FLIGHT-COMMANDER WILLIAM LEAFE ROBINSON, V.C.
Flight-Commander William Leafe Robinson, V.C., was the first airman
to bring down a German airship on British soil, and he enjoyed the
distinction of being the first soldier to win the Victoria Cross
in England. The raid during which his heroic act was performed was
carried out by thirteen airships in the early part of September,
1916. The principal theatre of operations was the Eastern Counties,
and the objectives seem to have been London and certain industrial
centres in the Midlands. The new measures taken for the reduction or
obscuration of light undoubtedly proved most efficacious, for the
raiding squadrons, instead of steering a steady course, as in the raids
of the spring and autumn of 1915, groped about in darkness, looking for
a safe avenue of approach to their objectives. Three airships only
were able to approach the outskirts of London. One of them appeared
over the northern district at about 2.15 a.m., where she was at once
picked up by searchlights and heavily engaged by anti-aircraft guns and
aeroplanes. After a few minutes this airship was seen to burst into
flames and to fall rapidly towards the earth.
Not, however, till some hours had elapsed was the name of the hero of
the hour made known. Meanwhile official reports were issued, the first
simply announcing the raid, and the second stating that one airship
had been brought down in flames near London. On Sunday, September
3, an official report stated that after careful inquiries it had
been found that casualties and damage caused by the raid were quite
disproportionate to the number of airships employed, the casualties
being one man and one woman killed, eleven men and two children
injured. No casualties occurred in the Metropolitan District, though
some houses and outhouses were slightly damaged. Elsewhere the damage
was very small, no military damage of any sort being done.
A great number of persons saw the airship fall. One witness relates
that he saw it shortly before two o’clock, and for ten minutes, it
seemed to him, it was smothered with shrapnel, held the whole time
by a concentration of three or four searchlights. He had watched the
bombardment on other visits, but in none of them, he says, did the
shells burst in such deadly proximity to their objective. The airship,
in his own words, might have been giving her own firework display.
He saw the airship make off northwards. Already she was a ship in
distress. ‘She yawed and dipped first this end and then that—going,
all the time, at a good speed. Then she was lost behind a cloud. A long
silence ensued. The sky was full of cloud patches. The searchlights
were all shut off. Suddenly the airship was seen far to the northward.
She had travelled behind a sheltering cloud. She slipped from its
edge, and the searchlights had her at once. It was seen that she was
falling. She must have been from 2,000 to 3,000 feet up. She had
fallen a little, when suddenly she burst into flames! The light was
everywhere. Had your back been to it, or your eyes shut, you must
have been sensible of it. The thing fell like the moon falling from
heaven, with a long trail of light—only the light was crimson, not
green—and as it fell there broke out one of the most eerie sounds ever
heard—hand-clapping and cheering from thousands of people all round,
whose waking existence one had never suspected in the dark until that
moment. They applauded simultaneously as at a pageant, till the sky
over London seemed as full of cheering as it had been full of the rosy
strange light only a moment before.’
There are many other interesting and instructive accounts. A special
constable, who witnessed the raid, writes: ‘It was at about 11.30
p.m. when I heard the first Zeppelin. I could not, however, see any
airship owing to the mist intervening. Several aeroplanes continued
to cruise around at great heights with only their little tail lights
discernible. People were beginning to return to bed on the assumption
that the raid was over, when soon after two o’clock bombs were heard
dropping again—this time in the direction of London—together with
the noise of heavy anti-aircraft bombardment. We now saw the airship
easily just over the north-eastern outskirts of London in the rays of
many searchlights. After some minutes of very heavy gunfire she made a
graceful sweep and turned tail, going full speed eastwards for home
and safety. But though she must have been about 8,000 feet up at this
time the searchlights followed with relentless persistency, while all
the time the guns were barking madly after her. Then a strange thing
occurred. The airship suddenly disappeared and reappeared again—caught
up apparently by new searchlights further along the line of its
retreating course. She looked much smaller than before. At about the
same time a strange red light appeared in the sky almost directly above
the airship and the guns immediately ceased to fire. The searchlights
never left the invader for an instant now. The hundreds of thousands of
people who were again out of doors and witnessing this new and weird
development held their breath. Everybody seemed to feel that something
dramatic was about to occur.
‘Suddenly a flame flashed out from one end of the airship, and almost
at the same time she began a nose dive towards the earth, the flame
growing and spreading throughout the whole length of her immense body.
