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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.
