EAVESDROPPER EWING AND HIS CREW

While Bockholt was waiting in Yambol for the weather to improve, in German East Africa an orderly entered the tent of Captain Gurdon during the night of November 20 — 21 and shook him awake. The captain, an intelligence officer with the British East African Expeditionary Force, sat up and took the paper the soldier handed him. It was a coded message. As he had done so often before, the captain sat down and decoded it at once. It was a direct message from the Director of Military Intelligence in London: "Airship will attempt to land at Kitangari".

This was nothing new. Early in November, the captain had first decoded a message from the War Office that an enemy airship with supplies might try to land at Kitangari on about the 20th of the month. All radio stations were instructed to jam radio signals from the airship. Local headquarters were to be advised of the time and place at which the airship had been observed and of the direction in which it was flying. Speed was of paramount importance. The message was to be sent as a priority message without encoding it. British air squadrons were instructed to attack the zeppelin with bombs; there was no incendiary ammunition in East Africa.

Since that first, startling message, Captain Gurdon had been awakened more than once to decode "immensely long cyphers" from London, instructing the British forces in great detail about action to be taken with respect to the airship.

How had London known about the plan to fly an airship to Africa? How had Major Trench known that Bockholt had replaced Buttlar as commander of "L 57", that the ship had been lengthened and then had been destroyed? Where had he learned that Kölle's ship had shared a hangar with Buttlar's "L 54", that Kraushaar was married to an English woman (was he considered reliable, the major had asked) and that Kölle had married while on two weeks leave in January? Trench had indifferently scattered these details about in the interrogation as if he were accustomed to regularly exchanging gossip with German airship officers over a glass of brandy.

Some of Major Trench's information had no doubt been supplied by those men and women who followed the ancient profession of spying and treason, motivated by almost every emotion that dwells in the human breast - greed, lust for excitement, revenge for hurts, real or imagined, fear of blackmail and in some cases, a sense of patriotic duty.

Human beings have an almost atavistic fear of spies - the unseen watchers, the readers of sealed letters and locked files, the betrayers of confidences and friendships. Spies are the breach in the wall of community into which men retreat for safety and reassurance. A spy does more than steal information. He sunders the fraternal ties, he undermines the feeling of trust and solidarity of the group and leaves each man alone, without support, because he no longer knows whether his brother is a friend or a secret foe. That is the unforgivable treason. In war, it traditionally demands the ultimate penalty. If war makes the danger of espionage more immediate, the cry of "spy" in peacetime can also produce a reaction tinged with hysteria. This is not confined to current times and the Iranian militants who seized the American Embassy in Teheran as a "nest of spies". The Europe of the early 20th century contracted its own form of spy fever.

There had been truly notorious espionage cases and these served to excite the fever. The Dreyfuss case became the vehicle of a right wing political and antisemitic campaign which deeply divided France, perverted the French judicial system, led to the acquittal of the real traitor and the transportation of the hapless Captain Dreyfuss to Devil's Island. There was the case of Colonel Redl whose sexual preferences the Russians levered into a betrayal of the mobilization plans of the Austrian army. But there was also a steady stream of lesser incidents to keep the fires stoked. Two weeks after Trench and Brandon had been arrested, two English officers on an afternoon ride on the heights overlooking Portsmouth observed a gentleman making sketches. As they drew near, he stopped and the officers asked to look at his sketchbook. The stranger obliged and when asked to identify himself, presented his calling card. It read: Lieutenant Siegfried Helm, 21st Nassau Engineering Battalion, Imperial German Army. The English officers informed him that he should call for his sketchbook at the local police station in the morning when he could probably have it back. The sketchbook contained details of the fortifications of Portsmouth, some of which were, to be sure, quite venerable, but also details of the harbor and dock yards. Helm was arrested.

