The old man interrupted his flow a moment, stared at me with his head tilted slightly to one side and then smiled gently, “Pardon me, I’m assaulting you with words,” he said, “I wouldn’t like you to take me for one of those old folk with an incontinent memory.” I replied, “No, not at all, on the contrary, I was very interested and was glad to hear what he had to say.” “Fear, that’s what it is, fear,” he went on, “I have to talk to you about fear, because if I do, you might be able to grasp the story more easily; fear didn’t get to you in the middle of an action, there it was a case of immediate physical terror, immediately resolved by catastrophe or luck, the sheer speed of what needed to be done put you into a kind of trance, it was like dancing, you had to surrender yourself to an instinctive rhythm, concentrate on the rhythm and not think of anything else, in any case if a shell caught you full on, you were dead before you knew about it, you had to surrender to instinct, to the pure rhythm of the trajectories which are only crossed by destiny, you had to connect with that destiny, and dance. Take Graziani, you know who I mean, Giulio Cesare Graziani? no, doesn’t matter, he’s still alive like me, well, as he was attacking a convoy at Tobruk, in the act of releasing his torpedo, one hand on the control column and the other on the lever, he noticed some spots on the windscreen and felt something damp on his neck, but he was too absorbed by the vague feeling that after the release there hadn’t been the usual bounce which indicated that the plane was now lighter by a good fifteen hundredweight of torpedo, too busy with the turns, sideslips and climbs which are part and parcel of any getaway, and only when he was out of range of the ships’ guns did he put his hand to his neck, and when he pulled it away in horror, he saw that in his palm he held half a human brain, the brain of the photographer in the fuselage, the top of whose head had been blown off by a shell. He turned in terror to his co-pilot, only to find him slumped over on his side with his shirt covered in blood, behind him the flight engineer was moaning, the gunner, also wounded, came staggering into the cockpit, and announced that the photographer was dead and the torpedo hadn’t gone. Everything at the one moment, a moment of some complexity, as they might say today. He made the return journey with a crew of the dead and dying, before darkness fell he happened to notice that on the windscreen, apart from the pieces of human brain, there were also several bullet holes, one of which corresponded to the place at the controls where he normally sat, as it passed by he must have been bent over the release lever, the bullet had torn the epaulette off his flying suit and had gone on to blow off two of the fingers of the flight engineer seated behind. It was night when he landed at Gadurrà. They opened the doors from outside, carried off the dead and wounded, and found him seated at the controls with his hand gripped on the control column, weeping uncontrollably, they had to lift him up bodily and carry him out.
“See what I mean? The fear’s not in the action, it was before and after, when we were standing under the wing waiting for someone to come running up with a sheet of paper, or the night before the raid when we were studying the routes and trying to work out from the maps what was in store for us. Wrestling with fear meant pushing back the thought that everything was the last – last shave, last tie-knot, last coffee, last letter, last night in a bed. Buscaglia confessed that he was often afraid and in a panic over the risk, he had to fight back those feelings like the rest of us, yet he was the man in charge. There were some who simply did not have that feeling of risk, and that spared them the fatigue of mind and body which the awareness of danger produces in normal people, but I sometimes think that the best of them are those who have that worried look, who are worried and silent; but there are not really any rules in this matter. Anyway, that’s the sort of man Buscaglia was.
“We would set off from Pantelleria or Decimomannu in Sardinia, or from Gerbini at the foot of Mount Etna, but most commonly from Rhodes in the Aegean; there the Royal Italian Air Force had constructed a runway with a couple of sheds at one side, Gadurrà it was called; the take-off field sloped down towards the sea, almost as far as the shore, it wasn’t easy to take off with a full cargo in the opposite direction, uphill, when the wind was swirling down from the hills. Between one sortie and the next, if there was time, I used to go and sit among the ruins of Lindos, some evenings the sea, the mountains, the olives trees and the Doric columns formed a landscape of such maternal peace that I could hardly believe there was a war on. War in Trento, where I came from, meant rain, grey skies, winter, frost, but how were you supposed to feel pain, how were you supposed to die, in a countryside like this?
