WRECKED ZEPPELIN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21544, 16 January 1932, Page 11

WRECKED ZEPPELIN

FATAL THIRTEENTH RAID » SOUVENIR-HUNTER’S FIND. LONDON, January 6. How a souvenir-hunter withheld from the British authorities a book of immensely valuable secrets, obtained by him when a German Zeppelin was brought down near London during the war, is revealed after 16 years. It was the unlucky thirteenth voyage of the airship L 32 that saw its destruction in flames. The book shows it, blit the commander who staggered, dying, from the burning wreckage knew it, too. In September, 1916, L 32 and L 33 were brought down during a concentrated raid carried out by all the naval Zeppelins, in which 38 people were killed and 125 were injured. The original finder of the book is now dead, and it was obtained from his widow, who desires to remain anonymous. It appears that when the -man saw the Zeppelin falling in flames at Billericay, Essex, he hurried to the scene, and was one of the first to reach the blazing wreckage. He saw a man staggering out of the holocaust with his clothes on fire and his face blackened by smoke, and clasping a large book. Suddenly he pitched forward on his face and shouted three times in a clear,shrill voice, “Dreizehn” (thirteen). He was Commander Petersen, the only man of the crew to escape immediate death. Apparently as he jumped clear he remembered the superstition attaching to the number 13, and it was uppermost in his mind as he dropped dead. The book is the airship’s ballast book. It shows the distribution of the weights and the amount of gas, fuel, water ballast, and bombs carried on the 12 voyages, the record for the thirteenth being incomplete.