War and Game

Air Power History, Fall, 2000 by A. D. Harvey

During the First World War, air operations were on a much smaller scale on the Italian front than in France and Flanders. Italian fighter pilots claimed to have shot down fewer than one-tenth the number of enemy aircraft officially credited to German fighter pilots operating over the Western front. [1] Nevertheless, the air war over the Isonzo and the Adriatic had several features that suggest the desirability of revising standard accounts of the evolution of air warfare that are based on the experiences of the British Royal Flying Corps and the German Luftstreitkrafte farther north, particularly with regard to the use of bombing aircraft.

In 1911, the Italians had been the first nation to employ aircraft in warfare, during the course of their invasion of Libya-- then part of the Ottoman Empire. On November 1, 1911, Lt. Giulio Gavotti dropped four bombs, each weighing two kilograms, on Turkish positions at Ain Zara and Tagiura. [2] Subsequent bombing attacks were denounced by the Ottoman government as contravening the Geneva Convention. In 1913, the Italian army's aviation battalion was placed under the command of a staff officer named Giulio Douhet, who has some claim to have been the only senior officer of the First World War era to have any real vision concerning the application of air power. Douhet made sure that the Italian government placed an order for several examples of the giant trimotor bomber designed by aviation pioneer Giovanni Caproni.

When war broke out in August 1914, Italy, at that time joined in a defensive alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, remained neutral and Douhet began writing commentaries on the war for the Turin newspaper La Gazetta del Popolo. He read with interest press reports of the first bombing raids by single German aircraft, warning on December 12, 1914:

Against the enemy that moves on the surface it is sufficient for safety to be in the rear of the battle line; against the enemy that is master of space there is no safety except for moles. Everything which is to the rear of the army and which makes it live is threatened and exposed; supply convoys, trains, railway stations, magazines, workshops, arsenals, everything. [3]

Douhet and his colleagues seem to have been less interested in the first air-to-air combats. By the time Italy abandoned its prewar alliance and declared war on Austria-Hungary on May 23, 1915, several German aircraft had already been shot down by British and French two-seaters, in which the observer was armed with a machinegun, and the French pilot Roland Garros had notable success in a single-seater Morane monoplane equipped with a machinegun fixed to fire through the arc of the propeller. [4] During the first six months of the Italo-Austrian conflict, however, both sides confined themselves mainly to using unarmed planes on reconnaissance missions, partly because the additional weight of a machinegun and ammunition was found to be disadvantageous when flying over mountainous terrain. However, the Austro-Hungarians communicated their resentment for their former ally by bombing Ancona and Venice with naval flying boats during the first days of the war. In addition on October 24, 1915, four Austro-Hungarian aircraft raided Venice. Though causing no loss of life or limb, the raiders destroyed an important fresco by the eighteenth-century artist Tiepolo in the church of Santa Maria degli Scalzi. [5] The Italians, for their part, began using their Caproni trimotors to bomb Austrian aerodromes, roads, and railways in August 1915, but quickly found that a three-engined aeroplane was at least three times likelier to be grounded by mechanical problems than a single-engined aeroplane. [6]

Meanwhile, the Germans had developed a single-seater fighter, the Fokker Eindecker, armed with a machinegun--later two machineguns--equipped with interrupter gear to enable the pilot to fire through the arc of his propeller without hitting it. (Garros had frequently hit his own propeller, but had it fitted with steel plates to deflect the bullets, which as it turned out was not an entirely practical idea.) Flying the Fokker Eindecker, Germany's first fighter aces, Max Immelmann and Oswald Boelcke, began to make their reputations on the Western Front during the second half of 1915, and a small number of these machines were passed on to the Austro-Hungarians. On February 18, 1916, ten Caproni trimotors with the commander of the aviation battalion, Lt. Col. Alfredo Barbieri, among the crew, set out from Aviano to bomb Ljubljana. Three of the planes turned back with engine failure; the others were intercepted by Austro-Hungarian Fokkers, one of them flown by Capt. Jindich Kostrba, afterwards creator of the Czech air force. In a series of attacks lasting fifteen minutes, Kostrba fired all 500 rounds of his ammunition at the Caproni carrying Barbieri. Barbieri was killed along with one of the pilots; the other pilot, intermittently blinded by blood flowing from a scalp wound, succeeded in bringing his aeroplane and his dead companions back to an Italian airfield. Kostrba had time to refuel and intercept the surviving Capronis on their way back from Ljubljana and helped shoot down one of them over Austrian territory. [7]