To several German newspapers, the case was immediately clear. Helm, a picture of naivity, would never have been arrested had it not been for the recent arrest of two real English spies. " Lt. Helm is simply nothing but a hostage.. less of a mistake than somewhat malicious revenge". Unlike Trench and Brandon, who were to be tried by the German Supreme Court, Lt. Helm was not arraigned before the House of Lords but faced the awesome authority of the Police Court of Farnham instead. He had to appear for a preliminary hearing to determine whether he should be held for a violation of the Official Secrets Act. The case was an instant sensation; only a favored few of the crowd clamoring for admission obtained tickets for the few seats in the small courtroom. Strict decorum was maintained. A photographer had to give up his plates when he attempted to take a picture of the defendant and an artist lost his sketchbook while drawing the portrait of a witness. After four hearings, the Police Court reduced the charge to a misdemeanor but held Helm for the Winchester Assizes. Bail was set at £200. Lt. Helm did not win his conditional freedom until October 4th. While Helm's case was proceeding, two German lieutenants were imprisoned in Moscow for spying on Russian army maneuvers. The charge was without substance and they were quickly released. The Wichester grand jury indicted Helm and the case came on for trial on November 15. Leading counsel for the defense rose and informed the court that, the offense being undeniable, the defendant wished to plead guilty. The mitigating circumstances, favoring the prisoner, including the possibility that a conviction might ruin the career of the young officer, were laid before the court. The Attorney General stated that he was satisfied because the case had established the principle that the acts committed by Lt. Helm constituted an offense under the Official Secrets Act. Since Lt. Helm had admitted the offense and had already been confined to jail for four weeks and if the prisoner was prepared to express his unfeigned regret and undertook never to repeat these acts again, the Attorney General was prepared to recommend the utmost leniency to the court. Helm was discharged.

The release of Lt. Helm stimulated much discussion in the German press concerning the pending espionage case of Capt. Trench and Lt. Brandon. It was assumed that the Englishmen were guilty and to the Germans the only question was how England could be deprived of the information they had gathered. The Berliner Neue Nachrichten suggested long imprisonment "with appropriate mental diversion (entsprechender geistigen Zerstreuung) so that the recollection of what they had seen would not remain too clear and vivid". The London Times translated the phrase "mental diversion" as "mental treatment", a translation which literally speaking was not justified although the original German sentence carried with it, whether intended or not, somewhat sinister overtones. The translation became the subject of several letters to the editor, some critical, but the Times stuck to its guns.

During the trial of Capt. Trench and Lt. Brandon, the German Supreme Court forbade any reference to the Helm case on the specious grounds that it did not have jurisdiction over it. Five days before the trial, Baron von Ungern-Sternberg, a Russian who was a correspondent for the Austrian Correspondence Bureau in St. Petersburg, was sentenced to four years of hard labor after a closed trial. It seems that the baron had given the Austrian Military Attaché a copy of the minutes of the meeting of the Duma, sitting in secret session on the armament budget. In fact, five hundred copies had been printed and distributed to every member of the Duma and the London Times reported that these could be obtained without difficulty in St. Petersburg!

We now know that at least one of these soldiers in the shadows, Sgt. Tony Mortimer, played his part in the "China" drama. In the Fall of 1917, Sergeant Mortimer of the British Intelligence Service travelled to an airfield near the Italian front. An airplane took him into Austria where he landed by parachute. He made his way to Vienna and at a designated hotel waited for an American businessman from Bulgaria. He was to bring information about a zeppelin which, it was said, was being built there. Mortimer was to find out what its destination was and what cargo it was to carry. He returned from his mission but what he learned has been extinguished by the secrecy that surrounds most intelligence operations.

Yet the information about the Naval Airship Service which Maj. Trench possessed was so detailed, comprehensive and up-to-date that it does not seem to have been collected by conventional espionage methods. So extensive a spy network and such ready means of transmitting information even the fabled British Secret Service was unlikely to possess, even assuming that the British were willing to devote such large resources to what was, in the grand picture, of only secondary importance.

