9. Decades Before Pearl Harbor, the British Launched History’s First Aerial Raid From the Sea
From the earliest days of aviation, navies saw the potential of airplanes and used them for reconnaissance and observation. On Christmas Day, 1914, the British Royal Navy used airplanes offensively for the first time, with aircraft carried by seaplane tenders – ships that support the operation of seaplanes. They carried seaplanes to within range of Cuxhaven, a German city on the North Sea coast near the mouth of the Elbe River that was close to a major German Imperial Navy airship, or Zeppelin, base.
Zeppelins and their potential to bomb London loomed large in British imaginations. Fears were spurred in no small part by pre-World War I apocalyptic fiction such as H. G. Wells’s The War in the Air, in which fleets of German dirigibles bombed cities around the world, and reduced them to rubble. Plans were begun for preemptive raids on Zeppelin facilities to destroy them before they began to bomb Britain. The resultant Cuxhaven Raid was the first time that air and sea power were combined to attack land targets. It was also the first step towards the creation of aircraft carriers and the projection of force inland by naval aviation.
