15. History’s First Seaborne Air Raid
Navies have used airplanes for reconnaissance and observation since aviation’s earliest days. Then on Christmas Day, 1914, the British Royal Navy used airplanes offensively for the first time. Aircraft were carried by seaplane tenders to within striking distance of Cuxhaven, a German town on the North Sea shore, in order to bomb Zeppelin sheds and German naval facilities. It was the first time that air and sea power were combined to attack land targets, and was the first step towards the creation of aircraft carriers and the projection of force inland by naval aviation.
Zeppelins and their potential to bomb London loomed large in British imagination. That was spurred in no small part by pre-war apocalyptic fiction such as H. G. Wells’ The War in the Air, which envisioned fleets of German dirigibles devastating cities around the world with bombs and reducing them to rubble. So plans were made to preemptively raid Zeppelin facilities, to destroy them before they began bombing Britain.