Willam Robinson VC

A few years ago I was astounded to find out that William Leefe Robinson was a distant relative of mine. He was my Grandmother’s cousin, son of a brother of William Robinson, my Great-Grandfather. Apparently my Grandmother had a piece of the Zeppelin in her care (it fell not far from her family home) but I’ve no idea where that might be now.

Here’s an account of the incident taken from “Hindenburg, an illustrated history” by Rick Archbold and Ken Marschall. A wee bit dramatic but interesting reading.

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The turning point came on September 2, 1916. From German navy and army bases sixteen airships took to the air, their chief target London. By now all limits on bombing of the British capital had been removed, beyond the proscription on historic buildings and royal palaces. The cream of the two airship corps would bring a fire storm to the enemy capital, or so Peter Strasser believed.

Ernst Lehmann, now in the brand-new LZ98, flew one of the thirteen airships to reach the target. As he aproached the city by way of the River Thames, he could see that London was already under attack: “The entire city lay under a luminous mist dotted everywhere with incessant flickering and flashes of bursting projectiles.” As he moved forward he noted that the enemy searchlights seemed more powerful and the ground guns bigger than on his visit the previous spring. The scene before him had an eerie beauty. “We could see many explosions on the ground, evidently from other ships, but they were hidden from view by the haze, bursting shells and searchlight beams. It was like hanging above a lighted stage in a theatre with the rest of the house darkened,” he later recalled.

The widespread haze would deceive him into thinking he was closer to his goal than he actually was. With artillery shells whizzing nearby Lehmann thought he was already over the London dockyards. He released his bombs, then dodged from cloud to cloud to evade the enemy searchlights. In fact, his explosives fell nowhere near the docks. Satisfied at what he believed to be a job well done, he entered a cloud bank, rose to 13,800 feet and headed for home.

Just before Lehmann found his final cloud cover, he was spotted by Second Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson in his single-engine BE2c biplane, the slow-moving night fighter that would prove to be the most effective weapon so far for combatting zeppelin attacks. In vain, Robinson spent fifteen minutes searching for the vanished zeppelin amidst the clouds. Then, in the glare of exploding shells he caught sight of another airship. This one would not get away.

He reached the giant without raising any answering fire, the airship crew had not detected him, then ran the whole length of the ship pumping one whole drum of incendiary ammunition into the hull. Like a whale oblivious to a school of minnows, the airship swam on. Robinson regained his altitude and attacked again, but again he saw no discernible result. “She might have been the Flying Dutchman for all the signs of life I saw,” he later commented.
For his third and final attack, Robinson positioned himself just behind the ship, below the huge cross formed by the horizontal and vertical stabilizing fins. Then he emptied a whole drum of ammunition into a small area of the hull, which immediately began to glow pink. The glow quickly spread forward until the entire interior was lit – a later pilot would describe a similar scene as resembling a huge Chinese lantern. Then, suddenly, the tail section burst into flames and the airborne whale began a slow death dive. The falling inferno lit up the countryside for sixty miles around.

Ernst Lehmann was leaning over the maps in the chart room of the LZ98 when a call from the bridge told him to look back at London. When Lehmann did so, he saw “a huge ball of fire,” perhaps forty miles behind him: “The flaming mass hung in the sky for more than a minute and we could see parts breaking loose and falling faster than the main body. Poor fellows, they had no chance at all when their ship caught fire.” (As a weight-saving measure, the wartime airships did not carry parachutes.)

The remainder of this account goes on to describe how the British defences, particular night-fighters equiped with incendiary ammunition, went on to inflict severe losses on German airships over the remainder of 1916, including the loss of the L31 commanded by the most famous of the zeppelin captains, Heinrich Mathy (who had opened the bombing campaign against London with a spectacular and remarkably destructive raid a year before on September 8, 1915). This was followed by a period of German technological ascendancy as new airships, capable of operating above the ceiling of the British defences, were constructed and brought into action. This in turn was countered by new British aircraft and this see-saw effect continued on throughout the war.

For his part, William Leefe Robinson was awarded the Victoria Cross and great acclaim.