“We took off regularly from Gadurrà to attack convoys of warships and cargo ships; the action would have started well before that, when our agents stationed at Algeciras or Tangiers got a message to Rome warning them of ships entering the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar. I said it was a operation of high, instinctive mathematics, but it might have been better to say internal mathematics, carried out by a ten-ton aircraft with six people on board, flying at sea level, weaving in and out among ships in a hail of shells and anti-aircraft fire. The torpedo had to be released sixty metres above the water at a velocity of three hundred kilometres an hour, while keeping the aircraft on manual and never deviating a centimetre from the horizontal; at the tail of the torpedo there was a little empennage which enabled it to glide, on impact with the water the empennage fell away and the torpedo was transformed from an aerial torpedo into a marine torpedo, so we had something in common with submarines. The point was to place an object over which you had no further control on the surface of the sea: everything depended on the actual firing, afterwards you would be as well sitting twiddling your thumbs. The height and velocity, as well as the tail-piece, were what fixed the torpedo’s angle of impact and ensured that it didn’t just slide under the waves or bob and bounce like a pebble skimmed over the water by a boy on the beach. In its airborne trajectory, the torpedo maintained the speed of the plane from which it had been launched, three hundred kilometres an hour, but the moment it touched the sea, it fell to seventy, which was why it was important to launch the torpedo as close to the ship as possible; close, but not too close, because the torpedo after entering the water executes a sinusoidal curve before straightening out, and at the lowest point of the curve it could pass at depth under the keel of the ship, fail to make contact and speed away on the far side. Now follow me closely, just pretend you’re still at school, or that we’re doing a waltz; considering that from seventy metres of height the aerial trajectory of the torpedo is around three hundred metres, and considering that once it’s in the water the torpedo takes another two hundred metres to stabilise at a depth tared on land, and that can vary from two to eight metres depending on the ship you’re aiming at, the conclusion is that the minimum distance from which the torpedo can be fired is five hundred metres. In addition, if you fired it from farther off, let’s say from one thousand metres, the time it takes for the torpedo to reach even the slowest of vessels would be sufficient to allow the vessel to turn, or get away. A splash in the water beneath an aeroplane coming up at top speed – they would see the whole thing from the ship and from that moment they had their chance to do their own dance steps, for us it was awesome to see a battleship on the other side of the windscreen, remember we were flying roughly level with the bulwarks, to see it pull round as fast as it could, its prow throwing cascades of water into the air, racing against the time it would take the torpedo to strike it. That laborious turn to make leeway was the only chance of escape the ship had; if at the moment of contact, the torpedo’s angle of impact was too tight or too tangential, the weapon couldn’t detonate, the whole business, the internal mathematics or dance among the cannonades came down to a straightforward bump, a little knock or thump between two pieces of iron, just imagine, all that painstaking precision and all that deadly risk just for one impact, for one innocuous little collision at sea between a ship and an ordinary piece of metal, which then slithers away along the hull and ends up who knows where
.
“If fired from five hundred metres, the torpedo would take twenty seconds to strike the ship’s side, and if the pilot had calculated correctly the movement of the target and the angle of impact, the Beta angle, not even the niftiest of ships had any chance of getting out of the way. The core of these internal mathematics was the Beta angle, an angle formed by the direction of the moving ship and a straight line from the position of the ship to the position of the plane at the moment of firing. This angle is like a mortgage, or like a song; I fire taking aim not at where you are but at where you will be twenty seconds from now if my calculations are correct. You don’t need me to tell you that some mortgages have to be foreclosed. If the torpedo had twenty seconds to reach its target, after firing it we, aircraft and crew, had hardly four or five; this was the most critical phase, the getaway, if getaway is the right word, sometimes we ended up right on top of the ship, so there was neither time nor space to turn, and there was nothing for it but to overfly it so low that we grazed its aerials and turrets, skidding, turning, sideslipping, pulling the plane into sudden inverted climbs, frantically trying all kinds of aerobatic numbers that a triple-engined, torpedo aircraft was never built for, but which were marvellous for putting off the anti-aircraft gun operators; we could see them swivelling round their machine- and pom-pom guns as we swerved madly overhead.
