110 years ago today, January 15, 1915 (December 1, 1914 in the lunar calendar), German Zeppelin airships bombed Britain for the first time. The earliest airships were invented by the German Count Zeppelin 1900. The Zeppelin airships served as important commercial flights on both sides of the Atlantic. After the outbreak of World War I, the German Army and Navy established their own airship fleets. On the night of August 5, 1914, the Zeppelin airboat Z-6 successfully bombed Fort Liege in Belgium. On January 15, 1915 (also known as the 19th), German airships began to bomb London, England, targeting military facilities in the lower reaches of the Thames and along the coast. In the middle of the night, Zeppelin 238 flew over London and dropped 150 bombs in 10 minutes, causing 41 fires and causing 42 casualties, but the results were not great. The British immediately strengthened London's air defense capabilities. By the end of the war, London had been attacked by airships five times, while Germany had lost many airships. The German Zeppelin spacecraft began air strikes on London in January 1915, but achieved only sporadic results. Their mission was to fly over major British cities and drop bombs in an attempt to force the government to withdraw troops and weapons from France to defend Britain. On the night of May 31, London was bombed for the first time by the LZ-38 spacecraft commanded by Captain Linnatz. The searchlight cannot reach a spacecraft flying very high. German bombs killed seven people and injured thirty others, and damaged some buildings in residential and commercial areas. Linnatz proved to be a man who does his word. During the previous attack, he failed to fly to the capital, and the attacker dropped a piece of paper warning: "You British. We have been here and will come again. Surrender or die. German. This period is known as the "Zeppelin Panic". However, the fear that the Germans hoped for failed in 1915 for the same reason as twenty-five years later: the British as a nation cannot panic. Moreover, the sadistic ability of Zeppelin is offset by their inherent disadvantages: Zeppelin can only fly in the most favorable weather. Moreover, the German High Command believed that their Zeppelin spacecraft, which flew higher than aircraft, was beyond the reach of British fighter jets. In fact, these "super weapons" have no defensive capabilities at all. Chasing aircraft cannot reach the height of a hard spacecraft, but they can easily fill it with incendiary bombs before the giant spacecraft can fly high to a safe altitude. Any touch of Mars with very flammable hydrogen gas would turn the spacecraft into hell, melting even the aluminum frame. Large spacecraft cannot remain stable in high winds. Eleven Zeppelin spacecraft flew for London on the night of October 20, and three never returned. Strong winds destroyed them. A spacecraft dropped bombs without effect and was blown towards France, where it was knocked down by the fire of anti-aircraft weapons. Another ship was blown out of control after dropping a bomb on Piccadilly Circus and crashed in southern France. The third ship was blown through the French forest by gusts, cutting off the front pod and its crew. It was then blown high into the sky and was finally seen losing control over the Mediterranean Sea. Initial defenses against the Zeppelin spacecraft showed that British authorities did not take them seriously. The original anti-aircraft weapons were all upward-aiming rifles and machine guns. No one believed that a plane equipped with machine guns could destroy this giant in the sky. Tactics are developed through trial and error. Attempts were made to fly to the Zeppelin spacecraft and drop small bombs, but the bombs often rolled away from the spacecraft. British intelligence never learned before the war how the Zeppelin spacecraft was built. At some point after the bombing of London, the British believed, for no logical reason, that each Zeppelin spacecraft had a thick layer of inert gas, perhaps nitrogen, between the outer and inner layers, and therefore could be fire-resistant. They were confused again when their initial bombing attempt failed to explode the spacecraft. Later, offensive aircraft were equipped with sixteen pounds of sharp-tipped incendiary bombs, and the results were different. At the same time, incendiary bombs were invented, and many of the Zeppelin spacecraft that flew to London were gone. Spaceships fell like burning firewood. Lieutenant Leaf Robinson saw the shooting down of the first Zeppelin over Essex, both of his machine guns armed with flaking bombs and incendiary bombs. As the spacecraft floated under thick clouds to observe the target area, Robinson flew above and pulled the triggers of two machine guns along the hull. The spacecraft fell vertically to the ground in a burst of flames. For this merit, Robinson was awarded the XXX Cross. Before the week ended, the L-32 spacecraft was shot down in the same way by Lieutenant F Soery, and the score increased. The third spacecraft, L-33, became the target of both aircraft and ground anti-aircraft artillery fire. The spacecraft was incredibly unburned and landed with minor injuries. The head of the British Air Force decided that the best defense was offensive and sent several aircraft to Zeppelin's domestic bases, one of which was in Evel, Belgium, to destroy them. Lieutenants J.P. Wilson and