individual names.
The Fliegerarsenal also hung on far longer than most to the idea— already fast waning in 1916—that an aeroplane was an aeroplane was an aeroplane, capable of being used equally well for any purpose that required a flying machine, whether reconnaissance, photography, artillery-spotting, bombing, shooting up ground troops or bringing down enemy aircraft. It was a belief that had already been comprehensively shot out of the skies over France, where in late 1915 it had only been their limited numbers that had prevented the notorious Fokker Eindeckers—the world’s first effective fighter aircraft—from wiping out the entire British and French air forces with their forward-firing machine guns. Aeroplanes were already beginning to split up into specialised types, and even here on the Austro- Hungarian South-West Front the first moves were beginning to be made towards setting up air units with special tasks.
This was why I had joined not Flik 19 but Flik 19F: the “F” stood for “Fernaufklarung,” or “long-range reconnaissance.” Previously all frontline Fliegerkompagnien had been attached to an infantry division, for which they provided artillery-spotting and air photography and a little (usually not very effective) bombing and close support for the troops. But in February a daring experiment had been tried. Early one morning a flight of three Lloyd two-seaters had lumbered into the air from Gardolo flying field, in the Alps north of Lake Garda, and had flown a four-hour round trip to bomb the city of Milan. The results had been so gratifyingly out of proportion to the meagre investment—mass panic in a city that until now had thought itself far away from the war—that the Austrian High Command had decided to make further experiments in this direction. After all, the war had never been very popular in Italy—their parliament had been manoeuvred into it in May 1915 by something little short of trickery—and it was quite possible that a few more daylight raids on Italian cities might shake public morale to breaking-point.
The only problem here was our Emperor. The Old Gentleman was by no means the kindly grandfather of popular legend: he was as hard-boiled as most monarchs of the old school and was said to have been quite un moved by the carnage at Solferino, whilst his adversary Napoleon III was violently sick when he saw and smelt that ghastly field the following day. But though seriously understocked in the imagination department, Franz Joseph was unquestionably a man of principle, and by his limited lights dropping bombs—even accidentally—on to unarmed civilians was something that he would never countenance, least of all in a city like Milan, which had been an Austrian provincial capital within living memory and where (it was rumoured) he still had an account at a military outfitters. In fact the very word “bomb” was said to produce a noticeable agitation in this otherwise phlegmatic and rather dull old man: perhaps because he had spent so much of his long life having them tossed at him by would- be assassins. Arguments that bombing-raids would be directed solely at military targets—barracks, arms factories, railway yards and the like—had completely failed to budge him; maybe because, although not especially intelligent, he possessed a good deal more common sense than most of his advisers and knew instinctively what we airmen had yet to find out: that dropping bombs from two thousand metres under fire with primitive bombsights is one of the most inexact sciences of which it is possible to conceive. Unimaginative though he was, the old boy perhaps knew in his aged bones what we young men did not: that when we staggered into the air in those feeble wood- and-linen biplanes of ours with their ludicrous bombloads we were in fact taking off on a flight which would lead via Rotterdam and Dresden to end amid the vitrified rubble of Hiroshima.
Anyway, the outcome was that when a specialist long-range bombing squadron was created—after long delays for the appropriate paperwork to be completed, naturally—it was split off from an existing unit, Flik 19, and disguised as a long-range reconnaissance unit. It was a rather neat piece of duplicity. But in the end it created as many problems as it solved, both administrative and personal. The parent unit, Flik 19, formed in the spring of 1916, had already built up a reputation as one of the best and most enterprising Austro-Hungarian flying units; largely because of its remarkable commanding officer Hauptmann Adolf Heyrowsky, the man who had not been able to meet me when I arrived at Haidenschaft and who it seemed was conducting a running campaign of insults against my own commanding officer Hauptmann Kraliczek.
Heyrowsky was the very model of the Old Austrian career officer, one of the few survivors of a species which had been largely destroyed in the autumn of 1914 at Limanowa and Krasnik. A superb fencer, skier and marksman, Heyrowsky—though not especially bright—was a man of exemplary courage, unshakeable loyalty to the House of Habsburg and spotless personal integrity. Although completely without experience in the air, he had insisted on flying as an observer from his first day with Flik 19, and within a month had bagged two Italian aircraft with a Mannlicher hunting rifle. And as if this were not enough, during the Fifth Isonzo battle in May, when the weather had been too bad for flying, he had volunteered to fight evenings and weekends (so to speak) as an infantry officer in the trenches.
