They were used for many of the airship bombing raids on the United Kingdom in 1915-16, for naval patrol work over the North Sea and Baltic and were also deployed on the eastern and south-eastern fronts.

On 5 August 1914 the Zeppelin company put forward a proposal to the German Navy Ministry for a design based on LZ 26.

This had been started as a passenger carrying craft for DELAG and was the first Zeppelin with a duralumin framework, and also had the strengthening keel inside the hull structure.

The proposed design was larger, with the volume increased from 24,900 to 31,900 m3 (880,000 to 1,126,000 cu ft) and a fourth engine was added.

Automatic pressure relief valves were placed at the bottom of the gasbags: there was no trunking to carry vented hydrogen to the top of the craft and waste gas simply diffused upwards in the space between gasbags and the covering, whose top surface was left undoped to allow the hydrogen to escape.

Although the bombing raids are their best known activity, the majority of the flights made by the naval craft were patrols over the North Sea and the Baltic.

It took part in five raids and made eight reconnaissance flights: on 3 September 1915 it was struck by lightning and crashed in flames in the North Sea near Neuwerk, Germany, with the loss of the entire 20-man crew.

[10] On 8 September 1915 LZ 45 (L 13), commanded by Heinrich Mathy, was the first Zeppelin to bomb central London, setting fire to textile warehouses to the north of St Paul's Cathedral and causing over half a million pounds worth of damage, around one sixth of all material damage caused by the bombing of Britain during the war.

[12] On the night of 2 - 3 April 1916, LZ 46 (L 14) attacked the city of Edinburgh and its port town of Leith in the first ever air raid over Scotland, dropping 25 high explosive and 19 incendiary bombs.

LZ 85 made two successful attacks on Salonika but during a third raid was damaged by fire from HMS Agamemnon on 5 May 1916 and came down in the Vardar marshes.

Subsequently, it made two attacks on Bucharest: it was eventually brought down by ground fire near Turnovo in Bulgaria on 27 September 1916.