by Джон Биггинс
Another drawback to this operation, from our point of view at least, was that our Siemens-Halske wireless set was ultra-top-secret. In fact at first Kraliczek was going to forbid it to be carried across the lines for fear of its being captured. It was only after we had spent a hour or so explaining, with the aid of diagrams, that there is not a great deal of sense in artillery-spotting on one’s own side of the lines that he had relented on this—but only on condition that we flew with a large demolition charge attached to the set so that it would blow up the apparatus, and us, if we crashed. Thus it was that, a generation before the Japanese kamikazes, Toth and I found ourselves flying in an aeroplane containing a two- kilogram slab of Ekrasit, the Austrian brand of TNT, attached to the wireless with surgical tape and wired up to explode if we hit the ground. It was all most reassuring.
In the event, though, our fine new wireless set was barely used that day. Our take-off from Caprovizza was delayed until mid-morning by fog over the target (the lower end of the Isonzo is notoriously foggy, even in summer). So it was not until nearly 1100 hours that we crossed the lines near Gorz and made our way southwards in a half-circle over Gradisca and Sagrado to approach our target from the landward side. It was evidently going to be a rough ride: flak shells banged around us at intervals from Gorz onwards, and once the mist cleared from their airfields there would be Italian single-seaters coming up to chase us. Better get the job done as quickly as possible and make for home, I thought: flying unarmed over enemy territory in broad daylight with a slab of explosive next to me did not appeal to me in the least.
We arrived over the target at two thousand metres amid a desultory peppering of flak bursts—only to find that the target was no more. There could be no doubt about it as we circled overhead and I scanned the forest clearing with my binoculars: the shell-dump had almost gone. When I compared the scene with an aerial photograph from two days before I could see where the tarpaulin-covered stacks had been—pale oblong patches on the grass of the clearing—but nearly all of them had gone now. As I watched, a beetle-like chain of motor lorries bumped along the forest trackway, carrying the shells forward to the hungry battery positions. I flicked the wireless set switch to “Transmit” and put on the headphones, then tapped out the message “Shells gone—query what now?” There was an acknowledge signal from the Prag, a distant grey shape out on the blue shining expanse of the Adriatic, but nothing more. Meanwhile we circled fretfully, dodging the flak shells. I could imagine the scratching of heads and confusion that reigned inside the conning tower of the old battleship. But that was scarcely any consolation to us now, flying around in slow circles to provide target practice for the Italian flak battery crews. I was just wondering whether to take matters into my own hands and head us for home when Toth turned and tugged at my sleeve excitedly. He pointed away to southward.
I could scarcely believe my eyes. Here indeed was something far more worthy of our attention than the place where a target had once been. Toth needed no order from me to turn and give full throttle. It was an Italian airship, strolling towards the lines above Monfalcone. It was about six kilometres away, and (I thought) about a thousand metres above us. That would mean at least eight minutes of climbing around in circles before we could reach him, not to speak of closing the distance. Still, it seemed worth a try. Airships were a matter of some interest to me that summer. I had won my Maria Theresa in part for having shot down just such an Italian semi-rigid, south of Venice in July. They were not very large airships as such contraptions go: certainly nothing to compare with the German Zeppelins. The gasbag was a single, soft envelope and rigidity was given by a long V-sectioned keel of aluminium girders from which the engines and control gondolas were suspended. The Italians had built quite a number of these airships—the larger ones had a crew of nine or ten—and had been trying for the past year to use them on bombing-raids, with conspicuous lack of success. And here was one of them now, insolently flaunting its toad-like, pale-yellow bulk over the countryside in broad daylight. Such effrontery could not go unanswered.
