Flight Over Vienna: 106 Years Ago, The Italian Air Force Daringly Dropped Leaflets Over Its WW1 Enemy’s Capital | Aviation

On this day, 106 years ago, eleven biplanes took off from the Italian North East for a 1200 km round trip to reach the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Wien, and drop propaganda leaflets written by poet Gabriele D’Annunzio and author Ugo Ojetti. 

At 5:30 in the morning of Aug. 9, 1918, eleven Ansaldo S.V.A. biplanes took off from a field at Due Carrare, near Padua in the Italian North East, for a daunting 1200 km round trip that brought them over the Alps and to the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Wien (known as Vienna in Italian), to drop over 400,000 propaganda leaflets, in one of the most famous propaganda missions in history.

Together with the ten single-seater S.V.A.5 planes (so named after the two designers, Savoia and Verduzio, and the maker, Ansaldo), there was a single S.V.A.10 twin-seater biplane carrying the famous poet and soldier Gabriele D’Annunzio.

D’Annunzio, an ardent interventionist, had volunteered at the start of World War I despite already being 52 years old, and by 1918 had participated in numerous battles on land, sea (among them, the Bakar raid also known as the Bakar mockery) and in the air,…