Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 424 - The Cuxhaven Raid

Episode Date: July 26, 2026

SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys TICKETS TO OUR LIVE SHOW IN CORK, IRELAND ARE NOW AVAILABLE! https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-cork-26th-september-tickets-1993823733459 CAN'T MAKE IT? NO PROBLEM! WE'RE STREAMING IT (WITH VOD) https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/livestream-lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-cork-26th-september-2026-tickets-1993900928351 GET JOE'S BOOK! Ebook, Audiobook, and Paperbacks now available! https://www.amazon.com/Highlands-Burn-Foundling-Brigade-Saga-ebook/dp/B0GSG5CNXX/ Or you can buy the ebook and audiobook directly from us: https://www.llbdpodcast.com/products/ Get Nate's band's debut album here! https://secondhomesband.com/ After zeppelins begin bombing the UK, the British order the first seaborne air raid in British military history. It involves hundreds of men, dozens of ships...all to launch a few biplanes that are barely armed with bombs, with no navigational devices, and no idea where they are going. SOURCES: Layman RD. The Cuxhaven Raid, The World's First Carrier Air Strike. Conway Maritime Press. 1985 https://www.avalanchepress.com/JutlandCuxhaven1.php https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/1998/february/strike-warfare-1914 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/raid-on-cuxhaven-first-carrier-raid-in-history-bw-122525 https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/cuxhaven-raid/

Come see us live, September 26th in Cork, Ireland at the Kino Events House. Tickets are available now, both live show and live stream. If you can't make it, the live stream will also have video on demand so you can watch it later for whatever reason, time zones or whatnot. We'll have new merch, we'll have some old merch. I might even have some books available. So come on down, get your tickets, and we'll see you in Cork. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on

Patreon. Just $5 a month gets you access to our entire bonus episode catalog as well as every regular episode, one full week early. Access to all of our side series that are currently ongoing and our back catalog of those as well. Gets you e-books, audiobooks, first dibs on live show tickets and merchandise when they're available, and also gets you access to our Discord, which has turned into a lovely little community. So go to patreon.com slash lions led by donkeys. and join the Legion of the Old Crow today. Hello and welcome to the Lions at By Junkies podcast, the only military is three podcast in the entire known world.

I'm Joe, and with me is Tom and Nate. And fellas, I got a story to tell you to start off today. I have a new goblin in the neighborhood, and I don't know how to fully explain this weirdo other than to you guys, the only two people I think will appreciate it. I don't know who it is, but someone is coming through my neighborhood, and they're posting stickers that are explicit photos of buttholes everywhere.

Welcome back, goatee. No, they're not goatee. I will say they're normal buttholes. But why? Unstretched. Unstretched, yeah. They're not gaped. They're hairy.

Some are quite dirty, but normal. So that is the new neighborhood decoration. We have a butthole bandit, and all of the butthole stickers are. right alongside like football firm stickers. Yeah, sounds about right. Yeah. I'm not sure how I should take this other than, uh, sir, I don't know who you are. And I'm assuredly that this is a man, but I respect the hustle. Getting a coin out to scrape off. You like, you know, the racist IAC sticker and next thing you're

just hit with a butt full of mud. What's weird is there are some racist football firm stickers, but none of them are for Dutch teams. Yes. It's like you'll see racist football stickers, but they're all for our teams in like the Bundesliga from Germany. Bundesliga and series are in Italy. Well, we get a lot of German tourists that come over. The two, the sea area where I live.

And I guess they're just bringing their large cachet of racist football hooligan stickers with them. I see a lot of the FC Servette stickers when I'm in London because I guess they just go around slapping them. They're not racist, but they're just like completely inscrutable unless you're aware of, like, they're basically like abbreviations

with acronyms to be like, fuck Lozahn, fuck Sian, like, fuck other teams in the league. And it's like, but people don't speak French and they're not going to recognize this. It's like when the people would put up those like moonite mosaics on the wall and people thought it was ISIS and called, you know, called the FBI, called the SWAT team. You heard this story. Even it was before the Boston bombing, but they, they thought they had previsaged the Boston bombing that it was going to be someone putting up like a glow light version of the moonenites from Aquatine Hunger Force. And that's, that is genuinely what I feel like encountering. Or like those like, uh, Andre the Giant has a

haussie stickers from like the 90s. You see those owners like, okay, this means something to football fans, but it means nothing to me. Yeah, I'm unaware of what any of the stickers mean other than I know those teams play football in Germany. And I don't watch German football. Like, I've been watching

the Dutch League because we have a local team that just got promoted. So it's kind of nice. But it's like breaking an inscrutable code. And then there'll be some from the Netherlands, which are just like the logo. You guys got to step up your game if you're going to compare with the strange touring bands of German football racists.

It's like wind talkers, but for Dutch, it's like ways to communicate racism, but incifered. Sometimes you see really cool stickers, not related to football clubs. And I'm like, I wish I could find this, but they're so obviously DIY, because I would buy them, but I can't recreate them on my own. And I think the one I saw that was most interesting recently was in the kind of like French von designe, like cartoon style. You had like, kind of someone's eyes wearing like a kind of like black block mask and like what looked like the kind of the flames from a lit Molotov cocktail, but like just like like a central bar of the

sticker and then it's spelled out like not the numbers, but spelled out in letters. It said, trez dues, which is 1312 in French. And I was like, that is such a cool sticker. I can't find it anywhere. That's why you got it. You got to be in the no, to know what the woke and anti-woke stickers are. Can you someone out there, if you recognize, what I'm describing because it's probably not Swiss, it's probably French because Switzerland is

less amenable to the cops mentality and there's only like 9 million people in this country. If you know the Therese do sticker I'm talking about, I want to get one. And if you want to combat racist football stickers with woke football stickers, you can do so when you come see us live

in Cork on the 26th of September. You can get your woke Cork City FC stickers, your woke bohemian stickers. If you can find the one woke Chelsea sticker. I would love that so much because we all know what the anti-woke Chelsea sticker looks like. Somehow I can spin this around and connect it. So hold on. Yes. Speaking of countries with racist football clubs, today we are talking about World War I. Because fellas,

