Take-Off

FOUR

Pauci Sed Semper Immites

AT DUSK, I used to sit at one of the tables in the old terrazza bar, scarcely a terrazza at all, more a slightly raised flooring of cracked tiles with a railing round the side; from there the whole deserted runway could be seen, the green of the grass clashing so stridently with the sea that only the hour and the season made the effect plausible. I killed time listening to the barmaid complain about her son who spent all his time in the hangars with the mechanics instead of giving her a hand, and in reply I sang the praises of the same mechanics and put up a stout defence of the highly educational value of their company. She paid no heed to me as she finished winding up the faded awning, locked the glass-panelled door from inside and went on her way in the company of those few who were still hanging about after the completion of the schedules, which was when the airfield closed down. Having spent the day flying, I stayed on, with a beer and a manual; in the last flickering light, in the peace which preserved the memory of the flights, I despaired over the mistakes I had committed and over all the things that were still beyond me. That evening my despair was related to the double three sixty, a landing procedure for planes with engine trouble, consisting of a twin-spin, spiral descent with engines switched off, executed while losing so many feet in the first spin and the same number in the second, all the while keeping the aeroplane, which was no longer engine-driven, at the speed of maximum efficiency, the speed at which it would travel furthest, and at the same time mentally dividing the runway into three segments, deciding in a split second where to touch down with the wheels and then touching down at exactly that point. I would never get the hang of it.

“Do you really think it’s that hard?” asked the elderly gentleman, sitting down at my table, “you should have seen what they made us do, believe me, nothing ever changes, the figures are still the same, this three and sixty of yours was attempted by Lindbergh in training at Brooks Field, San Antonio, that must have been, let me see, 1923 or ’4, the figures are like dance steps, looping, tonneau – one, two, three, pas de deux, pas glissé, pas floré – always the same, by the way are you a dancer? listen, it’s important to be able to dance, I was pretty good at the Cuban Eights, which is not all that difficult, granted, but what a dance step to try in the skies. The same’s true of the wing loop, which I used to do with a plane not exactly built for aerobatics. You know the one I’m talking about, the old Seventy-nine, the most famous of all Italian three-engined warplanes, a great hulking, ten-thousand-kilo beast.”

I had not noticed the elderly gentleman before the bar shut, but now as the sun set slowly behind the row of trees, we were the only two left in the little airfield. The man fiddled with an eye-catching tie-pin which, together with the handkerchief peeping out of the top pocket of his woollen summer jacket, gave him an air of ironic composure. He started up again: “You know what I used to do? I would set off flying so low as to be almost skimming the ground, ripping along at four hundred kilometres an hour, pull back, heavily at first then gradually releasing the control column, make the plane trace a parabola in the sky, take it right up to the top of the ascent, the point where it stopped climbing, and that’s where you had to manoeuvre, not a second too soon nor a second too late if you wanted a perfect circle, just at the moment when you felt yourself hanging like a salami from the rafters and your mouth had gone bone dry and you were staring at an anemometer which was touching zero and the engines were spluttering because they couldn’t climb any higher, then I’d grab the handle on the left and slam down the pedal on the same side and the Seventy-nine would turn on its left wing and go careering in a nose-dive towards the earth. At that point, it was time to cut out the other two engines, the speed climbed madly, I jammed on the trim crank to reverse the descent and pulled at the control column, by God you should have seen me pull! With a long circular, descending arc, the plane found level flight, skimmed over the eucalyptus trees and came down low and smooth on the fields. The first time I tried it, I came near to killing myself, but I wanted to celebrate ‘my’ Seventy-nine. ‘Your plane is here, Martino,’ said my CO. I left the crew behind, except for my flight engineer, and the two of us went up together, but when we were in the middle of that loop, our hearts were in our mouths, I can tell you, it was a beautiful spring morning in ’42, I’ll never forget the date, I was twenty-three and already a flight-lieutenant. A torpedo-bomber, that was what they called the plane and that was its speciality, so the plane and the airman were given the same name; I was a torpedo-bomber. The Seventy-nine, the aircraft, a right jewel, a wonderful three-engined Savoia Marchetti, great for taking anything the anti-aircraft guns could throw at her, a mean-looking machine, one of those that make you think of corsairs, and we were a bit like pirates ourselves, forced to fight a hit-and-run war by the inequality of resources, by the circumstances and by those thick-skulled idiots who, in the best Italian tradition, sent us into that war in the Mediterranean and left us to get by on our wits, with no back-up either. A right jewel, I was saying, a wonderful three-engined job, spotted like some Mediterranean version of a leopard, a hump just above the cockpit for the machine-gunner, one gun facing forward and the other facing the tail, two tubes peering out of that hump, or ‘devil’s hunchback’ as somebody nicknamed it, the rudder was emblazoned with the cross of Savoy and I’ve lost count of the number of times we huddled in a rubber dinghy after ditching in the sea, watching that cross and the three Fascist symbols in the disks on the upper part of the wings go down last. The whole lot would finally sink, Savoy cross, Fascist insignia and all, but it would remain afloat for hours before this happened. A magnificent machine, a right jewel, there’s no other word for it, it gave you goose pimples to pilot her, apart from the machine-guns on the look-out in the turret, there was another in the fuselage to fire through the side doors, but the masterpiece, the real warhead, was the thousand-kilo torpedo neatly hidden underneath the belly of the plane. To get down to wave level, to release and place the torpedo in the side of a cruiser was a complicated exercise of instinctive mathematics. You had to come down low on the sea, not to avoid the radar because we didn’t even know the British had such a thing, but to take advantage of the curve of the earth and to make ourselves visible only at the very last moment, six people to each plane, two pilots, one gunner, one radio operator, one photographer – the photos were very important and if you want I’ll tell you why – and one engineer. The life expectancy of each torpedo-bomber – aircraft and man – was three missions, maybe four, but if you think about the fire power of the battleships, the odds were stacked against you making it back from a fifth mission. That didn’t stop us all being proud of being torpedo-bombers, we would have been glad to be torpedo-bombers for the whole of our lives, but we were all young and innocent. We were still in our twenties, every one of us, as good a group as you would find anywhere, believe me, all united by fear and worries of various kinds, but a great group. The squadron-leader was twenty-six, a hero he was; when it seemed he was dead, we took his name and called ourselves the Buscaglia Group, the most amazing aero-aquatic circus ever seen in the Mediterranean war.”