The only trouble was, I realised as we climbed up towards the airship, that apart from my Mannlicher carbine and five clips of ammunition we had no means of attacking the airship short of ramming it. As for the Italians, they were quite well equipped to defend themselves. There seemed to be a machine gun in each of the crew gondolas, to judge by the streams of tracer that sprayed out at us like water from a garden hose each time we tried to manoeuvre within range. The one great advantage of an airship over an aeroplane in those days was the former’s ability to climb. An aeroplane had to labour round in circles for six or seven minutes to gain a thousand metres, whereas all that an airship had to do was to release water ballast and whee! up it would go like a witch on a broomstick. But for some reason which I shall never understand the Italians neglected to escape that way, only continued at the same height and allowed us to climb above them—where we saw to our delight that there was no machine-gun position on the top of the gasbag.
So we circled for a while, like Red Indians around a settler’s wagon, as I fired off our entire stock of ammunition into the airship’s envelope. It had no visible effect though. I suppose that, like me that morning, you have some mental picture of the airship going pop! at the first hit, like a child’s balloon pricked with a pin. Well, forget it: the pressure of the gas in an airship’s envelope is not in fact much above that of the surrounding air, and the seepage of hydrogen from a few puny rifle-bullet holes could probably have gone on for days before the thing even began to lose its shape. As we climbed away from our last futile pass, followed by a valedictory spatter of fire from the forward gondola, I looked around desperately for some other means of attack. Then an idea struck me: the wireless set. It weighed forty kilograms and, although it left much to be desired from an aerodynamic point of view, it had lots of jagged edges and sharp corners. Feverishly I got to work wrenching out wires and disconnecting the demolition charge as Toth turned to make another pass at the airship. He seemed to sense what I wanted, and took us roaring in a shallow dive along the airship’s swelling, pig-like back.
I almost ruptured myself as I lugged the wireless set on to the cockpit coaming, struggling to hold it steady in the howling slipstream, then heaved it into space at what I judged to be the correct moment. The aeroplane skipped and lurched, relieved suddenly of the weight, and it was several seconds before Toth could steady her enough for us to come around and survey the results—if any—of our unorthodox bombing attack. We saw that the wireless set had almost missed the airship as it plummeted past. Almost, but not quite: a large rent about two metres long had been torn in the fabric about a third of the way forward from the tail. The envelope was already beginning to sag and billow slightly as we watched, circling above. As for the Italians, they had clearly realised that something was wrong and were trying to turn around and get back across their own lines before they crashed. But to no avail: a rapidly deflating airship is almost impossible to steer, and in any case a south-west breeze had sprung up. Try as they might, they were being blown deeper and deeper into Austrian territory, losing height as they went. Meanwhile we circled above like a buzzard, waiting to see where our victim would come down.
In the end, twenty minutes later, the airship hit the ground way behind the lines, some distance outside the hamlet of Logavec, a Carso settlement so remote that no one had even bothered to transliterate its name into Italian. The crash was a prolonged and untidy business. The airship draggled along the ground like a wounded partridge for a good kilometre, leaving bits behind on stone walls and thickets, before what was left of it fetched up among the buildings of a farm, the envelope and broken keel finally draping themselves across the roof of a stone cottage. We circled above, looking for somewhere to land. A larger-than-usual dolina lay near by, about two hundred metres long and level from years of culivation. So we decided to chance a landing, despite the demolition charge which we were still carrying. Toth brought the
Lloyd to a stop only a couple of metres in front of the steep, rocky end of the hollow and we leapt out to scramble towards the farm, intent on capturing the survivors before they could sort themselves out after the crash.
I carried the empty carbine and Toth his Steyr pistol. They were not a great deal of use, but at least I thought that we might menace the Italians into surrendering quietly if they were still disentangling themselves from the wreckage. But we were too late. I stuck my head up over a drystone wall to get a look at the wreck—and was obliged to pull it down again smartly as a burst of machine-gun fire rattled and whined off the rocks. The Italians had barricaded themselves into a stone outbuilding, carrying the airship’s weapons with them. No doubt they hoped to hold out until nightfall and then slip away unobserved. The front to northwards of Gorz, among the forests of the Bainsizza, was much less densely manned than the Carso sector, and anyway there were more than enough ethnic Italians in these parts to provide them with shelter and civilian clothes. Troops would reach us eventually—the entire Isonzo Front must have watched the airship coming down—but they would take time to find us. Clearly, our task was to hold the Italians where they were until reinforcements arrived.