The Italians did not get their own back until April 1916, when Francesco Baracca, aboard a French-built Nieuport, shot down an Austro-Hungarian Aviatik that had just bombed a railway line. [8] This was the first successful interception by an Italian pilot. Thus, one sees that whereas in France and Flanders the first aircraft to be attacked and shot down by other aircraft had all been on reconnaissance or artillery spotting missions, on the Italian front the first interceptions by either side were of bombing planes. In fact, three of the first four aerial victories claimed by Francesco Baracca, subsequently Italy's leading fighter ace, were over bombers, whereas it is questionable whether Germany's Baron von Richthofen or France's Georges Guynemer or Britain's Albert Ball and James McCudden ever shot down a bomber at all. [9]

Although the Austro-Hungarians only had single-engined bombing aircraft, their air raids on Italian targets were often more spectacular in effect than the Italian attacks. On February 14, 1916, for example, ten aircraft--each armed with eighty kilograms of bombs--flew from a base near Trento to attack Milan. This was fifteen months before the first raid on a town in Britain by German heavier-than-air machines flying as a group, though of course the Germans had already attacked London with airships. Orientating themselves by means of Milan's "white shimmering" cathedral (as the Austro-Hungarian commander described it) two of the attacking aircraft unloaded their bombs in the general direction of a power station, killing twelve people and injuring seventy. The other eight aircraft apparently became lost and scattered their bombs between Monza and Bergamo. [10] On July 13, ten Austro-Hungarian aircraft dropped about 100 small bombs on Padua and managed to kill the army major commanding the city's air defenses. [11]

On August 9, 1916, seventeen Austro-Hungarian aircraft bombed Venice, killing seven civilians and sank a British submarine docked at the Arsenal--probably the first submarine ever to be sunk by bombing from the air. Seven weeks later Austro-Hungarian flying boats sank a French submarine, the Foucault, while it was actually under way at sea. This seems to have been the second submarine ever to have been sunk by bombing. [12]

On November 11, 1916, a single Austro-Hungarian bomb killed ninety-three civilians sheltering in a casemate in the old fortifications of Padua. It was the worst incident involving civilians taking shelter from an air raid during the entire course of the First World War, although there had been an even greater death toll the previous June when a French reprisal raid on Karlsruhe had destroyed a circus during a matinee, along with most of the children in the audience. [13]

Altogether, more than 400 Italian civilians were killed in Austro-Hungarian air raids on towns in northern Italy; another sixteen were killed by bombs dropped on Naples by a German long range Zeppelin operating from Yambol, Bulgaria, on the night of March 10, 1918. [14] These figures may be compared with the 1,414 civilians killed by German air raids on England, the 746 killed by British and French air raids on industrial centers in western Germany, and the 104 Belgian citizens who died as a result of the Royal Flying Corps and later the Royal Air Force's efforts to knock out the German U-boat pens at Bruges. [15]

The number of civilians killed by Italian air raids is not known. Giulio Douhet had been promoted away from the aviation battalion to become chief of staff of an infantry division in February 1915, but had not ceased to press his ideas regarding the use of aircraft as a strategic weapon. In a memo written a few months after Italy entered the war he argued:

Modern armies represent the armored shield behind which the nations at war work to prepare the means appropriate to feed the war: the powerful aeroplane is able to pass over such armor and strike at the nation itself in its centers of production and along the lines of supply running from the country to the army. [16]

