GERMAN BROADCASTS

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXII, Issue 193, 30 July 1932, Page 9

GERMAN BROADCASTS

“HOW I BOMBED LONDON” ZEPP. RAIDER'S NARRATIVE. PRAISES BRITISH AIRMEN. Memories of the air raids on England were revived by a broadcast talk, under the auspices of the 8.8.0., by a war Zeppelin commander, Kapitanleutnant a JD. Joachim Breitnaupt, who at the end of the war was captured following a raid and interned. “Some people,” he said, “may think that this talk is adding insult to injury, but that is not my wish. I do not wish to hurt your feelings ” He spoke of the hazards connected with the raids, and said that only a few airships existed at the end of the war. “Some people believe that Germany could have reduced whole cities to ashes by more definite and concentrated use of airships,” he said. “In my opinion that would have been impossible in 1914-15, when you had little anti-aircraft defence, and later on English flyers, by their excellent' bravery, greatly reduced the airship danger.”

A HAIL OF SHRAPNEL. Describing his first raid on London in the autumn of 1915, he said that he was captain of the Ll 5. They left Germany in the early evening, and arrived over England in the darkness. “About 8 p.m. we saw the Thames, which we recognised from her windings. We threw out all our ballast to gam the greatest possible height. We could make out several points like Regent’s Park and the Serpentine. We flew at 10,000 ft and were being shot at all the time. It is said my bombs did serious damage along the line from Hyde Park, Charing Cross, Strand, Lincoln’s Inn, Chancery Laue, Hatton Garden, Houndsditch, Aidgate and Limehouse. Our intended targets were the Admiralty and the Bank of England, but if we failed to hit them the newspaper quarter of Ludgate Hill did not seem less worth trying for.” For this raid he was awarded the Iron Cross (first-class). Kapitanleutnant Breithaupt went on to describe a second raid on England. The objective was Liverpool, .but he confessed that, according to British records, he only got as far as Burton-on-Trent.

HIS FINAL SALLY. Describing his last raid, when the Zeppelin, riddled with shrapnel, came down in halves in the sea, he said: “Over London. Every man was at his alarm post. Through the speaking tube came the message, ‘Hit in several places.’ 1 went to survey the damage. By a miracle we did not burst into flames. We could lighten the ship no more. All the ballast had gone. We set a course for home, but I realised that it was hopeless. We could not make it and would have to come down Could we reach the sea? Over the Thames Estuary we felt we were falling lower and lower. At last, 30 miles from the coast, we broke in two. 1 was m a gondola with two of the crew. The gondola was entirely submerged. One man never came up. The other had his teeth knocked out. I was dragged up into the ship.’’ The commander added that, having destroyed all the maps and secret documents, his thought was to make sure that the ship sank. He described how the crew clambered on top of the ship. “A trawler came up, and from it came a cry, ‘Go to hell,’ and the vessel steamed off.” Soon after four trawlers rescued them and took them to Chatham. They were the first Zeppelin crew to be captured. For the last two years of the war he was a prisoner of war at Donington Hall.

The commander paid a generous tribute to the skill and courage of the British airmen who fought so gallantly in combating the raids.