The Two-Headed Eagle

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.

In the event they had no need to come up after us: they were already waiting as we crossed the lines, circling a thousand metres above and positioned to make the best use of the sun. Everything just happened so fast: six or seven black specks hurtling down upon us out of the glare as our shadows skimmed phantom-like across a white field of cloud about five hundred metres below. Outnumbered, our only hope of survival lay inside the cloud. I turned as I cocked the machine gun and saw Potocznik’s aeroplane waggling its wings to tell us to follow, then putting his nose down to head into the white fluff. But the Nieuports were upon us before we could hide ourselves, two of them edging beneath us to shoot us down if we tried to dive. Donhanyi’s aeroplane was the first victim. I swung around and fired a hurriedly aimed burst or two in an attempt to knock out the Nieuport manoeuvring under his tail. Then the Schwarzlose jammed. I opened the breech and fumbled in my thick gloves to clear the block­age. I cleared it, but I was too late to be of any help to Donhanyi: orange flame burst suddenly from behind the Brandenburger’s engine mantle, and there was nothing more to be done except watch helpless as the aero­plane curved away to port and down into the cloud, ablaze and leaving a plume of greasy black smoke floating in the air. But there was no time to stand watching, only swing the gun around to fire at an Italian coming at us from the starboard side. He was firing at us as he came. Somehow Toth managed to flick us sideways and down into the cloud—just as our engine coughed and missed fire.

I suspected a bullet through the fuel pump, but it scarcely mattered as we drifted down through the clinging damp murk with the engine splutter­ing to a standstill. By the time we emerged from the underside of the cloud a half-minute later, the engine was gone for good, the wind singing eerily in the bracing-wires as the propeller windmilled idly in the slipstream. In the sudden, intense silence I was aware for the first time of the noise of other aeroplane engines and the dry rattle of firing above us.

I looked about us fearfully as we emerged into the sunshine once more. No one was to be seen for the moment. The Italians were presum­ably off chasing Potocznik and Szuborits. I looked below, trying to get my bearings. The first thing that I saw was the familiar outline of Gorz below me. Well, I thought to myself, if the Italians had jumped upon us as we crossed the lines, this did at least mean that the cripples might have some chance of limping home. I signalled to Toth to turn us around towards our lines, then lugged our two bombs up on to the edge of the cockpit and tipped them overboard. Provided that we could escape the atten­tions of Italian fighters and flak batteries, we might still make it back. We were still about three thousand metres up and our lines were perhaps five kilometres to the east. The aeroplanes of 1916 might have been primitive, slow, flimsy contraptions, but they could at least glide well.

I stood behind the machine gun, scanning the sky about us. We might just escape unobserved . . . Then I saw the shape swooping on us out of the cloud. I ground my teeth and traversed the gun around—more out of a feeling of honour than from any hope of beating off our attacker. A two- seater would stand little enough chance against a Nieuport even under full power. Gliding along like this, though, we were the most pitiful of sitting targets, incapable of doing anything more than drift gently downwards in a straight line at about half our maximum speed. The Italian came along behind us, manoeuvring for the fatal burst. Then to my surprise the little grey aeroplane turned away to port and throttled back to fly alongside us. As the pilot waved to me I saw that the aeroplane bore the familiar emblem of the pouncing black cat painted on its side. It was the famous Major di Carraciolo in person. As he raised his gauntleted hand and pointed down I grasped that he was signalling us to fly on towards our own side of the lines—with himself as our escort.

Quaint as it might sound now, such chivalrous behaviour was by no means uncommon in those days. By 1916, war in the air had become a fairly murderous business: not at all the gentlemanly jousting of legend. Even so, men had been flying then for something not much over a decade. The very act of taking to the sky was still something only marginally less dangerous than fighting in it, so it is scarcely surprising that we aviators were still bound together in some degree by a fellow-feeling that crossed the battle lines. I believe that even in the last months of 1918 in France, where the air battles had long since turned from duels into vast, ruth­less engagements involving hundreds of aircraft on each side, there was still a general disposition to leave obviously broken-down aircraft to their fate rather than simply shoot them out of the sky. In any event, Major di Carraciolo shepherded us down until we were within reach of our lines, and on the way headed off another Nieuport which was moving in to attack us. As we crossed the lines he waved in farewell and turned away, leaving us to glide down and land on a level stretch of pasture near the village of Biglia, suffering nothing worse than a burst tyre in the process. When we got the engine panels off we found that it was not battle damage that had forced us down but a blocked fuel filter.

We sat dolefully in the mess tent that evening back at Caprovizza. Kraliczek’s Verona raid had been a costly