The old man interrupted his flow a moment, stared at me with his head tilted slightly to one side and then smiled gently, “Pardon me, I’m assaulting you with words,” he said, “I wouldn’t like you to take me for one of those old folk with an incontinent memory.” I replied, “No, not at all, on the contrary, I was very interested and was glad to hear what he had to say.” “Fear, that’s what it is, fear,” he went on, “I have to talk to you about fear, because if I do, you might be able to grasp the story more easily; fear didn’t get to you in the middle of an action, there it was a case of immediate physical terror, immediately resolved by catastrophe or luck, the sheer speed of what needed to be done put you into a kind of trance, it was like dancing, you had to surrender yourself to an instinctive rhythm, concentrate on the rhythm and not think of anything else, in any case if a shell caught you full on, you were dead before you knew about it, you had to surrender to instinct, to the pure rhythm of the trajectories which are only crossed by destiny, you had to connect with that destiny, and dance. Take Graziani, you know who I mean, Giulio Cesare Graziani? no, doesn’t matter, he’s still alive like me, well, as he was attacking a convoy at Tobruk, in the act of releasing his torpedo, one hand on the control column and the other on the lever, he noticed some spots on the windscreen and felt something damp on his neck, but he was too absorbed by the vague feeling that after the release there hadn’t been the usual bounce which indicated that the plane was now lighter by a good fifteen hundredweight of torpedo, too busy with the turns, sideslips and climbs which are part and parcel of any getaway, and only when he was out of range of the ships’ guns did he put his hand to his neck, and when he pulled it away in horror, he saw that in his palm he held half a human brain, the brain of the photographer in the fuselage, the top of whose head had been blown off by a shell. He turned in terror to his co-pilot, only to find him slumped over on his side with his shirt covered in blood, behind him the flight engineer was moaning, the gunner, also wounded, came staggering into the cockpit, and announced that the photographer was dead and the torpedo hadn’t gone. Everything at the one moment, a moment of some complexity, as they might say today. He made the return journey with a crew of the dead and dying, before darkness fell he happened to notice that on the windscreen, apart from the pieces of human brain, there were also several bullet holes, one of which corresponded to the place at the controls where he normally sat, as it passed by he must have been bent over the release lever, the bullet had torn the epaulette off his flying suit and had gone on to blow off two of the fingers of the flight engineer seated behind. It was night when he landed at Gadurrà. They opened the doors from outside, carried off the dead and wounded, and found him seated at the controls with his hand gripped on the control column, weeping uncontrollably, they had to lift him up bodily and carry him out.

