ABSTRACT
When enemy aircraft appeared over Vienna in August 1918, the local population reacted with curiosity rather than fear. Failing to follow official air raid procedures, some residents ‘ran to open places or to windows and onto balconies – to see the planes’. The Neue Freie Presse, one of the city’s leading newspapers, criticized these ‘careless fools’ who ‘ran into the streets to enjoy a rare theatre’.1 The planes were Italian, and they dropped leaflets in the design of the Italian flag encouraging the Viennese to turn against the Habsburg government. ‘If we wanted to’, the flyers read, ‘we could drop tons of bombs on your city, but we are sending only a greeting of the tricolour.’2
