The record gleamed black in the twilight. I looked at the label with sinking heart. It was Mizzi Gunther and Hubert Marischka singing the duet “Sport und immer Sport” from the operetta Endlich Allein by Franz Lehar.
11 THE SPIDER AND THE BLACK CAT
If the continuing existence of Fliegerkompagnie 19F might have been a matter of some uncertainty in the last week of September 1916, the continuation of the war most certainly was not. The fighting had broken out again on the Carso on 17 September, as the Italians once again felt strong enough to continue their blood-soaked, metre-by- metre push towards Trieste. The weather had cleared for a while, so the two remaining serviceable aircraft with Flik 19F were assigned on 25 September to fly a very important photo reconnaissance mission.
The mission involved photographing a wood near Gradisca which was known to be concealing a large naval gun mounted on a railway carriage. This weapon—at least 30cm according to intelligence reports—had been brought up the previous week and was now causing a great deal of grief to our troops on the Carso. Known popularly as “Waldschani”—Viennese dialect for “Johnny-in-the-Wood”—it had been sending shells over at the rate of one every three minutes or so, day and night, to crash down on the trackways behind Fajtji Hrib amid the supply columns of men and mules struggling in the red mud. It was not known how they were aiming the guns—secret wireless messages from spies had been spoken of—but the Italians were certainly finding their targets now with depressing frequency. Normally this would not have weighed much in the counsels of the generals: being blown to bits by half-tonne shells wailing down out of the darkness was what common soldiers were for. But the previous day Waldschani had succeeded in dropping a shell alongside the farmhouse near the village of Vojscica which served as headquarters for the 9 th Infantry Division. Its commander the Archduke Joseph had not been injured when the roof fell in on him, only shaken and covered in soot from the chimney. But insults of that kind—a direct threat to the safety and well-being of staff officers, no less—could not be tolerated; especially when one of the officers in question was a member of the Imperial House. An order had gone out that all possible measures must be taken immediately to put an end to Waldschani’s destructive career.
A heavy bombing-raid would have to be laid on, since no Austrian gun on the Carso Front had enough range to reach Grandisca. The first requisite for this, though, would be to find out exactly where the gun was firing from, since we had now lost the heights along the rim of the Carso and no kite-balloon could get high enough to peer over the edge. Photo reconnaissance by aeroplane would be called for. But it would not be an easy task. The Italians would be expecting photographers and would certainly have ringed the site with flak batteries as well as detailing fighter aircraft to cover it. The best that we could do was to aim for surprise— after all, even Nieuports could not hover in the air all day long—and provide an escort for the two-seater taking the photographs. However, the mission was of the utmost importance, we were told, so not one but two Brandenburgers would be used—Potocznik’s and mine. It would also mark the operational debut of Austria-Hungary’s first single-seat fighter aeroplane, the Hansa- Brandenburg KD—the “Kampfdoppeldecker” or “fighting biplane.”
The fighter escort had been a last-minute decision on Vienna’s part, made possible by the fact that the first four Brandenburg KDs had been delivered from Berlin to the aircraft park at Marburg the previous day. So you may imagine that we were fairly dancing with anticipation that evening of 24 September as we received the telephone call and rushed out to watch the tiny specks materialise in the distance above the mountains, coming in to land at Caprovizza flying field. Only Meyerhofer remained in the Kanzlei hut, to speak with the Air Liaison Officer at the other end of the line. But we had been promised four aircraft, he said. And now Oberleutnant Potocznik was standing by him to report that only three aeroplanes could be seen. Yes, said Air Liaison; there had been . . . er . . . an unfortunate mishap on take-off from Marburg, so it would now be only three aircraft. However, that should be more than sufficient for our needs tomorrow. Meyerhofer put down the receiver and rushed out to join us on the field just as the aeroplanes were lining up to land.
“Lining up” is scarcely an accurate term for what was going on: the three aeroplanes were swaying and weaving through the air like a flight of drunken gnats. The first two managed untidy, bouncing landings on the field, but the third had no sooner touched its wheels to the ground than it promptly nosed over, seemed to stand still with its wheels like a recalcitrant mule, and stood on its head, then did a sort of forward somersault to end up lying on its back with a smashed propeller and a badly bent undercarriage. We all ran over to the wreck to find the pilot alive but badly concussed, hanging upside-down by his seat straps. We got him down and wheeled him to the ambulance on the hand barrow used for the injured. Then we went to look at the aeroplanes that had survived the journey, standing now under camouflage netting in the bora shelters. We all stood gazing for some time in silence.