“It was always hard to get out of a convoy, but after a while it was just as hard to get in. At the beginning, in the first torpedo raids, the British fired on individual aircraft, but then they had a go at the grand barrage, which is not a dance step but a wall of flame, as soon as they saw us in the distance they turned the whole of their artillery against us, erecting an impenetrable barrier of shells in the sky, rounded off at sea level by bursts of fire from four- or eight-barrel pom-pom guns which continually strafed the waves. We had to get through that wall of flame and iron – for us a wall of calculated risks – in perfectly level flying formation, because you needed a horizontal trim and fixed height to drop the torpedo into the sea. When you first entered that sky of black cloud, the aeroplane started its own dance on the ballistic waves of the explosions, the smoke from the shells made your eyes water, not just the smoke to tell the truth, and the saliva dried up in your mouth; flying lower than the bulwarks, so low that the spray thrown up by the exploding shells fell on your wings and windscreen, you sneaked into a gap between a destroyer and a cruiser, until you were able to fire the torpedo and make off, zooming up into the skies with one almighty kick on the pedals, leaving the crew to cling onto the struts as best they could.
“In all that murderous chaos, unless there was a loud explosion, nobody could ever say for sure whether or not the torpedo had hit its target; that was why there was always a photographer in the crew, while you and your co-pilot, eyes streaming, kept your mind on the dance and the mathematics, the photographer, held at the ankles by the gunner, was sticking his head out of the turret on the hump to shoot with his Leica and long-distance lens, taking one photo after another, to get snaps that were used not only to win you a medal, because you couldn’t exactly rely on the British to tell the truth about the number of ships that went down or about the damage done to their fleet. Buscaglia wanted the photographs to study the progress of the action, on our side as well as theirs. The moment we touched down, the photographers rushed off to their dark rooms and emerged half an hour later with dripping photographs which ended up on the CO’s desk. Fine photos, there’s no denying it, an extraordinary, unintended piece of reporting, unforgettable souvenirs for us; at first glance, when you saw that scene again, you couldn’t believe you had been in the thick of it, and even less that you’d got out alive. From the photos you were able to evaluate whether the column of water at the side of a ship was just part of the general chaos, or if it was due to the explosion of a torpedo, and how much damage it had caused. You could also work out from the photos the damage to our side, you might see a Seventy-nine engulfed in flames as it went into the sea, and from the type of spray thrown up you could guess if there was any chance of the people on board surviving. There was no shortage of planes ditching in the sea, this was another thing which made us feel like submarines, but everything depended on how you entered the water, on whether or not you were on fire, and whether you were still able to steer. Flaps out, levers down, feet and right arm braced against the instrument panel at the last minute, left hand tugging on the control lever to keep the aeroplane level as it was swallowed up by waves and spat out again a few seconds later, and if all went according to plan you would feel a violent thud and see water splashing and streaming down the windscreen, and the old Seventy-nine would float. At that point, you got the life-raft into the sea, if there was time you grabbed everything useful and destroyed the codes and cyphers, which were bound in lead to make sure they sank as quickly and as deeply as possible.