To unravel the mystery of how Major Trench knew so much, we must turn back to a slightly hazy summer morning, August 25, 1914, when a small German squadron, consisting of the light cruisers "Magdeburg" and "Augsburg" together with the destroyers "V 26" and "V 185", left Gotland off the Swedish coast in the Baltic, and steamed northward towards the Gulf of Finland. Their mission was to attack Suitable Russian war vessels likely to be found at the entrance of the gulf, in order to demonstrate to the world that the German flag flew even over those far reaches of the Baltic.

As the day wore on, fog settled over the sea and grew steadily thicker. By 9:00 p.m., "Magdeburg" had lost sight of the squadron leader "Augsburg" though she was only 3000 feet ahead.

At 11:07. near the Finnish coast, the captain of the "Magdeburg", Commander Habenicht received radio orders to steer southeast by east. It was a course which would take his ship across the mouth of the Finnish Gulf towards the Estonian coast. Habenicht felt uneasy steaming blindly into the fog but he had no choice but to follow the orders issued when the squadron set out: " In case of fog, keep on course until you receive radio signal".

The fog was very thick. No stars showed by which Habenicht could determine his position. He had only a rough idea where he was. His escort, "V 26", kept disappearing and rematerializing. The lead, thrown out every ten minutes, kept shortening - 58 meters, 43 meters, finally 34 meters. The 50 meter line marked the edge of the deep channel extending from the Baltic into the Gulf of Finland. "Magdeburg" was well out of the channel and approaching land. "Augsburg" remained silent. Commander Habenicht made up his mind. If by 12:30 a.m. "Augsburg" had not radioed new orders, he would, on his own responsibility, put the ship on a new course, away from land. A minute or two before the self imposed deadline, a coded radio message started to arrive. Habenicht held his course while it was being decoded. At 12:34 decoding was completed. It was a new, northerly course, away from land. The signal came too late. As "Magdeburg" made her turn, she ran hard aground on the rocks off the northern tip of Odensholm Island, near the Estonian coast.

Attempts to get the cruiser off the rocks began immediately. Despite an all night effort, they were of no avail. At 8:30 in the morning, two Russian torpedo boats found the "Magdeburg" and "V 26", which had rejoined the cruiser during the night. Soon afterwards, two Russian heavy cruisers crept out of the fog and 6" and 8" shells began bracketing "Magdeburg" and "V 26". Even while "V 26" had tried to tow the cruiser off the rocks, the crew had begun preparations for disabling the ship and destroying her secret documents. Indecision and confusion attended these efforts. After a carelessly executed demolition of the foredeck, the order to abandon ship was given. Panic now gripped the crew. In a mad rush, many went overboard, heedless of their duties or the safety of others. Despite shouts that the afterdeck of the "Magdeburg" would also be blown up momentarily (Habenicht had given the order but somehow it was not carried out), the captain of "V 26" courageously laid his destroyer to the stern of the cruiser and saved most of the remaining men. Nevertheless, 102 of her crew were drowned, killed or were unaccounted for. Among the missing was Commander Habenicht and Lt. Bender, the officer who had been in charge of destroying the ship's secret papers.

A court of inquiry decided that the loss of the "Magdeburg" and the handling of the secret materials involved no culpability on part of the crew. It recommended that the inquiry be closed. The Commander in Chief of the Baltic, Prince Henry, however, was not satisfied. He ordered a further inquiry into the disposal of the secret documents and recommended to higher authority that as a matter of caution, the naval signal codes be changed. The second inquiry came to a less reassuring conclusion:

",..{I]t must be taken for almost certain that the maps were fished out of the water by the Russians. The code key probably fell into Russian hands in the saine way. Finally, one must count on the possibility that the Russians, diving in the shallow, clear waters, may recover one of the signal books. The war diary, too, was probably captured by the Russians as it apparently was left on the deck of H.M.S. "Magdeburg'".

In short, none of the important, classified papers could be accounted for as having definitely been destroyed. Nevertheless, the navy did not change its signal code. It would have been well advised to follow Prince Henry's recommendation. The Russians had found at least one of the secret code books.

