by Джон Биггинс
The bubble sextant and look-up tables would not be available for another twenty years—and quite frankly would not be a lot of use even then.
There was no moon that night, so in the end the best that Toth and I could do was to fly west until we found the River Tagliamento, its tangled channels gleaming dully below us in the starlight like a half-unwound skein of silver thread. We then turned to follow the river up through the forests and hills until it began to bend to westward. It is a curiously hypnotic state, to be flying in an open-cockpit biplane at night over enemy territory. The absence of any sensations but the steady roar of the engine, the rushing of the cold wind and the flickering pulse of flame from the engine’s six stub-exhausts all conspired to produce (I must admit) a rather drowsy state in which it was far from easy to concentrate on navigational landmarks. I made a point of prodding Toth’s shoulder every five minutes to keep him alert. With a single-engined aeroplane in those days it was all too easy for even an experienced pilot to lose his sense of balance, especially if the night was overcast, and for propeller torque to tip the aeroplane gradually over to port until it would be flying along on one ear, dropping out of the sky as it did so.
The Italians had enough experience of air-raids now to be careful about black-out, so it was only by the unmistakable glow of a railway engine’s firebox and some lights in a goods yard that we managed to find Gemona. Numb and stiff with cold despite layers of clothing, I struggled to lug the first bomb on to the cockpit edge. Then suddenly I was struck blind by an amazing glare of light. The Italians had searchlights below. The first flak shells flashed around us as Toth banked away to starboard and I lost my grip on the bomb. I suppose that the searchlight crew must have heard it whistling down, because it was quite extraordinary to see how smartly they turned off the light. I saw the bomb flash red below as Toth brought us back round to repeat the compliment. I tipped the remaining bombs overboard one after another. As we climbed away at full throttle into the night sky with the searchlight beams criss-crossing vainly behind us, I saw that we had set a building on fire: a wooden goods shed, to judge by the sparks boiling up into the sky.
It was a tricky landing back at Caprovizza, coming down on to a rough field only by the uncertain light of a few flares made out of petrol tins half-filled with sump oil and with wicks of rag. We both went to get a few hours’ sleep before I wrote out and filed my report on the raid. I then strolled over to the hangars, where the Brandenburger was being serviced after our flight. Feldwebel Prokesch saluted, then said that I might care to see something. He pointed silently to the aeroplane’s plywood fuselage. The sides bore two holes the size of my hand exactly opposite each other athwart the observer’s seat. A piece of shrapnel had gone clean through the aeroplane when the flak shell burst near by. If I had not been standing up to hoist the first bomb on to the cockpit edge it would undoubtedly have passed through me on the way, at about kidney level.
Because he was busy with his compilations I was not able to make my verbal report to Hauptmann Kraliczek until nearly midday. I found him to be in an even more peevish mood than usual.
“Well, Prohaska, a fine mess you have landed us in this time.”
“In what respect, Herr Kommandant?”
“It wasn’t Gemona that you bombed, it was Tolmezzo. And it wasn’t a railway station, it was a brickworks.”
“Permit me to ask, Herr Kommandant, what difference does it make? Where bombing-raids are concerned one Italian town is much the same as any other I should think; while as for the target, it was unfortunate that we didn’t hit the railway station as intended, but I imagine that bricks are necessary for the Italian war effort as well.”
“Difference? My form giving you your orders for the raid had ‘Gemona’ clearly written in the box ‘Primary objective’ and ‘To attack railway station’ in the box ‘Purpose of mission.’ It said nothing whatever about either brickyards or Tolmezzo. If you had said that you were diverted by heavy fire over the target and flew on to bomb somewhere else that would have been acceptable, though a matter for regret. But in your report—which has now been forwarded without my approval to Army Headquarters—you stated categorically that you attacked Gemona when in fact you bombed Tolmezzo. I have it here in black and white on this form which you filled in when you landed. I regard this as a serious breach of discipline.”
