Qualla: Raid on Cuxhaven

Raid on Cuxhaven: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Eleven years before the war, Erskine Childers had written a novel about two Englishmen in a small yacht poking around the sandbanks of the German North Sea coast and uncovering an invasion plot. The Riddle of the Sands sold well and unsettled its readers. On Christmas morning 1914, Childers was back over those same sandbanks — in the observer's seat of a Short seaplane, at just above freezing, holding a chart. He had sailed this water before the war, which made him the best navigator the Royal Naval Air Service could find for what it was about to try.

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Raid on Cuxhaven: The Shed at Nordholz

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. The target was a building. Thirteen kilometres south of Cuxhaven, among orchards, the Imperial German Navy had raised an airship shed holding two parallel hangars each 182 metres long, the whole 4,100-tonne structure mounted on a turntable so its doors could swing to face the win...

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Image: A.Savin | FAL

Raid on Cuxhaven: Nine Engines, Seven Starts

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. So the aircraft would have to be carried. Three cross-Channel ferries converted into seaplane tenders — Engadine, Riviera and Empress — would steam to a point north of Heligoland and lower three machines each into the water. Harwich Force destroyers and the Oversea Submarine Flot...

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Image: A.Savin | FAL

Raid on Cuxhaven: Fog Over the Bight

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hombre, CC BY-SA 3.0. It did not go to plan. Fog, low cloud and anti-aircraft fire kept most pilots from finding the sheds at all, though several coastal installations were attacked and shore facilities damaged. The Admiralty later described the operation, drily, as an air reconnaissance of the Heligo...

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Image: Hombre | CC BY-SA 3.0

Raid on Cuxhaven: Getting Home

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit K. Siereveld, Public domain. Every crew survived, after more than three hours in the air. Three aircraft found their tenders and were hoisted aboard: Charles Edmonds in 811, R. P. Ross in 119, and Cecil Kilner in 136 with Childers beside him. Three more — A. J. Miley, V. Gaskell-Blackburn and D. A. Oliver — ...

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Image: K. Siereveld | Public domain

Raid on Cuxhaven: The Fleet That Stayed in Port

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Surgeon Oscar Parkes, Public domain. The strangest part of the day belongs to the Germans. A small, isolated British force sat within reach for hours, and the High Seas Fleet never moved. Naval staff had been tipped off on 24 December that something big was coming, and read it wrong — expecting an incursion into the...

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Image: Surgeon Oscar Parkes | Public domain

Raid on Cuxhaven: What It Actually Proved

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. Cuxhaven was not the first air attack launched from ships — the Japanese carrier Wakamiya had been flying strikes against Tsingtao since September 1914. What happened in the Bight on Christmas Day was something else: the first time a naval attack was pressed home above, on, and f...

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Image: A.Savin | FAL