it's time to put on your goggles, wrap a suggestive scarf around your neck, and climb behind the sticks of your wood canvas and mostly glue by planes because we're talking about fighting zeppelins today. Oh yes. Two aircrafts fighting that could equally be

taken down with a come shot forceful enough. Fuck you. For some reason something came to mind of like shoehorning in Final Fantasy stuff which we do on this show quite quite often and I realize that Final Fantasy the genre like the series has a lot of airship

combat. And so you bringing up Zeppelin combat makes me like, yeah. So does that mean that like, Kefka is going to summon Foon Baba in this battle? And it's like, oh, wait, no, no, it's actual real Zeppelins. It's balloons full of exploding gas. I mean, like, just don't shoot those. It's bad sporting to shoot those. It's a big glowing red thing full of people. Today we're mostly talk about the Kuxhaven raid of 1914 and the first British naval air attack in military history. But first, the Royal Air Context. I'm not proud of that one. World War I was revolutionary in about a million different horrifying ways, some of which we have talked about on this show at length. It's often said that it's the first real war in which civilians were seen as legitimate military targets,

thanks to the evolving concepts of total war. Since an entire society was being mobilized to fight in an industrial war, that same society needed to be targeted in order to defeat the war. the enemy. Now, long-time listeners of the show will know that this is bullshit. The only new aspect of this was the industrial part. Civilians had been the target of warfare since humans first teamed up to slaughter one another over who got the better cave. Civilians have always suffered worse than anyone else in war. And this idea that it was once a gentlemanly thing without the mass slaughter of the innocent is just not true. This time, has never existed. Armies have always been an unrelenting war crime machine across history.

But that being said, targeting civilians was once a lot harder. For an army to start doing things their future history books would certainly eventually lie about, the army had to generally defeat the enemy army so they could get to the local population's soft Newgity center. But with the evolution of weapons, namely air power and long distance indirect fire, that would change. And that's why we're bringing it back to World War I. Virtually as soon as World War I started, the Imperial German Strategic Bombing Campaign of Western Europe, but mostly, you know, Belgium and the United Kingdom began. At first, this was mostly launched via sea planes, but soon the responsibility fell onto the long,

gas-filled shoulders of their Zeppelin fleet. I should have a little bit of a side note here. The term zeppelin normally is used for German airships, and every zeppelin is an airship, but not every airship is a zeppelin. The difference boils down to the internal structure. Really unimportant for the context of this episode, but if I know my fellow balloon heads out there,

someone is going to yell at me. So just know that we know, we talked about this more over on our American airship episode with Dr. Patrick Wyman. There's a difference. I'm rolling with Zeppelin. Leave me alone. I like the idea that basically you handshake meme with a party clown that people are yelling at you about balloons. No, I was going to go a different route. It was before they banned the small fast gas canisters. The dominoes in my local area, all of the drivers are just be sitting on a wall behind the dominoes doing balloons until they had an order

and then get on their bike and wobble a little bit and then go like 60 miles an hour down the road. So inside of you there are two different kinds of balloon heads. You can be a party clown where a Domino's delivery drive in London. I mean I always like the fact that now it's like

oh they have to fill up the balloons in the shop and I always think someone is just going to walk around huffing off of like the 60 liter canister. I have seen videos of that night. Now there is a problem of a kids in London getting like frost burns because they have to use the big canisters and they put them between their legs and they condense when you defreshurize them. So it like gets super cold.

So now they're getting like frozen burns. For getting contact frostbite from huffing. Oh my God. Britain is such a wonderful country. Anyway, this is your wonderful PSA for the lines that by don't have gas. Also, I was going to say we're going to talk about, we're talking about Britain being fucked up now, but we can pivot all the way back to what was one of the causes of Britain's inevitable decline? Well, the First World War and... Nowadays, I have an idea, Nate. What if, when confronted by a Zeppelin fleet,

we simply said an equal fleet of Domino's delivery drivers who just hug the nose of the Zeppelin and huff it so hard that it slowly starts crashing towards the earth? I was going to say, Nate, do you remember the clip from Come Down with me where the guy puts the full whisk in his mouth? Yes, yes, I do. Yeah, there's just a dude hanging off the back of the zeppelin with his mouth around the exhaust like that, trying huffing as quickly as possible to try and take down the zeppelin.

I was just laughing. It's like the old man in the sea. It's like you catch the huge fish and you're trying to like just tire it out till it gives up. It's like World War I, you catch a zeppelin, you just drag it to Lewish him. So like people will just surround it and start huffing it. I'm breeding a new kind of Englishman where they can unhinge their jaw and swallow half of the zeppelin to get at its innards. the Brickonda They said that the Crystal Palace was I mean it wasn't actually used this way but that they had thought about potentially using part of the concrete pad

as like a docking station for Zeppelin traffic and so I just love the idea that's like people would just be lining up outside the Crystal Palace just waiting to be like okay when it lands we can off all the gas now the threat of the German Imperial Zeppelin fleet was something that the British were pretty well aware of

before the war even began while other nations in the war would eventually develop and deploy their own airships, Germany was by far the kings or kisars of the gas-filled floating death trap, and had been for years before a generation of Europeans was churned a mush. A few years before the war, the site of German zeppelins flying over Britain was not an uncommon site. We've already talked about how America was airship mad, as they said, during the same time frame. And by the 1900s and certainly by 1914, the Zeppelin's,

that Germany had in their arsenal, mainly the SL series, they have a lot of different Zeppelins, but we're not going to go into all of them, some of which would be 500 feet long and could carry thousands of pounds of bombs from Germany to London became the common thing. Once the war began, there was one man who was definitely the first one to point out that the possibility of a steampunk version of the Blitz could be coming their way. And that was the first Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Now, his tenure during World War I is probably best remembered for murdering a bunch of Aussies and Kiwis on a Turkish beach for no real reason. But he did occasionally get something right. Defense of the British coastline fell to the Royal Naval Air

Service, which sounds quite standard. But this is 1914 and everybody is still trying to figure out what an air service looks like and how it works. It only had 50 planes to defend the entire British coast. When the Minister of War, Lord Kitchener, questioned, do you really think that this is enough to protect Britain from the threat of seaplains and Zeppelons, Churchill insisted, yeah, I don't see why it wouldn't be. Yeah, it's worth remembering as well, Winston Churchill was just absolutely fucking hammered all the time and was drinking like pints of champagne. Well, I would hate to see him when he was sober. If these are the things he did while drunk. You know what I mean?

