“Had Ian Fleming conjured up James Bond 35 years earlier, he might have used Frank Arthur Brock as the template for secret agent 007.”

By Harry Smee and Henry Macrory

THEY WERE THE stealth bombers of their day, and the Germans planned to use them to win the First World War. In 1915, it seemed like everything about the new-fangled Zeppelin airships was formidable.

Flying at higher than 10,000 feet, these terrifying models of Teutonic efficiency were all but invulnerable to attack. They could fly higher and farther than any aircraft, and could cruise beyond the reach of artillery.

As they rained bombs down on Britain with impunity, the German press predicted they would reduce the enemy homeland “to ruins.”

The British pilots charged with taking on these fearsome aerial bandits had the odds stacked against them. Their aircraft were primitive affairs made of wood, wire and canvas. Even if they could get close enough to a Zeppelin to take a pot shot, their bullets only made small holes in the airships’ skin, which could be quickly repaired in mid-flight by sailmakers who were part of a Zeppelin crew.

But one man was hell-bent on wiping out this new menace. Had Ian Fleming conjured up James Bond 35 years earlier, he might have used Frank Arthur Brock as the template for secret agent 007.

At 30 years old, Brock was a large, powerful, broad-shouldered man of dark good looks. An all-round sportsmen, he excelled at football, rugby, golf, swimming, boxing and shooting. What’s more, he was an accomplished aviator. The word ‘derring-do’ summed up his raw courage and love of adventure. And on top of his many attributes, Brock was a brilliant inventor, as well.

As a scion of the famous Brock’s Fireworks family, gunpowder was in Frank’s blood. The Brock clan had practiced the art of pyrotechnical wizardry for eight generations, thrilling crowds with their elaborate displays since the early 1700s.

As a pupil at Dulwich College, Frank secured his reputation by blowing up a stove during a classroom experiment, subsequently avoiding a punishment beating because of the high esteem in which he was held by his headmaster. By his late teens, he was staging elaborate fireworks shows all over the world, including in Germany. And before the outbreak of war, he had presented himself as an American tourist to gain access to the Zeppelin works.

In October 1914, Brock, having already enlisted to fight in the war, married the beautiful Gladys Albert and on the afternoon of his wedding, he left for France on a hazardous, top-secret mission. He and another officer used false papers to cross into Switzerland, and from there they rowed across a lake into Germany to gather intelligence about the Zeppelin base at Friedrichstafen. The information was used to help organize the world’s first strategic bombing campaign, ordered by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, to destroy the “hornets’ nest” at Friedrichshafen. Under Frank’s direction, three British planes bombed the Zeppelin sheds on Nov. 21, 1914. The damage they caused was minor, but the raid was an enormous propaganda coup.

Zeppelins first struck England on Jan. 19, 1915. Over the next 18 months, the attacks on England grew in intensity. Frank was having none of it. While working from a secret base, he began months of experiments on a “magic bullet that would destroy the Zepps. Brock knew that simply puncturing a hydrogen-filled airship was not enough to bring one down. What was needed was a highly sensitive bullet that would explode on making contact with an airship’s skin and create a fireball when the hydrogen inside the Zeppelin mixed in the correct proportion with the outside air.

Since his pre-war spying mission, he’d been working on ideas and by 1916, his prototype incendiary round was ready.

The .303 calibre, 149 grain bullet featured a cupro-nickel envelope with a lead antimony core into which was added the main composition of potassium chlorate. From the moment he’d first spied on the airships, pretending to be an American tourist before the war, Frank had felt that a bullet working on what he called the “matchbox principle” might be effective and a priming charge of potassium chlorate and mercury sulphocyanide protruded through the envelope at the tip and was covered by orange varnish. The round was propelled by 37.5 grains of Cordite MDT 5-2 with one wad and had a muzzle velocity of about 2,380 fps.

This Holy Grail of bullets soon went into production. But would it work in combat?

