After encountering a severe
snowstorm on the evening of February 17, 1915, the German zeppelin L-4
crash-lands in the North Sea near the Danish coastal town of Varde.
The zeppelin, a motor-driven
rigid airship, was developed by German inventor Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin in
1900. Although a French inventor had built a power-driven airship several
decades before, Zeppelin's rigid dirigible, with its steel framework, was by
far the largest airship ever constructed.
The L-4's captain,
Count Platen-Hallermund, and a crew of 14 men had completed a routine scouting
mission off the Norwegian coast in search of Allied merchant vessels and were
returning to their base in Hamburg, Germany, when the snowstorm flared up,
bombarding the airship with gale-force winds.
Unable to control the zeppelin
in the face of such strong winds, the crew steered toward the Danish coast for
an emergency landing, but was unable to reach the shore before crashing into
the North Sea. The Danish coast guard rescued 11 members of the crew who had
abandoned ship and jumped into the sea prior to the crash; they were brought to
Odense as prisoners to be interrogated. Four members of the crew were believed
drowned and their bodies were never recovered.
One month earlier, the L-4
had taken part in the first-ever air raid on Britain in January 1915, when it
and two other zeppelins dropped bombs on the towns of Great Yarmouth and King's
Lynn on the eastern coast of England. Four civilians were killed in the raid,
two in each town. Zeppelins would continue to wreak destruction on Germany's
enemies throughout the next several years of war--by May 1916, 550 British
civilians had been killed by aerial bombs.
Taken from: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/zeppelin-l-4-crashes-into-north-sea
[17.02.2015]
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