“But Herr Komandant, navigating an aeroplane by night is a very hit-or-miss business, everyone knows that . . .”
“Not in Flik 19F it isn’t: your targets are given to you, and I shall expect you in future either to reach them or to give a very good reason why you were not able to do so: ‘Unable to find the target’ will simply not be acceptable, do you understand? Precision in reporting is the essence of operational effectiveness. But quite apart from that, I gather from Army Headquarters that your attack on the brickworks has caused us serious problems.”
“Permit me to ask how that can be?”
“A railway station is state property, and attacks upon it are permitted by the 1907 Hague Convention. A brickyard is private property, and is therefore immune to attack under the provisions of the same convention. But what makes it all far, far more serious in this case is the fact” (he adjusted his spectacles) “that the brickworks in question now turns out to have been the property of an Austrian national: one Herr Wranitzky of the Sudkarntner Ziegelkombinat AG in Klagenfurt. The factory manager telephoned him this morning via Switzerland to tell him of the attack, and I gather that the insurers are refusing to pay on the grounds that his policy excludes acts of war committed by the forces of his own country. He has already been to visit the War Ministry to complain, and is talking, I understand, of suing you in person for damages.”
So after that I took good care on all such night-time raids to unload our bombs over open country near the target. I also evolved an infallible system for precision bombing at night. We would be given a form specifying our target—say Latisana—before we took off. Usually we would be quite unable to find Latisana, or at most would end up dropping our bombs near somewhere that looked as if it might conceivably be Latisana. We would return from the raid, and I would go to my tent and sleep a few hours before writing out my report in longhand, leaving blank spaces for the name of the place attacked. I would then go back to bed until about midday, and when I woke up, send my batman Petrescu down into Haidenschaft on the station bicycle to buy the midday edition of the TriesterAn%eiger. This would usually contain a report received via Reuters in Zurich and entitled “Our Heroic Fliers Bomb the Town of Pordenone”—or Udine, or Portogruaro or somewhere similar: usually anywhere but Latisana. I would dismiss Petrescu with a tip of a few kreuzers, and then fill in a name—perhaps “Pordenone”—and maybe add a few convincing details gleaned from the article before handing it over to the Kanzlei to be typed out. I would then fill in Kraliczek’s report form, entering “Unable to attack primary objective because of heavy flak fire” or something like that against Latisana, and writing “Pordenone” in the box “Secondary target chosen.” It worked splendidly. In fact before long I had received a special mention from 5th Army Headquarters complimenting me on the extraordinary precision of my bombing-missions. I was fast becoming an accomplished practitioner of the art of retrospective aerial navigation: that is to say, not of getting from where one is to where one wants to be, but rather from where one was to where one ought to have been. But I was lost to shame now and cared about it no longer. So far as Toth and I were concerned, precision bombing at night meant hitting the right country.
All things considered though, it was perhaps no bad thing that we could do so little flying in the early part of September, for the Italians were now stationing a number of specialist single-seater squadrons along the Isonzo Front. These fighter squadrons were very much a new idea in 1916. When the Germans had brought out their revolutionary Fokker Eindecker on the Western Front at the end of 1915 they had been content to operate them singly, each aeroplane prowling li
ke a peregrine falcon above a specified sector of the Front and pouncing on any Allied aeroplane that tried to cross. But in the skies above Verdun that summer the French had finally dealt with the Eindecker by forming special squadrons of single-seat fighters: the famous Escadrilles de Chasse, led by pilots like Nungesser and Fonck. Always quick to see which way the wind was blowing, the Germans had followed suit, forming their own specialised fighter units—the Jagdstaffeln—which would make up for the German Air Force’s inferiority in numbers by moving about the Front to wherever the High Command was planning something, and then simply sweeping the enemy out of the sky for a fortnight or so.