Thankfully for everyone, Churchill was ignored on this and the responsibility was shifted to the much larger Royal Flying Corps. Though the R&AS would eventually be given duty of defending London and acting as something of an early warning system with different bases

stationed around the British aisles as well as Flanders to head off any attack making the way to the home islands. And the pilots and planes we're going to be talking about throughout this episode are all members of the R-N-A-S, not what would eventually become the Royal Air Force, which was then the Royal Flying Corps. Yeah, see, Churchill hadn't reached that perfect equilibrium in the way that people who say,

oh yeah, three beers makes me better at driving. You know, he hadn't reached the perfect equilibrium of being an alcoholic and being really good at warfare. Six bottles of Armenian brandy makes me a better prime minister. There was, of course, a pretty big flaw in this entire plan. Nobody had any idea how or even what fighting Zeppelins looked like. Zeppelins could fly way higher than the wood and canvas biplanes of the day. Modern anti-aircraft guns with air bursting rounds like would exist in World War II weren't even a glimmer in the eyes of weapons manufacturers yet.

Shit Churchill, in his position to technically be in charge of the defense of Britain, didn't even have searchlights to scan the sky for incoming threats. That didn't mean fighter pilots didn't occasionally catch Zeppelins at an altitude where they could engage them at, though. Which led to another new fun discovery. Shooting down a Zeppelin with their standard issue lead

bullet firing machine guns that were mounted on the fighter planes was kind of impossible. Mm-hmm. Yeah, on paper, zeppelins were easy targets, but only in our modern conception of guns. Sure, zeppelins were full of highly flammable and explosive gases,

but guns don't work like they do in the movies, no matter how much we really want them to. Imagine being a pilot and you're just like flying at night and then you come across a Zeppelin. It's like, oh shit, oh fuck, I've accidentally become important at work. Just crash into it. You'll be fine. Here's like, fuck, fuck, what do I do? What do I do? They didn't train us for this. And like the regular bullets that they're firing, they don't just make shit catch on fire and explode, right? So, like, if you're a fighter pilot back then, you're just unloading into the

Zeppelin and it's doing nothing. Incendiary bullets for machine guns, those that make things catch on fire, wouldn't be invented for two more years. Insiniary rifle rounds did exist and they were often carried by pilots as a backup weapon because early dog fights, remember, were mostly dudes firing pistols and rifles at one another out of a moving plane, which is insane, but did kind of work. There was something very, very funny about

like all of the, you know, the entirety of the history of human civilization dreaming of heavier than air flight. And then you finally achieve it. And you get up there and you basically do the equivalent of shooting slingshots at each other. Yeah. Did you guys not also think when you were inventing,

you know, all of the sort of principles of lift for heavier than air flight and all of like the propulsion stuff? Like, maybe you could, put an gun on it and single gun on it that could mount on a pivot, something like that, you know, pencil mounted, anything. It was like, no, apparently it's like, no, get up in the plane, fly really close to people and basically shoot them with a paintball gun. This is like one of my favorite eras of the weird branches of weapons development, because this isn't really what the episode's about, but like, when they first put machine guns on planes, they didn't have

what was known as an interrupter, which meant that it could fire through the props of the plane. So when they first plopped a machine gun firing directly over the nose of a plane where the propellers were, the just general hope was you didn't shoot your own propeller off. And then one of the ways that they tried to counter that was by arcing the propeller somewhat at an edge. So if you did, it would just kind of glance off. But they had a side effect of occasionally it would just ricochet back and hit the fucking pilot. Yep. I just love this part of history.

Didn't they at one point have some aircraft that had a machine gun tube basically in the nose of the plane forward of the propeller. I think that was the one design they tried. Others tried to just put it on like a lift. So it fired over the propeller, but that it was really hard to aim. And then eventually the interrupter was developed and people stopped

kind of shooting themselves down. That is very, very funny. Going to shoot down a Zeppelin and experience the equivalent of like having a gun in your waistband and shooting your own dick off. Yes. The plexicoburis of dog fighting. It's like when you think about the people who were doing this you know, it's like you were born in an air

where it was very much made clear that like heavier than air flight was basically a novelty. Stuff like hot air balloons were the only thing and even that wasn't all that useful. And then suddenly you can fly a plane and it's like how do you engage in combat? You basically treat it like a flying deer stand. And think of the backup here when it comes to

trying to shoot down a Zeppelin, right? Like shooting down a plane with a bolt action rifle or a pistol is crazy enough. But like like shooting down a Zeppelin with an incendiary rifle round from your bolt to action rifle you have stuffed in your cab is virtually impossible as well. I mean, I want to believe that it was basically like Turoc dinosaur hunter, but in World War I, that you had like a gun with a powerful enough gun with a huge exploding bullet and that could just take down a zeppelin. The flying punt gun full of fire. The Brits love big ass guns. I mean, come on, you know, elephant guns and the

like. Just get that, that thing. They should have gone back in time even further and just, winged a crossbow bolt at it. None of this meant that pilots didn't try to do this, but I couldn't find any accounts of these rifle-wielding psychos bringing a Zeppelin down. In fact, the mixture of bullets that British fighters would eventually find to be successful was a lot more than just standard incendiary machine gun bullets. There were two, the Pomeroy bullet, which was an explosive bullet,

and the Buckingham bullet, which was the incendiary. The idea was to use the explosive bullet to puncture the gas bags within the Zeppelin, and then the fire that came afterwards would then cause it to explode. They would be fed together in the same belt of ammunition, first the explosive and then the incendiary. It's a pretty cool idea, but not that existed yet. So Churchill and the British commanders were left with no real counter as the bombings of London and the greater UK began. And to be completely honest here, these raids,

did, fuck all, physically, really, in the grand scheme of things, especially of World War I. But as you can imagine, for the morale of a civilian population that suddenly found itself under the threat of being attacked from the sky for the first time, it was quite destructive at a psychological level. And just to underline here, how shitty these raids were, let's call them the fish crawling out of the ooze moment in the evolution of liquefying civilians from the clouds. The first was a raid via sea plane in 1914 targeting Dover. The only casualties were a broken window from Dover Castle and a bomb that exploded in a man's Brussels sprout garden.