He advocated that an entire air army of 500 Caproni trimotors be maintained at the front. Unfortunately Douhet's superiors were much less interested in his memoranda than in the fact that he was sending copies to politicians in Rome, and in October 1916 he was court-martialled and sentenced to one year's confinement in a military fortress. Whatever enthusiasm his successor, Alfredo Barbieri, may have felt for Douhet's ideas came to an abrupt end in combat over Aisovizza, when Jindrich Kostrba intercepted Barbieri's Caproni en route for Ljubljana and killed him. After that the Caproni was used mainly for shorter-range missions against road and railway targets immediately behind the front line, and against Austro-Hungarian naval bases on the Adriatic coast. Other important strategic targets that were theoretically within the Caproni's range, such as the railway and armaments factories at Zagreb and the steelworks at Graz, were left undisturbed. In fact, although the Caproni trimotor was built in larger numbers than the British Handley-Page 0/400 bomber or the German Gotha GIV and GV--in larger numbers indeed, than any other multi-engine type until the 1930s. By no means an entirely satisfactory combat plane, the Caproni was so slow and unwieldy that the AustroHungarian naval ace Godfrey Banfield took a leading part in shooting down at least five Capronis, while piloting flying boats of exactly the same unaerodynamic configuration as the Supermarmne Walrus flying boats used by the RAF for air-sea rescue during the World War 11.17 In the end, the longest-ranged bombing mission carried out by Italian aviators during the First World War, a return flight of nearly 320 miles across the Alps to bomb the railway station and shoot up the marshalling yard at Innsbruck on February 28, 1918, employed four single-engined Ansaldo SVA 5s. [18] The same type was also used for the ten-plane mission to drop propaganda leaflets on Vienna on August 9, 1918. The one record set by Capronis was for the largest single air raid, on the nig ht of August 2, 1917, when thirty-six trimotors attacked Pola (now Pula in Croatia); but this record lasted only until the following May, when forty-three German bombers, some of them four-engined Zeppelin-Staakens, struck at London. [19]

It is possible, however, that one of the more than 800 Caproni trimotors built inadvertently achieved a historic first that subsequent events could only make more noteworthy. In June 1918, a Hungarian pilot, Frigyes Hefty, having shot down a Caproni over Il Montello, scratched the words Caproni (auf Il Montello), and the date 17.vi 1918, on the windscreen of his Albatros DIII. Subsequent victories were marked in the same way. [20] Hefty seems to have been the first fighter pilot of any nationality to have marked his "score" on his aeroplane. This custom, though universal during the Second World War--even the Japanese adopted it--is not recorded before 1918.

Since completing his PhD at Cambridge, England, A. D. Harvey has taught at universities in Italy, France, and Germany. He is the author of Collision of Empires: Britain in Three World Wars, 1793-1945 (1992), A Must of Fire: Literature, Art and War (1998), and articles on air warfare in the Journal of Contemporary History and War in History.

NOTES

(1.) Italian airmen claimed 530 aerial victories compared to 7,425 claimed by the Germans, who admitted to the loss of 6,830 aircraft. Rosario Abate, Storia della Aeronautica Italiana (Milan, 1974), p. 115; Erich von Hoeppner, Deutschlands Krieg in der Luft (Leipzig, 1921), p. 174, notes 1 and 2.

(2.) Abate, Storia della Aeronautica Italiana, p. 84.

(3.) La Gazetta del Popolo, Dec. 12, 1914, reprinted in Giulio Douhet, Le Profizie di Cassandra: raccolta di scritti (Genoa, 1931), p. 244.

(4.) See L. A. Strange, Recollections of an Airman (London, 1933), pp. 74-78 and Jacques Mortane, Carre d'As (Paris, 1934), pp. 8-11 for British and French attacks on German aircraft in Oct. and Nov. 1914; Jacques Quellennec ed. Roland Garros, Memoires (Paris, 1966), 254 foll, for the development and use of a Morane carrying a machinegun firing through the arc of a propeller fitted with deflector plates.

