The Two-Headed Eagle

Well, we were bombed-up and ready for submarine hunting, so what were we waiting for? I doubted very much whether we would catch the prowler, who would certainly have sighted the Pola aeroplane and turned around if he had any sense at all. But this promised to be a welcome break from the monotony of circling endlessly above a flock of worn-out mer­chant steamers. Submarines, I knew from experience, had a way of turn­ing out to be floating logs or dolphins or upturned lifeboats; but there was always just a slim chance that one day it might be the real thing. As Nechledil warmed up the engine I turned quickly to check the four anti­submarine bombs slung beneath the wings just behind the cockpit. They were 20kg contact-fuse bombs, but with an additional calcium fuse which would detonate them at about four metres’ depth if the submarine had dived by the time they hit the water. One of them exploding alongside would be quite enough to do for any submarine afloat.

We arrived in the search area about 8:30. The cloud had lifted some­what, but occasional curtains of drizzle still drifted slowly across the winter sea. For over an hour we quartered and requartered the twenty- kilometre square where I thought the submarine might be lurking, hav­ing first circled it several times to make sure that the thing was not trying to escape on the surface, where its speed would be much higher. I tried to work out what I would do as a U-Boat commander if I thought that an aeroplane was prowling above me: probably idle around at a couple of knots about ten metres below the surface, conserving batteries as much as possible and hoping that the aeroplane would run low on fuel and patience after about an hour and go home. As for us, our only chance of getting at him would be if he came up to periscope depth and lay there, dimly visible from above like a pike lurking just below the surface of a pond. In that case we had him: prismatic periscopes to search the sky for aircraft were still well into the future in 1916, and if our luck was in, the first that he would know of our presence would be the crash of a bomb alongside and the sudden rush of water as the hull plating blew in.

We were flying about fifty metres up as I scanned the sea through my binoculars. We reached the end of one of our sweeps and turned to make the next one, like a man ploughing a field. Suddenly Nechledil caught my arm and pointed excitedly below. I leant over him at the controls to look. It was an oil slick, spreading across the surface of the sea and reflecting the pallid light with the iridescent gleam of a peacock’s feather. Well, that settled it: our submarine was somewhere below us with one of his tanks seeping oil. All that we had to do now was to track him until he came up to the surface. I checked our petrol gauge: three-quarters full. That gave us a good four hours. We were both filled now with the lust of the chase. As for myself, I was determined if need be to follow him like a bloodhound until our tanks ran dry, even if it meant landing on the sea and being towed back in. I was not going to let a chance like this pass us by because of any old-womanish concern about getting back home after­wards. Nechledil checked the compass bearing as I tapped out a message: “L149—8:56 a.m.—Field 167—Just sighted oil slick from submarine. In pursuit. Send assistance.” A few minutes later back came the reply, “Good luck and good hunting. Torpedo-boat on way from Lussin.”

By now we were intent on following the oil slick. It could only be coming from a submarine, spreading across the sea like a snail track, mile after mile, marking on the surface the boat’s silent progress down in the depths. We held our breath, expecting any moment to see the dim outline as the vessel came up to take a look around. But after some forty minutes of this, doubts began to creep in. Surely we had flown over that patch of seaweed before? I checked the compass bearing. The same thought had just occurred to Nechledil, and I saw him peer as well at his notepad, then at the compass on the dashboard. The realisation hit us both at the same moment: that for the past three-quarters of an hour we had in fact been flying round and round in the same huge circle about four miles across, by now on about our eighth or ninth lap. I glanced astern—and saw to my horror what was the real cause of the circular oil slick! A thin black dribble was trickling from beneath the engine and being blown astern by the slipstream to be beaten to spray by the propeller. We had been follow­ing our own track, like a dog chasing a tin can tied to its tail.

I stared at the oil-pressure gauge—and saw that the pointer had dropped almost to zero. The Mercedes 160hp engine contained eight litres of oil in its sump and had a fresh oil tank in the upper wing contain­ing a further sixteen litres. A pump sucked oil out of this tank at each turn of the crankshaft and returned an equal amount of used oil back into the tank. The drain-tap beneath the sump had clearly shaken itself open in flight, so that instead of circulating the oil, the pump was squirting out a little of the engine’s heart’s blood at each stroke. It was too late to do anything now: after an hour or more of this both sump and tank must be nearly dry. I checked the cooling- water thermometer and saw that it was nearly boiling as the engine overheated. Already I heard it beginning to seize up. The best that we could do now was to thank the kind fates that we were in a flying-boat and that there was only a light swell running: also that there was a torpedo-boat already on its way.

