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Along with Germany's involvement in The Great War came the zeppelin. With this, the Count's dreams finally would be realized. His mammoth ships would carry their deadly cargo from far from behind the battles in France and bomb London itself. Initially, there was no defense to put against these raids. The zeppelins would leave Germany at dusk and arrive over England by the cover of night. Cities could be easily spotted by their street lights and the bombs would be dropped. The Zeppelins would then turn for home and arrive before dawn.

(An early Naval Zeppelin during the First World War. You can see the tube
that allowed crew to move between the command car and the hull. You can also
just make out one of the propeller blades behind the command car.)

Often English pilots would pursue the zeppelins across the sky but they had little chance of catching them. The zeppelins would be at a considerable altitude and the zeppelin's cruising speed was often comparable to that of the aeroplane chasing it. To make matters worse, if a pilot did manage to catch up to the airship, the zeppelins were bristling with machine guns.

Only later in the war did the tide turn against the zeppelins. New planes with more powerful engines were built that could catch the midnight marauders. These new planes also carried a new weapon that would exploit the zeppelins Achilles' heel: incendiary ammunition. Bullets laced with phosphorus would burn with a hot flame that could easily set the massive volume of hydrogen aflame. When a zeppelin burned, eye witnesses said that it would light the night sky.
The Germans tried to counter this by making new high-flying, super light weight zeppelins called "Height Climbers" and by painting the undersides black. The idea was that if a zeppelin could fly high enough, it could exceed the operational altitude of the British planes and its black underside would be less likely to be spotted against the night sky. These were both good ideas, but by then, the time of the zeppelin as a military front-line weapon was over.

I II

I. A "height-climber zeppelin lands in Germany. Note the black painted under side and nose. This was supposed to help it hide from search lights.

II. A British propaganda poster from the time. It reads, "ENLIST, By staying at home you are giving your approval to this kind of thing." and depicts a woman and her children being caught in a blast from a zeppelin-dropped bomb. In reality, zeppelin bombing accuracy was pitiful and most of the damage done was to the moral of the British people only.