In the streets of Sheffield in the late summer of 1916, there would have been a low, constant rumble. The industrial engine of the British war effort, Sheffield’s massive steelworks and munitions factories ran day and night. At night they cast an eerie crimson glow against the low-hanging English clouds. The city was vital, roaring, and seemingly untouchable. The prevailing wisdom said that Germany’s Zeppelins could never navigate far enough inland to threaten the steel city. A local woman named Margaret wrote:¹
The Sheffield people kept saying [… the Zeppelins] will never get here […]
But just after midnight on September 26, 1916, the illusion of safety dissolved into bomb blasts and shattered glass. The leviathans of the sky had arrived, bringing with them a new breed of psychological warfare. The era of the Babykillers would forever change the home front.
The story of that night is part of a grander, more tragic historical arc: the rise and spectacular fall of the Lighter-Than-Air (LTA) craft.
From Dream to Weapon: The Rise of the LTA Craft
Before they were instruments of terror, airships were symbols of human triumph over gravity. German inventor Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin spearheaded the dream of navigable LTA flight. He took a massive leap forward at the turn of the twentieth century. Unlike the pliable, unsteerable blimps of the era, Zeppelin’s genius was the rigid airship, or dirigible. He built a majestic external aluminum framework housing separate internal gas bags and driven by powerful internal combustion engines.
In the peaceful years leading up to 1914, these rigid airships were the undisputed kings of luxury travel. Germany’s DELAG, the world’s first airline, carried over 34,000 passengers on thousands of commercial flights without a single injury. Passengers sat in carpeted, wicker-furnished cabins, sipping champagne while floating smoothly above the European countryside. It felt like the dawn of a utopian era of global connectivity.
But when the world went to war in 1914, Germany immediately recognized the military potential of these floating skyscrapers. They were re-engineered to fly higher than any contemporary biplane. They could also carry tons of high explosives over the North Sea to strike at the heart of the British home front.
Zeppelins: Hydrogen Leviathans
To understand the sheer terror of a World War I air raid, one must discard the modern image of aviation. The German Zeppelins were longer than two football fields, lifted by millions of cubic feet of gas.
Powered by massive petrol engines, these airships could drift silently at 16,000 feet. This put them far above the reach of early Allied fighter planes and anti-aircraft artillery. For the crews inside, it was a brutal, alien environment. Crossing the North Sea in pitch darkness, the men aboard endured sub-zero temperatures and oxygen deprivation without heating or breathing apparatus. They navigated entirely by compass, wind calculations, and sheer guesswork.
Already by 1916, the British public had dubbed these silent stalkers “Babykillers.” The moniker entered the cultural lexicon following early, indiscriminate raids on coastal towns and London. In these raids, Zeppelins dropped bombs blindly from the clouds, tearing through civilian homes rather than military targets. It was a stark, horrifying reminder that the battlefields of the Great War were no longer confined to the muddy trenches of the Western Front.
A Fiasco of Defense
On the afternoon of September 25, 1916, Zeppelin L-22, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Martin Dietrich, lifted off from Germany’s North Sea coast. His explicit orders: strike the industrial heart of Sheffield.
As L-22 and its sister ship, L-21, reached the English coast under the cover of thick, overcast skies, Britain’s air defense network detected their presence. In Sheffield, electric air raid buzzers wailed through the night. It was the city’s fourteenth warning of the war. Because the previous thirteen had been false alarms, many citizens grumbled, dismissed the threat, or reluctantly headed to their cellars.
The defense that night was, by all accounts, a shambles. Captain Edward Clifton of the Royal Flying Corps scrambled into the pitch-black, cloudy night in a night-fighting B.E.2c biplane to intercept the raiders. Blinded by the soup of fog and clouds, he searched fruitlessly for twenty minutes before returning to Coal Aston airfield. He crashed his aircraft on high ground, miraculously survived unhurt.
Meanwhile, the city’s ground defenses were paralyzed. The anti-aircraft gun at Shiregreen fired exactly two blind rounds into the darkness before falling silent. Local fury erupted in the newspapers the following week. A persistent—though unverified—rumor circulated that the defense officers had been unavailable because they were attending a high-society ball at the Grand Hotel in the city center.
The Cruel Irony of the Zeppelins’ Inaccuracy
At 12:20 AM, L-22 slid silently over the city. To evade ground fire, Dietrich accelerated to full speed and began a zigzag pattern across the sky. Five minutes later, the first bombs fell.
What followed was a tragedy defined by the inaccuracy of aerial bombing. Dietrich was aiming for the sprawling steelworks feeding the front lines, but the clouds completely obscured his vision. Instead of striking the factories, L-22 systematically rained destruction down on residential, working-class neighborhoods.
The Sheffield Zeppelin Raid’s Casualties
The first two incendiary bombs thudded into the grass of Burngreave Cemetery, scorching a notice board. But the high-explosive Carbonit bombs that followed found human targets:
- On Danville Street, 49-year-old Frederick Stratford was killed by flying shrapnel while lying in his bed.
- On Petre Street, Thomas Wilson heard the terrifying droning and ran to his bedroom window to investigate. A bomb detonated on a nearby outbuilding, killing him instantly.
- On Cossey Road, a bomb leveled a row of terrace houses, killing Alice and Albert Newton as they slept. In a bittersweet twist of fate, their infant son was staying with his grandmother a few streets over and survived.