“See what I mean? The fear’s not in the action, it was before and after, when we were standing under the wing waiting for someone to come running up with a sheet of paper, or the night before the raid when we were studying the routes and trying to work out from the maps what was in store for us. Wrestling with fear meant pushing back the thought that everything was the last – last shave, last tie-knot, last coffee, last letter, last night in a bed. Buscaglia confessed that he was often afraid and in a panic over the risk, he had to fight back those feelings like the rest of us, yet he was the man in charge. There were some who simply did not have that feeling of risk, and that spared them the fatigue of mind and body which the awareness of danger produces in normal people, but I sometimes think that the best of them are those who have that worried look, who are worried and silent; but there are not really any rules in this matter. Anyway, that’s the sort of man Buscaglia was.

“We would set off from Pantelleria or Decimomannu in Sardinia, or from Gerbini at the foot of Mount Etna, but most commonly from Rhodes in the Aegean; there the Royal Italian Air Force had constructed a runway with a couple of sheds at one side, Gadurrà it was called; the take-off field sloped down towards the sea, almost as far as the shore, it wasn’t easy to take off with a full cargo in the opposite direction, uphill, when the wind was swirling down from the hills. Between one sortie and the next, if there was time, I used to go and sit among the ruins of Lindos, some evenings the sea, the mountains, the olives trees and the Doric columns formed a landscape of such maternal peace that I could hardly believe there was a war on. War in Trento, where I came from, meant rain, grey skies, winter, frost, but how were you supposed to feel pain, how were you supposed to die, in a countryside like this?

“We took off regularly from Gadurrà to attack convoys of warships and cargo ships; the action would have started well before that, when our agents stationed at Algeciras or Tangiers got a message to Rome warning them of ships entering the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar. I said it was a operation of high, instinctive mathematics, but it might have been better to say internal mathematics, carried out by a ten-ton aircraft with six people on board, flying at sea level, weaving in and out among ships in a hail of shells and anti-aircraft fire. The torpedo had to be released sixty metres above the water at a velocity of three hundred kilometres an hour, while keeping the aircraft on manual and never deviating a centimetre from the horizontal; at the tail of the torpedo there was a little empennage which enabled it to glide, on impact with the water the empennage fell away and the torpedo was transformed from an aerial torpedo into a marine torpedo, so we had something in common with submarines. The point was to place an object over which you had no further control on the surface of the sea: everything depended on the actual firing, afterwards you would be as well sitting twiddling your thumbs. The height and velocity, as well as the tail-piece, were what fixed the torpedo’s angle of impact and ensured that it didn’t just slide under the waves or bob and bounce like a pebble skimmed over the water by a boy on the beach. In its airborne trajectory, the torpedo maintained the speed of the plane from which it had been launched, three hundred kilometres an hour, but the moment it touched the sea, it fell to seventy, which was why it was important to launch the torpedo as close to the ship as possible; close, but not too close, because the torpedo after entering the water executes a sinusoidal curve before straightening out, and at the lowest point of the curve it could pass at depth under the keel of the ship, fail to make contact and speed away on the far side. Now follow me closely, just pretend you’re still at school, or that we’re doing a waltz; considering that from seventy metres of height the aerial trajectory of the torpedo is around three hundred metres, and considering that once it’s in the water the torpedo takes another two hundred metres to stabilise at a depth tared on land, and that can vary from two to eight metres depending on the ship you’re aiming at, the conclusion is that the minimum distance from which the torpedo can be fired is five hundred metres. In addition, if you fired it from farther off, let’s say from one thousand metres, the time it takes for the torpedo to reach even the slowest of vessels would be sufficient to allow the vessel to turn, or get away. A splash in the water beneath an aeroplane coming up at top speed – they would see the whole thing from the ship and from that moment they had their chance to do their own dance steps, for us it was awesome to see a battleship on the other side of the windscreen, remember we were flying roughly level with the bulwarks, to see it pull round as fast as it could, its prow throwing cascades of water into the air, racing against the time it would take the torpedo to strike it. That laborious turn to make leeway was the only chance of escape the ship had; if at the moment of contact, the torpedo’s angle of impact was too tight or too tangential, the weapon couldn’t detonate, the whole business, the internal mathematics or dance among the cannonades came down to a straightforward bump, a little knock or thump between two pieces of iron, just imagine, all that painstaking precision and all that deadly risk just for one impact, for one innocuous little collision at sea between a ship and an ordinary piece of metal, which then slithers away along the hull and ends up who knows where.

