Somehow I managed to miss – by exactly a year! – the publication of the third and final volume of Ian Castle’s history of the Zeppelin and Gotha raids:
- Ian Castle, Zeppelin Onslaught: The Forgotten Blitz 1914–1915 (Barnsley: Frontline, 2018).
- Ian Castle, Zeppelin Inferno: The Forgotten Blitz 1916 (Philadelphia: Frontline, 2022).
- Ian Castle, Gotha Terror: The Forgotten Blitz 1917–1918 (Philadelphia: Frontline, 2024).
I included Zeppelin Onslaught on my 1914–1918 air raids reading list back in 2022. In the meantime I’ve read Zeppelin Inferno, and having just finished Gotha Terror I can now say that the Forgotten Blitz trilogy is now the gold-standard narrative of the German air raids on Britain in the First World War, especially in terms of the damage suffered on the ground. Indeed, thanks to Ian’s meticulous research in the National Archives and the press (especially coroner’s inquests), for the first time we have a near-complete list of the individuals killed in all the raids: 1285 out of the official total of 1414 dead, or nearly 91 percent. In itself this is a huge achievement. There is also a solid account of the operational side of the raids, both British and German.
As somebody is also (but at a much slower rate!) writing about these raids, I’m extremely grateful to have these books. Although it’s structured chronologically, my book is not a narrative, or not a comprehensive one anyway; I’m focusing much more on how people, communities and governments responded to the raids, than on the details of the raids themselves. But those details matter, and that’s why it’s great to have such a reliable and well-researched guide to hand when I need it (which is often).
Congratulations, Ian!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://airminded.org/copyright/.
