Flight over Vienna

The Flight over Vienna was an air raid during World War I undertaken by Italian poet and nationalist Gabriele D'Annunzio on 9 August 1918.

[1] The action was planned the year before but technical problems, such as the fuel capacity of the planes, delayed it.

They flew over Vienna and dropped 50,000 leaflets on a three-colored card (green, white, and red: the colors of the Italian flag).

The rumble of the young Italian wing does not sound like the one of the funereal bronze, in the morning sky.

Nevertheless the joyful boldness suspends between Saint Stephen and the Graben an irrevocable sentence, o Viennese.

Because D'Annunzio's Italian text was considered not translatable into German, Ferdinando Martini quipped: "Now he acts but does not write."

In reality, they also dropped 350,000 leaflets written by author Ugo Ojetti, which were translated into German:

Gabriele D'Annunzio in the front seat of an Ansaldo SVA-9 before the flight.
Lion of St. Mark displayed on most of the Ansaldo SVA aircraft on the raid
Italian leaflets dropped over the center of Vienna ( St. Stephen's Cathedral is visible in the upper right corner with the Graben street below)