We arrived over Schlanke Emma at 0825 as arranged. The weather was good and the mist was lifting rapidly in the valley on the other side of the mountain. It looked as if shooting would commence as planned. I reached down to flick the switch for powering up the transmitter, saw that the blue spark was flickering across the gap as the toothed wheel began to spin, then leant over the side to fire a white rocket: the signal to the battery wireless operators that I had started transmitting. I gazed at the jumble of forest and bare rock below. Even though I knew from the map where it was hidden, there was no visible sign of the Skoda howitzer lurking among the pine trees: the camouflage experts had done their job too well for that. I tapped out the pre-arranged letters “K-U-K” on the Morse key, and saw a white flare arch up from among the trees to signal that they were receiving us. There was a pause as we circled above. Surely something had gone wrong—no, there was the green rocket, the signal for us to begin our work. The enormous gun was loaded and ready to fire. Our task now was to find its target.
That, I had realised from the outset, would not be easy. The Italians were no fools and had done a thorough job themselves of camouflaging their howitzer battery in its mountain valley, even hanging up screens of wire mesh to break up the noise of firing and prevent us from using sound- location to get a cross-bearing on them. I also knew perfectly well that as soon as an aeroplane appeared above them they would cease firing until it had gone. So in the event it was an extraordinary piece of luck that one of the howitzers should just have fired its first ranging shell of the day as we came over the ridge of the mountain. I missed the flash, but my binoculars caught the remains of the brown puff of cordite smoke that it left behind. Hastily I fumbled with the pencil in my thick flying gloves to mark the position on the map, then tapped out its co-ordinates on the Morse key as Toth banked us around to the south. That should give our gunners an area a kilometre square to range upon. Once they were hitting that I would use a crude system of letter-and-number signals to correct their shooting: “U” then so many metres for “Overshoot,” “K”—“Kurz”—for “Undershoot,” “L” for “Too far left” and “R” for “Too far right.” The aim was to signal the conclusion of the process by a single letter: “V” for “Volltreffer”—“Direct hit.” From what I knew of the Skoda 42cm howitzer I doubted very much whether more than one “V” would be necessary. The thing spoke but seldom, I understood, but when it did its arguments were of impressive finality.
We had only just circled back across the ridge when the Skoda howitzer fired its first shot. Even from a thousand metres above it was a spectacle of brute explosive violence that remains with me to this day. I had seen heavy guns fire before, of course: I had been a battleship gunnery officer before the war and still had impaired hearing in the upper registers to prove it. But I had never seen anything quite so big fired before—or been looking almost down the barrel as it did so. It astonished me to see that the shock waves were actually visible, spreading out like ripples on a pond around the great gout of orange and brown which suddenly erupted from the dark forest, making the trees about it flex and thrash as if some localised hurricane had struck them. A few seconds later the blast hit our flimsy aeroplane, making it skip and bounce suddenly like a mountain goat. The enormous shell was just visible for a moment or two as it reached the apex of its flight above the mountain ridge, losing speed before toppling over to plummet down towards its target. I was able to imagine—though with no particular relish—the feelings of the Italian gunners as the express-train roar came rushing down upon them to announce the arrival of the mighty projectile.
It landed on the mountain slope some way above their position. Seen from where I was it looked like the sudden birth of a volcano: a disc of rock and forest floor about fifty metres across, suddenly heaving itself into the air as though a giant mole were stirring beneath it, then belching forth a great cloud of yellowish smoke as full-grown pines flew into the air like so many matchsticks. When the smoke cleared I saw that a hole the size of a small quarry had been excavated in the valley side, surrounded by a chaos of fallen trees and a circle of shattered rock. I marked the crater on my map and signalled “K200 L300” to indicate that the shot had fallen two hundred metres too short and about three hundred metres too far left of the target. Meanwhile the slopes below me broke out into a rash of flashes and smoke clouds as the Italians recovered from their shock and, realising what was afoot, let fly with every gun available to try and find the perpetrator of this outrage. The telephone lines down from the ridge of the mountain must be glowing red, I thought, as the Italian spotters signalled back the position of the muzzle-flash from our gun.
They began to make it uncomfortably hot for us, now that they had realised what we were up to flying in slow circles over the mountain. A desultory spatter of rifle fire had greeted our first appearance—Italian infantrymen in their rocky trenches relieving the boredom of yet another day in the line by loosing off a few shots at a passing aeroplane. But now the shooting began in earnest: machine guns coming into action, then a flak battery in the valley sending shells up at us. I signalled to Toth to take us higher. Meanwhile the Italian howitzer battery fired a salvo. The shots were well short of our gun, and loosely grouped, but the line was worryingly accurate. By now the Italian outposts up on the ridge must be taking compass bearings to fix the hidden Skoda’s position. Like us, they knew that down there among the trees men were cursing and sweating as they struggled to hoist the enormous shell into the still-hot breech, then swinging the ponderous breech block into place and locking it shut before cranking furiously at the elevation wheels to raise the mighty barrel skywards once more.
Our second shot fell even further short than the first, dropping right into the bed of the torrent that ran down the mountain valley. I suppose that there must still be a miniature lake there, interrupting the course of the stream and providing puzzlement for the area’s natural historians. I like to think that, now the trees have grown back around it, the village children from Caporetto go up there to fish and to swim on summer afternoons, unaware of the events that took place in that quiet valley when their great-grandfathers were young. I signalled back “K300” as we banked away once more to await the Italian reply. Neither contender could move of course: the Italian howitzers, though (we understood) mounted on wheels, would have taken several hours to dig out of their emplacements and haul away. As for our Skoda weapon, it was concreted into its emplacement and could only be released with the aid of blasting charges and pneumatic drills. Neither contender could do anything more than await the enemy’s riposte. It was like watching some bizarre medieval duel to the death, prescribed perhaps in a fable to establish which suitor would have the hand of the princess; the two opponents with their feet set in tubs of mortar and taking turns to lunge at one another through a paper screen, their thrusts guided only by the calls of the spectators in the gallery.
The Italians fired a second salvo after three minutes or so, just as we were coming back over them. It was more closely grouped this time, and it landed only four hundred metres or so from our gun. Meanwhile our third shot went wide again: two hundred metres over and one hundred too far right. Damn them, what was wrong with our gunners this morning? Heavy artillery shooting was never an exact science: shot falls varied because of wind and air density and the precise chemistry of each propellant charge—and by 1916 Austrian cordite was becoming very uneven in quality. But even so their shooting was not up to the usually high standards of the Imperial and Royal Artillery. Did they realise what peril they were in? At this rate it was more than likely that the Italian battery would find them before they found the Italians.