In a video about the Graf Zeppelin by Military History Visualized, he says that the German Empire WW1 had a substantial fleet air arm. How true is this statement and what did the fleet air arm look like?

by Pashahlis

On one hand, it seems to make sense that Germany would have a big fleet air arm since it was the second biggest naval power during that time. On the other hand, it (and essentially every other country) had no carriers and torpedo bombers weren't a big thing either yet, so what was it equipped with then? And what was its tasks, size and efficiency?

Meesus

They may be referring to the Zeppelins operated by the Kaiserliche Marine. Both the German Army and Navy operated comparatively large numbers of airships during WW1. The German Navy's Zeppelins were originally procured with naval reconnaissance in mind - operating out of bases along the North Sea coast, Zeppelins would be able to fly marathon missions and cover vast distances relatively quickly compared to ships, and thus allow the High Seas Fleet to more effectively scout out the location of the British Grand Fleet. Higher profile, though of dubious effectiveness, was the bombing of England by the Zeppelins. Such missions tended to do very little damage compared to the later raids by fixed-wing aircraft, and almost always had extreme difficulties even getting to the target due to the distance, timing, and weather.

With the Zeppelins, perhaps the most notable mission was that of LZ 104/L 59. In November 1917, it flew from the Zeppelin base at Friedrichschafen to the southernmost point in Bulgaria that it could feasibly operate from. There, it was fitted out for a resupply mission for the forces of Generalmajor Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who was currently waging a highly mobile bush war in German East Africa (modern day Tanzania) and holding down a hugely disproportionate amount of Entente resources. The idea was to have the ship fly from Bulgaria to southern German East Africa in one go, carrying 15 tons of supplies, but only enough fuel for the one-way trip. It set off on November 21, 1917 after two failed attempts with an all volunteer crew. A few days later, after much difficulty, the crew received an "abort" message about 125 miles west of Khartoum and decided to turn back. When they finally returned to their start point 95 hours and 4,200 miles later, the ship still had over 60 hours of fuel left. The mission was a failure, but the failure wasn't catastrophic and it's likely it wouldn't have had a significant impact anyways - Vorbeck would take his troops into Portuguese Mozambique and ultimately continue fighting with captured supplies until several days after the Armistice.

I'm less familiar with the Kaiserliche Marine's fixed-wing aviation, although I know they did operate a force of seaplanes along the coasts as well as land-based aircraft. They did have prewar attempts to create seaplane tenders, but I'm not familiar enough with them to speak as any authority and whatever they did appears to have been on a much smaller scale than the British experiments with seaplane tenders and primitive aircraft carriers during the war. The Kaiserliche Marine's fixed-wing air arm did have some very successful pilots, but they weren't exactly "naval aviation" in the traditional sense - they were more analogous to the Royal Naval Flying Corps of the British, being the Navy's counterpart to the Army's air forces.