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America Accidentally Attacked the Soviet Union and Other Lesser Known History Moments

Khalid Elhassan February 27, 2020 34 min

Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star - Aircraft — American F-80s in action during the Korean War. Squdron

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.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.