month British and Allied shipping sustained its greatest losses.
The value of the airship in combating this menace was now fully
recognized, and with the big building programme of Zero airships
approved, the housing accommodation again reached an acute stage.

Shortage of steel and timber for shed building, and the lack of
labour to erect these materials had they been available, rendered
other methods necessary. It was resolved to try the experiment
of mooring airships in clearings cut into belts of trees or small
woods.

A suitable site was selected and the trees were felled by service
labour. The ships were then taken into the gaps thus formed and
were moored by steel wires to the adjacent trees. Screens of
brushwood were then built up between the trees, and the whole
scheme proved so successful that even in winter, when the trees
were stripped of their foliage, airships rode out gales of over
60 miles per hour. The personnel were housed either in tents or
billeted in cottages or houses in the neighbourhood, and gas was
supplied in tubes as in the earlier days of the stations before
the gas plants had been erected.

This method having succeeded beyond the most sanguine
expectations, every station had one or more of these sub-stations
based on it, the airships allocated to them making a periodical
visit to the parent station for overhaul as required.
Engineering repairs were effected by workshop lorries, provided
that extensive work was not required.

In this way a large fleet of small airships was maintained around