THE FIRST BLITZ The German Air Campaign 1917-1918

In 1917 the Germans launched a major air campaign against the British mainland which shocked the whole nation and terrorised the south-east of England.These attacks by German bombers caused hundred of deaths and injuries, but until now the full details of these raids have NEVER before been told. These range from the massacre of Canadian troops resting in Folkstone on May 25, 1917, to the widespread carnage of shoppers a couple of miles away in the city centre. Who is any the wiser that Sherness, then a major dockyard for the Royal Navy, barely escaped a similar fate when it too was singles out for the same treatment or that a 50kg bomb struck Upper North Street School in London’s Poplar on June 13, 1917. It not only took the lives of 18 school children, many as young as 5 years, but crippled and mutilated twice as many again. Terrible as this was, it was just one of scores of similar tragedies which terrified the populace of London and horrified the world.The account of this campaign plus the political and military circumstances surrounding it, follows years of original and painstaking research, interviews and correspondence with those who remember that period.