the Front by damaging this or that or the other rail junction. They had a magic all of their own, those night-time raids: the charm of the mystery rail outings of my childhood, in which one bought a ticket and perhaps ended up for the day in Olmutz or Trencin, or even in Prague for long enough to consume a lemonade and a couple of frankfurters at the station buffet. They were largely without danger to us—the Italians had no more idea of night fighting in the air at that stage of the war than anyone else—but by the same token they posed very little threat indeed to the enemy.
Quite apart from navigational problems, not the least of the reasons for the basic harmlessness of these raids was that about the middle of the month, gazing in despair at his graph line Total Weight of Bombs Dropped, which had nose-dived during early September because of bad weather, Hauptmann Kraliczek had been struck by a sudden thunderbolt of inspiration: he would rectify the situation by drawing the graph in future, not according to the weight of bombs dropped on enemy territory each day, but according to their number! In this way (he explained to us), if an aeroplane took off on a raid carrying—say—four 20kg bombs instead of two 40kg, the statistical efficacy of the raid would be doubled at a stroke and the graph line would immediately climb like a rocket. We all came away from his lecture feeling very depressed, knowing as we did that a telegram had already gone to the munitions depot in Marburg requesting them to supply us with the smallest aerial bombs they had in stock. These were old 5kg and 10kg models which had lain there since
1915 because they were pretty well useless, the accuracy of a bomb generally being a function of its weight. Meyerhofer did his best with the Marburg people over the telephone, pleading with them to dump their old stock in the nearest river and tell Kraliczek that they had nothing smaller than 20kg. But it was too late, and anyway it was plain that the Ordnance Officer in charge of the depot was only too happy to unload surplus munitions on to those idiots at Caprovizza rather than having to keep entering it on his own monthly stock inventory. A red-painted ammunition wagon arrived at Haidenschaft Station the next day. From now on the only thought with which we could comfort ourselves as we risked our lives on bombing-raids over Italy was that no one on the ground was likely to come to any harm. Our only chance of influencing the outcome of the war, Meyerhofer said ruefully, was if one of our puny bombs happened to hit Cadorna on the head.
The first of my own night-time excursions took place in the third week of September, lurching away into the sunset from Caprovizza airfield with eight 10kg Carbonit bombs stowed on the cockpit floor beneath my feet. Our objective was the town of Gemona in the Alpine foothills, and our task was to bomb the railway station, incidentally (though this was not explicitly stated in our orders) causing alarm and despondency in the Italian rear, panic on the Milan stockmarket, the soil to ooze blood, the moon to be obscured and cows to give birth to two-headed calves across the whole of Lombardy-Venetia. The only problem was that, like most people in 1916, we had no experience whatever of night flying and no equipment for it beyond the aeroplane’s dubious magnetic compass and a pair of spirit-levels for judging our attitude and angle of bank. I had made some experiments a few days before in using a nautical sextant to find our way by the stars; but, experienced sea navigator though I was, I had found it to be a hopeless task with no visible horizon to work to and nothing but the ponderous Nautical Ephemerids to do the calculations with.
The bubble sextant and look-up tables would not be available for another twenty years—and quite frankly would not be a lot of use even then.
There was no moon that night, so in the end the best that Toth and I could do was to fly west until we found the River Tagliamento, its tangled channels gleaming dully below us in the starlight like a half-unwound skein of silver thread. We then turned to follow the river up through the forests and hills until it began to bend to westward. It is a curiously hypnotic state, to be flying in an open-cockpit biplane at night over enemy territory. The absence of any sensations but the steady roar of the engine, the rushing of the cold wind and the flickering pulse of flame from the engine’s six stub-exhausts all conspired to produce (I must admit) a rather drowsy state in which it was far from easy to concentrate on navigational landmarks. I made a point of prodding Toth’s shoulder every five minutes to keep him alert. With a single-engined aeroplane in those days it was all too easy for even an experienced pilot to lose his sense of balance, especially if the night was overcast, and for propeller torque to tip the aeroplane gradu ally over to port until it would be flying along on one ear, dropping out of the sky as it did so.
