In the event they did manage to stagger into the air, engine roaring at full throttle and the whole airframe wobbling most alarmingly under the load. Then it was our turn. We went about into the breeze at the end of the airfield. With my heart fluttering wildly I slapped Toth on the shoulder and called “Ite nunc—celere!” Toth pushed the throttle lever forward through its gate latch and black smoke belched from the stub-exhausts as we began to creak and lurch forward. I thought that we had had it as the wheels left the ground: the wings gave a tortured groan and bounced visibly as they took the weight. But Toth was a good pilot. Somehow he managed to sweat and coax our protesting lattice of wood and piano wire up into the air, climbing ponderously to join Potocznik, who was making a circuit of the airfield—with the sedateness of an old lady in a bath chair, for fear that the strain of banking too tightly would leave the wings behind. We formed up in line ahead, Potocznik leading, and then began the slow, tedious business of climbing as we flew south-east up the Vippaco Valley, gaining height at barely ten metres per thousand, a rate of climb that would have been unimpressive in a goods train.
It was not until we were above Niedendorf at the head of the valley that we had enough altitude to turn east over Sesana and fly across the karst ridge above Trieste. It was just getting light as we flew over the steep scarp- edge at Villa Opicina and saw the city spread out below us, with the still dark expanse of the Adriatic beyond. It was now just light enough to make out the white turrets of the Schloss Miramare on its headland above the sea. I hoped that this would not be an ill omen for what was already a hazardous enough enterprise: Miramare had been the residence of the unfortunate Archduke Ferdinand Max, who had ended his days in front of a Mexican firing squad. Legend had it that the castle had since brought misfortune and a violent end to all who had anything to do with the place.
When we were a couple of kilometres out to sea I noticed that we were slowly overtaking Potocznik’s aeroplane: also that his engine was giving out fitful puffs and coughs of bluish smoke and leaving a strong smell of burning oil in its wake. Before long they were starting to lose height. I watched as Maybauer in the observer’s seat conferred with Potocznik, then turned to me and shrugged his shoulders, shaking his head in an exaggerated pantomime. They were turning back to land at Prosecco airfield—a broken piston-ring, we learnt later. I wondered for a moment what we should do. But no, our orders were specific on the point: if one aeroplane fell out the other must press on regardless. We were on our own now.
Though only about twenty kilometres in all, the crossing of the Gulf of Trieste was likely to be the most hazardous part of our flight until we reached the outer defence lines of Venice. We had chosen to fly over the sea, in order to dodge the flak batteries on the Isonzo; but even so it was a dangerous business. The gulf was now little more than a salt-water no man’s land, thickly sown with minefields and fought over day and night by seaplanes and motor-boats. If we ditched in the sea and managed to avoid drowning, then in all probability it would be at the cost of being fished out and taken prisoner by an Italian MAS boat.
As it turned out, our crossing was surprisingly uneventful. The k.u.k. Kriegsmarine’s flying-boats were already at work harassing the Italian batteries at Sdobba, so I suppose that must have diverted their attention. An Italian seaplane tried to climb up after us as we made landfall at Porto Buso, west of Grado, but we were too high up for him and a providential patch of low cloud allowed us to give him the slip while he was still climbing round in circles. After that there was not a great deal to remark upon, flying along at 120 kilometres per hour three thousand metres above the monotonous green and brown coastal marshes of the Veneto. Winter was setting in early, and I constantly readjusted my scarf to try and block out the nagging chill that kept creeping down the collar of my flying jacket. I would have huddled down behind Toth and out of the wind, but I was the officer and the job of officers was to navigate.
Not that there was a great deal of navigating to do. In fact all the help that we required in that line was provided by the gleaming railway tracks running dead-straight across the marshy fields and meadows below us. The countryside here was thinly populated, and in those days still malarial in places. I checked the few towns as we flew across them—Portogruaro and Latisana and San Dona—and also the rivers that ran down from the Alps, already swollen with the autumn rains: Tagliamento, Ausa, Livenza and Piave. I interrupted my map-reading from time to time in order to scan the sky about us for enemy aircraft. All that I saw however in the whole journey was a lone biplane in the far distance. It turned away and disappeared when it saw us: quite possibly one of our own.
