“Buscaglia was dead. An ace aviator, you will say, and yes he was certainly that, in spite of the conventions, because ours was not an age of aces, the term belongs to the First World War, a vague definition, indicating exceptional technical and moral qualities, later tightened up by the introduction of precise standards to avoid its abuse; they even went as far as drawing up an official list of First World War aces, a distinction awarded principally to fighter pilots. But we did not shoot down other planes, our targets were ships and with the passing of the years the concept of fighter pilot underwent a change, it lost its overtones of individual duellist, our training was all about crews and groups, that was the basic mental, I might almost say emotional, unit, an anti-prima donna spirit enforced by Supreme Command’s rigid regulations, they moved us around constantly from one mission to the next to avoid the accumulation of honours, in the dispatches, no matter how sensational the actions were, the principal characters were indicated by their initials followed by rank, so as to discourage swollen egos. And yet, as torpedo-bombers we enjoyed a special status, it was spontaneous and involuntary, perhaps because there were so few of us, as was evidenced by the emblem of Buscaglia’s squad – four cats lined up on a torpedo, four dumbfounded and perplexed cats under the motto Pauci sed semper immites – or perhaps because our line of combat made us amphibian, aero-aquatic, like submariners operating at sea level, or rather taking wing, or perhaps, when all is said and done, it was simply because we were a group. Whatever the reason, the bulletin of the 13th of November 1942 gave the announcement of the death of our commanding officer with name, surname and decorations awarded for the one hundred thousand tons of shipping he had sent to the bottom of the sea during his various sorties, including the last, and from that day we became the Buscaglia group.
“Pauci we were, and becoming fewer by the day, eight officers out of twenty had died in less than eight months, and as for the immites, had we the guts to get back into a Seventy-nine, or any other aircraft for that matter, after the death of Buscaglia? And yet, scared as we were, we started flying again; Graziani and Faggioni assumed command, the one of the group the other of the squadron, but everything became more demanding, the Allied defence was such that we had to cut out daytime and even evening sorties, too many things needed to come together, too many elements all constantly shifting – us, the convoys sailing the Mediterranean, the sun in its brief, twilight span. Night and night attack was all we had, darkness saved us from the Spitfires but tied us to the moon and its phases, we began to think in terms of waning and crescent moons as though we were Red Indians, at full moon we could make out the surface of the sea, attacking into the moon we could make a guess at the ships’ silhouettes, but even so, often you couldn’t see as far as your nose, one night in the bay of Philippeville pulling out of a dive I glanced at the altimeter, it stood at ten metres below sea level, I pulled back the throttle with all my might and shut my eyes, the altimeter was still calibrated to Castelvetrano pressure which was different from that of the Algerian coast, but how great was the difference in metres, in centimetres?, how close had I come to the surface of the water without seeing a thing? With night flying we became familiar with the unsettling effects of the searchlight, beams of light which shone on the windscreen then veered off to the side at the last moment, it was a new and alarming optical effect, disembodied blows which it became instinctive to ward off by making the plane yaw one way then another, or by air-braking and diving desperately. We flew with lights out, in constant fear of the wings touching, but out of nowhere, from land or sea, on would go the searchlights: the first time it was like a cannonade of blinding light, I couldn’t see the phosphorescence of the instruments, nor could I make out what was going on and for a few seconds I completely lost control of the plane. The Seventy-nine had blinds over the wide, side windows and over the big windows above the windscreen, and for a while we flew with blinds down. Soon afterwards the Spitfires adopted the tactic of waiting for us above the airfield as we returned from our mission, we would get back in the dark totally worn out, sometimes with a damaged plane or with wounded men on board, they would make out the reverberations of the engine exhaust, or see the rocket we fired to alert ground crew to switch on the runway lights, and at that point they would open fire and come chasing after us, forcing us to race off, scared witless, at the level of the fields and up over the hills, in total darkness.