And now, in the autumn of 1916, the Italian Air Corps had also taken up this idea. Special squadrons of Nieuport single-seaters were being formed under leaders like Barracca and Ruffo di Calabria. The cult of the fighter ace was reaching now even to the remote and little-regarded Austro-Italian Front. But as yet, only to one side of it. The official doctrine on our side of the lines was an aeroplane worthy of the name ought to be able to carry out any front-flying task demanded of it, even if the result was that it did them all more or less poorly. We were told that General Uzelac had been moving heaven and earth in Vienna to get a budget allocation for an Austro-Hungarian single-seater capable of taking on the Nieuport. But so far nothing had emerged. Aircraft procurement was the business of the k.u.k. Fliegerarsenal, not the pilots at the Front. While we fought and cursed and died amid the stink of cordite and petrol and burning bodies, the desk-aviators sat in their offices at the War Ministry, floating serene and godlike above the suffering of mankind, and exchanged memoranda and aides-memoire with their fellow-bureaucrats at Fischamend. It was only by removing themselves (they said) as far as possible from the vulgar brawl—“der Kriegskrawalle”—taking place on the Isonzo that they could arrive at considered and administratively correct decisions on how best to spend the taxpayers’ money.
So for the time being it looked as if we must go on trying to do our duty in our unwieldly Brandenburg two-seaters. It had been a hazardous business even when the Italians had been operating their Nieuports in ones and twos. But now that they would be going around in gangs, our life expectancy would be quite dramatically reduced, to a point where even Oberleutnant Friml would decline to quote us a premium. Our own strength in single-seat fighter aircraft consisted of precisely three aircraft: Fokker Eindeckers reluctantly sold to us by the Germans and grounded for most of the time at their base at Wippach because Flik 4 could no longer obtain the castor oil used as a lubricant in their rotary engines. Not that they would have been much use however, even if they could have got airborne more often. The Eindecker had not been a brilliant aircraft even in 1915, and it stood little chance now in single combat with a Nieuport flown by a half-way competent pilot. In any case, the Eindeckers were forbidden to operate west of the front line. The Germans were still worried that the Allies would capture and copy the secret mechanism that allowed the Eindecker’s gun to fire through the propeller arc, so they had only agreed to sell them to us on strict condition that they always stayed on our side of the lines.
The wretched early-autumn weather and our lack of serviceable aircraft put paid to flying for most of the third week of September. It also gave a marked downward trend to nearly all the lines on nearly all of the graphs that decorated the walls of Hauptmann Kraliczek’s office: particularly to the all-important red line Kilometres Flown over Enemy Territory, which, for our commanding officer, was the touchstone of Flik 19F’s efficiency as a fighting unit. At last, on 20 September, three days after the resumption of large-scale fighting on the Carso, Kraliczek was able to bear the strain no longer. Perhaps because they could no longer be bothered organising them when the results were so meagre, 5th Army Command had given the commander of Flik 19F a completely free hand in planning long-range bombing operations: in future he would be able to go and bomb whatever he pleased, provided that he submitted his plans first for approval by the High Command and provided that his aeroplanes were not required elsewhere for photo reconnaissance. The result was a daring plan; so daring in fact that it was plain at first sight that whoever had conceived of it was confident that someone else would have the job of turning it into reality. The next day Flik 19F’s entire effective strength of four Hansa-Brandenburgs would take off to fly on a raid to the very limit of their range: to the city of Verona, some 250 kilometres behind the Italian lines.
For our commanding officer, what we were to do when—and if—we reached Verona was of quite secondary importance. Photographs of the railway junction and a barracks were cursorily indicated at our briefing session that afternoon; but even if we managed to get that far and identify them, there was not going to be a great deal that we would be able to do to them. The raid would be in daylight, so each aeroplane would have to carry an observer and machine gun for defence, while at that range our bombload would be limited to two 10kg bombs each. So far as we could make out, Hauptmann Kraliczek had selected Verona as a target and chosen to send four aircraft against it purely on the grounds that 4 X 250km x 2 = 2,000km, which would suffice to pull the Kilometres Flown line back up to where it had been at the beginning of August. My polite enquiry, whether we might just send up one aeroplane four nights running with instructions to fly around in circles until its tank was empty, was met with a baffled stare from behind the round spectacles. That is the trouble with people of Kraliczek’s cast of mind, I have always found: sarcasm is quite wasted upon them, since their brains can only proceed from A to B and from B to C.
