For our commanding officer, what we were to do when—and if—we reached Verona was of quite secondary importance. Photographs of the railway junction and a barracks were cursorily indicated at our briefing session that afternoon; but even if we managed to get that far and identify them, there was not going to be a great deal that we would be able to do to them. The raid would be in daylight, so each aeroplane would have to carry an observer and machine gun for defence, while at that range our bombload would be limited to two 10kg bombs each. So far as we could make out, Hauptmann Kraliczek had selected Verona as a target and chosen to send four aircraft against it purely on the grounds that 4 X 250km x 2 = 2,000km, which would suffice to pull the Kilometres Flown line back up to where it had been at the beginning of August. My polite enquiry, whether we might just send up one aeroplane four nights running with instructions to fly around in circles until its tank was empty, was met with a baffled stare from behind the round spectacles. That is the trouble with people of Kraliczek’s cast of mind, I have always found: sarcasm is quite wasted upon them, since their brains can only proceed from A to B and from B to C.
None of us was at all confident as we made our preparations that we would even complete the hundred-kilometre round trip, let alone do anything worthwhile on the way. No one cared to say as much, but we all knew that intelligence reports had revealed the presence of a new Italian single-seater squadron recently arrived at San Vito airfield, just east of Palmanova and directly under our planned flight path. It was the recently formed Squadriglia 64a , led by the legendary Major Oreste di Carraciolo.
I suppose that, along with the tank, the fighter aces were the year 1916’s great innovation in the field of warfare. Or perhaps it was all just public relations, I cannot say. At any rate, they fulfilled a deep public need. The grey, anonymous infantry might be perishing by the million, gassed, blown up and burnt alive with as little compunction as rats in their burrows. But up in the air above this frightful massacre—as if to give the public’s numbed imagination something that it could grasp—the flying aces were fast acquiring the status of opera singers. Even this early, in the summer of 1916, cigarette cards and books of salon photographs and the first ghost-written autobiographies were being produced to feed the public’s hunger for heroes to worship in this, the most monstrously unheroic war the world had ever seen. Fonck, Guynemer, Boelcke, Immelmann: even in tradition-encrusted old Austria the naval fighter pilot Godfrey Banfield was already being styled by the newspapers as “the Eagle of Trieste.”
It was against this background that one morning early in September we officers at Caprovizza had circulated among us at breakfast a cutting from a Swiss newspaper. It carried a photograph of a shortish, thick-set man in the uniform of an Italian army officer, standing against the side of a Nieuport fighter. The aeroplane bore the emblem of a rampant black cat, claws extended, and the article was entitled “Italy’s Black Cat: Ready to Pounce on the Austrians.” It appeared from the text of the article that a journalist from a Berne newspaper had managed to obtain an interview with Major Oreste di Carraciolo: sculptor, explorer, duellist, racing driver and aviator.
The Major, we learnt, though not a career army officer and although well past forty years of age, had volunteered for the Italian Air Corps in 1915. Since then he had made a spectacular career as a flier, with ten kills to his credit already, including one of our Fokker Eindeckers and a Halberstadt single-seater from a German squadron that had operated briefly from Veldes. But by all accounts this extraordinary turn to his career was something that might well have been expected; for Major di Carraciolo was clearly a character in the mould of the condottieri of the Italian Renaissance.
His early life had mostly been spent as a sculptor, helping found the Futurist movement and leaving a few score writhing monuments in white marble in the squares of Italian towns and cities, as well as enjoying the friendship and patronage of Rodin. His “Monument to the Heroes of Adowa” had been particularly praised: to a degree where it had almost overshadowed the fact that Adowa was a battle in which an entire Italian army had been wiped out by the Emperor Menelik’s barefooted Abyssinians. But he had managed to take time off from hammer and chisel to live the life of the literary salons; and to enjoy the favours of a great many salon hostesses; and to fight a great many duels—sometimes victorious, sometimes not—with their husbands. It was one of these complications (the article said) that had obliged him to go and live for several years in the wild mountain fringes of the Italian colony of Eritrea. During his time in Africa he had discovered a major lake in the Rift Valley; had been mauled almost to death by a dying lioness; and had later rescued the lioness’s cub, which he had brought up in his household and which now followed him about like a pet dog. He had driven racing cars, had taught himself to fly about 1910, and had then flown in the Italian war against Turkey, where he claimed to have been the first man to drop a bomb from an aeroplane: on a Turkish steamer in Benghazi harbour.
It appeared also that in 1914 he and a gang of like-minded desperadoes had tried to force the hand of the dithering Italian government by provoking a war with Austria. They had hired a ship and arms and had been about to sail from Rimini to attack the island of Cherso when the carabinieri had arrived and arrested them. Carraciolo had received a sentence of five years, but in the event he had served only a few months, since Italy had declared war on Austria in May 1915. He had then organised a similar expedition against an Adriatic islet off Lissa: an expedition which I myself had unwittingly frustrated the previous July, when my submarine U8 had torpedoed the Italian cruiser leading the force.
All in all, it looked quite an impressive curriculum vitae. Major di Carraciolo was now (he said) ablaze with a passionate desire to clear the Habsburg eagle out of the remnants of Italia irredenta in Trieste and Dalmatia and the South Tyrol. He had no personal animus against us, he assured the Swiss journalist: “The Austrian is a brave and determined fighter,” he said, “but he is also ill-organised and not very well equipped and now outnumbered into the bargain. I think that I can promise him a hot time of it once Squadriglia 64a gets into action.” Some of our younger officers dismissed the article as empty Latin bragging; but for myself I had little doubt that the Major would be as good as his word. I hoped that so long as I was flying a Brandenburger we would never meet him in the air.
We were to meet, though, and a good deal sooner than I had anticipated. 21 September dawned sunny after a week of mist and drizzle, though with some patchy cloud coming from the west. Laden down with fuel and bombs, the four Brandenburgers had squelched across the waterlogged flying field at Caprovizza and lumbered heavily into the air. We were all climbing slowly, the aeroplanes not only heavy-laden but themselves damp-soaked and sluggish after weeks of standing around in the rain and fog on the airfield. It was not until we were almost over the trench lines east of Gorz, still climbing, that we finally got into formation. We would fly in a diamond shape, perhaps fifty metres apart. The leading aeroplane would be flown by Oberleutnant Potocznik, Toth and I would fly on the starboard flank, while a new officer called Leutnant Donhanyi would take the port flank. The rear aeroplane would be flown by Stabsfeldwebel Zwierzkowski with Leutnant Szuborits as observer. The idea of the diamond formation was to guard against aeroplanes wandering off and getting lost. We also hoped that we might be able to give one another supporting fire if the Italians came up after us.