“One night in January ’43 my turn came, my number came up, one night with no moon, not that you could rely on her for a good turn if you were going into combat. We took off at eight in the evening from Decimomannu in Sardinia for the Bay of Bona in Algeria, we fired our torpedo against a ship in the most perfect darkness when all of a sudden the sky was lit up with a firework display of piercing beams and machine-gun fire. Outside the bay we found the usual fighters lying in wait, but we shook them off by swooping down to sea level. We had been holed in several places but without any too serious damage, so we stayed low and headed back to Sardinia. All of a sudden, an hour into our flight home, there erupted from the darkness beneath us a geyser of shells and dazzling jets of light, the night was so dark and the sea so black that we had been overflying a convoy without even being aware of it. We were hit in various places and just when it seemed we were going to get away with it, all three engines suddenly packed up. At that altitude, there was no chance of keeping airborne and no time to think, we sent an uncoded SOS, I got ready to ditch for what was the umpteenth time, but the first when I couldn’t see a thing, neither the horizon nor the sea line. I stared at the instruments on the flight deck, the anemometer and altimeter, and waited. We entered the water at two hundred an hour, one almighty crash into a gluey wall, the power of the deceleration hurtled us all forward, I banged my head against the bomb sight with its handles and racks. When the plane bobbed back up onto the surface, my thumb was pulp and one eye was oozing blood. I raised my good hand, groped for the door above the pilot’s seat, got it open and crawled out into the biting wind and driving rain, and if I’d been emerging from a submarine at sea in the middle of the night, it couldn’t have been worse; I leaped onto one of the wings and it was like plunging into a frozen well of utter darkness. Someone got a life-raft into the water, we managed to get in, each one of us wounded somewhere, and the Seventy-nine floated off with its nose under water and its tail in the air. We drifted, numb with cold, sprays of salt water burning our wounds, but at least they kept us awake. We had no way of knowing we were only fifteen miles off Capo Spartivento, nor that the signal station on the island of Sant’Antioco had seen us go down and given the alarm, although we only learned the worst at day break when an auxiliary vessel picked us up; we had ditched in a mined area, so to rescue us they had to clear the whole zone, then lay down the mines again.
“I woke up in hospital swathed in bandages, I had come out of it the worst but I’m a fast healer and some weeks later they took off the dressings and let me out of bed. But in the following days, as I wandered around the corridors, I seemed to be constantly bumping my shoulder into the walls or into the doorways, as though I had lost that instinctive balance we all have when we walk. I mentioned this to the doctor and was immediately sent back to bed with the strict order to stay absolutely still. They gave me a weird pair of glasses with only one tiny hole to see through, and a couple of weeks later they announced that when I banged my head and eye against the bomb sight, a film had formed over the retina and closed it up, but maybe, just maybe, with treatment it would reopen. San Remo, where I spent the spring, was beautiful, one huge convalescent centre for the wounded of all the services. In the evening I would go for a stroll along the promenade, I knew only too well that I would never be going back to the group, for me the war was over, but staring at the sea from the shore gave me an odd feeling of solidity and protection. The Riviera was magnificent, I was one of Fortune’s favoured and yet I felt a nostalgia for the old times, at any moment of the day I knew exactly what the others were up to, it took no eff
ort to picture it in my mind’s eye, especially on my evening strolls when I stopped to gaze at the moon, which was no longer for me a source of the light you needed for survival but had reverted to being a poignant, metaphysical embellishment of night’s landscape.