Such a man as this was no more likely than his imperial master to take kindly to the idea of running an air unit designed to drop bombs on cities far behind the lines. Quite apart from the risks to civilians, he held it to be the duty of fighting airmen to fight in the closest possible support of the men in the trenches. But there was also the administrative insult offered to him by the existence of Flik 19F. Flik 19, you see, remained under the command of its nearest corps headquarters—the Archduke Joseph’s 7th Corps at Oppachiasella if I remember rightly—while we, being a strategic flying unit, came directly under 5th Army Headquarters far away in Marburg. Now, there is nothing that a professional officer loathes more than to have responsibility for a unit but no operational control over it— rather like being responsible for one’s wife’s debts when she has been living with another man for years past. So quite apart from the personalities involved, Hauptmann Heyrowsky could scarcely have been expected to look with any favour on this bastard offspring of his.
But the fact is that quite apart from his professional dislike of Flik 19F, Heyrowsky nursed an almost homicidal enmity towards the wretched Kraliczek, whom he despised as a desk-soldier of the most abject kind. It was not poor Kraliczek’s fault, I suppose, that his name was a Germanised version of the Czech word for “little rabbit” (a fact of which Heyrowsky was well aware, since he spoke that language fluently along with six or seven others). But it was a pity that the man’s timid, grey, burrowing, nocturnal nature should have corresponded so exactly with his name. The very sight of such a creature might well be expected to arouse in a warrior like Heyrowsky feelings— well, feelings like those of a weasel confronted with a rabbit. I was told in fact (confidentially, since it had had to be kept quiet at the time for fear of a court martial) that, a few weeks before, there had been a disgraceful scene when Kraliczek had arrived at Fliegerfeld Haidenschaft to visit Heyrowsky on some business or other and had emerged from the Kanzlei hut after a few minutes pursued by Heyrowsky, with his sporting rifle, firing shots around Kraliczek’s boots as the latter scurried towards his staff car and shouting, “Run for your life, bunny rabbit!” Since then scarcely a day had gone by without some elaborate insult—like the offer of bicycle-riding lessons—being conveyed from Haidenschaft to Caprovizza: all with perfect impunity, since Heyrowsky knew that any complaint by Kraliczek would involve the latter in a court of honour and the choice either of fighting a duel or of being cashiered in disgrace.
Quite apart from its shortcomings as regards supply of aircraft and organisation, the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe when I was seconded to it in July
1916 still suffered from yet another crippling disadvantage imposed on it by the intense conservatism of its superiors. This was the doctrine, still held to by the War Ministry even if it was beginning to break down in the field, that it was the job of an officer to command an aeroplane and the job of an enlisted man—a sergeant at best—to fly the thing. The trouble was, I think, that even if k.u.k. military officialdom had by now grudgingly accepted that it needed an air force of some sort, it was damned if it was going to let the exigencies of flying get in the way of the famous Old Austrian discipline which, over the previous two centuries, had caused the Habsburg Army to be kicked about the deck by a succession of enemies ranging in size from France to Montenegro. In particular it would coun tenance no dilution whatever of that sacred entity the Habsburg officer corps, twin pillar of the Dynasty along with the Catholic Church.
By 1916 this was frankly a crazy notion: ever since the 1870s the old Imperial aristocracy had been withdrawing from military life and its place had been taken by ordinary people like myself, grandson of a Bohemian peasant. Even before 1914 the k.u.k. officer corps had been a thoroughly bourgeois body, and the terrible losses of that year had made it even more so by bringing in huge numbers of hastily commissioned cadets and one- year volunteers: youths who would have been pharmacists and schoolteachers but for the war, and who would certainly go back to dispensing pills and teaching French grammar once it was over. Yet still the War Ministry behaved as if we were all Schwarzenbergs and Khevenhullers, and as if tying on the sacred black-and-yellow silk sword-belt (which large numbers of newly commissioned officers were now not even bothering to buy) was the next best thing to being anointed with consecrated oil by the Pope. Meanwhile men from the ranks—without the all-important Matura certificate which allowed them to apply for a commission—were debarred absolutely from becoming officers,
