On November 1, 1911, Italian army lieutenant Giulio Gavotti, while flying over Libya, tosses three grenades out of his plane over a Turkish camp, effectively dropping the world’s first aerial bomb.
Just eight years after the Wright brothers in America had accomplished the world’s first flight, the Kingdom of Italy sent several aircraft into Libya, hoping to conquer territory in their war against the collapsing Ottoman Empire. Gavotti boarded one of the Italian army’s wood-and-canvas "Taube" airplanes and brought four grenades with him.
He flew toward the Turkish oasis encampment of Ain Zara (east of modern-day Tripoli), and threw three of the four grenades he had—marking the first time live ordinance had been dropped out of a plane with enemies firing back. The Ottoman Empire responded with outrage and claimed that the bombs fell on a field hospital and killed innocent civilians. The governments of Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the United States launched inquiries to analyze the raid, and released findings that the bombing likely caused caused few if any casualties, as the grenades had either not detonated or exploded over uninhabited areas of desert.
While the assault may have had a muted collateral impact, it signaled the beginning of a new era of aerial assaults. A Berlin newspaper observed that, while airplanes and airships could not be practically used for offense and destruction, they had reconnaissance value: “The Italian Command is always, thanks to aircraft, informed of every displacement of Turkish troops, and knows the exact positions of them.” A few years later, German Zeppelin airships deployed during World War I dropped bombs over European cities from Antwerp to Paris to London—heralding a time when civilians, and not just combatants, were targeted by aircraft.
