.”

Then, after 43 hours of sailing, the Royal reached the lightships at the mouth of the Elbe estuary:

“… regular prize-crew came on board, all armed to the teeth. But we were seamen enough not to want to turn our prize over to them without a ‘by your leave’; that would not have suited us at all, and the end of the business was that we sailed her ourselves right into Cuxhaven.

And there were were met by no less a person than the chief of the airship service in person, who took us back to Nordholz in his own car. When we got back, we celebrated our success by putting inside us enough liquor to float our prize.”

The Navy impounded and later old the Royal, which would serve with various shipping companies until 1924 when it was sold for scrap. The L.23’s capture of the Royal quickly became the stuff of legend, and did much to bolster the flagging morale of the airship service. However, the German High Command saw the exploit as unnecessarily risky, and admonished zeppelin crews not to repeat it. The crew of the L.23 remain the only men to have captured another craft entirely from the air, and are thus history’s first – and thus far only – bona fide sky pirates.

But the story doesn’t quite end there, for both the L.23 and her captain would go on to play further pioneering roles in aviation history. In late 1917, the German Army launched Operation China Show, an ambitious attempt to resupply German troops fighting in Southeast Africa by zeppelin. From the first dat of the war to the very last, Generalmajor Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, commanding a small force of imperial Schutztruppe and native African Askaris, waged a brilliant guerrilla campaign in what is now Burundi, Rwanda, and Tanzania, using ambush and hit-and-run tactics to outfox the some 300,000 British, Belgian, and Portuguese sent to destroy him. These legendary exploits earned von Lettow-Vorbeck the nickname The Lion of Africa. However, by late 1917 his forces were running dangerously low on ammunition and other supplies, and the German High Command cast around for a means to keep him fighting. The Royal Navy’s command of the sea made resupply by ship impossible, while Southeast Africa – 6,400 kilometres from friendly German territory – was far beyond the range of any contemporary heavier-than-air craft. But a zeppelin just might make it.

The craft chosen for the flight was the brand-new L 59, which was loaded with 15 metric tonnes of supplies for von Lettow-Vorbeck’s army. As the zeppelin could not be supplied with hydrogen for a return journey, upon reaching its destination the craft would be dismantled and every last part recycled, with the outer covering being used for tents, the aluminium frame for radio towers, and so on.

Between the 3rd and 4th of November, 1917, the L 59 was flown by chief pilot Hugo Eckner from the Zeppelin factory in Friedrichshafen to Yambol, Bulgaria, the southernmost air base in the Central Powers’ sphere of influence. Command of the craft then passed to Ludwig Bockholt, who, after a number of failed attempts due to poor weather finally succeeded in getting airborne on November 21. From Yambol, the L 59 flew southeast over what is now Turkey, crossing the African coast near Mersa Matruh, Egypt, the following day. Despite numerous difficulties including engine trouble and turbulence that nearly caused a crash, the zeppelin carried on south, reaching the Sudan by the 23rd. However, some 201 kilometres west of Khartoum, the L 59 received a message from Germany announcing that von Lettow-Vorbeck had surrendered and ordering Bockholt to turn around and return to base. L 59 arrived back at Yambol on the morning of November 25, 1917, having travelled 6,800 kilometres over 95 hours.

British Intelligence would later claim that the recall signal was faked by Entente forces. In reality, the message was genuine, but had been garbled in translation on the way from Southern Africa to Germany. Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s forces had not, in fact surrendered, but rather had retreated from the Mahaenge flatlands in Tanzania to more mountainous terrain where the L 59 could not have safely landed. Indeed, von Lettow-Vorbeck was the last German commander to surrender at the end of the war, having never been defeated or captured in battle. And while the epic flight of the L 59 was ultimately unsuccessful, it nonetheless set an endurance and distance record for military airships that still stand to this day. As for her captain, Ludwig Bockholt, his career – and life – would come to an end on April 7th, 1918 when the airship LZ 104 crashed into the Strait of Otranto during an attack on Malta.

Upon Bockholt’s departure to command the L 59, command of the L.23 – history’s only aerial pirate ship – passed to Oberleutnant zer See Bernhard Dinter. Unfortunately, his tenure would be short-lived, for on August 21, 1917, the L.23 was shadowing the Royal Navy’s First Light Cruiser Squadron off the Danish coast when they were suddenly attacked by a short-range Sopwith Pup fighter. Dinter was baffled, for there were no Entente airbases anywhere within range. Unbeknownst to him, the aircraft, flown by Lieutenant Arthur Smart, had actually taken off from platform atop a gun turret on the cruiser HMS Yarmouth – the first time in history an aerial strike had been launched at sea. Catching the L.23 completely by surprise, Lieutenant Smart maneuvered into position 3,000 feet above and behind the zeppelin and moved in for the kill:

“I now realised the time had come. I pushed forward the control stick and dived. The speed indicator went with a rush up to 150 m.p.h….The roar of the engine had increased to a shrill scream while the wires were whistling and screeching in an awful manner….At 250 yards and at the same height as the Zeppelin, I flattened out slightly and pulled the lever which works the fixed machine-guns….I had just time to see about half a dozen [incendiary bullets] enter the blunt end of the Zeppelin, and a spurt of flame, before my very soul froze with the thought that in my eagerness to aim the gun, I had waited too long and couldn’t avoid a collision. Spasmodically I jammed the joystick hard forward and my heart seemed to come into my mouth in the absolute vertical nose dive which followed.”

The L.23 went down with all hands, with the top gunner initially managing to parachute away but drowning in the sea soon after . As for Lieutenant Smart, the most harrowing part of his mission was yet to come, for there was no way for him to land back aboard HMS Yarmouth. Instead, he would have to ditch in the sea:

“This was my first attempt at coming down in the sea in a land machine, but instinct told me that at all costs I must hit with practically no forward way on whatever to avoid turning head over heels…The machine lost all flying speed and dropped like a stone, hitting the water with a nasty jerk which would probably have meant broken bones had it been on mother earth. The destroyer was alongside in a short time but not before the nose of the machine had sunk and left me just hanging on to the tail.”

Smart’s exploits won him the Distinguished Service Order and the French Croix de Guerre, and dramatically demonstrated the potential of naval aviation. Less than a year later on July 19, 1918, Smart would participate in a similar raid on the zeppelin base at Tønder, which destroyed the LZ 99 & LZ 108.

For all the massive resources the Germans poured into the zeppelin program, the results were less than impressive. Between early 1915 and late 1917, the zeppelin service conducted 51 raids over the British Isles, dropping 196 tonnes of bombs and losing 77 of their 115 machines while killing 557 British civilians, injuring 1,358, and inflicting £1.5 million in damage. But while the bombing campaign had little effect on the course of the war, it marked a major turning point in the history of warfare. No longer were the British Isles – or civilians anywhere – safe from the ravages of modern warfare. The scourge of the “Baby Killers” would still be fresh in Britons’ minds when, only 20 years later, the skies over southern England filled once again with the foreboding drone of German bomber aircraft.

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