The "Magdeburg" code book was brought to London and on October 13, 1914, the Russians handed it to Rear Admiral Sir Henry Oliver, R.N. and Sir Alfred Ewing. Admiral Oliver was the head of Naval Intelligence. Sir Alfred had been active in naval education until the outbreak of the war but few knew what he was doing now or why he was with the admiral that day. The explanation was simple but for many years highly secret.

Soon after the outbreak of the war, The English radio station at Stockton had begun receiving radio signals which it could not read and which were not of British origin. Assuming that they were coded German messages, it sent them to Admiral Oliver. The Marconi Company and the Post Office had begun to intercept similar signals. Admiral Oliver was curious about them but discovered that the navy's mobilization plan had made no provision for personnel to intercept and decode enemy messages. Oliver remembered that Ewing had been vaguely interested in constructing ciphers and had recently built a "futile cyphering mechanism" as Sir Alfred had descibed it. The admiral sent for him. Ewing was intrigued by the puzzle which the admiral handed him. Yes, he would try but he was not sure he could succeed. Relieved to be rid of that business, Oliver issued orders that henceforth all intercepts were to be delivered to Sir Alfred. Soon hundreds of messages, addressed to "Ewing Admiralty" piled up in his small office, sometimes more than two hundred a day.

Meanwhile the soft spoken, genial Scot borrowed codebooks and books on ciphermaking from the British Museum, the Post Office and Lloyds and assidiously studied them. He often sat in his office in the Old Building of the Admiralty with two discreet friends who spoke German well, to find the key to the meaningless jumble of letters in the messages which lay before them. Ewing thrived on the challenge. "My present work makes me feel younger" he confided to his diary.

A few bright, young men with a flair for numbers or languages and men from the Naval Colleges at Osborne and Dartmout and others with more arcane skills were gradually added to the staff and it was moved to a larger office in the building, Room 40. Unfortunately, they made no progress towards breaking the German codes.

In the meantime, German radio messages gushed through the air. The Naval Command was talking with its ships and the long distance station at Nauen was sending an endless stream of directives overseas to embassies, colonies and naval units on the high seas. "Der Feind hört mit!" (The enemy listens in) the Germans were to remind everyone in the Second World War but in the summer of 1914, the thought seems not to have troubled them. There was no cause for concern. All messages were carefully enciphered. The key to the ciphers was changed every three months so that there was no chance that the enemy would be able to decode the messages. Besides, the traffic for the fleet in Heligoland Bay went out on a radio band which was too weak to be intercepted in England.

With the "Magdeburg" cipher book, the Russians handed Ewing the key to the inscrutable messages which were flooding his office. It was also a fitting climax to Admiral Oliver's duties in Naval Intelligence. He went on to a new assignment the next day and his post was taken over by Captain Reginald Hall (not the "Reggie" to whom Trench had planned to pass his information before the Germans caught him). "Blinker" Hall, his nickname was derived from a tic that afflicted one of his eyes, took a great interest in the work of Intelligence Division 25, the code breaking group in Ewing's charge. He further enlarged its staff and moved it to still larger quarters but the bland anonimity of the name "Room 40". so ephemerally disguised the purposes of Ewing's band that it stuck with it for good. The volume of its work increased once again when two radio amateurs showed the Royal Navy how it could listen to the radio traffic of the German navy in Heligoland Bay.

By November, I.D. 25 was able to read the messages exchanged between the various naval staffs, the fleet and naval attaches. Yet reading the messages was not enough. For security reasons, important orders did not go through the ether. They were delivered by hand, wire or visual signal. Room 40 still had to learn how to use the information it had obtained, how to correctly interpret the subsidiary messages, the warnings to outposts, last minute changes in orders to squadrons already at sea, orders to minesweepers and submarines and the like. This would provided the mosaic pieces from which the larger picture had to be constructed.

