These are true stories about the Zeppelin airships that were built to wage war, the men who flew them and those who shot them down. During the Great War, the German military unleashed a terrible new weapon on the unsuspecting British population; the Zeppelin. This airship was virtually silent and could travel at heights beyond the reach of the first anti-aircraft guns before dropping incendiary bombs indiscriminately on populated areas causing many civilian casualties and creating a new type of warfare that still exists today; the Air Raid. So feared were these machines that they became known as 'the Baby Killers'. But Britain was far from beaten and responded with improvements in searchlight and anti-aircraft design which, with heroic night flying by the fighter pilots of the Royal Flying Corps, took the fight to the enemy. The civilian population, including Nurses, Air Raid Wardens and the female operators of the London Telephone Exchange, who refused to leave their posts during the air raids to keep military lines of communication open, played its part too. One man in particular, Sir Charles Wakefield, the Lord Mayor of London was determined to reward the courage of the first individual to shoot down a Zeppelin on British soil with a substantial prize. How he eventually discharged this debt of honour, despite opposition from the military establishment exacerbated by class discrimination, forms a fascinating background to the story of the L15 Zeppelin and the Wakefield Gold Medal.