It was a wonderful, unforgettable sight. The flames lit up the sky
and land for miles and miles around with a brilliant red hue as the
million and half or so cubic feet of hydrogen were being devoured by
the hungry flames. I could read a newspaper with ease in this light,
though I was more than ten miles away. The airship took quite two
minutes dropping to earth, but during those two minutes mad, deafening
cheers rose out of the night from all sides. Hooters from works and
from vessels in the Thames and railways shrieked and whistled and
screeched, all joining in the general pandemonium of joy. Even from
a distance of five miles away I could hear the deep-throated cheers
of the Irish Guards in camp there. For a full half-hour the cheering
continued, echoing and re-echoing from all sides, and in the intervals
of the joyous shouts of half-dressed men, women, and children could be
heard the humming of an aeroplane’s uncommonly powerful engines. Again
the mysterious red light appeared: then a white light and again a red
light, and so on alternately, until the multitude realized that the
victor of a great air battle was returning, signalling the story of his
success as he made for his aerodrome head quarters, guided by friendly
searchlights. Then again such cheers rent the air as may not have ever
been heard before anywhere on earth in the blackness of a very early
September morning.’
A crowd of persons from a radius of almost twenty miles flocked hastily
to the scene of the wreckage. One records how ‘an engine, salved with
the two halves of a propeller from the wreckage, lay by the side of
a hedge. Men were measuring them with their walking-sticks and women
by the length of their umbrellas. Pieces of wood and aluminium had
been shot helter-skelter all over the field and were being gathered
up as grim yet precious treasures. A cordon, half military, half
constabulary, kept the onlookers at a distance of some twenty yards.
And all the time the flames were steadily consuming the framework of the
terror of the air.’
How the monster met her end was described by one who saw all that
happened: ‘She was flying at a great height,’ he said, ‘but the
anti-aircraft guns were putting in splendid work. Not once, nor twice,
but many times the airship seemed to be hit, until the gondola must
have been riddled through and through. She reeled. Then she shook
herself like some great angry animal enraged at attack, but not
disposed to turn and flee. Probably she couldn’t fly away, even at that
time. Anyway, she made no attempt. The airship burst into flames in
the centre first, then at the ends. She sank lower and lower, and at
last, tumbling over with nose pointing downward, she fell to the earth
with no bump or thud. The dull splash of an incendiary bomb and the
cracking report of what was left of her ammunition were the only noises
she made as her dying gasps.
‘When the crowd did talk of the awful thing that lay smouldering in
the long damp grass they were emphatic in two directions. Men of our
own Flying Corps, who know the perils of the air from experience, paid
splendid tribute to the memory of the charred dead who lay doubled
up in the attitudes of the final agony. “Whatever they meant to do,
whatever they had done, they were brave men,” said one. From others
of the spectators came what was, perhaps, not unnatural—satisfaction
undisguised.’
People who saw the airship in full flight agreed that she was flying
very high—much higher indeed than the airship which previously visited
London. From the earth she looked like a small illuminated cigar set
thousands of feet above the countryside. Directly she was sighted in
the northern districts of London several large searchlights held her
while the guns got to work. There was an incessant gunfire for a few
minutes, and then there was silence. The airship had fled north. But in
the course of the next few moments the lights picked her up again. Then
was seen the mysterious signalling light of our heroic airmen.
The village of Cuffley, made famous by the fall of the airship, is
a little village of tiled cottages resting in the curve of a white
road which defines the crest of a splendid sweeping hill crowned with
poplars and tall pines.
The contour of the village is that of a wide, clearly determined
triangle, with the church and the inn marking the base and the cottage
of Castle Farm placed at the apex. ‘The shadow of the little grey
church falls athwart the yard of the inn, by name The Plough; but
Castle Farm is divided from it by two smooth, rich meadows.’ A footpath
crosses these meadows, uniting the farm and the inn.
The burning airship fell into a big field which lies in the direct
centre of the triangle. This is a barren field; the very soil is
black and unfertile, covered with tall grass, grey and parched. The
splintered blades of the airship’s propeller crashed through a
hedge, tearing it and breaking it down. ‘Such was the damage done,’
one writes, ‘such was the fine quality of the mercy meted out to the
village of Cuffley.’
