Saint Nicholas pulls his sled along a road stretched between two Christmas tree boughs and Christmas greetings. The Iron Cross below is dated 1917.
Fröhliche WeihnachtenMerry Christmas
"On Christmas Eve, the Royal Flying Corps made its first avowed reprisal raid on Germany. Ten aircraft droned over the misty Rhine valley to bomb Mannheim in daylight. A bridge over the Neckar was demolished, and fires were seen burning in the city. Four bombs crashed on the main railway station. A Swiss account of the mid-morning attack was read in London with considerable satisfaction and some regrets. The Kaiser's special train, it informed, had left the station only half an hour before the bombs struck."
Beginning in 1915, first Zeppelin and Schütte-Lanz airships, then Gotha and other large multi-engine planes had bombed London and other cities in England. The Royal Flying Corps' December 24, 1917 raid on Mannheim, Germany was the first reprisal raid on a primarily civilian site in Germany itself.
The Sky on Fire by Raymond H. Fredette by Raymond H. Fredette, page 178, copyright © 1966, 1976, 1991 by Raymond H. Fredette, publisher: Smithsonian Institution Press, publication date: 1991
1917-12-24, 1917, December, Mannheim, bombing raid, Christmas 1917 Iron Cross, Royal Flying Corps
