On November 1, 1911, Italian Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti dropped hand grenades from his Etrich Taube monoplane on Turkish troops in Libya during the Italo-Turkish War. This was the first recorded act of aerial bombardment. Gavotti's attack marked the introduction of the airplane as a weapon of war, foreshadowing the devastating strategic bombing of later conflicts.

This event introduced a dark, ominous dimension to the previously romanticized notion of flight, a theme that would become central to war poetry and literature throughout the 20th century. It marked the birth of the 'aerial view' as a weapon, transforming the sky into a theater of war and the pilot into a potential agent of mass destruction. The dehumanizing potential of flight became a major motif in anti-war literature.