(5.) Peter Schupita, Die k.u.k. Seeflieger: Chronik und Dokumentation der osterreichisch- ungarischen Marineluftwaffe 1911-1918 (Coblenz, 1983), pp. 169-70 for raids by Austro-Hungarian naval flying boats; Andrea Moschetti, I Danni ai Monumenti e alle opere d'arte delle venezie: nella guerra mondiale MCMXV-MCMX VIII (Venice, 1932), p. 47 for the Oct. 24, 1915 raid. A complete list of Austro-Hungarian raids on Venice is given in Giovanni Scarabello, Il Martirio di Venezie: durante la grande guerra e l'opera di difesa della marina Italiana, 2 vols., (Venice, 1933), pp. 1, 59.

(6.) Luigi Contini, L'Aviazione Italiana in Guerra (Milan, 1934), p. 48.

(7.) Ibid., p.58 and Martin O'Connor, Air Aces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1914-1918 (Mesa, 1986), p. 110.

(8.) Vincenzo Manca, L'idea meravigliosa di Francesco Baracca (Roma, 1989), pp. 172-77.

(9.) Detailed lists of the aircraft shot down by leading fighter aces are now available in a series of books published by Grub Street London during the 1990s: Christopher Shores, Norman Franks and Russell Guest, Above the Trenches; Norman Franks, Frank W. Bailey and Russell Guest, Above the Lines; Norman Franks, Russell Guest and Gregory Alegi, Above the War Fronts; and Norman Franks and Frank W. Bailey, Over the Front.

(10.) For a personal account of this raid see Eugen Steiner-Goltl Edler von Auring, "Osterreichischungarische Fliegen beim Angriff" in Georg Paul Neumann ed. In der Luft unbesiegt: Erlebnisse im Weltkrieg: erzdhlt von Luftkampfern (Munich, 1923), pp. 50-56; see also Corriere della Sera, Feb. 15, 1916, 1d; Times, Feb. 15, 1916, 8d and Feb. 23, 1916, 7d; and Riccardo Cavigioli, L'Aviazione Austro-Ungarica sulla fronte Italiana 1915-1918 (Milan, 1934), p. 74.

(11.) Guido Solito, Padova nella Guerra (1915-1918) (Padua, 1933), pp. 199-201.

(12.) Public Record Office, Kew, London AIR 1/2282/204/73/2 Harold C. Swan to J. H. Towsey Aug. 10, 1916; Schupita, k.u.k. Seeflieger, p. 192.

(13.) Solito, Padova, pp. 228-9 and fn. 1, cf. Heidelberger Tageblatt, Jun. 24, 1916, 1c. The victims of the Karlsruhe tragedy were buried in a group of individually marked graves that are still to be seen in the town's principal cemetery.

(14.) Corriere della Sera, Mar. 12, 1918, 1a, c.f Douglas H. Robinson, The Zeppelin in Combat: A History of the German Naval Airship Division, 1912-1918, p. 295

(15.) Walter Raleigh and H. A. Jones, The War in the Air, 7 vols, (Oxford, 1922-1934) V 153, VI 152, Public Record Office AIR 1/678/21/13/2137

(16.) Giulio Douhet, Diario Critico di Guerra, 2 vols., (Turin, 1921), II, pp. 20-21.

(17.) Abate, Storia della Aeronautica Italiana, p. 107; Jean Marie Gustave Pedoya, La Commission de l'Armee pendant la grande guerre (Paris, 1921), p. 164n.; A. R. Kingsford, Night Raiders of the Air (London, [1930]), p. 129.

(18.) Contini, L'Aviazione Italiana, pp. 151-52.

(19.) Abate, Storia della Aeronautica Italiana, p. 106, cf. Raymond H. Fredette, The First Battle of Britain, 1917-1918: The Birth of the Royal Air Force (London, 1966).

(20.) O'Connor, Air Aces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, p. 180 reproduces part of Hefty's wind-screen.