The Italians had enough experience of air-raids now to be careful about black-out, so it was only by the unmistakable glow of a railway engine’s firebox and some lights in a goods yard that we managed to find Gemona. Numb and stiff with cold despite layers of clothing, I struggled to lug the first bomb on to the cockpit edge. Then suddenly I was struck blind by an amazing glare of light. The Italians had searchlights below. The first flak shells flashed around us as Toth banked away to starboard and I lost my grip on the bomb. I suppose that the searchlight crew must have heard it whistling down, because it was quite extraordinary to see how smartly they turned off the light. I saw the bomb flash red below as Toth brought us back round to repeat the compliment. I tipped the re maining bombs overboard one after another. As we climbed away at full throttle into the night sky with the searchlight beams criss-crossing vainly behind us, I saw that we had set a building on fire: a wooden goods shed, to judge by the sparks boiling up into the sky.
It was a tricky landing back at Caprovizza, coming down on to a rough field only by the uncertain light of a few flares made out of petrol tins half-filled with sump oil and with wicks of rag. We both went to get a few hours’ sleep before I wrote out and filed my report on the raid. I then strolled over to the hangars, where the Brandenburger was being serviced after our flight. Feldwebel Prokesch saluted, then said that I might care to see something. He pointed silently to the aeroplane’s plywood fuselage. The sides bore two holes the size of my hand exactly opposite each other athwart the observer’s seat. A piece of shrapnel had gone clean through the aeroplane when the flak shell burst near by. If I had not been standing up to hoist the first bomb on to the cockpit edge it would undoubtedly have passed through me on the way, at about kidney level.
Because he was busy with his compilations I was not able to make my verbal report to Hauptmann Kraliczek until nearly midday. I found him to be in an even more peevish mood than usual.
“Well, Prohaska, a fine mess you have landed us in this time.”
“In what respect, Herr Kommandant?”
“It wasn’t Gemona that you bombed, it was Tolmezzo. And it wasn’t a railway station, it was a brickworks.”
“Permit me to ask, Herr Kommandant, what difference does it make? Where bombing-raids are concerned one Italian town is much the same as any other I should think; while as for the target, it was unfortunate that we didn’t hit the railway station as intended, but I imagine that bricks are necessary for the Italian war effort as well.”
“Difference? My form giving you your orders for the raid had ‘Gemona’ clearly written in the box ‘Primary objective’ and ‘To attack railway station’ in the box ‘Purpose of mission.’ It said nothing whatever about either brickyards or Tolmezzo. If you had said that you were diverted by heavy fire over the target and flew on to bomb somewhere else that would have been acceptable, though a matter for regret. But in your report—which has now been forwarded without my approval to Army Headquarters—you stated categorically that you attacked Gemona when in fact you bombed Tolmezzo. I have it here in black and white on this form which you filled in when you landed. I regard this as a serious breach of discipline.”
“But Herr Komandant, navigating an aeroplane by night is a very hit-or-miss business, everyone knows that . . .”
“Not in Flik 19F it isn’t: your targets are given to you, and I shall expect you in future either to reach them or to give a very good reason why you were not able to do so: ‘Unable to find the target’ will simply not be acceptable, do you understand? Precision in reporting is the essence of operational effectiveness. But quite apart from that, I gather from Army Headquarters that your attack on the brickworks has caused us serious problems.”
“Permit me to ask how that can be?”
“A railway station is state property, and attacks upon it are permitted by the 1907 Hague Convention. A brickyard is private property, and is therefore immune to attack under the provisions of the same convention. But what makes it all far, far more serious in this case is the fact” (he adjusted his spectacles) “that the brickworks in question now turns out to have been the property of an Austrian national: one Herr Wranitzky of the Sudkarntner Ziegelkombinat AG in Klagenfurt. The factory manager telephoned him this morning via Switzerland to tell him of the attack, and I gather that the insurers are refusing to pay on the grounds that his policy excludes acts of war committed by the forces of his own country. He has already been to visit the War Ministry to complain, and is talking, I understand, of suing you in person for damages.”