J.S. Mills, flying Farman planes, arrived at the Zeppelin base just before dawn, circling the area waiting for enough light to reach the bomber hangar. The ground troops believed they were all friendly aircraft and did not shoot them. As the initial daylight drew the outline of the long shed factory, both drivers were at an altitude of two thousand feet. Wilson aimed with his eyes and threw three sixty-five-pound high-explosive bombs into the center of the building. Mills then aimed the fire at the target, but was held back by anti-aircraft fire. He rose to five thousand feet, flew towards the column of smoke rising from his partner's bombing, and dropped four twenty-pound bombs. A dazzling flash lit up the ground, and the hit Zeppelin spacecraft in the shed factory shattered into a pile of shapeless metal. The spacecraft hit was the L-38, whose commander had left his visiting business card in the UK a few weeks ago. British fighter jets were attacking the Zeppelin While Wilson and Mills were blowing up the L-38, another pilot, Lieutenant Reginald Woneford, was on a mission to destroy Belgium's second Zeppelin base. Woneford blinked in amazement when he flew closer to Ostend at midnight on June 7. A Zeppelin spacecraft cruises slowly ahead. The new L-37 is undergoing night tests, and a group of engineers and designers from the Zeppelin spacecraft factory have boarded the spacecraft to inspect technical details. The 521-foot-long spacecraft is operated by twenty-eight crew members. The spacecraft is floated by eighteen secondary airbags filled with 953,000 cubic feet of hydrogen. The machine gunners stationed in each engine pod kept Warneford away, and several bullets penetrated unimportant parts of his aircraft. Half an hour later, he sneaked "behind the Zeppelin, but much higher than it," and Warneford later wrote in his flight log,"At that time the altitude reached fourteen thousand feet, I shut down my engine and descended above it. When approaching... At seven thousand feet, I dropped my bombs (six twenty-pound incendiary bombs), and while dropping the last one, an explosion lifted my plane and turned it over." Two nuns were killed when the burning spacecraft crashed into a convent near Ghent. All but one of the crew of the Zeppelin died. Forced to land behind enemy lines, Werneford decided not to burn the plane without the Germans showing up. The aircraft was inspected and found that only one gasoline pipe in the engine was broken. He quickly used the metal head on the mouth of his cigarette to make a temporary joint. It is not easy for a person to start the engine by turning the propeller, because the engine has no idling speed-it only turns intermittently. A solo pilot had to leap into the cockpit with great agility before the plane roared off, but Warnford coped through and returned home safely. Britain gratefully awarded him the XXX Cross. But ten days later, when he was thrown from the cockpit of a new Farman biplane, he fell to his death, with seat belts still scarce. The last Zeppelin spacecraft to bomb London was the L-31, commanded by Germany's most feared attacker, Captain Heinrich Marty. At an altitude of 14,500 feet, Lieutenant W.J. Tempeste saw the spacecraft trapped in twelve bright searchlights fifteen miles away. To get to his target, Tempeste had to fly through "a real hell of exploding artillery fire." Just five miles away from his target, the mechanical fuel pump that supplied air pressure to the tank stopped running. The pilot switched to an emergency backup hand-operated pump, which required huge effort at 15,000 feet. (There was no oxygen system to support pilots at thin air altitudes.) The pilot, with all determination, continued to pump up until he was within range, but the Zeppelin had just dropped its bomb and was flying fast. Tempeste used all his strength to "give my fuel tank a huge twitch, dive straight into the ship, and fire a burst of artillery fire... as I was in range. As I flew under it, I fired another burst of artillery fire, then tilted my plane, took a position under the tail of the ship, and fired bullets at it desperately along the lower deck of the ship. As I was shooting, I noticed that the interior of the spacecraft was beginning to turn red, like a huge China lantern. I've set the ship on fire. It spewed flames for about two hundred feet, stopped, and roared straight at me before I could avoid it. I plunged vertically as hard as I could, and the Zeppelin followed me." Tempeste "managed to circle away when the spacecraft roared like a stove and passed by me." When the L-31 fell to the ground in a cluster of sparks, he leveled the plane and watched it from the sky. The wreckage of the Zeppelin airship that was destroyed in Symersey, Essex, southeastern England after being shot down The Zeppelin drifted on the River Thames until October 1916, the German High Command realized that spacecraft warfare was ineffective. In eighteen months, only 51 attacks were carried out, during which time 196 tons of bombs were dropped, killing 557 people and injuring nearly 1,360 people-such a huge price is simply not worth paying at a time of severe shortage of manpower and material resources. An estimated eighty ships were destroyed by Allied fire and storms. Long before the law of diminishing returns took effect on the Zeppelin attack, Berlin strategists were already making plans to build bombers heavier than air.