The plan was that we would turn sharp south just short of the town of Mestre and then drop down to attack the bridge at low level from the landward side. But it was not until we emerged from a patch of thin, low cloud west of San Dona that I realised that—as usual—my wayward pilot had other ideas. As we sliced through the last thinning tendrils of cloud into the pallid, watery sunshine of a Venetian autumn morning I saw that below us there lay not a further expanse of wet farmland, but the vast dull pewter expanse of the lagoons east of Venice, intricately fern-leaf- patterned with a million creeks and rivulets and dotted with dark islands of reed and sedge. I was not going to stand for this: I scribbled, “Quo vademus?” on my notepad and shoved it under Toth’s arm. He glanced at it, then scrawled a note on his own pad. It read “Aspice ad septentriones versus.” I looked to the north as requested—and saw that once again Toth’s flying instinct had served us well. East of Mestre there swayed and bobbed an immense barrier of kite-balloons: three successive layers, no less, arranged at heights from about a thousand metres up to four thousand. The Corps Air Intelligence Officer had made no mention of them when we were planning the raid. If we had followed our planned route we would have flown out of the cloud and straight in among them, slicing our wings off against the steel cables and plunging to our deaths almost before we knew what had happened. It now looked as if, thanks to Toth, we had found our way into the last gap in Venice’s aerial defenceworks. It was at this point I think that I finally made the decision to abandon all attempts at back-seat driving and leave the business of flying to my pilot, realising that if I was not exactly in safe hands—Toth was still a hair-raising man to fly with—I was at least with someone who was competently dangerous.
It looked as if he had decided not to try attacking the bridge from the landward side. In fact as the domes and towers of the city appeared before us across the flat expanse of lagoon it became obvious that we were going to try an entirely different line of approach—and at extremely low level.
We skimmed across the water at a height of barely ten metres. I kept watch astern as clouds of waterfowl rose into the air, screaming in alarm as we roared over them. There were few defences here apart from the odd antiaircraft pontoon moored among the reedbeds, so poorly camouflaged that it was an easy matter to fly around them. A few desultory streams of tracer curved up at us, to no effect whatever. But I saw signal rockets arching into the sky in our wake. Venice was being warned of our approach and would doubtless give us a warm welcome.
It is a noble perspective, that approach to Venice from the sea, one of the finest in the entire world I think: the Canale di San Marco with the island of San Giorgio Maggiore to port and the Riva delli Schiavoni to starboard and the Madonna del Salute and the Basilica ahead. Yet I think that of all the millions of tourists who must have seen it over the centuries, none ever had or ever again will see it as I saw it that October morning in the pale sunlight, rushing along at full throttle in a flimsy wood and canvas biplane a few metres above the waves while the Day of Judgement crashed about us, as the men on shore and aboard the warships riding at anchor let fly at us with everything at their disposal. It was terrifying yet wildly exhilarating, with rifle and machine-gun fire coming at us from every side and the angry orange and yellow flashes of flak shells bursting above as the gunners tried to get down low enough to hit us. I looked ahead into the howling air, peering over Toth’s shoulder and down the side of the engine cowling. A sudden familiar outline loomed ahead— and a strangely terrible thought flashed through my brain: that even if we survived this mad exploit I might be known for the rest of my life as “Prohaska—the man who demolished the Basilica of San Marco.” Toth lugged at the control column and we rose to skim over the house-tops, barely missing the pinnacled roof. We rushed on across the roof-tops and the sudden chasm of the Grand Canal as I grasped the bomb-release lever and tried to make out the glass roof of Santa Lucia Station ahead. I have a vivid recollection to this day of glancing down and catching a glimpse of an Italian officer on a roof-top firing a pistol at us with one hand while he pulled up his trousers with the other and a woman scurried in terror to hide behind a chimney. We swerved to avoid a church dome. Yes, there was the station! We would make our bombing-run along the bridge instead of approaching it side-on. I waited until the station canopies had disappeared below us—then yanked at the lever and felt the aeroplane leap as it was relieved of the weight of the two bombs. There was a flash and a mighty confusion of smoke astern as Toth banked us sharply away to avoid the flak batteries at the landward end of the bridge. Our mission had been accomplished: we could now dedicate ourselves entirely to the business of saving our own skins. I later learnt, by the way, that one of our bombs had damaged a bridge support while the other had landed in the mud and failed to explode. Traffic between Venice and the mainland had been held up for all of half an hour while Italian sappers carried out repairs.
