The Two-Headed Eagle

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 Hauptma

“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 like 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 pla

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 Vie