“If fired from five hundred metres, the torpedo would take twenty seconds to strike the ship’s side, and if the pilot had calculated correctly the movement of the target and the angle of impact, the Beta angle, not even the niftiest of ships had any chance of getting out of the way. The core of these internal mathematics was the Beta angle, an angle formed by the direction of the moving ship and a straight line from the position of the ship to the position of the plane at the moment of firing. This angle is like a mortgage, or like a song; I fire taking aim not at where you are but at where you will be twenty seconds from now if my calculations are correct. You don’t need me to tell you that some mortgages have to be foreclosed. If the torpedo had twenty seconds to reach its target, after firing it we, aircraft and crew, had hardly four or five; this was the most critical phase, the getaway, if getaway is the right word, sometimes we ended up right on top of the ship, so there was neither time nor space to turn, and there was nothing for it but to overfly it so low that we grazed its aerials and turrets, skidding, turning, sideslipping, pulling the plane into sudden inverted climbs, frantically trying all kinds of aerobatic numbers that a triple-engined, torpedo aircraft was never built for, but which were marvellous for putting off the anti-aircraft gun operators; we could see them swivelling round their machine- and pom-pom guns as we swerved madly overhead.

“It was always hard to get out of a convoy, but after a while it was just as hard to get in. At the beginning, in the first torpedo raids, the British fired on individual aircraft, but then they had a go at the grand barrage, which is not a dance step but a wall of flame, as soon as they saw us in the distance they turned the whole of their artillery against us, erecting an impenetrable barrier of shells in the sky, rounded off at sea level by bursts of fire from four- or eight-barrel pom-pom guns which continually strafed the waves. We had to get through that wall of flame and iron – for us a wall of calculated risks – in perfectly level flying formation, because you needed a horizontal trim and fixed height to drop the torpedo into the sea. When you first entered that sky of black cloud, the aeroplane started its own dance on the ballistic waves of the explosions, the smoke from the shells made your eyes water, not just the smoke to tell the truth, and the saliva dried up in your mouth; flying lower than the bulwarks, so low that the spray thrown up by the exploding shells fell on your wings and windscreen, you sneaked into a gap between a destroyer and a cruiser, until you were able to fire the torpedo and make off, zooming up into the skies with one almighty kick on the pedals, leaving the crew to cling onto the struts as best they could.

“In all that murderous chaos, unless there was a loud explosion, nobody could ever say for sure whether or not the torpedo had hit its target; that was why there was always a photographer in the crew, while you and your co-pilot, eyes streaming, kept your mind on the dance and the mathematics, the photographer, held at the ankles by the gunner, was sticking his head out of the turret on the hump to shoot with his Leica and long-distance lens, taking one photo after another, to get snaps that were used not only to win you a medal, because you couldn’t exactly rely on the British to tell the truth about the number of ships that went down or about the damage done to their fleet. Buscaglia wanted the photographs to study the progress of the action, on our side as well as theirs. The moment we touched down, the photographers rushed off to their dark rooms and emerged half an hour later with dripping photographs which ended up on the CO’s desk. Fine photos, there’s no denying it, an extraordinary, unintended piece of reporting, unforgettable souvenirs for us; at first glance, when you saw that scene again, you couldn’t believe you had been in the thick of it, and even less that you’d got out alive. From the photos you were able to evaluate whether the column of water at the side of a ship was just part of the general chaos, or if it was due to the explosion of a torpedo, and how much damage it had caused. You could also work out from the photos the damage to our side, you might see a Seventy-nine engulfed in flames as it went into the sea, and from the type of spray thrown up you could guess if there was any chance of the people on board surviving. There was no shortage of planes ditching in the sea, this was another thing which made us feel like submarines, but everything depended on how you entered the water, on whether or not you were on fire, and whether you were still able to steer. Flaps out, levers down, feet and right arm braced against the instrument panel at the last minute, left hand tugging on the control lever to keep the aeroplane level as it was swallowed up by waves and spat out again a few seconds later, and if all went according to plan you would feel a violent thud and see water splashing and streaming down the windscreen, and the old Seventy-nine would float. At that point, you got the life-raft into the sea, if there was time you grabbed everything useful and destroyed the codes and cyphers, which were bound in lead to make sure they sank as quickly and as deeply as possible.