Oh no, not the vegetable garden. My sprouts! There'll be no fart in this Christmas kids. The council has been waging war on my allotment for so long. They've had to invent new methods of warfare to stop me from growing my disgusting Brussels sprouts. This man could have been Erzatz killdozer dude. He could have like had a wagon

with like wooden siding on it, plowing into like the communal cabbage patch in protest because they won't let me grow my Brussels sprouts. I'm sorry kids. Thanks to the fucking honeies, we can't even have farts this Christmas. We even have to ration our farts. I mean, the idea to me is very

funny though, just I know kind of carrying off this of like someone is settling a personal beef with a zeppelin. because I feel like it would be very, very difficult to do anything inconspicuously with a Zeppelin. No, it's like 500 feet long. Yeah, you're trying to fuck over your enemies and like get one over on them and it's like, oh, that's time for my getaway. It takes four hours for you to disappear off the horizon.

This would load Brussels sprout gardener shaking his fist up at the sky. I'm going to be doing this for a fucking while. Could you hurry up. My arm's getting tired. And then the sea planes were able to get away because the British. interceptors simply couldn't find them. There's no way for these planes to communicate with one another. There's no airborne

radio systems yet. They just couldn't spot them as they slowly putted away back to the sea. This was more of a proof of concept. And when plans were first submitted to use Zeppelin to hit Britain, the Kaiser approved but temporarily refused permission to hit London

because he was worried that his relatives in the British royal family might get hurt in the process. But by winter of 1915, Zeppelins were targeting civilian infrastructure and racking up a body count. And that might sound bad, and it is obviously there's no amount of bombing civilians, which is correct. But way more Zeppelin raids failed thanks to just getting lost in the clouds or crashing due to bad weather. The Kaiser is opposed to the air raids because he was a fart lover and he did not want

the Brussels Brought man attacked. Yeah, my cousins in the royal family who I also want to kiss on the mouth, neither farts. In one instant, while trying to fly towards Britain, a Zeppelin pilot got lost due to the clouds. He brought his ship down so he might be able to see better, only discover he was very close to the ground, only a couple hundred feet. And he was right over a Belgian army position, which then shot him to pieces with a machine gun. Bad weather and total inability to navigate saved more British lives than any counter operations at this point. This combined nicely with the British pilots having no bomb sites to speak of, and

bombing a ground target was pretty much just spray and prey. Though I guess spray and prey doesn't really work for bombing. How about drop and plop? I don't know. There's a part of me that feels like if you were engaging a zeppelin from a, you know, a firing position that it would feel like you were attacking a whale, like you were attacking some kind of like sentient creature, just like the weirdness of it, the improbable size of it. And that then led me to wonder, like, do you think that like when the bullets hit,

like if they punctured the thing, it started to make weird noises that would effectively be like taking damage sounds? Just letting out little puffs and whines. A little little, little moaned. You are just perfectly describing a boss fight in death stranding too. That's true. I guess there's an extent to which these sorts of thing, you know, like the conquistadors going over to South America and suddenly seeing like trees taller than any building in Europe and like weird ass freak bugs and animals they'd never seen before because like, you know, the whole Colombian exchange was literally just happening. That's how I feel sometimes about like,

if you were raised in air where like, like I just said that, you know, hot air balloons were like a novelty that they like did like engravings and etchings and fucking illustrations in the newspaper for. And then you like, you then you get drafted into an army and you have to basically shoot down a sky whale. Like it must have just been surreal. Yeah.

Back of the day, a young Kakisador was getting his face torn off by a Jaguar. and in 1915 a British conscript is unloading into the sky whale as it blows up the city behind it. Can you imagine even just being a conquistur and be like, oh, there's this thing called a jaguar. It's like a cat, but it's huge and it'll kill you. It's like obviously cultures that have stuff like tigers and lions, etc. But like they don't have those in Western Europe. They don't have those on the aviary peninsula.

I say we introduce them to keep people scared. There was only one man who was uniquely equipped to battle the skywale and that is Captain Ahab the third. They have to conscript his entire extended family. I was going to pivot in a different direction that, like, as terrifying as Jaguars and Panthers must have been to Conquise. Or as you know, at least one of them was sort of like a Frodo furry. Like, he took the complete different approach to it when he's like, wait. Man, he must have been so excited when he saw Jaguar Warriors for the first time. Yeah, if only that guy lived long enough to see Tekken.

German pilots routinely thought they were bombing one place and that turned out to actually be another. or blown so far off target they had absolutely nothing. But my personal favorite is the case when one Zeppelin attempted to bomb London. They hit Hull for non-British heads out there. That is 150 miles away, give or take. And thanks to a policy, a good policy of total media blackout regarding anything to do with the bombings, the Germans couldn't really figure out if they're doing any real damage or even where they were doing damage. It's very similar to, again, with an episode Dr. Patrick Wyman, where we talked about the Japanese fire balloons of World War II, where there's a total press blackout.

So the Japanese thought that none of them even made it to the U.S. because they didn't see anything in the media about it. Like, this is a policy that a lot of countries tended to make back before someone could just like post about the Zeppelin over their house on social media. And it was very, very clear to the British that they were not going to be able to shoot down Zeppelins in the air. least not yet. So they need to attack them on the ground. I'm just imagining 1910s TikTok. It's T-I-C-K-Tick, comma, talk and sons.

And it's like... It's right out of a white workman. Yeah, he's a white omnibus pulled by a horse. You can run in there. You can do a custom engraving that then you're like, you know, you can mimeograph it or whatever and send it to all your friends. It's just this pork pie straight, balson, bulsome. Damn, sky full of whales.

