Anyone who knows much of anything about World War II is familiar with the Blitz, an eight-month-long campaign of bombing strikes by the German Luftwaffe -- primarily over London -- in an effort to break the spirit of the English people and drive them out of the war.

Fewer people are familiar with an earlier blitz, also carried out by the Germans in an aerial attack on London. Although it wasn't called a "blitz" at the time -- that word, short for the German "blitzkrieg," was first coined in 1939 -- it had a similar goal ... and it also failed.

The First Blitz in 100 Objects attempts to capture the horror and the humor of those attacks, which were primarily carried out by zeppelin over two years during World War I. The author, Ian Castle, knows his subject; his previous books include Zeppelin Onslaught: The Forgotten Blitz 1914-1915 and The First Blitz: Bombing London in the First World War. This book, however, focuses on relics of the blitz, and it's an interesting look at an unfamiliar mode of war.

The book contains numerous photographs of the various artifacts, which are described and explained in summaries of up to four pages each. Items included here range from pieces of downed German airships and remnants of the bombs that fell on England to battle scars that still remain on some war-struck buildings and grave markers of people who died in the attacks. There's a pane of stained glass that survived in a bombed church and pieces of china and other souvenirs that were made for a British public that maintained a philosophical, sometimes whimsical attitude toward the attacks -- despite the hardships and terror they caused.

There are contemporary newspaper clippings and photographs, monuments and memorials, even a board game that made light of the time. There are physical reminders of gun emplacements used to defend England from zeppelin attacks, and mementos of the aircraft and pilots who took to the skies to defend Britain from assault. There are amusing postcards, a collar that may have saved a man's life from flying debris, even the stuffed remains of a carrier pigeon that carried word of a downed aircrew's plight at sea.

I knew little of this "first blitz" and found Castle's summation of events quite informative. Coupled with the sizable collection of photographs, The First Blitz in 100 Objects will school readers on a time when the British people faced terrifying attacks from above with wit and resolve.