"Against London:" a Zeppelin Officer's Account‪.‬

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Early in the afternoon of March 16, 1917, five Zeppelin airships of the Imperial German Navy set out from their bases in Germany to bomb London. The observation officer on board Zeppelin L.40, under the command of Kapitanleutnant Sommerfeldt, was Oberleutnant zu See Hans Gebauer. After the war, Gebauer studied law at the University of Konigsberg, wrote a thesis on the question of delayed delivery of purchased items, and became a district judge in East Prussia. In the late 1920s, the staff working on the official history of the wartime Royal Flying Corps and Royal Air Force obtained a copy of an account he had written of L.40's part in the March 1917 attack on London. This seems never to have been published in Germany and only the English translation, preserved in The National Archives at Kew and printed here for the first time, appears to survive. (AIR 1/2398/267/12)