Before 1915, no British civilian had ever died in an aerial attack. That changed on 19 January 1915, when German Navy Zeppelins bombed Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn, killing seventy-two-year-old Martha Taylor and shoemaker Samuel Smith—the first aerial bombing casualties in British history. Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s rigid airships, each capable of roughly 85 mph and carrying two tons of bombs, were intended to break civilian morale and force the government to divert resources from the trenches. The first raid on London came on 31 May 1915, led by Kapitänleutnant Erich Linnarz in LZ 38. Over the next three years, Zeppelins struck Hull, Southend, Liverpool, and Edinburgh. The most destructive raid occurred on 8 September 1916, when Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Mathy’s Zeppelin set London ablaze, killing twenty-two and wounding eighty-seven. The turning point came on 3 September 1916, when Second Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson shot down Schütte-Lanz airship SL11 over Cuffley (widely misidentified as a Zeppelin at the time) using explosive and incendiary bullets—an act for which he received the Victoria Cross. The Germans responded with “Super Zeppelins,” but the new ammunition had exposed the hydrogen giant’s Achilles heel. By August 1918, when the last raid was attempted over the Norfolk coast, the Zeppelin was obsolete. In total, more than 500 people had been killed and over 1,000 injured. The raids failed to break morale, but they succeeded in one respect: they convinced the British government that the home front required a unified aerial defence, leading directly to the formation of the Royal Air Force on 1 April 1918.