“I have to tell you that I’ve ended up in the sea many a time, the first time out of utter stupidity when I was returning from a training flight off Pola. So as to give a wave to some friends on the beach at Sistiana, I came in so low over the sea that the side-engine propellers touched the water, there was a tremendous clang and the tips of the blades bent outwards: I managed to get her to climb a bit but the plane was kept in the air by the central engine alone, and all of a sudden it dropped. The crew dashed into the cockpit, I could feel them staring daggers at me, and sweating buckets though I was, it became a matter of curiosity for them to see how I’d get out of this one, and then a matter of some pride for successfully ditching a plane without anyone having ever shown me what happens to a land-plane when it ends up in the water. The second time I ditched, it was in the waters around Pantelleria after sinking my destroyer, you must forgive me if I call it mine, in fact it belonged to a British captain whom I met years later in London, a nice man with a real sense of humour; before we fired the torpedo we had been hit ourselves, then as we flew over the ship we were holed again and I could feel the plane losing power under my feet. Once we were in the sea, as the crew were clambering into the life-raft, I perched myself on a wing and set to work with a hammer to detach an aileron for use as a nautical rudder, while the co-pilot dismantled the compass, something that could always come in handy. We heard them shouting from the life-raft and turned just in time to see the destroyer’s prow rearing obscenely in the air and the ship sliding under, stern first. This happened in the battle of Mid-June, June ’42, I mean. The third time . . . well the third time I’ll leave for the moment.
“In terms of risk, the torpedo-bombers were just one step below kamikazes, and presumably that must have occurred to Supreme Command, because in the battle of Mid-August, after the aircraft carrier Furious had dispatched about forty Spitfires from a latitude on a level with Algiers to take part in the defence of Malta, an unmanned Seventy-nine, operated by a radio on board a Cant Z sent along with it, took off from Villacidro in Sardinia. The Seventy-nine was packed with explosives, and was supposed to crash into one of the biggest ships in the convoy; everything worked like a dream until they got in sight of the British fleet off the island of La Galite, here a condenser in the radio-control mechanism, built in accordance with the usual penny-pinching philosophy, overheated, the Seventy-nine failed to respond to instructions, overflew the convoy, continued in a straight line towards Algeria where it crash-landed. The rescuers were very puzzled at not finding human remains among the wreckage. Mid-June, Mid-August – funny names for battles, names of times not places, however these were the two great air-sea battles of the Mediterranean, both fought to prevent the British getting supplies through to Malta. But for us Malta was already lost, the real problem was elsewhere. Flying over the front lines, we had the dubious privilege of seeing before anyone else that the war was lost. You just had to look at the sheer number of convoys coming into the Mediterranean, piling up in the ports; and we were supposed to be hunting them down! We would understand it all even better later on, during the attacks on ships off Algiers or Gibraltar, acts
of war supposedly, but principally acts of propaganda, phoney raids to fill the news bulletins and keep up morale, and maybe it did fool some infantryman in Albania into believing that the mare nostrum was still really ours. We risked our skins in a state of terror, three or four raids at the most, remember? We came back from each raid more and more sure in our minds that it was all going to end in grief, and this knowledge, believe me, made everything even more painful and hopeless. One day in Comiso, they captured an enemy bomber, the crew was British but the aircraft was American, they had mistaken the airfield in Comiso for one in Malta, has anything like that ever happened to you? They glided in to land without a care in the world, the lieutenant on duty realized what had happened and gave orders to hold fire; in fact he made the guard line up to welcome the incoming crew, who stepped out all smiles only to find themselves under arrest. You see, war’s got its funny side at times, even if this time it was hardly a laughing matter, because that bomber was the eighth wonder of the world, armed to the nines and with every vital component covered up with thick, solid armour. It was October ’42, the war was already over, take my word for it, the Americans landed in Algeria the following month, they landed at one o’clock in the morning of the 8th of November, I remember it well because Buscaglia called us together early that afternoon, quietly said these events were not to upset us, we are at war and you each of you know where your duty lies, we take off in half an hour for Algiers. We were in no condition to attack during daylight hours, because the Spitfires from the aircraft carriers would have massacred us, but we were going to attack in the half-light, as cinema people call the light when the sun has just gone down but the sky is still bright, the light we’ve got just now as you and I are talking, except that then it was well into autumn; we were supposed to arrive over Algiers exactly with that fading light so that we would not be visible to the