LZ 37

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Contemporary English illustration of the destruction of LZ 37

The Zeppelin LZ 37 was Count Zeppelin's 37th airship and the seventeenth airship of the German Army .

history

The first trip from LZ 37 took place on March 4, 1915.

LZ 37 was stationed in Cologne in April – May 1915 and then moved to Brussels-Etterbeck .

From Brussels, LZ 37 under its commander Otto van der Haegen carried out an attack with 1.5 tons of bombs on a railway junction near Calais on the night of June 6th, 1915 , where the airship was shot at but not hit. On the way back, the zeppelin made a detour across the North Sea in order not to have to run over the front and run the risk of being shot at again. At the same time, the LZ37 had to fight against strong headwinds and thus lost additional time and only reached its destination, the German airship port of Gontrode near Ghent , in daylight .

The ship was already about to land when the British aviator Reginald Warneford LZ 37 approached from above from the best attack position. The machine guns in the driver's gondola under the ship could not repel the aircraft and so only the machine gun on the back of the airship fired at the attacker. Warneford dropped bombs on the zeppelin, the last of which set the ship on fire and LZ 37 burned down in the air. The entire crew was killed except for the helmsman who was in the driver's gondola during the crash. When he hit the roof of a nunnery in Sint Amandsberg (today a district of Ghent) he was thrown out of the gondola and landed through the destroyed roof in an empty bed of a nun. He was able to save himself from the burning building outside with relatively minor injuries.

LZ 37 was the first airship to be destroyed by an airplane in the air.

Technical specifications

  • Carrying gas volume: 24,900 m³ hydrogen
  • Length: 161.40 m
  • Diameter: 16.00 m
  • Payload: 11.1 t
  • Drive: three Maybach engines, each 210 hp (154 kW)
  • Speed: 23.6 m / s

See also

literature

  • Peter Meyer: Airships - The History of the German Zeppelins. Wehr & Wissen, Koblenz / Bonn 1980.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ernst A. Lehmann : On air patrol and world travel. Wegweiser-Verlag, Berlin 1936, pages 46-47