On December 14, 1914, the first fruits of Room 40's work were gathered. A message was deciphered which stated that German battle cruisers were to leave their anchorage in the Jade river early the next day and that they would return the following evening. Sceptical of the value of such intelligence, Admiral Jellicoe, who was in command of the British Grand Fleet, nevertheless sent the Second Battle Squadron to the Dogger Bank. German ships bombarded Scarborough and Hartlepool on the 16th and turned home. The British forces were in a perfect intercepting position athwart the German return route and only bad weather prevented them from engaging the Germans. On January 25, 1915, I.D. 25 decoded another message. A German squadron was to reconnoiter the Dogger Bank. Once more an English squadron put to sea. This time, it found the Germans and in the ensuing fight sank a heavy cruiser and damaged two battle cruisers.

It was a period of great activity for Room 40 and "Eavesdropper Ewing", as some of his informed friends were calling him now. "My work goes on blithely and keeps me engrossed - so much so that it is difficult to find time to get my hair cut", Ewing noted in his diary.

Possession of the German naval code demonstrated the great possibilities inherent in the newly developing art of electronic intelligence. To extend its reach, more German code books were needed. A copy of the "Handelsschiffverkehrsbuch" (Commercial Shipping Code) had been found on a German merchantman in Australia at the beginning of the war and sent to England by the fastest means possible. Such was the state of communications then that the book did not reach London until the middle of September. The Commercial Shipping Code, however, was of little help to the British; it only permitted them to listen to radio traffic with auxiliary vessels and airships and yielded little of importance about German operations.

A copy of another code was smuggled out of Brussels in 1915 and later in the year, Code 13040, a diplomatic code, was found in the luggage of a German agent in Iran. It was this code that was later used by Zimmerman, the German Foreign Minister, to communicate his harebrained scheme to entangle the United States in a war with Mexico and Japan to keep it out of the war in Europe. His Excellency accomplished quite the opposite; the telegram was intercepted by Room 40 and helped to make up President Wilson's mind and align the United States on the side of the Allies.

If one could not always steal or capture a code book, there were other ways of getting these precious tomes. In December 1914, an English fishing trawler had already dragged up the safe of one of the destroyers which H.M.S. "Dauntless" had sunk along the Dutch coast on October 16th. It contained a new code book. Early in 1916, the Royal Navy located the wreck of a German Submarine off the Kentish coast. A diver was sent down and managed to enter the ship. In the officer's mess, he found a safe which contained still another naval code book. Sunken submarines were now routinely searched whenever possible. Shipwright Miller became a specialist in this vital work which often required him to thread his way through corpses floating in the submarines and past huge eels, seven or eight feet long, which had made their homes in the steel hulks.

The naval climax of the First World War came with the Battle of Jutland in 1916. The new commander of the German fleet, Admiral Scheer, had decided that the German fleet could not meet the British Grand Fleet on equal terms. His strategy was therefore to defeat it by overwhelming individual squadrons, one by one, or by drawing them into concentrations of submarines or into minefields. Scheer had planned such an operation for May 23, 1916. A cruiser bombardment of Sunderland was to bring out the British fleet. An advance by the German High Seas Fleet into the Skagerrak was to entice part of the Grand Fleet into the grasp of the concentrated German fleet, first drawing it across a line of ten submarines as it steamed towards its rendez-vous with the waiting German guns. Shorly after May 17, Room 40 began to suspect that some major operation was planned. It detected a concentration of eight submarines in the North Sea, soon joined by more U boats until they numbered sixteen. At 11:30 a.m. on May 29, Room 40 intercepted a Signal to the U boats that they might sight the German Battle Fleet during the next two days. Signals to minesweepers, picket boats and other units led Room 40 to conclude that the operation was under way. What the German intentions were was not known. Those had not been radioed and lay beyond the reach of Naval Intelligence. One radio Signal was in a new code. Judging that this security measure was meant to shield a message of particular importance, Naval Intelligence decided that it was the signal to set Sail. It advised the Admiralty which at once ordered Admiral Jellicoe to sea.

