Sometimes, it seems that my at times dilettante research is a series of rabbit holes.

And so with my attempts to date a world war one propaganda postcard of a cartoon German soldier being pursued by a tank has led me to the little known story of German air raids on Britain.

While the story is almost forgotten today, the first world war saw the first bombing of civilian targets, both by Germany using airships and later large biplane bombers, and by both Britain and France using bombers.

Large bombers were not unknown at the start of world war one. Tsarist Russia was the first to build large biplane bombers, although they were mostly used to attack troop formations rather than civilian targets.

Germany began by using airships to bomb civilian targets in 1915. As attempts to bomb strategic locations they were mostly a failure, missing targets due to poor navigation and the general non manoeuvrability of the airships and poor bomb aiming technology.

However they were extremely effective in sowing fear among a civilian population unused to being attacked directly.

Raids carried on throughout the war but it was not until 1917 that German forces attempted a sustained series of attacks, perhaps because things were becoming increasingly difficult in Germany – there were food riots in 1916, and Ernesta Drinker records seeing increasingly longer queues for rations, in part due to the poor harvest in 1916.

By late 1916, the war had bogged down in the mud of Flanders to a bloody stalemate and had become a war of attrition. While the generals still talked in terms of military breakthroughs, the reality was that it was a war of attrition, and it was Germany, and its ally Austria Hungary, that were running out of resources and were increasingly unable to feed both their armies and civilian population.

It’s a sign of how short of materials Germany by 1916 that that year that the Reichsbank started to withdraw the cupro-nickel and copper small change (basically the copper 1 and 2 pfennig coins and the cupronickel 5 and 10 pfennig coins) replacing them with with aluminum 1 pfennig coins and iron 5 and 10 pfennig coins as the copper and nickel was needed for the war effort, leading to a chronic shortage of small change as they never managed to mint enough of the iron coins to replace the withdrawn cupronickel coins.

They withdrew the aluminum 1 pfennig after a year and never produced a substitute 2 pfennig coin.

The aim of the raids was to both dishearten the British population at large and to cause the British government to divert resources in terms of both aircraft and anti aircraft guns from the western front to defend London and the south east of England.

While, compared to World War 2, few people died as a result of the German air raids, they caused great disruption with at times more people sheltering in the London Underground than there were during the London Blitz of world war 2.

The Underworld – Walter Bayes (public domain via Imperial War Museum London)

Arrangements for the civilian population were initially uncoordinated, but with the increasing frequency of the raids, it became clear to the British government that they hadhhave not only a military response but also that they had to become more organised with regard air raid warnings and delegate local officials to help coordinate the response – in short not only to be seen to be doing something but to actually do something effectively.rit

The raids did not deliver much of an advantage to Germany, although they may have increased war weariness in the British civilian population, but whatever effect they had on the progress of the war was overshadowed by the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks suing for peace, allowing Germany to divert troops from the eastern front.

However, one can argue that the early experience of bombing raids helped in 1940 as it gave the British authorities a template as to how to manage the response to the immeasurably larger and effective air raids during the Blitz.