I sent out a hurried SOS message giving our position and saying that we were being forced to ditch by engine failure. Then I remembered the bombs. I had leant overboard at the start of our foot’s chase to remove the nosecaps and set the fuses. The calcium fuses could not be made safe again once they had been armed. The smallest splash of salt water would deto­nate them, so they had to be dropped before we landed. I placed my hand on the bomb-release levers. Then I saw it, about a mile ahead: a low, shad­owy shape obscured by drizzle with a smoking funnel amidships, head­ing west. My heart jumped for joy: it must be the torpedo-boat. Nechledil turned towards it as I fired a signal rocket to attract their attention, then pulled the bomb releases and felt the aeroplane lift momentarily as the bombs fell away to throw up great mounds of spray astern. We certainly needed the lift: the engine was coughing and faltering now as boiling water spumed out of the radiator safety valve above us. We would try to come down in the water beyond them so that the slight wind would blow us towards and not away from them as they lowered their dinghy.

It was not until we were almost above our would-be rescuer that I realised something was badly wrong: that it was not a torpedo-boat at all, let alone an Austrian one, and that what I had taken to be signal flares were in fact tracer rounds from a machine gun being fired up at us— fortunately with very little accuracy. A few bullets flicked through the wings as we skimmed over the mystery vessel to land on the sea about eight hundred metres beyond. As I turned to see who on earth they were I saw that it was in fact a steam-powered submarine which had now lowered its funnel and was in the act of submerging. Within ten seconds the thing had vanished like a ghost, leaving only a patch of foam to prove that it had ever existed. So that was it: the submarine we had set out to hunt had been a submarine after all, one of the large French steam-driven boats of the Ventose class which had been operating in the Adriatic now for two years with somewhat patchy results. Nechledil and I sat down and awaited developments. Would they leave the scene as quickly as they could, not bothering about us? Or would they realise that we had ditched and come back up to take us prisoner?

In the event they did neither. The submarine had been submerged for only a minute or so when suddenly it reappeared in almost the same place, bows breaking surface in a tumult of spray, submerging and then bobbing back up again. We watched fascinated. Within a few seconds the entire forward section of the submarine was sticking out of the water at forty-five degrees. Soon it was almost vertical, like a sporting whale. It hung there for a good two minutes, pirouetting slowly, until the forward hatch burst open to cascade human figures scrambling into the water. They did so among an evil-looking yellowish cloud which I knew must be chlorine coming from the batteries as the seawater poured in. A minute later and it was all over: the bows had disappeared beneath the surface in a boiling heap of air bubbles, leaving only flotsam and the heads of swimmers to mark its final exit. Had we been the agents of its destruc­tion? Surely not: our bombs had fallen into the sea a good thousand metres short. No, all that I could imagine was that they had panicked as they saw us coming towards them and had dived with a hatch left open. It was an easy enough thing to do in any submarine, and doubly so in these steam-powered boats with their telescopic funnel and numerous ventila­tor trunks. I had good cause to know about these things, since I myself had narrowly escaped drowning aboard just such a vessel, the Reamur, during a visit to Toulon before the war, when a piece of driftwood had jammed beneath the funnel hatch during a demonstration dive. Apart from that, what I particularly remembered about these French boats was the nonchalant, hair-raising disregard for any sort of consistency in their design. Some valves, I recalled, opened anti-clockwise, others clockwise; some electrical switches worked down, others up; certain cocks closed with the handle parallel to the pipe, others across it, others still at an angle to it. Sailing these contraptions must have been hazardous enough in peacetime: what they were like to operate in a war zone hardly bore thinking about. But what would become of her crew, swimming now in the sea thirty-odd miles from land? We had inadvertently sunk them, but now we were their only hope of staying afloat long enough to be picked up. The breeze was drifting us gradually towards them. As we drew near I hoped that they would understand the situation and not simply slake their desire for vengeance upon us. Just in case, Nechledil and I drew our pistols.

As it turned out we need not have worried about being lynched. In fact when we finally drifted among them