“Out of the blue in autumn I received two letters, one from Graziani and the other from Faggioni. The armistice had taken Graziani by surprise while he was on leave in Rimini, and he had wasted two days talking to the Germans and contacting Rome for orders; finally, under a hail of bullets from an Italian artillery squadron, he stole a Seventy-nine from the airfield at Fano and landed in Catania. As he was taxying along the runway, he was met by a jeep driven by a smiling American soldier, a lieutenant who spoke perfect Sicilian; on the ramp, he shook hands enthusiastically with each member of the crew, offered them cigarettes, then produced a cine camera from the jeep and asked them to get back inside and make their appearance at the door one more time while he shot his film. Graziani had to repeat the scene several times, the final time for the Catania airport commander, a colonel of the United States Air Force. There was enormous excitement among the Americans when they discovered it was a torpedo-bomber, they stuck under his nose a wodge of photographs taken from various ships during torpedo attacks, among the planes racing about like cats on heat Graziani picked out his own more than once, and it was only then he realized that certain ships really had been sunk. Then the Intelligence Service put to him various detailed questions about the system of air defence in Italy, matters about which he had no knowledge. The Americans didn’t believe him, and were not persuaded by the fact that he had headed south immediately and of his own accord, they put him in charge of a group of Seventy-nines transporting mail and officers between the mainland and the islands, and for some months he had a military policeman sitting at his back, whose job was to file a report every evening on every single thing he had done during the day.
“Faggioni too was on leave on the day of the armistice, and he too stole a Seventy-nine, from Florence-Peretola airport, and along with it he stole the mechanic he had asked to check it over. He landed at Littoria, where the rest of the unit was. Desperate times, believe me, appalling times, almost impossible to obtain orders, difficult to grasp what was going on or to make decisions, the Germans were closing in on the airports, the following morning Faggioni and the rest loaded men, munitions and spare parts onto thirteen planes and took off for Ampugnano airfield, Siena, the only free base after the fall of Pisa and Littoria. In Siena, in the general turmoil and complete breakdown of communications, they received first an order to make their planes unusable by removing the air-intake ducts from the engines, an order they declined to carry out, then an order to proceed to Milis in Sardinia, an airport which some said was already occupied by the Germans. They took off at dawn and the moment they were over the Tyrrhenian, it was clear, there in the sky, what each one had concluded about the armistice, the choice was tacitly declared by a swift turn and change of course. They separated over the sea without a word, one Seventy-nine heading north, another four making for Sicily and only one landing on the mined runway at Milis, where the crew was immediately taken into custody by the Germans; the others, watching the scene from above, headed south. Faggioni, travelling separately with a group of four planes, flew without any difficulties as far as Bocche di Bonifacio, then one of his planes was attacked by a Messerschmitt 109 and forced to ditch, another was buzzed by two Focke Wulf 190s and forced down into the sea off Capo Testa; Faggioni saw some Seventy-nines parked around the airfield at Milis but no sign of the green rocket giving them the all clear for landing. He attempted to land at Borore, but was dissuaded by two red rockets followed by two shells. He turned back and, keeping in formation with the other plane, returned to Ampugnano as per last orders received. For three days they lived in the deserted airstrip as though they were in some God-forsaken outpost, until one day a civilian on a bicycle, who turned out to be the ex-commander of the base, arrived with the evacuation order. They applied to the headquarters at Siena for clarification, and both were given one month’s leave. Faggioni’s lasted four days, at the end of which he presented himself at the Training Academy of the Royal Italian Air Force at Cascine airbase and enlisted for a body which did not yet exist, but which was to become the aviation corps of the Italian Social Republic. He died at midnight on Easter Monday 1944, while torpedoing American ships anchored off Anzio under the April new moon, he always said it’s hard but as long as I’m able I’ll go on, he called cargo ships ‘big bellies,’ and perhaps even in that last attack he issued the order over the headphones – let the big bellies have it! – a funny war cry right enough, and we always used to laugh at him about it. They fished his beret and briefcase out of the sea near Anzio.