F-R-F-R. I'm feeling Loker genuinely scared right now these goddamn skywales if you know you know the first of these attempts was at 1914 targeting the Imperial Zeppelin

Basin Dusseldorf four pilots flying the wonderfully named Sopwith tabloid biplane What a great name I know the soft with camel

but I didn't know about the Sopwith Tabloid The difference is with the Sopwith Tabloid flies over your house it just screams slurs at you No it actually just like hacks your

really airly phone to record your conversations with your mistress. It's got a very early form of aerial photography to allow it to take pictures of what's in the contents of your rubbish bin outside. It's the first biplane that flies of your house has very strong opinions than Megan Markle. It's a handshake meme once again between that plane and Princess Michael of Kent somehow. That's a fucking deep cut joke. The flight takes off from Antwerp. But again, thanks to the great Northern European weather, only one man, Lieutenant Charles Cullet, is able to actually navigate his way through the fog using only a compass to locate the Zeppelin base, which was at the very, very limit of what these planes were

capable of. We need to pause. It was like, that is so fucking cool to do that with a compass. Yeah, these pilots back in the day, like it reminds me when we talked about like the early US mail service episode that we did with Josh Borman. That's just like, how did any of these guys survive? You have to be totally psychotic. The pilots can't do this anymore

because the Royal Air Force is woke. Yeah, the pilots can't do this anymore to the concept of flight safety. They just have a compass that all four cardinal points to spell out W-O-K-E. Yeah, exactly. Flying west, flying east, flying K,

flying W, flying O. Flying K. is a real pain of the ass. You get really tired and just kind of fall asleep. In order to conduct the dive bombing run, Collett would have to climb up to 6,000 feet of altitude, cut his engines, and then dive down to just 400 feet before dropping his bombs,

at which point he would have to turn his engine back on and safely pull away. Obviously, there's a lot of problems with this, but the main one was the bombs did not go off, and he only succeeded in again, breaking a window with one of them, meaning Dover has been avenged. Much like a lot of the German bombing raids, though, this was kind of a proof of concept, what was possible,

but also a huge propaganda victory that scared the Germans. Suddenly, their bases could be hit from the sky. A month later in October, the British launched their second raid. This was with only two of the Sopwits and targeted the same base. Again, one of the pilots got lost and decided to bomb a train station and he missed, because of course he did. The other pilot, the very Britishly named Lieutenant Reginald Marix, found the Dusseldorf base. But this time, the bombs worked. He scored a direct hit and blew up one of the Zeppelins that was full of gas and bombs,

creating a 500-foot-tall geyser of flame as he flew away very slowly, because the same. is still a bi-played we're talking about. Fucking hell. They were motivated by, there was just a single guy on the White Cliffs of Dover with a massive drum saying, come up fucking eagle and drop some fucking boops. It's going home.

And then the Zeppelin turns around. He's like, oh God, it's actually coming home. After these two run-ins, the Germans massively reinforced their air defenses around the Dusseldorf base, making penetrating it with the standard biplane, more of a suicide attack. that anybody was comfortable ordering. That left two other Zeppelin bases, one in Kuxhaven and one in

Hamburg. But the decision was made to hit the one in Kuxhaven. This came with arguably even a bigger hurdle than just standard air defenses when it came to hitting it. Namely, land-based planes couldn't fly that far. So the British came up with a different idea. Sea planes, kind of. Because even that was not realistic. They would attach flotation devices to land-based planes, them on a ship, haul them closer through the North Sea, deploy them onto the sea from there, and then they would take off. This is something that nobody had ever done before. And it's still technically the first naval air attack in British military history. I know some people were probably expecting some kind of early aircraft carrier when I brought that up about half an hour ago.

This is more of an OLL-UPE version of a naval air attack, I guess. But, hey, you got to start somewhere. After hitting the targets, the planes could land back in the North Sea, be recovered back onto the ships via the crane, and then everything would be fine. Mind you, once the planes are deployed, nobody have any idea what was going on until or if they returned, because there was no radio communication. They did have any kind of radio system, and there was no way for them to talk to another while they're flying, let alone radio back to the fleet and give them status updates. This again brought fun new problems

to the operation, namely landing or taking off in a sea plane in the middle of the North Sea is a very hard thing to do. They also chose the winter to do it, the worst time of the year for the North Sea. Now, everybody

brought this up to Churchill. It was like, you know, maybe this isn't the best idea. Maybe we should wait until the current slows, the waves slow, whatever. But Churchill said, fuck it, do it anyway. Yeah, much like most alcoholics, they did it at an inopportune time where he wasn't drunk enough to get normal or he was too drunk to be normal. Yes, get to do what I did, wait until he fell asleep.

They need to be fine. They're taking the keys of the plane out of his pocket as he's passed out on the couch. Putting a blanket over him, sneaking out of the house. He ordered four sea fairies to be retrofitted to be able to carry, deploy, and recover three planes a piece. The planes chosen were of various types of the same plane, called the Short Folder, which, as you can tell from its name, had wings that could fold up for storage. Each carried two men and three 20-pound bombs. These are not some kind of earth-shaking bomber aircraft here. These planes also had no bomb sites whatsoever.

the bombs were wired to hang between the flotation devices, deployable when the pilot could just kind of glance over the side and pull a big string when he thought he was over the target. I was about to say, are they using the triggering mechanism for these bombs to drop as like having a cardboard box and a bit of cheese to trap a mouse? Yeah, it's definitely Acmey style bombing. You just pull this string when you think you're close enough. And some people would get pretty good at this, like they would learn how to lead and all this other stuff, but they're not quite there yet. And there's a lot of other issues that come with this system.

For example, the British never built anything like these planes or ferries before, but the urge to keep the plan secret. And because Churchill refused except pushing the deadline for the operation further out, which was set for October 25th of 1914, but that is not when it would actually start, meant that absolutely none of this stuff would be tested before. being deployed on active operation. None of these pilots really got to practice with the strange flotation device bomb set up that they had going on. Seems like it'll work. It's fine. They're pilots. They know how to

fly. Pull the string. Zeplands explode. This neab, boys, you must pull the string at the opportune time. Really, the only concession that he made was accepting that the Royal Navy would need to send some escort ships because the converted ferries were completely unarmed and unarmored. So the

25th rolls around and so does terrible weather. Because who could imagine that ever happening in the North Sea? Churchill insists that the operation go ahead anyway and they try. The ferries get into position off the coast of Hegeland Island. They lower their planes into the water, but the waves, the cloud cover, and the wind are all so bad that only two of the planes are able to take off, one of which had to turn around after only 12 miles thanks to its engine catching on fire. The last plane turned around when he realized he couldn't see anything. And even if he was somehow able to find Kuxhaven, there was no way he was going to be able to actually hit a target.

