A bomb load of 1,600 kilograms (3,530 lb) could be carried and a number of MG 08 machine guns were mounted for aircraft defence.

Naval scouting was the main role of the navy's Zeppelin fleet, and a total of 220 such flights were carried out during the war.

[6] Commanded by Kapitänleutnant Odo Löwe, L 19 left her Danish base at Tondern at noon on 31 January 1916, one of nine navy Zeppelins to raid England that night.

[5] Due to the extreme difficulties of navigating with primitive equipment at night over a darkened countryside, the captain of L 21 believed he had bombed Liverpool, in fact around 70 miles (110 km) away.

Löwe dropped a bottle into the sea, with a report on his situation and with letters to his family; this was found a few weeks later by a yacht near Gothenburg, Sweden.

The next morning, the floating wreck of the airship was discovered by a British steam fishing trawler, King Stephen, of 162 tons,[14] commanded by William Martin.

In a later newspaper interview, he stated that the nine crew of King Stephen were unarmed and badly outnumbered and would have had little chance of resisting the German airmen if, after being rescued, they had hijacked his vessel to sail it to Germany.

[17] Ignoring the Germans' pleas for help, disbelieving their promises of good conduct, and refusing their offers of money, Martin sailed away.

Discovered six months later by Swedish fishermen at Marstrand, the bottle contained personal last messages from the airmen to their families and a final report from Löwe.

[18] With fifteen men on the top platform and backbone girder of the L 19, floating without gondolas in approximately 3 degrees East longitude, I am attempting to send a last report.

2 February 1916, towards one o'clock, will apparently be our last hour.Royal Navy ships made a search of the area, but they found no trace of the Zeppelin or her crew.

[20] In 1964, a journalist researching the incident checked Admiralty archives and interviewed two surviving members of King Stephen's crew.

This revealed that Martin had indeed been fishing in a forbidden zone and had initially given the naval authorities a false position for the Zeppelin in order to conceal this, making the Royal Navy search for the airship futile.

[22] Others, including Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the Bishop of London, praised Martin for placing the safety of his crew first and not trusting the promises of the Germans.

[24] German airship crews, sometimes referred to as "baby killers" or "pirates" because of their bombing of civilians, were the subject of intense Allied propaganda and public hatred.

[30] King Stephen, now fitted with a 3 pounder Hotchkiss gun,[31] had fired on and pursued a surfaced U-boat, but then inadvertently steamed directly into the path of the returning German fleet.

[28] However, the charges were dropped and he and his crew were treated as normal prisoners-of-war after a photograph of William Martin was published in a British newspaper and the Germans realized they held another man.

[36] One of the L 19 crew's bottles, together with its messages, are surviving relics of the incident; they were displayed as part of an exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in London in 2001.

[37] The Aeronauticum, the German naval aviation museum in Nordholz, displays one of the King Stephen's lifebelts, as well as her Red Ensign flag, taken from the vessel before she was sunk.