The Two-Headed Eagle

I stared at the oil-pressure gauge—and saw that the pointer had dropped almost to zero. The Mercedes 160hp engine contained eight litres of oil in its sump and had a fresh oil tank in the upper wing contain­ing a further sixteen litres. A pump sucked oil out of this tank at each turn of the crankshaft and returned an equal amount of used oil back into the tank. The drain-tap beneath the sump had clearly shaken itself open in flight, so that instead of circulating the oil, the pump was squirting out a little of the engine’s heart’s blood at each stroke. It was too late to do anything now: after an hour or more of this both sump and tank must be nearly dry. I checked the cooling-water thermometer and saw that it was nearly boiling as the engine overheated. Already I heard it begi

I sent out a hurried SOS message giving our position and saying that we were being forced to ditch by engine failure. Then I remembered the bombs. I had leant overboard at the start of our foot’s chase to remove the nosecaps and set the fuses. The calcium fuses could not be made safe again once they had been armed. The smallest splash of salt water would deto­nate them, so they had to be dropped before we landed. I placed my hand on the bomb-release levers. Then I saw it, about a mile ahead: a low, shad­owy shape obscured by drizzle with a smoking fu

It was not until we were almost above our would-be rescuer that I realised something was badly wrong: that it was not a torpedo-boat at all, let alone an Austrian one, and that what I had taken to be signal flares were in fact tracer rounds from a machine gun being fired up at us— fortunately with very little accuracy. A few bullets flicked through the wings as we skimmed over the mystery vessel to land on the sea about eight hundred metres beyond. As I turned to see who on earth they were I saw that it was in fact a steam-powered submarine which had now lowered its fu

In the event they did neither. The submarine had been submerged for only a minute or so when suddenly it reappeared in almost the same place, bows breaking surface in a tumult of spray, submerging and then bobbing back up again. We watched fascinated. Within a few seconds the entire forward section of the submarine was sticking out of the water at forty-five degrees. Soon it was almost vertical, like a sporting whale. It hung there for a good two minutes, pirouetting slowly, until the forward hatch burst open to cascade human figures scrambling into the water. They did so among an evil-looking yellowish cloud which I knew must be chlorine coming from the batteries as the seawater poured in. A minute later and it was all over: the bows had disappeared beneath the surface in a boiling heap of air bubbles, leaving only flotsam and the heads of swimmers to mark its final exit. Had we been the agents of its destruc­tion? Surely not: our bombs had fallen into the sea a good thousand metres short. No, all that I could imagine was that they had panicked as they saw us coming towards them and had dived with a hatch left open. It was an easy enough thing to do in any submarine, and doubly so in these steam-powered boats with their telescopic fu

As it turned out we need not have worried about being lynched. In fact when we finally drifted among them we found that they barely noticed our arrival, being too busy trying to lynch one of their own number, the unfortunate diving coxswain whom they clearly blamed for having dived the boat with a window left open, so to speak. Fortunately for him it is far from easy to beat up a man swimming in the sea—especially when his assailants are also treading water. So Nechledil and I laid about with our paddles at the wet heads around us, then took hold of the wretched man and dragged him aboard. It was not until we had placed him safely on the bows of the boat in front of the cockpit that we set about rescuing the others: twenty-three of them in all, the boat’s entire complement of two officers and twenty-two men.

Our most immediate concern was to prevent them from swamping us by clambering aboard all at once. Nechledil, whose French was excellent, explained the position to them and beseeched them to behave sensibly in the interests of us all. They did, and we took them aboard one by one, distributing them carefully around the flying-boat to spread the strain upon its flimsy hull and wings. Lohner flying-boats were sturdily built as aeroplanes went in those days; but getting on for a to

I sent out a distress message in clear. The wireless was normally driven by a wind-powered dynamo. We had a small battery to allow us to transmit while standing still, but it was too small for more than three repetitions of the message “L149 ditched 44.27N by 13.55E with crew of French submarine aboard. Send help urgently.” It would be heard I knew. But by whom? And who would reach us first?