None of us was at all confident as we made our preparations that we would even complete the hundred-kilometre round trip, let alone do anything worthwhile on the way. No one cared to say as much, but we all knew that intelligence reports had revealed the presence of a new Italian single-seater squadron recently arrived at San Vito airfield, just east of Palmanova and directly under our planned flight path. It was the recently formed Squadriglia 64a , led by the legendary Major Oreste di Carraciolo.
I suppose that, along with the tank, the fighter aces were the year 1916’s great innovation in the field of warfare. Or perhaps it was all just public relations, I cannot say. At any rate, they fulfilled a deep public need. The grey, anonymous infantry might be perishing by the million, gassed, blown up and burnt alive with as little compunction as rats in their burrows. But up in the air above this frightful massacre—as if to give the public’s numbed imagination something that it could grasp—the flying aces were fast acquiring the status of opera singers. Even this early, in the summer of 1916, cigarette cards and books of salon photographs and the first ghost-written autobiographies were being produced to feed the public’s hunger for heroes to worship in this, the most monstrously unheroic war the world had ever seen. Fonck, Guynemer, Boelcke, Immelmann: even in tradition-encrusted old Austria the naval fighter pilot Godfrey Banfield was already being styled by the newspapers as “the Eagle of Trieste.”
It was against this background that one morning early in September we officers at Caprovizza had circulated among us at breakfast a cutting from a Swiss newspaper. It carried a photograph of a shortish, thick-set man in the uniform of an Italian army officer, standing against the side of a Nieuport fighter. The aeroplane bore the emblem of a rampant black cat, claws extended, and the article was entitled “Italy’s Black Cat: Ready to Pounce on the Austrians.” It appeared from the text of the article that a journalist from a Berne newspaper had managed to obtain an interview with Major Oreste di Carraciolo: sculptor, explorer, duellist, racing driver and aviator.
The Major, we learnt, though not a career army officer and although well past forty years of age, had volunteered for the Italian Air Corps in 1915. Since then he had made a spectacular career as a flier, with ten kills to his credit already, including one of our Fokker Eindeckers and a Halberstadt single-seater from a German squadron that had operated briefly from Veldes. But by all accounts this extraordinary turn to his career was something that might well hav
e been expected; for Major di Carraciolo was clearly a character in the mould of the condottieri of the Italian Renaissance.
His early life had mostly been spent as a sculptor, helping found the Futurist movement and leaving a few score writhing monuments in white marble in the squares of Italian towns and cities, as well as enjoying the friendship and patronage of Rodin. His “Monument to the Heroes of Adowa” had been particularly praised: to a degree where it had almost overshadowed the fact that Adowa was a battle in which an entire Italian army had been wiped out by the Emperor Menelik’s barefooted Abyssinians. But he had managed to take time off from hammer and chisel to live the life of the literary salons; and to enjoy the favours of a great many salon hostesses; and to fight a great many duels—sometimes victorious, sometimes not—with their husbands. It was one of these complications (the article said) that had obliged him to go and live for several years in the wild mountain fringes of the Italian colony of Eritrea. During his time in Africa he had discovered a major lake in the Rift Valley; had been mauled almost to death by a dying lioness; and had later rescued the lioness’s cub, which he had brought up in his household and which now followed him about like a pet dog. He had driven racing cars, had taught himself to fly about 1910, and had then flown in the Italian war against Turkey, where he claimed to have been the first man to drop a bomb from an aeroplane: on a Turkish steamer in Benghazi harbour.