The Two-Headed Eagle

It was not that the Dual Monarchy lacked good aircraft designers; it was rather that it seemed incapable of using them to any purpose. Igo Etrich, Kurt Sablatnig, the immortal Dr Ferdinand Porsche—all very soon grew tired of trying to squeeze money out of the Austrian bureaucracy, whose attitude to aviation was probably that if God had meant Austrians to get both feet off the ground at once he would not have created the Habsburgs to rule over them. One by one they had left to work in Germany, where the official attitude to these things was much less blinkered. An Austro- Hungarian aircraft industry of sorts had begun to put out shoots by 1914, but it was always a feeble and sickly plant. Industrialisation had anyway come late to our venerable Empire, and when the war arrived it was far too late to make up the arrears. By the end of it, Austro-Hungarian aircraft designs were by no means bad: I understand that the Phonix two-seaters of 1918 could give even the much-feared Sopwith Camel a run for its money, and Austro-Daimler aero engines were outstandingly good. But the numbers of aircraft built were always miserably small, and production of engines was anyway very fitful as the wartime shortages spread and the electricity supply was cut off for much of each day. When the Armistice Commissioners arrived in 1919 I believe that they found entire hangars full of finished airframes waiting for engines that never arrived.

A good deal of the trouble, I think, was that the enormous Imperial and Royal bureaucracy, though undeniably conscientious and hard-working enough in its way, was simply unable to adjust mentally to the twentieth century: in fact seemed never to have been entirely comfortable with the nineteenth. Even as I arrived there at Haidenschaft in July 1916, almost two years into the most desperate, bloody war in the Monarchy’s long his­tory, the official doctrine was still that it would all be over before long, and that there was thus no call to crank up war production unduly for a con­flict that would soon have ended. No cutting of corners, no reduction of paperwork, no lowering of pre-war standards was still Vie

The Fliegerarsenal also hung on far longer than most to the idea— already fast waning in 1916—that an aeroplane was an aeroplane was an aeroplane, capable of being used equally well for any purpose that required a flying machine, whether reco

This was why I had joined not Flik 19 but Flik 19F: the “F” stood for “Fernaufklarung,” or “long-range reco

The only problem here was our Emperor. The Old Gentleman was by no means the kindly grandfather of popular legend: he was as hard-boiled as most monarchs of the old school and was said to have been quite un­moved by the carnage at Solferino, whilst his adversary Napoleon III was violently sick when he saw and smelt that ghastly field the following day. But though seriously understocked in the imagination department, Franz Joseph was unquestionably a man of principle, and by his limited lights dropping bombs—even accidentally—on to unarmed civilians was some­thing that he would never countenance, least of all in a city like Milan, which had been an Austrian provincial capital within living memory and where (it was rumoured) he still had an account at a military outfitters. In fact the very word “bomb” was said to produce a noticeable agitation in this otherwise phlegmatic and rather dull old man: perhaps because he had spent so much of his long life having them tossed at him by would- be assassins. Arguments that bombing-raids would be directed solely at military targets—barracks, arms factories, railway yards and the like—had completely failed to budge him; maybe because, although not especially intelligent, he possessed a good deal more common sense than most of his advisers and knew instinctively what we airmen had yet to find out: that dropping bombs from two thousand metres under fire with primitive bombsights is one of the most inexact sciences of which it is possible to conceive. Unimaginative though he was, the old boy perhaps knew in his aged bones what we young men did not: that when we staggered into the air in those feeble wood-and-linen biplanes of ours with their ludicrous bombloads we were in fact taking off on a flight which would lead via Rotterdam and Dresden to end amid the vitrified rubble of Hiroshima.

Anyway, the outcome was that when a specialist long-range bombing squadron was created—after long delays for the appropriate paperwork to be completed, naturally—it was split off from an existing unit, Flik 19, and disguised as a long-range reco