fighter-planes and the ships, but we were supposed to be able to make them out in outline, in the semi-darkness that lasts five or six minutes on an autumn afternoon, and there’s a fine test of navigational calculation for you, or inner mathematics if you like, one thousand kilometres of distance with twelve planes in formation and a margin of error at the target of a couple of hundred seconds. We took off from Castelvetrano in Sicily, where we had been moved in the meantime, a splendid place for oil, and for wine. Over the Mediterranean we ran into one squall after another, solid columns of rain stretching from the sea to the low banks of cloud overhead, we had to swerve out of their way, changing tack as we went and obviously at every deviation Buscaglia had to adjust the calculations of time lost, wind drift and bow angle to get us back on course, a marvellous feat of dead-reckoning navigation. Finally, in the dark, we caught a glimpse of the outlines of the Atlas Tellien, with the shadows of the great warships over to the west, but we were late, too late, the sun was already down and that was fine, but even the lingering, thin light of dusk was fading second by second, it was five past six on a November evening, Buscaglia gave his orders over the headphones without any trace of emotion – turn back, head for Sicily. Two days later, Buscaglia launched an attack on the Bay of Bougie, to the east of Algiers, along with him he wanted no more than three other planes, commanded by Graziani, Faggioni and Angelucci, who was new to the group, so I stayed at home, not without some disappointment. Instead of attacking from the sea, Buscaglia decided to come at the port of Bougie from the land side, so when they got to La Galite they left the Mediterranean and made for Tunisia, flying very low to the west, turning north to allow them to clear the mountains then swoop down on Bougie harbour; the surprise was less than perfect, because a high-flying German, twin-engined plane saw them emerge from inland, took them for British or American and nose-dived onto them, at which point everybody opened fire from all sides, there was flak from the ships and the anti-aircraft positions on land, the Spitfires took off from the aircraft carriers, Buscaglia and the others bunched together to defend themselves better from the fighters, the bay was a terrifying spectacle for them, they’d never seen so many warships, so many guns and so much firepower, they came down to the usual, harrowing height of seventy or so metres, flying right into round after round of gunfire, they collected a few hits but went straight on, Angelucci and his crew died at that moment, in the barrage the plane was seen bursting into flames, breaking apart and falling into the hills, the corpses were brought back to Italy only a couple of years ago. The others fired off their torpedoes against the cargo ships moored in the harbour, the only target worth bothering about, because warships could be replaced in no time but supplies were still valuable; the problem was that because they were aiming for the docks, they found themselves above the houses and inside the mountainous Gulf of Bougie, they climbed steeply, made a tight turn, grazing the rocks as they did so, at the top of the ascent Faggioni let himself go into a sideslip and lined up under his companions, Buscaglia did likewise and the whole patrol reversed course and formation, came hurtling down from the heights – a right circus number that must have been! a fine dance step with great, lumbering beasts like those! – and all this in non-stop enemy fire, pure instinct guided by rhythm, those three were the best there were, the most skilled of all the torpedo-bombers; they went back across the port, the only escape route open to them, there they were welcomed by more fire from the anti-aircraft guns and then, just as they got out of the port, they were picked up by the Spitfires which fired furiously at them, they huddled together wing to wing once again, at sea level so as to protect their undersides, the most delicate part of the Seventy-nine, and to leave the way clear for their machine-gunners who were firing from the turrets at the pursuing fighters. The Seventy-nine was exceptionally sensitive to the slightest touch, if you had her well in hand you could form a pack by placing your wing between the wing and tail of the next plane, flying so closely together with such an awkward plane was quite scary the first couple of times, eventually you found the courage, but you still needed perfect engine synchronisation, enormous confidence in your patrol leader and an exact level of pressure on the pedal and lever to be able to stay close in without snarling up your companion or having the tip of your wing torn off by the outside propeller. The effect, for anyone pursuing you, was of a solid wall of fire thrown up by the tail gunners, who were limited in their sweep by the need to avoid the rudder and tailplane, so this provided a shadow zone for fighter-pilots who had learned to shelter there while riddling you with shots. I have to tell you all this because it will be important in a short while, as you will see, and because it was by flying and firing this way that the three of them were able to get out of the Bay of Bougie, away from a barrage the like of which had never been seen, leaving a few Spitfires groaning in their wake, pierced with bullet holes or else belching smoke as they vanished among the fish.
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