One of the villagers records: “I was running downstairs at the time
the airship was falling. The whole house was lighted up. I saw all of
the furniture in the hall, and the table and the carpet. My husband
was down there. He hadn’t had time to get dressed. He was putting on
his clothes down there in the hall. They were all streaked with red,
his face and his hands, too. The red light stopped, but it was still
light—just a little light.”
‘I could hear him talking. I was trying to ask him what he was saying,
but my tongue wouldn’t move in my mouth. I was shaking all over. I
thought I was going to fall down the stairs—the steps in our house are
very crooked.
‘“We are lost—we are lost!”’ I said. But my husband says I said
nothing at all. I’m sure I don’t know.
‘“We must get out of here,” he said, “It’ll be on us in a minute.”
‘But we couldn’t get the front door unlocked. We were trying to break
it open, hammering on it. And I was wondering all the time if it was
going to fall through the roof. I thought it was hours we were there.
“What a dreadful way to die,” I said. And he said, “There, there,
everything’s all right.”
‘Then the red light came back in the sky again—and all of the time we
couldn’t get the door open. But all at once it came open quite easily.
‘We were out in the yard. We saw a flaming mass drop into the field by
The Plough. We thought the people there were killed. We began to run.
We could see the fire burning. But nobody was hurt—what a wonderful
thing! I felt, almost happy—but I knew I shouldn’t be happy when such
an awful thing had happened.
‘My husband took me with him into the field. He said I couldn’t stand
to see those things out there. But I thought that when it’s war
everybody can stand everything. And I didn’t know—maybe, somebody had
been hurt. You couldn’t tell, you know—somebody might need help.’
Another villager records that the airship just missed The Plough, and
fell in a field close by. ‘When we got over to the field we could
still hear the crack, crack, crack of the cartridges exploding in
the fire. This must have kept up for about twenty minutes. The thing
I was thinking was that there wasn’t much of a wreck there for an
airship—only about twenty-five square yards of it. I had a great fear
at the back of my mind that it might be one of our smaller airships,
after all. Then we found the propeller. We saw four bodies burning in
the wires—they were all black and charred, still burning. There’s no
doubt about it—not a man in that airship came down alive. There was a
lot of burnt wood sticking in the ground everywhere around—everything
had stuck in the ground end on. We even saw a broken Thermos flask.’
It is well that these statements of eye-witnesses, which with the
passing of time will take on peculiar interest, should be set down in
these pages.
In appraising the heroic achievement of Flight-Commander Robinson,
V.C., we should bear in mind that night flying presents peculiar
difficulties. A contributor to _The Aeroplane_, October 11, 1916,
writes: ‘The actual bodily peril of flying at night may not be as great
as is the peril of crossing the German lines in broad daylight, but the
nerve strain must be greater. The aviator over the German side of the
lines has generally something on hand to keep him from brooding, such
as a battle with a German machine or the dodging of good shooting, and
he generally has a passenger by way of company. The night pilot, on the
other hand, flies entirely alone. He flaps around for hours on end,
with nothing to do but think and keep a look-out for other aircraft.
And nothing is so great a strain on the nerves as unlimited time for
thinking, a pastime for which the pilot has considerable leisure, now
that all respectable aeroplanes are inherently stable.
‘If there is any mist about, there is the constant danger of collision
with other machines, for in the dark there is not even that chance
of dodging which a pilot gets from the few seconds during which he
can see another aeroplane approaching in a cloud which is illuminated
by daylight. Over and above it all is the constant imminence of the
landing problem, with the prospect of being smashed up, and possibly
burnt to death, if the pilot makes a mistake, or fortune is against
him.’
Flight-Commander Robinson showed remarkable skill as well as great
valour—a hero in the good British sense of the word. On September
3 he had the honour of being foremost at the investiture at Windsor
Castle, when the King decorated him with the Victoria Cross.
The first of the money rewards received from grateful admirers of his
valour was £500 from Mr. L. A. Oldfield. Mr. William Bow also sent the
£500 which he offered to the first pilot to bring down an enemy airship
on British soil. A further £2,000 came from Col. Joseph Cowen, and
public recognition was made by Sir Charles Cheers Wakefield, Lord Mayor
of London. All united in paying a tribute to the young aviator’s heroic
deed.
We have seen that he bore his honours with fine spirit. He claimed
for himself no peculiar gifts of gallantry or skill. It was, he said,
merely his good fortune. There were many, he said, waiting for the
opportunity to do what he had done. Later the opportunity came, and we
know to our just pride that amongst our airmen there are _many_ heroes.