Tondern is routinely called the first carrier air strike, and the claim needs its qualifier attached or it falls apart. Ships had been throwing aircraft at enemies since 1914; Britain, Japan and Russia all did it. On Christmas Day 1914 the seaplane carriers Engadine, Riviera and Empress stood off the German coast and craned nine Short seaplanes into the water. Seven managed to start and take off, and went looking for the Zeppelin sheds at Cuxhaven. That raid had a genuine first of its own - a contemporary account marvelled that an attack had been delivered above, on, and from below the surface of the water at once. But those machines were boats with wings. They needed water to leave and water to return to. What Furious did in July 1918 was different in kind: wheeled landplanes, under their own power, off a flight deck, against a target ashore. Every carrier strike since descends from that morning.

The idea came up from below. Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Clark-Hall, the Royal Air Force staff officer attached to Rear Admiral Richard Phillimore, and one of Phillimore's pilots, Squadron Commander Richard Bell-Davies, proposed hitting the German Naval Airship Division at its bases. Phillimore approved, and so did Admiral David Beatty, commanding the Grand Fleet. The first plan called for Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutters, but those were too valuable as reconnaissance machines, so Camels were substituted - and the Camel's shorter legs chose the target. Tondern was what a Camel could reach. The pilots trained at Turnhouse, bombing the outlines of Tondern's three airship sheds marked out on the grass. A first attempt, Operation F.6, sailed from Rosyth on 27 June and reached the flying-off point into a Force 6 wind, and was cancelled. Operation F.7 sailed at 12:03 on 17 July. At 03:04 the next morning, with the Camels ranged, a thunderstorm arrived. Rather than abandon the whole thing, the squadron cruised out of sight of the Danish coast for another day.

The Germans had names for the sheds. Toska was the largest, a double, and it held two Zeppelins: L 54 and L 60. Tobias contained a captive balloon. Toni was being dismantled. Jackson, Dickson and Williams arrived overhead at 04:35 and found the base entirely unprepared. Three bombs went into Toska. The gas bags caught and both airships burned where they stood - burned rather than exploded, which is the only reason the shed itself survived. Another bomb damaged the balloon in Tobias, and the second wave set it alight, with several near misses on a wagon loaded with hydrogen cylinders that would have made the morning considerably worse. Ground fire came up at both waves and achieved almost nothing: one undercarriage wheel shot off a Camel. Two Zeppelins destroyed, one balloon burned, four German airmen injured, none killed.

Thyne never reached Tondern. His engine failed on the way out, he turned back, ditched, and was recovered. Of the six who bombed, Williams, Jackson and Dawson doubted they had the fuel to find the fleet and put down in Denmark instead. Dickson, Yeulett and Smart went out to sea to look for the ships. Dickson ditched at 05:55. Smart's engine gave out and he went into the water at 06:30. Both were picked up. Yeulett was not heard from again, and it was assumed his tank had run dry short of the squadron. The ships waited past the hour when no Camel could still be flying, then turned for home a little after 07:00. Yeulett's body came ashore later and was buried in the churchyard at Norre Havrvig, on the same neutral coast three of his colleagues had reached safely. Dickson and Yeulett were awarded the Distinguished Service Order; Smart, who already held one, received a bar.

The Germans repaired Toska quickly, then abandoned Tondern as an airship station anyway, keeping it only as an emergency landing ground. At Nordholz they improved the defences and burned a swathe of countryside so that a stray bomb could not set the heath alight. The Royal Navy was already designing the follow-up: a torpedo attack on the German High Seas Fleet using the new Sopwith Cuckoo. The Cuckoos did not arrive in useful numbers until 1919, and the plan died with the war. The concept did not. In November 1940, Fleet Air Arm aircraft flew from a carrier into Taranto harbour and left three Italian battleships on the bottom. Tonder today is a quiet market town just north of the German border, with nothing overhead. The sheds are gone. What happened above them for twenty minutes on a July morning is why the aircraft carrier became the decisive warship of the century that followed.