Bear in mind if you will that in the year 1916 aeroplanes had not been flying for very long. Szuborits was the youngest of us, little more than an adolescent still, but even he had been at junior school in 1903 when the Wright brothers had made their first flight. Since that time every possible layout had been designed, built and (usually) crashed by aspiring designers: tractors, pushers, monoplanes, biplanes, triplanes, sesquiplanes, canards and deltas. There was as yet no settled notion of what an aeroplane ought to look like. Yet even so, standing there that evening, we all realised that there was something not quite right about the Hansa-Brandenburg Kampfdoppeldecker. It was as if the plans for an aeroplane had mistakenly been posted to a manufacturer of agricultural machinery.
True, it was a conventional enough aircraft in layout: a small single- engined tractor biplane with a propeller at one end and a tailplane and rudder at the other. It was just that compared with the pretty little Nieuport, which was as delightful to look at as it was dangerous to engage, something seemed to have gone badly wrong with the Brandenburg KD’s proportions, as if we were looking at a normal aeroplane in a fairground distorting mirror. It seemed so inordinately high off the ground in relation to its length and wing span. The fuselage was a deep, narrow mahogany trunk of an affair with an Austro-Daimler engine completely blocking the forward vision, so that the pilot had to look along the recessed sides past the cylinder block (as with many of his other designs, Herr Heinkel seemed to consider forward view an unnecessary luxury). The rudder was tiny, a mere comma-shaped flap hung on the knife-edge sternpost of the fuselage. The short wings were squared-off and of equal width, so that the pilot had a badly restricted view downwards. Likewise his upward view was not too good, through a cut-out in the trailing edge of the upper wing. But the most bizarre thing about the whole contraption was the struts holding the wings apart: not pairs of sticks as in a normal aeroplane, but an arrangement of pyramids held together in the middle by a star-shaped metal bracket, rather like the four legs of a canvas field-washbasin.
And to crown all these eccentricities, making an already high aeroplane look higher still, like a dwarf wearing a top hat, was a curious wood- and-aluminium fairing structure atop the upper wing. This, we learnt, housed the aeroplane’s armament of a single Schwarzlose machine gun. It appeared that when he had designed the aeroplane for the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe Heinkel had assumed that he would be able to have a machine gun firing through the propeller arc as in all the latest German machines. Not a bit of it though: the German War Ministry had refused to sell Fokker interrupter gear to Austria and had in fact even refused to license the patent to us. The machine gun on top of the wing was an afterthought, and the fairing—universally known as “the Baby’s Coffin”—was a desperate attempt to reduce the drag. Not only did it do next to nothing to help the aeroplane’s speed, it made it completely impossible—as we would soon find out—to clear a machine-gun stoppage in flight. In the years since, I have heard it said that we used to call the Brandenburg KD “the Flying Coffin.” I cannot say that I remember that nickname being used, even though I suppose looking back on it that it was quite apt, and that the varnished mahogany fuselage did look rather like a burial casket. The only name I ever remember being used for it—and that but seldom—was the “Spinne,” or “Spider.” Nicknames, after all, are usually reserved for people and things for which we feel a glimmer of affection, and certainly no one who flew the KD could ever feel that.
We made our way back to the mess tent in silence. The two delivery pilots were already there, being plied with drinks by the orderlies like two unhurt but still intensely shocked survivors of a train crash. One was a Hungarian called Terszetanyi, if I remember rightly, the other a Pole called Romanowicz. The latter was still chalk- faced as he poured himself yet another schnapps with a trembling hand.
“Holy Mother of God,” he said, “I’m volunteering for the trenches tomorrow. Anything: storm-battalion, flame-thrower company, gas, burying corpses—I don’t care.”
“Was it that bad? ”
“Bad? Jesus Christ I’ve never flown anything like it. Not even the Aviatik Rocking-Chair. The thing’s a disaster. The first time I took it up was yesterday afternoon, and it got me into a spin at two thousand metres. I