I crept round as close as I dared to the outbuilding where the airmen were hiding and called out to them. Lucky, I thought, that four years at the k.u.k. Marine Akademie had made me fluent in Italian. The reply was another short burst of fire, aimed at random as far as I could make out. I tried again.
“Friends . . .” I paused, awaiting more shots. But none came. I went on, “Friends, Italian aviators, we mean you no harm.” There was a single shot, but I went on regardless. “Please see sense: you are now deep in Austrian territory after being brought down in a fair combat with no dishonour to yourselves. You have done everything that your country could reasonably expect of you and you must not sacrifice your lives in so futile a fashion after surviving a crash. You are now surrounded and heavily outnumbered . . .” (I have to add that I choked a little at this whopper), “so please be reasonable and surrender. You will be treated with every courtesy and in strict accordance with the Hague Convention and the laws of war: I myself promise you this upon my honour as an officer of the House of Austria.”
There was a long silence, then a voice answered. The accent was Piedmontese, I noticed.
“Do you have Ungheresi with you, or Bosniaci?”
Biting my tongue, I assured the invisible speaker that I had only one Hungarian among my men, and no Bosnians whatever. “But why do you ask?” I called.
“Because it is well known that the Hungarians carry bill-hooks with which they scalp their prisoners. While as for your Bosnians, they are Mohammedan bandits and make eunuchs of their captives in order to sell them to the Sultan of Turkey for guarding his harem. This much is common knowledge: I read it myself only the other day in the Corriere.” I answered that, to the best of my knowledge, our own single Hungarian had never so much as owned a bill-hook in his life, let alone scalped anyone with it; while as for the Bosnian eunuch dealers, whether Muslim or of any other religion, I had no such people under my command (I might have added that from what I had heard of the Bosnians they very rarely took any prisoners; but this would have been extremely tactless in the circumstances).
When I had finished, the voice still seemed unconvinced. Meanwhile, from within the stone cottage on top of which the airship had landed, there had issued for the past five minutes or so the sounds of a woman having hysterics in Slovene, pausing every now and then to implore the aid of each of the saints in the Church’s calendar, starting with St Anna the Mother of Our Lady. She was already on the line to SS Cyril and Methodius, Apostles to the Slavs, and the shrieks in between were growing louder by the minute. At that moment one of the numerous goats browsing the scrub around the farmstead was bold enough to climb up a drystone wall and peer over the top—only to fall back a second or two later riddled with machine-gun-bullets. It was clear that our Italians still required some persuasion as to the hopelessness of their case. I felt a sudden tug at my sleeve. It was Toth, creeping along in the lee of the wall, pistol in hand.
“Magnum fragorem face—boom!—auxilio Ekrasito.” I stared at him for a moment in bewilderment, then realised what he meant. Of course: the slab of TNT. We scrambled back along the wall and ran to the Lloyd, which was standing out of sight of the Italians in the sunken dolina. Toth seized the block of Ekrasit and its detonators while I ripped out the aerial wire and the wireless set’s emergency battery. Then we ran back to the lee of the outbuilding and heaped up rocks from the wall on top of the explosive charge. When all was ready we clambered over a wall, trailing the wires behind us, and took cover. I looked at Toth and he nodded back. I was far from sure that this would work . . . I touched the two ends of the wire to the battery terminals.
It did work. There was a most impressive bang, and Toth and I had to huddle up to the wall for shelter as stones rained from the sky around us. The flock of goats was scattering in all directions, bleating in panic as the rocks showered down among them. From within the cottage there came a piercing scream, followed by frenzied calls for St Blasius of Ragusa to orare pro nobis. I crept up to the outbuilding and called out:
“Come out and surrender. Your position is hopeless. Our artillery has these buildings ranged now. That was a warning shot. I have only to signal to them and the next one will land among you.”