In a sense, the German fleet was defeated before the first gun was fired. Forewarned by Room 40, the Grand Fleet met the enemy as a single unit and Scheer's hope of defeating the Royal Navy piecemeal came to naught. The Royal Navy retained control of the seas and with this laid the foundations of ultimate victory.

After the Battle of Jutland, the Germans changed their entire ciphering system. Naval Intelligence was groping in the dark again. By this time, however, Room 40 had a large, experienced staff. It set to work immediately to break the new codes.

German carelessness once more helped the British. On September 24, 1916, Lt. Cmdr. Peterson took off in naval airship "L 32" to bomb England. In accordance with standard operating procedures, he radioed his take off to the Chief of Airships, Cmdr. Strasser, adding the words "Only HVB on board" to his message. Since March 1915, German airships had been under orders not to take secret code books with them when operating over enemy territory. They were only to carry the Commercial Shipping Code, known as the "HVB", and they were to confirm this when taking off. In fact, Peterson's signal to Strasser was not true. For some unknown reason, Peterson took one of the new signal code books with him. He should have known better.

One of the six airship captains of the original Airship Division, Peterson knew the vulnerability of airships first hand. His "L 12" had been hit by anti-aircraft fire over England and had been forced to land in the English Channel. That time he had been in luck because German destroyers had been able to tow him back to the Belgian coast.

The listening posts in England heard Peterson's "Only HVB on board". They knew the significance of these words. Another zeppelin raid was under way. The airship alert was sounded. Over northeastern London, Peterson was intercepted by an airplane and set on fire. "L 32" crashed near Great Burstead and burned for an hour. A special intelligence team, standing by to examine crashed airships, rushed to the site of the crumpled wreckage. In it, they found the Signal code book, burned but still readable.

Winston Churchill later wrote about the "Magdeburg" and the naval code retrieved as a result of her foundering, but he belittled the value of the code: "The Germans, however, repeatedly changed their codes and it was only occasionally and for fitful periods that we were able to read them". This was, of course, untrue but Churchill probably felt justified in tampering with the truth for he was helping to keep the operations of Room 40 a secret on the chance that its inethods might be useful again in the future. Nor did Admiral Hall say anything about this critical aspect of his work. When in 1925 he was asked to comment on a sensational article which revealed the story of the Zimmerman telegram, he told the reporter of the Daily Mail: "It is the tradition of the Intelligence Department that we never say anything about our work". He did add: "The great mistake the Germans made during the war was that they never gave us credit for any intelligence; they never saw our side of the question". As if to explain, he continued: "Of course, our whole object was to prevent the Germans from giving us very much credit for intelligence". Ewing finally disclosed the secret, "never more successfully observed", in December 1927 when he described the work of Room 40 in a lecture before the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution. Yet so intent was the Admiralty to preserve the secrets of Room 40 that it made Ewing promise not to say anything further about it without its permission and even as late as 1932 would not let him write about his wartime work.

Even though in the latter stages of the war, the Germans began to change their code key every day, I.D. 25 was reading the enemy messages as soon as two hours after the key had been changed, and never more than ten hours later. The Germans, content that the constant changes in the code key would make it impossible to break the naval code, never learned of the success of Naval Intelligence. The story was to repeat itself in the Second World War when the British succeeded in penetrating the German "Enigma" codes and the Germans, thoroughly convinced that it was impossible to break them, never could get themselves to accept the possibility that the Allies might do so, to its immense damage.

