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N0KFQ > TODAY 17.02.08 08:01l 41 Lines 1809 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Today in History - Feb 17
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To : TODAY@ALLUS
February 17, 1915
Zeppelin L-4 crashes into North Sea
After encountering a severe snowstorm on the evening of February
17, 1915, the German zeppelin L-4 crash-lands in the North Sea
near the Danish coastal town of Varde.
The zeppelin, a motor-driven rigid airship, was developed by
German inventor Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin in 1900. Although a
French inventor had built a power-driven airship several decades
before, Zeppelin’s rigid dirigible, with its steel framework, was
by far the largest airship ever constructed.
The L-4’s captain, Count Platen-Hallermund, and a crew of 14 men
had completed a routine scouting mission off the Norwegian coast
in search of Allied merchant vessels and were returning to their
base in Hamburg, Germany, when the snowstorm flared up,
bombarding the airship with gale-force winds.
Unable to control the zeppelin in the face of such strong winds,
the crew steered toward the Danish coast for an emergency
landing, but was unable to reach the shore before crashing into
the North Sea. The Danish coast guard rescued 11 members of the
crew who had abandoned ship and jumped into the sea prior to the
crash; they were brought to Odense as prisoners to be
interrogated. Four members of the crew were believed drowned and
their bodies were never recovered.
One month earlier, the L-4 had taken part in the first-ever air
raid on Britain in January 1915, when it and two other zeppelins
dropped bombs on the towns of Great Yarmouth and King's Lynn on
the eastern coast of England. Four civilians were killed in the
raid, two in each town. Zeppelins would continue to wreak
destruction on Germany’s enemies throughout the next several
years of war--by May 1916, 550 British civilians had been killed
by aerial bombs.
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