The moral effect upon the airship crew was much as I had hoped: before long a man in leather flying overalls came out of the outbuilding bearing a white handkerchief fixed to a stick. There were ten of them in all, largely unharmed by the crash, apart from a mechanic who had fallen out of an engine gondola as they hit the ground and broken his leg. Toth gave him morphine from the aeroplane’s first-aid kit as I parleyed with the airship’s commander, an army Capitano in his late twenties. He marched up and saluted me stiffly, then, seeing with some surprise that I was wearing naval uniform (I had cast aside my flying jacket in the heat), demanded to speak with the local troop commander. I answered that so far as he was concerned I was in command of the troops in the immediate area—which happened to be perfectly true, since there was only one of them. Where were the rest of them then, he demanded? I intimated as politely as I could that this was none of his business. He persisted: it was my duty to provide a proper prisoners’ escort at once, as laid down in the relevant international conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war; and in any case he was not going to surrender either his crew or the wreck of his airship—for which he demanded a signed receipt, by the way—to anyone of a rank less than his own. I replied that I was an Austro- Hungarian Linienschiffsleutnant, and that so far as I was aware that rank was equivalent to Capitano in the Italian Army; at any rate, it was equal to a Hauptmann in ours. With this he changed tack and said that as an officer in an Italian cavalry regiment—and a rather grand one too by the sound of him—he could not agree to present his formal surrender to a naval officer: the honour of the Army would not allow it. I sympathised, but said that I thought that with things as they were he was in no position to lay down terms.
And all the while this pantomime was going on I was thinking, damn them, where are they? They must have seen the airship come down. When would help reach us? For I sensed from the way the conversation was drifting that if our Italian captives realised that there were only two of us, they might seriously reconsider their earlier intention to surrender. I could even foresee a possibility that the tables might be turned, and that Toth and I would end up by being dragged back across the lines with them into captivity. And as if that were not enough to worry about, I now had the farmer and his wife to deal with as well. She had at last overcome her fright enough to be able to come out of the cottage. Even today I still think that she was one of the fattest women I have ever seen: like a walking fairground tent in the striped dress of the locality. The airship envelope was billowing flaccidly above the cottage, the remaining gas having collected inside the
nose section; but the farmer’s wife still almost managed to upstage it as regards bulk. Her husband was a whiskery-chinned, pegtoothed Slovene peasant with a white walrus moustache. He stood before me with the limp, riddled carcass of the goat in his arms, like Our Lady with the dead Christ.
“Kompensat,” he wheezed toothlessly, “koza mea e ganz kaput— capria moja ist finito—totalverlust, capisco?” He rubbed finger and thumb together, then pointed to the devastated thatch of his cottage. “Casa mea je auch havariert! Pagare—geld—penezy!”
I answered in Slovene as best I could. “In a moment, Gospodar . . . the War Damage Assessment Officer will be notified and will deal with your claim in due course, you may rest assured of that . . . Now, if you will excuse me . . .”
The airship captain was by now asking me a number of rather impertinent questions about how exactly the Austriaci had brought down his airship: the Citta di Piacenza, we later learnt. He had evidently not seen Toth and me land near by after the crash and did not associate us with the aeroplane that had attacked him. I was beginning to suspect that he was looking around for an excuse—having been unfairly shot down or something—that would allow him to square his earlier word as an officer and gentleman with his present intention of overpowering us and making a run for it . . . Then, at last, to my intense relief, I heard the sound of a motor lorry coming up the trackway. It was a party of soldiers. As they got down and came to join us I saw with some dismay that they were Hungarian Honveds, and that several of them had hanging at their belts the wicked-looking bill-hook or “fokos” which was much favoured by the Magyars as a trench-fighting weapon. The Capitano saw this as well and grew pale—then turned to me with a most reproachful look, marking me down for future reference as a trickster and a man devoid of honour. With that, we left things to the Army. The Italians climbed on to the lorry peaceably enough, and an ambulance was sent for to take the injured man to hospital. They waved to us in farewell as they bumped away down the track. I could see that, whatever their commander might think, the crew were mightily relieved to have come out of it all alive and unhurt. Hydrogen-filled airships were extremely inflammable and very few people ever survived being shot down in one.