“Anzio is not too far from Naples,” the elderly gentleman began again, “and not far from Naples itself stands the town of Ottaviano Vesuvio, and not far from there is Campo Vesuviano, an airstrip set up by the Americans; among the vines flanking the runway, a bomber flight of the Royal Italian Air Force was bivouacked. Graziani used the Baltimore, a two-engine aircraft supplied by the new allies for pilot training, spending his days in a dual-control flight with his pupils and one afternoon in July, while engaged on lessons around the airfield, he saw a Seventy-nine in service as a passenger transport come in to land, nothing unusual about that, the plane often carried high-ranking officers, but what was strange was that control tower invited him to land as well. Taxying up to the parking area, he passed near to the newly landed plane, and one figure in a bright new uniform detached himself from the group of officers around the ramp and came over to him. Do you know who it was?” asked the elderly gentleman. “No, you can’t know, you could never imagine, nobody could have imagined, not even Graziani himself until he found himself face to face with the other man. It was Buscaglia. Carlo Emanuele Buscaglia in flesh and blood. Risen from the dead. Graziani stared at him without speaking a word, they embraced, Buscaglia said to him with tears in his eyes, ‘You’re still in the thick of things.’ The last time they had spoken to each other was before take-off for Bougie, the morning of the argument over the light, a year and a half previously at the airfield in Castelvetrano in Sicily. Buscaglia had to depart at once for Lecce, there was some Minister shouting from inside the aeroplane, but he said he would be coming back the following month to take command of a bomber unit and then they would have time to talk. True to his word, he returned the following month to do a training stint on the Baltimore, and one August night at the foot of Vesuvius, sitting in front of the tent that was their quarters, Buscaglia told Graziani his story. The Americans had picked him up in the Bay of Bougie, picked him up and stitched him together, then despatched him to a POW camp in Texas. The only thing he remembered about the crash landing was the slow agony of the plane’s photographer, the only one apart from himself to have survived in that sea of blazing oil; as he died he cursed Buscaglia for having run those excessive risks, and that memory made Buscaglia burst into tears. But his story started further back, at the time when, even before Castelvetrano, he had given orders for his plane to be placed under police guard day and night, an order no one could understand at the time but which was the result, he now explained, of confidential advice from the Bishop of Catania to keep the planes, and most especially his own, under strict surveillance, since he had heard talk about possible sabotage in the unit. And in fact, said Buscaglia, someone must have interfered with the equipment, because at Bougie, under fire from the Spitfires, the guns on his Seventy-nine had jammed on the first round because of defective cartridges. He obtained proof of sabotage on his return to Italy when many political and military authorities sought him out, even Palmiro Togliatti invited him along to the Naples headquarters of the Communist Party. Togliatti praised him to the heavens for backing the Constitution, but also reproached him for having sounded off about victory two years previously when replying to a speech by some Fascist dignitary from Catania on an official visit to the group. Togli
atti had informed Buscaglia that there was a Communist cell already operating at that time among the torpedo-bomber personnel, and Buscaglia instantly attributed to them responsibility for the sabotage of the ammunition. He was surprised that only the Church and the Communists seemed in possession of worthwhile information, but he remained convinced that if the weapons had worked he would not have finished in the sea. In the same way, responsibility for the malfunctioning of the torpedoes which, to the equal amazement of those who launched the strikes and those who were struck, did not explode on impact, was to be laid at the door of the powerful Communist cell operating in the torpedo manufacturing plant at Maiano near Naples. The night was hot and humid there at the feet of Vesuvius, Buscaglia told Graziani how he was the object of reverential deference among Italian prisoners of war on his entry into the Monticello POW camp but of general contempt on exit because of his decision to side with Badoglio. But the decision was the right one, he continued, and in keeping with his duty as a soldier, it gave him the opportunity to put himself once again at the service of his country in the work of national reconstruction and, for that reason, he had requested and obtained a command. At the foot of the volcano the night was long and hot, the moon was ringed by humid vapours, Buscaglia reminisced and speculated, slipping effortlessly from the past and to the present and from the present to the future, he would complete his training on the Baltimore as soon as possible, would get back into action, he had plans which stretched far beyond the liberation of Italy, once the war in Europe was won he expected to take up a position in the Allied armed forces with a command of his own, he would go to the Pacific, would transform the Baltimores from simple bombers to torpedo-bombers, would take up the old fight, with Japanese shipping as the final objective.
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