So the operation was canceled. In November, Churchill tries again, but it's canceled. Nobody's entirely sure why other than he said to hold off. And with that, the operation was rescheduled for Christmas Day and expanded to include 11 submarine escorts. Now, the reason why they fell on submarines is because they didn't want to expand the surface footprint. because the island that they're staging off of, the place that the ferries would be sitting targets as they went to work offloading planes, was only about 43 nautical miles away from the German high seas fleet headquarters at Wilhelm Schaffin.

So, if the Brits parked a massive squadron off of the coast, it was only a matter of time before they'd blown out of the water. Though the article to Cuxhaven raid by Mark Carlson, as always check her show notes for our full source list, puts all of this in a very funny way. 50 ships of the Royal Navy were deployed to deliver, at most, 82 pounds of explosives, which was the total combined amount for the 27 bombs that could possibly be carried by the entire mission, if they all were successful. Great analysis there from the Royal Navy. I mean, if you do manage to take out one Zeppelin, I suppose this is a pretty good trade. And if they do take out several zeppelins, that's a wonderful trade.

This is a bit of a spoiler alert here for you, boys. They take out precisely zero zeppelins, but oh well. I mean, like, even if they took out one, you think of like the force of an explosion of one Zeppelin would at least set one other one on fire. And it would definitely destroy the hangar it was in. It would cause a lot of damage. All the zepplins are actually just deflated. It's like when you unplug a bouncy castle to roll it up to like give it back to the delivery guy. The Germans just roll it up to hand it back to the manufacturer for repair.

I know someone's going to be annoyed. just like, oh, they're not actually hollow, but you know what, don't care. Yeah, the balloon heads coming at Tom now. The loon heads. That's something different. The thing was, on December 24th, as the mission left British waters to get into position, German intelligence was already on to them. The Germans had been getting reports that the British were disguising civilianships,

like berries, from military operation. And while the intelligence didn't uncover the full detail of the plan, they did say, hey, on the 25th, there's going to be an operation about 4,000, three nautical miles from the high seas fleet headquarters, and you're going to need to counter it. But like almost every situation in which we find ourselves talking about the German Navy, either during World War I or two, the decision was made to not have them sail out for fear of running into the British Navy's main fleet. Despite the fact they would have absolutely pasted this operation in about five seconds, they were told to hold on. This is kind of par for the

course whenever we bring up the German Navy in any war, obviously other than that was. one famous time where they didn't, but they would just park there and let this whole thing happen. Another fun detail here, since we're talking about Christmas Day and all that, this is all happening. These hundreds of men are moving into position. These dozens of ships of the British Navy are moving into position to conduct the strangest naval operation of the war, all while the Christmas truce is taking hold along certain stretches of the Western Front. At 7 a.m. with the sun fully up, as anything else would have made this entire operation. even crazier than what they were already doing, it was ordered to begin.

Things began to go wrong in about 701. Two of the planes suffered engine failure and were unable to take off, but the other seven managed to pull away in the mostly right direction. As they flew over the sea, the weather was mostly clear, but as they crossed over Germany, everything was covered by a thick fog. And immediately the pilots begin to get lost. get lost in that thick eye fog. They're getting lost in that thick fog.

F-A-W-G, baby. F-A-W-G, baby. F-A-W-G. Just when you thought the fog was back. Stephen King's the fog. You're basically describing like a Stephen King novel audiobook narrated by Paul Wall. We would all buy that. Everybody listening would buy that.

That would vault over my book of the audiobook ranking so fast. speaking of my book, The Highlands Burn, you can get it now. Check out the show notes. Fog. Fog. Fog does appear in the Highlands Burn. It's true. The fog was so bad that pilots dropped to just 150 feet, so they might be able to see where they were going, but still couldn't see anything. In fact, the thick-ass fog was so bad that they had no idea that only a few miles away from them, a Zeppelin measuring at about 500 feet long, had just lifted off from Cuxhaven. And they clearly would have been able to see it

floating past them like a mythical sky whale if it wasn't for all this. But that will be important in a minute, so just put a big-ass pin in that one for now. At this point, the entire flight had broken up in the weather, and each pilot was pretty much on their own. Because remember, they can't talk to one another. They can't relay their positions.

They have no way to determine their exact location. and they're all trying to find their way to the Zeppelin hangar that was nearly two football fields in size and just so you can maybe picture this in your head and you don't even have to rotate it because the hanger itself could rotate. What? It was built like a turntable

so it might be able to be slowly cranked over to face the wind to make Zeppelin deployment easier. We'd need to get all the boys out, start cranking that hangar. The first hanger designed by Soldier Boy. Well, no, I was thinking more of two turntables in a microphone. You have two enormous turntables and an enormous mic. I guess the Zeppelin could be the microphone. You put a big loud speaker on top of it.

It's the first Scientologist deployed Zeppelin. Exactly. That you know of. It should have been hypothetically very easy to find. One pilot dove so low and he found railroad tracks like we've talked about before, another pilot of this era episodes. oftentimes they would find like electrical lines or railroad tracks and follow them to where they think that they need to be going. And he assumed that these railroad tracks must be leading to the Cuxhaven base.

So he began to follow them. But it didn't bring him to the Cuxhaven base. Instead, the railroad tracks let him directly to Wilhelm Schaffin and the High Seas fleet headquarters. This is the W on the woke compass. Yeah. Oh no, it only points to Wilhelmshaven. Who designed this? All of the ships then began shooting at the single plane, but much like most of the pilots completely missed.

