The target was a building. Thirteen kilometres south of Cuxhaven, among orchards, the Imperial German Navy had raised an airship shed holding two parallel hangars each 182 metres long, the whole 4,100-tonne structure mounted on a turntable so its doors could swing to face the wind. From August 1914 it was headquarters of the Naval Airship Division. It housed most of the four operational naval Zeppelins available for North Sea work — hydrogen ships 158 metres long holding 22,500 cubic metres of gas, three engines apiece, around 80 km/h flat out, twenty-four men aboard, and a bomb load measured in hundreds of pounds. British planners could see the threat. What they could not do was reach it: Nordholz lay far beyond the range of anything flying from an English aerodrome.

So the aircraft would have to be carried. Three cross-Channel ferries converted into seaplane tenders — Engadine, Riviera and Empress — would steam to a point north of Heligoland and lower three machines each into the water. Harwich Force destroyers and the Oversea Submarine Flotilla came along under Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt, with the cruisers Arethusa and Undaunted attached; Squadron-Commander Cecil Malone had charge of the air side. At dawn on 25 December, with the air barely above zero, nine seaplanes were craned over the side and the crews began swinging propellers. Seven engines caught: three Short Improved Type 74 folders, two Short Type 81s, two Short Type 135s, each carrying three bombs. Two machines never started and were winched back aboard. Seven aircraft went off to bomb Germany's largest airship base.

It did not go to plan. Fog, low cloud and anti-aircraft fire kept most pilots from finding the sheds at all, though several coastal installations were attacked and shore facilities damaged. The Admiralty later described the operation, drily, as an air reconnaissance of the Heligoland Bight during which the opportunity was taken of attacking points of military importance. The telling result showed up second-hand. In a telegram of 7 January 1915, the Admiralty's chief censor logged an intercepted message from a Copenhagen correspondent to the Daily Mail: the raid had prompted the German admiralty to shift the greater part of the High Seas Fleet out of Cuxhaven to moorings along the Kiel Canal. Seven seaplanes had moved a battle fleet.

Every crew survived, after more than three hours in the air. Three aircraft found their tenders and were hoisted aboard: Charles Edmonds in 811, R. P. Ross in 119, and Cecil Kilner in 136 with Childers beside him. Three more — A. J. Miley, V. Gaskell-Blackburn and D. A. Oliver — came down off Norderney, where the submarine E11 under Martin Nasmith took the airmen aboard and the aircraft were scuttled rather than left to the Germans. The seventh, Francis Hewlett, lost his engine and ditched fifteen kilometres off Heligoland. He was posted missing. He was in fact in the water beside his aeroplane until the Dutch trawler Marta van Hattem found him, and he stepped ashore at IJmuiden on 2 January 1915.

The strangest part of the day belongs to the Germans. A small, isolated British force sat within reach for hours, and the High Seas Fleet never moved. Naval staff had been tipped off on 24 December that something big was coming, and read it wrong — expecting an incursion into the Bight, perhaps with disguised merchant ships to be sunk as blockships in the river mouths, the Grand Fleet right behind. Under the Kaiser's standing instruction the fleet was not to be risked. Aircraft went out instead. A Friedrichshafen FF.19 stayed aloft for five hours and fifty-two minutes, remarkable flying for 1914. Another seaplane found the British ships but carried no wireless and had to fly home to report. The airship L 6 spotted them, and a generator failure kept the news to itself. When Empress fell behind the twenty-knot formation with boiler trouble she took the brunt of it — bombed by two Friedrichshafens, one bomb bursting six metres off her bow, then strafed by L 6 while her crew answered with rifles. Nothing was hit.

Cuxhaven was not the first air attack launched from ships — the Japanese carrier Wakamiya had been flying strikes against Tsingtao since September 1914. What happened in the Bight on Christmas Day was something else: the first time a naval attack was pressed home above, on, and from below the surface at once. Writing in 1994, the naval historian Paul Halpern called it an imaginative endeavour, evidence of a real willingness among British commanders to take up new technology, pointing toward the air-sea battles to come. At the time it was mostly a tonic for morale. Kilner and Edmonds received the Distinguished Service Order; Chief Petty Officer Mechanics James William Bell and Gilbert Budds, the Distinguished Service Medal.