The Reading Warehouse

These are true stories about the Zeppelin airships that were

built to wage war, the men who flew them and those who shot

them down.

During the Great War, the German military unleashed a terrible

new weapon on the unsuspecting British population; the

Zeppelin. This airship was virtually silent and could travel at

heights beyond the reach of the first anti-aircraft guns before

dropping incendiary bombs indiscriminately on populated

areas causing many civilian casualties and creating a new type

of warfare that still exists today; the Air Raid. So feared were

these machines that they became known as 'the Baby Killers'.

But Britain was far from beaten and responded with

improvements in searchlight and anti-aircraft design which,

with heroic night flying by the fighter pilots of the Royal Flying

Corps, took the fight to the enemy. The civilian population,

including Nurses, Air Raid Wardens and the female operators

of the London Telephone Exchange, who refused to leave their

posts during the air raids to keep military lines of

communication open, played its part too. One man in

particular, Sir Charles Wakefield, the Lord Mayor of London

was determined to reward the courage of the first individual to

shoot down a Zeppelin on British soil with a substantial prize.

How he eventually discharged this debt of honour, despite

opposition from the military establishment exacerbated by

class discrimination, forms a fascinating background to the

story of the L15 Zeppelin and the Wakefield Gold Medal.