Killing Zeppelin L-53 & thereafter the Royal Naval Air Service

The Royal Naval Air Service in the Graet War was outstanding in killing German submarines and Zeppelins. I have recently described one such success, here is anothe, again from The Spider's Web, showing even greater innovation and ingenuity:

(Page 230) But the L 53 annoyed Colonel Samson, D.S.O., who at this time was Officer Commanding No. 4 Group, E/.A.F., and he had a thirty- foot deck made to fit on one of the towing lighters, and on this, held in place with a quick release  gear, he put a Camel aeroplane, a single-seated fighter land-machine with great speed and climb.

(Page 233) The flotilla then cruised off Terschelling until fifteen minutes after eight o'clock, when the flagship signalled to the destroyer towing the Camel lighter that the L 53 had been sighted. Immediately Cully saw the Zeppelin glistening in the sunlight. It was about thirty miles away, at a height of ten thousand feet. It looked about as big as his little finger.
He climbed into the cockpit of his machine. The propeller was swung. He tested the rotary engine. When the towing destroyer had got up to thirty knots, he ran his engine full out, slipped the quick release, ran along the lighter deck only five feet, and took to the air.
At forty -one minutes after eight o'clock he started to climb towards Commander Proells' airship at a speed of fifty-two miles an hour.

(Page 235) Commander Proells had also been climbing, and he was still above Cully. His airship was of the type known as the height-climbing 50's, the last word in construction, six hundred and forty feet long, with five engines, and containing two million cubic feet of inflammable gas.
The L 53 had all this time been broadside on to Cully. He now saw her turn end on. He thought that he had been sighted by her crew, and that her Commander had turned out to sea away from him. He swung the nose of the Camel directly towards her and continued to...

(Page 236) ... But the crew of the great Zeppelin apparently did not see the tiny midge in the sun, for they held on their course at the same height. At forty-one minutes after nine o'clock, one hour after Cully had left the lighter in the Camel, the two machines met head on, the airship only two hundred feet above the aeroplane.
Cully pulled back his controls and stalled his machine until the Camel was almost standing on its tail. As the bow of the Zeppelin came into his sight he started both Lewis guns....

(Page 238) The aluminium skeleton of the bow of the Zeppelin was now fully exposed. But the fabric of the tail was still smoking and burning. She was standing vertically upright, nose down, and was falling rapidly below him with ever increasing momentum.

The End of the RNAS

(Page 243/4) It was the older of the two British flying services, having its beginnings in 1910. It had never been noted for its red-tape methods, its ingenuity in creating forms to be filled in, or the number of ground personnel required to administer it. But the debt which the nation owes to it for the development of engines and efficient aircraft, no less than for its operations on land and sea over the whole world, has hardly been appreciated. For at one time, without the pilots developed under its traditions and the machines and engines developed by its foresight, things would have gone hard with our arms in France.
It was a small service that had done great things. But its work was not  appreciated, as it followed the traditions of its parent, and adopted, not without a struggle it is true, the virtue of silence. And now its people were asked to give up the legends about the mighty pilots who had created the service, the traditions which had accumulated so rapidly in war time, the uniform and routine which so well fitted their work, the comradeship which had permeated the personnel owing to its limited number, and the name which numberless brave men had laid down their lives to make honourable.

And bitterest pill of all, the Navy, our natural parent, was willing we should be put under the guardianship of an unknown and alien stepmother.
 

At this dinner the toast to the King was drunk in the mess sitting; for the last time.
 

Blow this khaki ! I feel hardly human.

Zeppelins - the German tool for the Slaughter and Terrorising of Women and Children

In World War One, the Germans in their determination to rule Europe, proved once again they would stop at nothing in pursuit of that aim, when they introduced giantairships called Zeppelins, to bomb innocent civilians up and down the legth of Britain.

As Prime Minister, David Cameron, meets with the German Chancellor Merkel, this weekend; the entire nation would do well to recall just the history of the past one hundred years and the clear message of Margaret Thatcher whose funeral will be next week, the means of her disposal and the nature of those who performed that act and the interests in which they may have been working ALL given the present appalling situation across Europe and the deliberate suffering being imposed, again largely on women and children, to meet German demands in Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Ireland and no doubt very soon elsewhere!

My grandfather was a Flight Lieutenant in flying boats based at Felixtowe, charged with mainly destroying submarines but also these Zeppelins if they could be found. The following extract from the book "The Spider's Web The Romance of a Flying Boat Flight in the First World War" (pdf format file linked here) descibes the destruction of one such by two of his Canadian Co-Pilots:

The quarry these two pilots were crossing the North Sea to hunt was a Zeppelin, an airship over six hundred feet long. It carried a crew of captain, second in command, a warrant officer who did the navigation, a warrant officer engineer, two engineer ratings for each of the five engines, a petrol man, and six other hands, of which two worked the elevators, two steered, one attended to the wireless and signalling, and one repaired the fabric.
All these men had received a highly specialised training at Nordholz, the course lasting not less than six months. Also the deck-ratings and the engine - room mechanics were trained in aerialgunnery, and when at action stations the men not on watch were employed as machine-gunners.
Throughout this month there had been great Zeppehn activity over the North Sea, for early in the year the German military craft had been handed over to the German navy, and the best airships of the tw^o services had been concentrated near the German coast at Nordholz, Wittmundshaven, Ahlhorn, and Tondern. Until May 1916 the Zeppelins had carried out their patrols at a height of a thousand feet, looking for our minefields and scouting for our naval forces, but in this month L-7 was destroyed by gun-fire from a naval unit, and they were now, excepting on rare occasions, carrying out their work at a great altitude.......
Dickey suddenly saw a Zeppelin.
It was five miles on the starboard beam, at a height of only fifteen hundred feet.
Billiken swung the bow of '11 towards the airship.
He opened out his engines. He climbed straight for the Zeppelin.
Dickey was at the bow gun, the wireless operator was at the midships gun, and the engineer was at the stern guns. The Zeppelin was barely moving. Her propellers were merely ticking over.
They were now at two thousand feet, a thousand yards away from the airship, and above her. Now the look - out on the Zeppelin saw the flyingboat.
The propellers vanished as the engines were speeded up. She moved forward. She swung away on a new course. Two men raced to the gun on the tail and the gun amidships on top.
Billiken dived on the Zeppelin's tail at a screaming hundred and forty miles an hour. He  passed diagonally across her from starboard to port.
When one hundred feet above and two hundred feet away Dickey got in two bursts from his machine-gun.
He used only fifteen cartridges.
As he cleared the Zeppelin, Billiken made a sharp right-hand turn, and found himself slightly
below and heading straight for the enemy. He read her number, L 43. Her immense size staggered him.
Then he saw that she was on fire.
Little spurts of flame stabbed out where the explosive bullets had torn the fabric, and the
incendiary bullets had set alight the escaping hydrogen.
Pulling back his controls, he lifted the boat over the airship, and just in time. With a tremendous burst of flame—a flame so hot that all on board the flying-boat felt the heat—the millions of cubic feet of hydrogen were set off. She broke in half 
Each part, burning furiously, fell towards the water.
The top gunner rolled into the flames and vanished.
Three men fell out of the gondolas. Turning over and over they struck the water in advance of the wreckage.
The remnants of the Zeppelin fell into the sea, and a heavy pillar of black smoke reared itself to the sky.

Just what does the present leader of the Conservative Party think he is playing at in disregarding all the plain warnings of Margaret Thatcher, his more experienced and longer serving predecessor, especially those made since she was ousted by their party, and even more so given the clear and obvious results of EMU all across Europe now underway?