Zeppelins contributed their share to the flow of radio messages that was so helpful to the British. From his headquarters in Ahlhorn, Strasser kept tight control over the operations of his airships. The airships had to report to him whenever they took off. Strasser radioed instructions to them when changes in the weather or tactical conditions required it. The airships often stated the purpose of their mission as they started off: "Took off for reconaissance", "Took off for transfer to Tondern airfield", "To guard minsweepers" and so on. On April 23, 1917, "L 30" radioed "Took off to search for uC 30", thus advising the British that their attempt to destroy this submarine had probably suceeded. While aloft, the airships reported their sightings and mishaps encountered and called each other to cooperate in their work. They asked for weather reports and for radio fixes, which incidentally permitted the British to check the accuracy of their own radio location system with which they tracked the zeppelins on their flights. The German airships became particularly chatty as they retreated from England after a completed raid, reporting their successes and exchanging experiences. From these bits and pieces, British Intelligence built up its picture of the Airship Division and its activities.

Of course, the picture of German airship activities obtained through radio intelligence could not be complete. Telegraph, telephone and hand carried messages were beyond the reach of Room 40 and it is difficult to see how Major Trench could know from radio intercepts that Buttlar had lost the command of the "China" ship to Bockholt. Such messages normally were sent by telegraph and not by radio. However, no intelligence service relies on one source of information alone but combines a variety of them to form its view of the enemy. The signals London had sent to Africa to expect an airship landing at Kitangari around November 20th suggest that the British had not been able to read the radio messages Berlin had sent to Governor Schnee about the coming airborne relief but that London had obtained this information from another, albeit inaccurate source. Kitangari had not been mentioned by the German Colonial Office or the Naval Command as a possible landing place for "L 59" until well after the first signal from London had gone off to Africa, describing the village as the spot where the Germans proposed to land. Neither had the Germans fixed any particular time for the take off or ianding of "L 57" or "L 59", Weather and cicumstances were to determine the starting date. The November 20 date, therefore, could not have been obtained from radio intercepts which never mentioned such a date or any other take off dates. Again, it must have come from another source which, however, had the wrong information or made the wrong deduction.

For Room 40, the Africa airship was only an interesting sideshow but the messages which it sent to East Africa set the stage for the biggest game hunt yet - bagging a zeppelin in Africa!

Kitangari was now closely watched by the British aviators for any sign of an expected zeppelin landing. Kitangari was a small village on the Makonde Plateau, not far from its western edge, amid hilly, thin bush country. About 2-1/2 miles south of the village, the Germans had built an encampment of some forty huts. Two good dirt roads led into the village and they might be used to carry off the cargo of " L 59". The aviators saw that the roads had been heavily used by wheeled vehicles lately but so far nothing suggested that the Germans were preparing the area for the arrival of an airship.

As it happened, the airforce of the Fast African Expeditionary Force was not well prepared for this sport. Its aircraft were seriously deficient in performance.

Wo. 26 Squadron at Mtua, twenty miles inland from Kilwa, had six BE2C and BE2E machines in operating condition. No. 8 (Naval) Squadron at Nahunga mustered three Voisin 3's. The basic design of the BE2 machine dated from 1912. It was a gawky boxkite like affair with a skinny fuselage and a large fourbladed propellor. Tne plane accommodated a pilot, an observer and a machinegun and carried 224 pounds of bombs. The best speed of which the BE2C was capable was 72 m.p.h. as against the 64 m.p.h. maximum speed of "L 59". While the airship could not have attained its best speed because one of its engines was not operating, the difference did not give the airplane a decisive edge. Moreover, the BE2's climbed slowly and their maximum ceiling was 10,000 feet. This was well below the height at which "L 59" had planned to travel across East Africa, although its search for Lettow's troops would have had to be carried out at much lower altitudes. The performance of the Voisins was equally limited. Midair interception of the airship would therefore be a matter of great luck und uncertain of success as the British planes lacked incendiary ammunition. The best chance of destroying the zeppelin lay in attacking it with bombs while it was landing or on the ground. However, locating it on the ground quickly was essential; the airship would have to be destroyed before any large amounts of the cargo had been unloaded. Once the ship had been emptied, its destruction would not have mattered.

The British airmen were not dismayed by the difficulties they faced. They kept their machines ready, Commander Looff saw them on the 25th as he was driven by after his tea party, and they waited for their chance for the greatest trophy yet - the African zeppelin!