They Were So Happy, Oh! So Happy

DESCRIPTION: "They were happy, Oh! so happy When they left Germany To fly across the sea, No danger they did see." But when it came to Cuffley, "We brought it to the ground." The Zeppelin will not return home. The king congratulates Robinson
AUTHOR: "Privates Sunderland and Fleet" (source: Nettleingham-TommysTunes)
EARLIEST DATE: 1917 (Nettleingham-TommysTunes)
KEYWORDS: battle technology | zeppelin
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Sep 3, 1917 - First successful British interception of a zeppelin raid
FOUND IN: Britain
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Nettleingham-TommysTunes, #39, "They Were So Happy, Oh! So Happy" (1 text, tune referenced)
Roud #10782
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Back Home in Tennessee" (tune)
cf. "Our Essex Camp" (tune)
NOTES [991 words]: Germany used more than 100 zeppelins in World War I. Most of these were used near the front lines, with limited success (they were vulnerable to weather as well as enemy planes), but there were 53 zeppelin raids on Great Britain, with the most attacks (22) being made in 1916 (Pope/Wheal, pp. 519-520; Swinfield, p. 45 counts 51 instead of 53).
The zeppelin raids didn't really do a lot of damage in Britain -- compared to what would happen in World War II, they were nothing. But Swinfield, p. 45, says they managed to drop 196 tons of bombs in the course of the war, killing 557 and injuring 1358. And they were frightening and irritating because, at first, there seemed to be nothing anyone could do about them. Swinfield, p. 41, quotes someone (Brad King?) as calling them "the H-bomb of the day" for the fear they inspired: there was no sound, and then something exploded when their bombs landed. "Not until September 2-3, 1916 was a Zeppelin shot down (by Lieutenant Leefe Robinson)" (Forty p. 444). That, obviously, was the event that inspired this song.
I might add, though, that although the zeppelins seemed invulnerable to the British public, their crews certainly weren't "so happy" -- zeppelins were dangerous beasts, prone to crashes and accidents; their crews had plenty to worry about: "Airships were difficult to maneuver, especially if heavily loaded with bombs. Navigation aids were primitive, officers and crews numb with cold in the open gondolas" (Swinfield, p. 43).
According to Cross, p. 66, Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson (1895-1918) was "twenty-one, a thin six-footer with piercing blue eyes, fair skin, and a round face." (There is an image of him -- it looks like a painting, not a photograph -- in Cross's photo section. There are photographs of him in his Wikipedia article, which is much, much longer than I would have expected -- clearly someone is a fan....) He and his squadron were assigned to defending Britain, but they weren't given a particularly good plane with which to do so. Cross, p. 73, says that he flew a BE-2c -- coincidentally, the plane that is the subject of "The Pilot's Psalm" (which see). It wasn't a fighter; it was a two-seater utility craft.
By 1917, it at least could carry a Lewis machine gun. And the British had been using incendiary bullets since 1915 (Cross, p. 68); it's just that they didn't seem to work. At least, they hadn't managed to hurt the zeppelins!
There had been a number of indications on the night of September 2/3 that a raid was coming (Cross, p. 71). Robinson received orders at about 11:00 p.m. to go up and intercept (Cross, p. 73). Interestingly, he went up alone, without an observer -- an advantage in flight, since the BE-2c could take off in a shorter space, fly higher, climb faster, stay up longer, and land more easily. And Robinson didn't really need a navigator since he was near home.
His first sighting was said to come at 1:08 a.m. on September 3 (Cross, p. 77). That one eluded him, as did the second zeppelin he saw. But he saw a glow nearby, which he took to be the result of bombs hitting. Robinson turned and found zeppelin SL-11 (Cross, pp. 79-80). His first two passes failed to damage the German airship, but on the third run, he finally managed to start a fire which brought the zeppelin down. Avoiding British anti-aircraft fire, he managed to land safely at 2:43 a.m. Britain had finally managed to bring down a bomber (Cross, pp. 81-84).
I can't help but think that it would have happened a lot sooner had they assigned actual fighter planes to the task.
When people realized that someone had shot down a gasbag, there was supposedly singing and dancing in the streets (Cross, p. 93). As the song says, the wreckage landed near the town of Cuffley, and it became "the site of a virtual pilgrimage" (Cross, p. 96).
It didn't stop Peter Strasser, the commander of Germany's zeppelin fleet. He himself led another large-scale raid on September 23, 1916. But this resulted in the loss of three more airships (Cross, pp. 97-108), one of them shot down by another member of Robinson's flight group. In all. six were shot down in the course of about a year (Cross, p. 113). Suddenly they weren't looking so indestructible, and their bombing raids would be severely curtailed. Strasser tried to adjust by using zeppellins with very high flight ceilings, but while the British couldn't shoot these down, the crews couldn't manage them, either, because of altitude sickness (CRoss, pp. 134-135). So the Germans had little choice but to cut back.
The craft Robinson shot down, the SL-11, wasn't technically a zeppelin -- it wasn't made by the Zeppelin company but by a competitor called the Luftfahrzeugbau Schütte-Lanz. Their craft, according to Cross, p. 63, had better "aerodynamic design. They were also superior in the matter of power-plant capabilities and control systems." They tended to age faster than true Zeppelins, because they used frames of wood rather than aluminum. This didn't matter for the SL-11, though, since she was just a month old. "She was 570 feet long, almost 70 feet high, and was powered by four 140-horsepower Maybach engines that would produce a top airspeed of 60 miles per hour. She could carry a useful load of about 50,000 pounds, including two tons of bombs and incendiaries."
Their other big disadvantage, according to Cross, p. 64, was a relatively low ceiling. Which was what enabled Robinson to shoot down the SL-11.
Robinson, according to Wikipedia, was eventually awarded the Victoria Cross. Posted to active service in France, he was shot down and captured. He survived the war as a prisoner but died in 1918 as a result of the influenza epidemic.
There are at least two biographies of Robinson, Ray Rimell, The Airship VC: The Life of Captain William Leefe Robinson, Aston, 1989 and Leslie William Bills, A Medal for Life: The Biography of Captain William Leefe Robinson, Spellmount, 1990. - RBW
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File: NeTT039

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