Inside the command module beneath the streamlined, cylindrical hull of the craft, there are 20 crew members, each busy in their own way.
The pilot picks up the radio and reports to the ship's captain, Capt. Linnaerts, that he has arrived over the target.
The captain observes for a moment, then orders the observer: start dropping bombs.
The observer turned on the bomb-dropping equipment, and saw the opening of the bomb-dropping port under the hull, dozens of bombs with a yield of several hundred kilograms fell successively, and in a short time, the ground was ablaze with fire, which was particularly dazzling in the dark night.
Linnaz watched all this with satisfaction, and a small smile appeared on his face. Suddenly, he leaned over and wrote a line on a scrap of paper in front of the command console, and then had the observer drop it through the hatch window.
The piece of paper read: you British, we have been here before and we will come again, surrender or die. Germans.
The hull then turned around and flew east.
On this day, Germany used airships carrying bombs to bomb Britain, and thus began the history of aerial bombing.
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The mission was carried out by the famous German zeppelin.
As early as July 1900, the German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin designed, built and successfully flew the world's first Zeppelin.
More than a decade had passed since he was inspired to design a better flying machine when, as a German soldier visiting the United States, he first saw the manned balloon units used in the American Civil War.
The previous airships were soft structures that did not step outside the realm of the balloon, and the principle was no different from that of a hydrogen balloon. Therefore, the shortcomings are too obvious, the airship itself is too fragile and unreliable, and there are extremely high requirements for climate and wind direction.
The Zeppelin-designed airship, on the other hand, pioneered the use of rigid construction.
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The Zeppelin's buoyancy device consisted mainly of an aluminum skeleton and a dozen or so hydrogen-filled airbags, which were kept in separate compartments.
The aluminum skeleton was then used to cover all the airbags, and the outside was covered with silk cloth to make it look like only one airbag was used.
Aluminum trestles the length of the hull were used on the top of the Zeppelin to hang ballast and pods.
There were two zeppelin pods, the front one was the command pod, in which the zeppelin pilots operated, and the back one was the power pod, which housed the engines and fuel.
Since airplanes had only recently appeared in World War I, they had very little airborne capacity and posed little threat on the ground.
As a result, Germany began to use the zeppelin, which had the advantages of long range, high bomb load, long lag time, and high lift, to bomb the United Kingdom and a number of other countries.
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From January 19, 1915 to August 5, 1918, Germany sent 208 zeppelins to carry out air raids on the United Kingdom, dropping about 300 tons of bombs, resulting in about 1,300 deaths and 3,000 people were injured.
However, the Zeppelin also had the disadvantages of huge size, clumsy, low defense, high influence by weather, high cost, and difficult to take off.
So **** about 80 zeppelins were destroyed by Allied fire and bad weather.