Terror from the sky
IT has been forgotten in the sands of time, but 100 years ago this month Birmingham suffered its third and final air raid of the First World War.
Its orchestrator, Hauptmann Kuno Manger, was something of a well-known airman among his contemporaries.
In 1917 he had flown his Zeppelin airship over the city and dropped bombs on the Austin factory at Longbridge. On the night of April 12, 1918, Manger was back. A force of five ‘V Class’ Zeppelins crossed the coast between 9.20pm and 10pm, and were at large over the North and the Midlands.
Manger dropped bombs on Coventry, then found himself over Hockley Heath and proceeded north to Hall Green.
The Zeppelin circled and then a bomb was released which fell on to Robin Hood golf course and another on to Manor Farm, in Shirley.
Further bombs may have dropped in Olton Reservoir before Zeppelin L62 retreated eastwards towards the coast, descending several thousand feet to escape the headwinds.
At this stage in the war, Air Defence units were in place to combat German bombing raids, be they day or night attacks.
Protection over the night skies of Birmingham and Coventry fell to 38 Squadron, which dispersed its F.E.2b aircraft across three locations to offer better coverage.
The newly formed Royal Air Force was less than a fortnight old at the time of this Zeppelin attack. This year marks the force’s centenary.
Lieutenant Cecil Henry NobleCampbell of ‘B’ Flight, 38 Sqn, took off from his home airfield of Buckminster, on the Leicestershire/Lincolnshire border, at 11.25pm.
He was patrolling at 16,000 feet, when at 1.15am he saw Zeppelin L62 north-east of Birmingham.
He manoeuvred his F.E.2b fighter to make an attack.
However, Noble-Campbell was not the only fighter monitoring the Zeppelin. Lt William Alfred Brown, of 38 Sqn’s ‘C’ Flight, had taken off from RAF Wittering at 11.18pm, and also made an attack on the Zeppelin.
Suddenly, Noble-Campbell’s propeller was smashed and he sustained a head injury. He broke off the attack and nursed his crippled fighter down to the ground at Coventry where he managed to get out before the machine caught fire.
His forced landing had finished up at the boundary wall of White and Poppe, an artillery shell-filling factory.
Brown’s F.E.2b was also in trouble and he forced-landed 200 yards short of Radford airfield near Coventry. Brown was seriously injured.
Both fighters are recorded as having force-landed at 1.30am.
Squadron records document that each pilot assumed that he had been the victim of defensive gunfire from the Zeppelin.
But as the airship commander, Hauptmann Kuno Manger, never made any report of an attack upon his airship, we are left with something of a mystery.
It is possible that the two fighters had collided in the dark, or maybe even shot one another down.
This was the last occasion that German bombers appeared over Birmingham prior to August 1940.
The city had come through the Great War virtually unscathed.
Fast-forward 25 years to April 23, 1943. Birmingham’s final air raid of the Second World War took place on that night. The alert went out at 11pm and lasted less than 30 minutes.
During this time, a single raider dropped bombs on Drummond Road, Little Bromwich, where damage was caused to scores of houses, while others fell on playing fields in Saltley. No-one died in the attack, but eight people were seriously injured and a further 13 slightly injured.
German air raids cost the city and its surrounding boroughs around 2,400 lives, the loss of 4,650 homes and 300 factory buildings.
Nevertheless, referring to the areas which, before the outbreak of war, had been identified for redevelopment, the City Engineer, at a council meeting in July 1943, observed that the task of redevelopment had altered little since 1939.
In other words, the Luftwaffe had not assisted him as much as it might have.