Another casualty was Elizabeth Bellamy, as noted in my novel Roseleigh:
After the bombing, [Simon Burr] had seen her taken to the Royal Hospital and knew she wouldn’t survive. Bombs falling, she had carried her sleeping granddaughter toward the safety of the cellar. Passing a window, shrapnel from a high-explosive bomb nearly cut her in two. Her granddaughter survived. Simon drifted back to sleep, clutching the baby booties beneath his pillow, envying Mrs. Bellamy for dying knowing she’d saved someone she loved.
Yet, amid the smoke and grief, the night also produced a legendary moment of hope. Amidst the rubble of a completely collapsed building on Princess Street, rescue workers dug frantically through the brick dust. Hours into the search, they pulled a baby from the wreckage—alive, conscious, and entirely unharmed. In her letter, Margaret noted:
[T]he soldiers who found him cheered.
By the time L-22 turned back toward the North Sea, 28 people were dead, 19 were wounded, and over 200 homes were damaged or destroyed. The vital steelworks remained completely untouched.
The Fire in the Sky: The Turning Point
The terror of the Babykiller raids could not last forever. The Zeppelins carried a fatal, systemic flaw: their lifting gas.
To float, an airship requires a gas lighter than the surrounding air. The ideal candidate is helium—it is highly buoyant and, crucially, completely non-flammable. However, in the 1910s and 1920s, the world’s only viable, abundant source of helium was the natural gas wells of the United States. Recognizing its strategic value, the US government strictly embargoed helium, refusing to export it to Germany.
Left with no alternative, German engineers had to fill their massive airships with hydrogen. Hydrogen is highly buoyant and cheap to produce, but it is also violently, catastrophically flammable when mixed with oxygen.
For the first two years of the war, this didn’t matter much. British biplanes would shoot regular lead bullets at the Zeppelins. These poked tiny holes in the fabric, but without an ignition source, the hydrogen simply leaked out harmlessly. The Zeppelins seemed invincible.
That changed in the summer of 1916 with the invention of Brock and Pomeroy incendiary bullets.
British pilots began loading their machine-gun drums with an alternating mix of explosive and incendiary ammunition. This instantly nullified the Zeppelin threat. A single well-placed burst from a biplane could turn a multi-million-dollar, 600-foot floating fortress into a falling pillar of fire in under sixty seconds. By late 1916, Germany abandoned strategic airship raids over Britain.
The Illusion Shattered: LTA Post-War Disasters
Despite their bloody failure as weapons of war, the dream of the commercial passenger airship refused to die. In the 1920s and 30s, Nations across the globe raced to build ever-larger luxury liners, convinced they were the future of long-distance transport.
It was a race that ended in a series of shocking, highly publicized disasters. These proved LTA technology was fundamentally too fragile for our atmosphere. The Allies attempted to master the rigid airship using their own engineering. Even with access to safe helium, the results were devastating.
The British R101 was built to connect the British Empire via luxury air routes. On its maiden voyage to India in 1930, this massive hydrogen-filled state airship crashed into a hillside in France. The resulting explosion killed forty-eight of the fifty-four people on board, including the Air Minister and the airship’s designer. The program was instantly scrapped.
The United States thought they could conquer the skies by using non-flammable helium. The USS Akron was a flying aircraft carrier for the US Navy. However, off the coast of New Jersey in 1931, high winds battered it and it crashed into the ocean. Because the ship lacked life vests and aviation rafts, 73 men drowned—making it the deadliest airship crash in history. Two years later, its sister ship, the USS Macon, also tore apart in a storm and sank off California.
Hindenburg: The Last Zeppelin
The final nail in the coffin of LTA flight was, of course, the LZ 129 Hindenburg. On May 6, 1937, while attempting to dock at Lakehurst, New Jersey, a small spark ignited a hydrogen leak. In 34 seconds, the grandest airship ever built burned to a skeleton on live radio and newsreel film.
Though 62 people miraculously survived, the haunting words of broadcaster Herbert Morrison—“Oh, the humanity!”—echoed across the globe. The public’s trust in airships was permanently shattered. Within days, the era of the rigid airship was over, replaced by the rapid rise of safer, faster aluminum airplanes.
Echoes in the Fiction
The Sheffield raid of 1916 illustrates the psychological weight of the home front of WWI. This is an important element of Roseleigh’s atmosphere. Long before the WWII’s Blitz, civilians had to cope with the reality that their homes could suddenly become a war zone. The Babykiller raids didn’t break British morale as Germany hoped. Instead, they ignited a fierce wave of national anger, sparking a massive surge in military recruitment.
For a writer, history isn’t just found in the tactics of the Zeppelins or the technical specifications of their bombs. It’s the sleepless nights that followed. The letters written with shaking hands. The resilience of ordinary people who went to sleep in their own beds and woke up on the front lines of history.
What are some other overlooked stories of the WWI home front or early aviation history that fascinate you? Let me know in the comments.
To find out more about how I’ve woven home front tensions into Roseleigh, please join my mailing list.
Notes & References
- Sophie Maxwell, “Exploring the archives: Zeppelin raid over Sheffield, 1916”, Libraries Sheffield (website), January 27, 2015.
- Ibid.
“The Raid,” Zeppelins Over Sheffield (website).
Chris Hobbs, “Sheffield’s First Air Raid—25th September 1916,” Chris Hobbs (website), last updated August 31, 2025.
“Zeppelins Raid Sheffield,” Doncaster 1914-18 (website).
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