There were about forty of us at Naval Air Station Lussin Piccolo, lodged in a small wooden-hutted encampment on the shores of Kovcanja Bay, at the opposite end of the long, narrow fjord-harbour from the town about five kilometres distant. The flying-boat base had recently been moved here out of the way because a minesweeper flotilla was using the town harbour, and things had become too crowded for safe take-off and landing. Lussin’s fjord was a splendid natural anchorage, sheltered by low hills to eastward from the bora and with only one narrow entrance, about half-way down the seaward side. The French Navy had occupied the place in the war of 1859 with the intention of using it as a base for stirring up revolt in Hungary—if the war had not ended after only a few weeks with Austria’s defeat. The War Ministry had learnt its lesson though and had built a number of forts on the island in the 1860s, as well as providing a chain barrier to block the harbour entrance.
By the looks of it the War Ministry might very well have installed the personnel of the Naval Air Station at the same time as the defences, because the average age of the lower deck was (I should think) nearer to sixty than to fifty: a collection of ancient naval reservists and pensioners called up for the duration and commanded—for want of a better word—by a delightful old gentleman called Fregattenkapitan Maximillian von Lotsch. Fregattenkapitan von Lotsch had not so much been called from retirement to command the station as returned from the embalmers. Nobody knew for sure how old he was, but it was reasonably certain on the evidence of old daguerreotype photographs that he had been a Seefahnrich aboard the brig Hus%ar at the siege of Venice in 1849. Certainly he must have been eighty-five if he was a day when I knew him: a charming old boy straight out of Biedermeyer Austria, but pretty well gaga and unshake- ably convinced that we were at war with the Prussians. He had not the remotest idea about aviation, or about running a naval air station. But it scarcely mattered, since he spent most of the day dozing peacefully in an armchair in his office, waking only from time to time to enquire whether the “Pfiff-Chinesers” had managed to capture Prague yet. We just gave him things to sign every now and then and got on with running the station as best we could.
Not that our crew gave us much trouble. Apart from a few young engine fitters and other such craftsmen from our parent unit, the naval air base at Pola, the station personnel were simply too old to present us with the disciplinary problems that usually arise from having a ship full of feckless and hot-blooded young men. There was none of the drunkenness, none of the whoring, none of the fights and none of the requests to visit pox clinics that normally make life so tiresome for divisional officers; only a good deal of grumbling among a collection of aged men who had suddenly found themselves in naval uniform again when they were already grandfathers, and who had now been exiled to spend the war on a remote island in the Adriatic. They would while away their off-duty hours huddled around the stove at the Cafe Garibaldi in town, playing backgammon and wheezing complaints against the war and the “verfluchtete Kriegsmarine” as they snapped their arthritic knuckles.
My servant was an ancient Pola-Italian naval pensioner called Tomas- sini who claimed (with what truth I cannot say) to have served as a powder- monkey aboard the wooden battleship Kaiser at Lissa in 1866. It was a pity, I once told him, that the Monarchy’s desperate shortage of manpower should have compelled it to call up men in their sixties. Tomassini sucked his remaining teeth and thought for a while about this.
“Can’t say that it bothers me too much, Herr Leutnant, if you really want to know what I think. It gets me away from the old woman for a bit, and all things considered this isn’t too bad a place to sit out the war, specially now as they’re copping it back in Pola. There’s an air-raid every other day now, the missus says. They had a bomb come down the chimney of the house next door last week and bring our ceiling down. Frightened the life out of her it did. No danger of that out here anyway.”
He was quite right about that: Lussin Island was way outside the range of the smaller Italian aircraft, and had nothing whatever to attract the big Caproni bombers that were now raiding Austrian towns as far behind the Front as Graz and Laibach. Fighter aircraft could not get this far, and we ourselves were too far from the Italian ports to be employed for bombing- raids. So air operations from Naval Air Station Lussin Piccolo consisted entirely of the humdrum business of convoy escort, varied only occasionally by the odd anti-submarine patrol.
It was difficult to say which of these two was the more tedious. Escorting convoys meant flying over them in circles for four or five hours at a stretch all the way down from the port of Fiume through the Quarnerolo Gulf to the limit of our sector at the northern tip of Lunga Island—sometimes further, if the aeroplane from Zara had not turned up to relieve us. But, tiresome or not, it was certainly a necessary task. The Balkans in those days were a wild and primitive land, almost devoid of roads and railways. This meant that most of the supplies for our fleet at Cattaro and for the Austrian armies in Albania had to travel by sea, down a long coast which lay everywhere within easy striking distance of the Italian shore.
If the convoys had not been properly protected, Allied submarines and motor boats would have been free to slaughter at will like foxes in a hencoop. But they never managed it: in fact thanks to our Navy’s competent use of escorts, only a handful of merchantmen were ever sunk on the Fiume—Durazzo run, even though the number of sailings must have run into thousands. But it was arduous work for all those involved, both for the overworked destroyer and torpedo-boat crews who did the surface escorting and for the flying-boat pilots above.
The trouble from our point of view was that even at half-throttle, down nearly to stalling speed, a Lohner flying-boat was about eight times as fast as a convoy of elderly merchant steamers with engines worn out by lack of grease and burning lignite in their boilers. We had to circle above them all the time, turning in great slow loops as the merchantmen doddered along below at five or six knots with a couple of harassed torpedo- boats fussing about on their flanks. Sometimes we would go clockwise, sometimes anti-clockwise, for no other reason than to break the monotony and stop ourselves getting dizzy, and also because our riggers warned us that this circling in the same direction all the time gave a permanent warp to the airframe. Yet it was a job that demanded unrelenting vigilance: constantly on the look-out not only for the tell-tale white plume of a periscope but for the tiny black dot of a drifting mine or the miniscule grey outlines of a flotilla of Italian MAS boats lurking among the myriad islands and waiting to skim in and launch their torpedoes. We were looking all the time for something which was probably not there, but which would wreak disaster if it were there and we failed to see it. If there was any doubt on that point it was dispelled early in November when the Ungaro-Croatia steamer Gabor Bethlen was torpedoed and sunk off Lunga Island after the other Lussin aeroplane had fumbled the hand-over to the relief from Zara and a submarine had taken advantage of the gap. As an ex-submarine captain myself I liked to think that he would never have had the chance if I had been there, but secretly I was far from sure of that. Observer and pilot used to work one-hour shifts in those flying-boats; but in the winter cold it was dreadfully easy to drift into trains of thought and miss a periscope wake, especially when the sea was flecked with white-caps from the wind or if there had been a lot of dolphins about.