The pilot realizing he needed to get the fuck out of there, dropped his bombs, missed, and then ran back towards the fleet that was waiting for him in the North Sea. Another pilot that was completely lost found the coast. Now this told him that he was so far off course that he had no chance of buying Kuxhaven. but he didn't want the mission to go to waste. He wanted to drop his bombs on something. And he found something that looked like a seaplane hanger. So he dove in low and bombed it. And he hit his target.

It was not a seaplane hanger though. It was a shed used to dry fish by the locals. No. Too many civilian collateral damage. First, the Brussels Sprout guy. Now the dried fish people. Oh, nine. My trucking fish.

My trout. I have spent so long drying my trout. One pilot, however, did manage to find the Cuxhaven base, but the weather was so terrible, he still couldn't find the giant Zeppelin hangar. So he picked a random building, he thought might be it, dropped his bombs, missed by about a half a mile and flew away. There's loads of painters in that one building, painting a Zeppelin, like a perfect like Tromp-Loy painting.

it's just all clouds and that's the version of 1914 Camo. Yeah people are like thinking about camo hadn't been vented yet. People are just making everything earth tones but there's one genius man who just drew giant

puffy clouds all over his building and the Royal Air Corps couldn't figure it out. He's flipping through his collection of daguerreotypes from the collection of a fog hunter. Fuck. So the first naval air raid in British military history had failed so badly that the Germans didn't even know they were under attack.

Not a single German was killed in the attack and the only losses were some already dead and I assume very dry fish. But it gets worse. Because of the shit weather, the Zeppelin, the flight missed, was now patrolling over the North Sea, right back to where they were all heading to be picked up and where there are dozens of British ships. The Zeppelin quickly spotted the ships, radioed back to base, and in turn the high seas fleet, following orders that they were not to risk their ships, instead dispatched two bomb-laden sea planes to hit the British in what would be history's first air-to-sea battle, kind of. It turned out bad aim was a neutral force and a war before bomb sites, because one of the German planes

dove towards a target, the ferry HMS Empress, which had fallen behind thanks to some engine trouble, and the first pilot missed by about 200 meters, and the second by about half that. That's when the Zeppelin flying at 5,000 feet in the sky or about a kilometer and a half, moved in to try to drop its payload of three 110-pound bombs on the ferry. Now, the thing is, when you drop something from that high and they're falling that slowly,

you can see them coming? Really? Yes. Yes. That is very funny. The guy in charge of piloting the ferry just kind of looked up and zigzagged his ship around the bombs. The Zeppelin's bombs harmlessly rained down around them, and now the Germans out of bombs just turned around and went home.

The British pilots having no idea any of this was going on, or in fact they had missed a giant fucking Zeppelin flying past them. Also, dangerously low on fuel at this point, showed back up and began landing in the North Sea to get picked up. However, four of the planes had yet to return. The commander of the mission decided they must be out of fuel by now, or they would have crashed or been shot down. So, fuck them, they're dead.

Everybody pack it up or going home. But then three of the planes showed up and began landing near one of the submarines. Obviously, the submarines were not equipped to grab the planes in any way. So they just left the planes and stuffed the crewmen in the submarines. Some of the planes were destroyed by the crews. Then another British submarine that was not tasked at all to be part of the mission randomly shows up on scene. At the same time, another Zeppelin does. The British commander thought that this new submarine must be German because it showed up at the same time,

and that's just too weird for it to be circumstance. And he's about to order the other ships to fire on the submarine. But then the Zeppelin begins dropping bombs into the water that just started exploding everywhere, all while the submarines are still trying to pull pilots. from the sea. Now the bomb's all missed, but it's adding to the general chaos of the situation that everyone decides fuck that submarine that may or may not be German. Everybody get the hell out of here. Go the fuck home. But that still leaves one last pilot. He finally shows up. He lands in the sea completely out of fuel. He lands exactly where he's supposed to land. But he finds

his ride home had ditched it. Foggin hate when that happens. The whole fleet had pulled the Irish goodbye. He's just floating there in the sea, but like, yo, what in the fuck? This has always worked out in the stories I've read with someone gets left alone in the sea. The North Sea in December. Great time to be alone. He didn't even have a volleyball in the plane with him to keep him occupied. Not that we're aware of. He's going to fuck that volleyball. But he was rescued by a very confused passing Dutch fishermen and then slowly brought home. Yeah, what seems should be a problem? You're out here in the North Shee, man. You've got a plane. What are you doing here? Imagine how weird it must

have been to be that fisherman as he's trolling along, trying to catch his fish that will certainly be served raw with raw onions on top and on a piece of bread. And like suddenly there's zeppelins in the sky dropping bombs everywhere. There's fucking submarines. A random man in a plane that you have to rescue. Like, it's been a strange day at the office. Are you hungry man? Would you like to slice of bread with chocolate sprinkles on it? The Brits is like, fuck this. dives into the sea. I choose death. The operation is over.

And somehow, nobody has died on either side, which might be a first for this show. All of these moving parts, bombs being dropped, zeppelins are trying to bomb ships. Nobody's even wounded. There is an injury of a slip and fall. That's it. So did anything come out of this operation, outside of everyone flinging bombs like the steampunk version of Star Wars Storm? troopers.

Kind of. Remember that plane that got lost over Willem Schaffin? Mm-hmm. It's Navigator, the, again, Britishly named, Lieutenant Erskine Childers, made sure to note the strength and layout of the German high seas fleet while they were being shot at. This made it the first successful use of aerial surveillance missions over an enemy naval base in history, even if it was completely an accident. Mm-hmm.

There would be much more successful race. on Zeppelin bases in the future. Maybe we'll talk about them at some point. But the era of the Zeppelin was quickly coming to a close as weapons continued to evolve. And while Zeppelin raids over Britain would eventually kill over 1,000 people. It was not long before their time was over

and the Zeppelin bombing mission was little more than a highly explosive suicide quest. Even if we can all agree, they looked fly as hell doing it. Yeah. The end. I mean, is this a first where nobody has died in the entire episode? I mean, we've definitely talked about episodes where nobody dies, but we've never done an episode

where it's like a full on military operation where you have someone shooting at you and bombs going off and there's air wing and naval wing and fucking everything else. And somehow nobody is even slightly winged. Again, the only injury was a slip and fall. That's it. OSHA could have solved that. This is odd. Yeah.

