Reviving this thread:
Britain tried to kill Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918 with secret RAF bombing raid, reveals archivesExclusive: 'In Germany it might well have turned the increasingly unpopular Kaiser into a martyred war hero and so perhaps even have saved the monarchy from collapse'
Remarkable unpublished evidence has revealed that in the final year of the First World War Britain attempted to kill Germany’s leader, Kaiser Wilhelm II.
The secret mission failed – but only just.
The evidence – largely unpublished documentation in the RAF Museum’s archives and documents in a private archive in France – show that exactly 100 years ago this Saturday, a squadron of 12 bombers took off from an airfield near Boulogne to bomb a French chateau which, intelligence work had revealed, was being used by the Kaiser as his secret Western Front operational residence.
The full story – partly revealed in a new book just published – started in late March 1918 when the German army launched the first of a series of major new offensives against the Allies.
The massive attacks were initially successful – but nevertheless some German soldiers were captured by the Allies. Some of these German PoWs were interrogated by French Intelligence – and one of them revealed to his interrogators that the Kaiser had just taken up residence at a chateau immediately outside a small French village called Trelon, three miles from the Belgian frontier.
By coincidence, one of the intelligence section’s interpreters on the staff of the famous French general, Philippe Pétain, was the owner of that chateau. In mid April 1918 he was given the job of interrogating the German prisoner-of-war in more detail – and, by using local knowledge, to check the veracity of the revelation.
This interrogator (a French officer named Frédéric de Merode) and his commanding officer then went to tell Pétain what they had discovered.
At some stage – probably in May and presumably in conjunction with the British – an "in principle" decision was taken to bomb the chateau. Indeed, De Merode (the chateau owner) was asked by the French military to give them permission to bomb the building. Patriotically, he agreed.
German sources reveal that the Kaiser stayed there on at least three occasions – from 21 March to 2 April; from 5 April to 15 April; from mid May to 1 June and possibly from around 26 April to around 1 May.
It may well be that British intelligence wanted to learn further details before any final political or military green light could be given to try to kill the Kaiser.
After all, they would probably only get one opportunity. If it failed, he would nevertheless realise that the Allies knew exactly where he was living and he would therefore promptly change his Western Front operational residence.
British intelligence officers in Amsterdam in neutral Holland had frequent contact with an underground espionage network in German-occupied Belgium and northern France called La Dame Blanche (The White Lady). It is known that the LDB had agents in the Trelon area – so it is likely that further information on the Kaiser’s movements was passed on (via Amsterdam) to British intelligence HQ in London. However, there was always a time delay – so information was always slightly out of date.
At the same time that the Allies discovered the precise location of the Kaiser (and more importantly realised that he was within bombing range), the German Spring offensive was giving British and French forces a terrible battering. The Germans were succeeding in pushing the Allies back more than 40 miles.
What’s more, in late May, at the battle of Chemin des Dames, the Germans captured 45,000 Allied troops and 400 field guns. For the Allies, it was a catastrophe. At that stage, even in late Spring, 1918, they must have feared that the Germans might even win the war.
So, it was in those dire circumstances that the French and the British appear to have finally decided to try to kill the German emperor.
Having taken off from Ruisseauville Airfield (near Boulogne-sur-Mer) at 4.50am on Sunday 2 June, 12 RAF De Havilland-4 bombers reached the Kaiser’s secret Western Front residence at Trelon at 5:25am. They dropped up to a dozen 50kg bombs and up to 24 11kg ones.
However, unbeknown to British Intelligence, the same German military successes that had probably triggered the bid to kill Kaiser Wilhelm, had also led him to leave the chateau to congratulate his generals at the front. As a result, he had left his Western Front operational residence 19 hours before the RAF struck.
What’s more, the British aircraft chose to attack at an altitude of only 500 feet – and to do so in single file. As a result the smoke from the initial few bombs billowed skywards and prevented many of the succeeding pilots from seeing their target.
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John Watts, the grandson of one of the RAF airmen involved in the raid, believes that much more information on the raid must still exist in as yet un-studied files in archives in Britain, France and possibly Germany.
“My grandfather’s role was always part of family folklore. The remarkable new details now emerging from sources in northern France and RAF files is at last beginning to reveal what really happened,” said Mr Watts, a West Midlands military history enthusiast.
‘The Kaiser’s Dawn: the untold story of Britain’s secret mission to murder the Kaiser in 1918’ by John Hughes-Wilson (Unicorn Publishing)