On the night of Saturday, 2 Sept., Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson took off in a Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.2 biplane on an anti-Zeppelin patrol. His aircraft’s machine guns were loaded with a mixture of Frank’s bullets and other experimental rounds: Pomeroys and Buckinghams.

Far below Robinson’s plane, the civilian population was in a state of high alarm. Sixteen Zeppelins carrying 32 tons of bombs had been spotted crossing the Channel. It was the biggest airship raid yet. High above North London, Leefe Robinson spotted a target lit up in the glare of searchlights. As he passed close to the enemy machine, he riddled its entire length with bullets but the airship flew on unhindered; the new experimental rounds appeared to have little effect.

The young pilot had one drum of ammunition remaining. Diving down behind the airship, he let loose with the last of his bullets. Suddenly he spotted a pink glow from inside the Zeppelin’s massive hull. Seconds later the entire machine went up in flames as thousands of cubic feet of hydrogen gas ignited with a brilliance that turned the night sky as bright as broad daylight. To ecstatic cheering from the ground, it plunged to earth.

Overnight, no German Zeppelin was safe and Germany’s dreams of air supremacy had been dashed.

Frank Brock had made this stunning achievement possible. But as we show in our biography — the first time his remarkable story has been fully told — he was not one to rest on his laurels. As he told a relative: ’I have finished the Zeppelins. Now I am going to do for the submarines.’

There were fears that the country would be starved into submission. Of particular concern to the Admiralty was the largely unrestricted passage of U-boats through the Straits of Dover. Frank applied his mind to the problem and came up with the Dover Flare, a light of one million candle power which, in the words of one observer, lit up the Channel at night “as bright as Piccadilly.”

Pinned in the brilliant light of Frank’s flares, U-boats were forced to dive beneath the surface at night, exposing them to the threat of nets and below-surface mines. Hours after the flares were first lit, a U-boat was destroyed. Others quickly followed it to the bottom of the sea.

Frank Brock’s exploits ended on 23 April, 1918 — St. George’s Day — as he took part in a daring raid on Zeebrugge in Belgium. The operation was mounted to knock out a German U-boat base.

The raid itself was made possible by yet another of Frank’s inventions: a new and surprisingly dense smoke screen to be used by Royal Navy warships, crucially, the first naval smoke screen that did not give away its position by flame.  Thanks to Brock’s artificial fog, which was also used by the Royal Navy in WW II, the German garrison guarding Zeebrugge was taken by surprise as a flotilla of blockships and armed vessels appeared at the harbour entrance.

Frank himself could have stayed on board one of the ships in comparative safety as a shore party of sailors and Royal Marines stormed the German defences, but that wasn’t his style.

Armed with two pistols, a cutlass and several hand grenades, Frank shouted ‘Come on, you boys,’ and leapt ashore into a blizzard of German bullets and shells. He was seen hurling a bomb into an observation post before single-handedly attacking and scattering a gun crew. A German Marine later described  a British officer “who seemed to be entirely devoid of fear.”

“He rushed straight at the first gun,” the eyewitness recalled, “and with his fists he struck out at the gunners, knocking down four of them and putting the rest to flight.”

Brock was last seen in a furious swordfight with a German sailor. In the morning, both men were found a few feet apart, killed by each other’s last thrusts. It was probably the last time a British officer fought and died in a swordfight.

As the book explains, it would take approaching a century and the dedicated detective work of a local Flemish military historian Johan Ryheul, fluent in both English and German, to establish the full extent of Brock’s heroism that night, but in 1937, recognizing the significance of Frank’s death, the Nazis named a destroyer after his killer, the Herman Künne.

Harry Smee and Henry Macrory are the authors of Gunpowder and Glory: The Explosive Life of Frank Brock OBE. Smee, the former director of Brock’s Fireworks, is Frank Brock’s grandson.

© Harry Smee and Henry Macrory 2020