The Two-Headed Eagle

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 sca

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 Ma

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 disco

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 begi

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.