And I imagine it's like if you were participating in this, your thought would be, I mean, this is really dumb. These things aren't going to work. This is incredible. But it wasn't the death knell of them. They did last a while longer. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, Zeppelins, of course, survive the war for the most part. But as weapons technology catches up to them, they stop being such a sure thing. They start exploding into flames a whole lot more. Balloon busters become a thing, even though balloon busters are. much more geared towards observational balloons and things like that.

But still, they stop being the mythical sky whale and start being something that Ahab and his conscripted offspring can take down. Yeah, yeah. Basically, in World War II, you have dirgibles that are typically used to protect against dive bombers. And basically they are just meant to obscure visibility and also make it dangerous for planes too. So it stops being a skywale and becomes more of like,

surrounding yourself with a sky herd of sheep in order to protect against sky wolves, I guess. There's also the U.S. did a really good job using airships to counter U-boat threats. Incredibly successful doing that. As is often said that they never lost an airship in anti-U-boat operations. So they just had to fight, you know, the actual whale with the sky whale. Another moment in Irish excellence, you know, Erskinschilders who did the bombing at Crookshaven? Do you know how he died? How did he die, Tom?

He was executed by the Irish Free State in 1922. I was like, is that the Earthken Childers, not the Earthken Childers who ended up being the president? But it was like, no, this is Erskinskind Chilers who was like part of the Anglo-Irish tree, who then got executed in 1922. Let's see you fly away from this one. But fellas, we do a thing on this show called Question from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, support the show on Patreon. $5 a month gets you absolutely everything. Years and years of bonus content.

Every episode a week early. Ebooks, audiobooks, first dibs on live show tickets and merch. Or you can scribble your question down onto a Brussels sprout and knuckleball that son of a bitch directly into Nate. and we will answer it on the show. Don't throw Brussels spray at and Nate. If it's muffins, that's okay. Those are like, if they're not they. Muffins can be soft.

Today's question is you have to be isekid into a fantasy world, which you have consumed its media. Which fantasy world are you being isichied into? This is easy for me because I consume a lot of fantasy media. and all of it is like grim, dark and terrible. So I have to default to being Issykid into the Hobbit probably sounds quite nice. You know, like having a massive hobbiton dinner and second dinner and second lunch, just sitting around smoking pipes with my sweet wizard friends.

Legitimately the most cheerful fantasy stuff I've ever read, even though obviously there's the whole like threat of Mordor and all that, that's still much better than every, like, much more hopeful than anything else that I read. I want to go chill with my Hobbit homies in New Zealand. And that's not just because your feet are huge as well and Harry. I would fit in except that I would definitely be the center on the Hobbiton basketball team. Yeah, but what are you doing when Saruman and Wormtong invade the Shire?

Look, yeah, got to take the bad with the good. You know what I'm saying? Like, I would rather, because like we know how that story ends, right? Like, Hobbiton is fine. It goes through some things at the end of the third book that the movies definitely didn't go into. But you compare that to anything that, say, did Joe Epicrauby ever wrote? I'm hanging out in The Hobbit, for sure. I'm hanging out in Middle Earth.

I'm smoking pipe with my wizard friends. I'm centering the Hobbiton basketball team. 100%. I'm getting Isikide into the Chobani commercial, Dear Al, is the solar punk yogurt commercial. I actually think that would be cool. I'm interested. I keep thinking of Ursula Le Guin, whenever I see reference to that, I think of, you know, the dispossessed or the word for world is forest or there's another one that's that's

with the left hand of darkness stuff like that yeah so i i want to i want to get us a guide into the solar punk yogurt commercial yeah same send me to the left hand of darkness i want to chill with the gender fluid uh aliens yeah but you have to live on the cold planet with like the evil king and shit and yeah i already live on the cold planet i live in the uk you already live on the cold planet with the evil king yeah the dispossessed is wonderful in the sense that you have like the austere anarchy planet, you know, where everyone's basically like one degree above starvation, but they've achieved a kind of anarchist to societal balance. And then you have to go study physics on, you know, like the sort of hell capitalism planet, this kind

of like sex circus and or Charles Dickens, you know, so. I don't feel like I would enjoy either of those things personally. I mean, the dispossess is, is actually really fascinating. It's a tremendous book. But yeah, it basically envisions an anarchist society on what's effectively like a semi-desert planet. Or speaking of desert planets, send me to Dune. I'll be doing lines of spice with Paula Trades at the afters. You can do lines of spice back in my hometown and just rip your clothes off and

like throw yourself in the traffic. Exactly. Exactly. You know, this podcast always pivots back to its origins. Lines of spice from Dune becomes the gas station spice packets. Climbing K2 becomes climbing K2 the spice packet from the gas station. I'm currently reading the Greenbone saga

right now and it's quite good but I don't want to live in like a fantasy reimagination of Hong Kong only because in the book there's like super powered triads

that just get into gang wars and butcher each other whether they're effectively like what if the triads were super sayans it's a really cool book I don't want to live there but fellas

I believe that's a podcast you host other podcasts plug those podcasts I listen to Trash Future podcast about the tech industry being bad and British politics also being bad

Listen to Kill James Bond, a podcast about films from a feminist perspective that's extremely funny. Listen to Second Homes. My band, our first album is out everywhere. You can get albums. And we're working on a physical release. So hopefully in a couple of months we'll have more on that. But it's available on Bandcamp if you want to actually buy a digital version and give us money. Or you can listen to it on streaming and we will get the fractional ghost of a hypothetical scent.

But it is very convenient, I'll admit. Listen to Bloodwork, a show about the economy of violence or beneath skin, a show about the history. of everything told her the history of tattoos. I do a lot of shit. Just follow me on Instagram at Scam Golden. That's G-O-L-D-I-N. You can see whatever shit I'm working on in any given day. This is my show and you've already listened to it. So thanks for that. Leave us a review and wherever it is you listen to podcasts. Consider supporting us on Patreon. We're a completely independent podcast. We have no ads. We have no marketing. Just our listeners. You make everything we do here possible and you get a ton of stuff for it. And I have a book out. The Highlands

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