“I have to tell you that I’ve ended up in the sea many a time, the first time out of utter stupidity when I was returning from a training flight off Pola. So as to give a wave to some friends on the beach at Sistiana, I came in so low over the sea that the side-engine propellers touched the water, there was a tremendous clang and the tips of the blades bent outwards: I managed to get her to climb a bit but the plane was kept in the air by the central engine alone, and all of a sudden it dropped. The crew dashed into the cockpit, I could feel them staring daggers at me, and sweating buckets though I was, it became a matter of curiosity for them to see how I’d get out of this one, and then a matter of some pride for successfully ditching a plane without anyone having ever shown me what happens to a land-plane when it ends up in the water. The second time I ditched, it was in the waters around Pantelleria after sinking my destroyer, you must forgive me if I call it mine, in fact it belonged to a British captain whom I met years later in London, a nice man with a real sense of humour; before we fired the torpedo we had been hit ourselves, then as we flew over the ship we were holed again and I could feel the plane losing power under my feet. Once we were in the sea, as the crew were clambering into the life-raft, I perched myself on a wing and set to work with a hammer to detach an aileron for use as a nautical rudder, while the co-pilot dismantled the compass, something that could always come in handy. We heard them shouting from the life-raft and turned just in time to see the destroyer’s prow rearing obscenely in the air and the ship sliding under, stern first. This happened in the battle of Mid-June, June ’42, I mean. The third time . . . well the third time I’ll leave for the moment.

“In terms of risk, the torpedo-bombers were just one step below kamikazes, and presumably that must have occurred to Supreme Command, because in the battle of Mid-August, after the aircraft carrier Furious had dispatched about forty Spitfires from a latitude on a level with Algiers to take part in the defence of Malta, an unmanned Seventy-nine, operated by a radio on board a Cant Z sent along with it, took off from Villacidro in Sardinia. The Seventy-nine was packed with explosives, and was supposed to crash into one of the biggest ships in the convoy; everything worked like a dream until they got in sight of the British fleet off the island of La Galite, here a condenser in the radio-control mechanism, built in accordance with the usual penny-pinching philosophy, overheated, the Seventy-nine failed to respond to instructions, overflew the convoy, continued in a straight line towards Algeria where it crash-landed. The rescuers were very puzzled at not finding human remains among the wreckage. Mid-June, Mid-August – funny names for battles, names of times not places, however these were the two great air-sea battles of the Mediterranean, both fought to prevent the British getting supplies through to Malta. But for us Malta was already lost, the real problem was elsewhere. Flying over the front lines, we had the dubious privilege of seeing before anyone else that the war was lost. You just had to look at the sheer number of convoys coming into the Mediterranean, piling up in the ports; and we were supposed to be hunting them down! We would understand it all even better later on, during the attacks on ships off Algiers or Gibraltar, acts of war supposedly, but principally acts of propaganda, phoney raids to fill the news bulletins and keep up morale, and maybe it did fool some infantryman in Albania into believing that the mare nostrum was still really ours. We risked our skins in a state of terror, three or four raids at the most, remember? We came back from each raid more and more sure in our minds that it was all going to end in grief, and this knowledge, believe me, made everything even more painful and hopeless. One day in Comiso, they captured an enemy bomber, the crew was British but the aircraft was American, they had mistaken the airfield in Comiso for one in Malta, has anything like that ever happened to you? They glided in to land without a care in the world, the lieutenant on duty realized what had happened and gave orders to hold fire; in fact he made the guard line up to welcome the incoming crew, who stepped out all smiles only to find themselves under arrest. You see, war’s got its funny side at times, even if this time it was hardly a laughing matter, because that bomber was the eighth wonder of the world, armed to the nines and with every vital component covered up with thick, solid armour. It was October ’42, the war was already over, take my word for it, the Americans landed in Algeria the following month, they landed at one o’clock in the morning of the 8th of November, I remember it well because Buscaglia called us together early that afternoon, quietly said these events were not to upset us, we are at war and you each of you know where your duty lies, we take off in half an hour for Algiers. We were in no condition to attack during daylight hours, because the Spitfires from the aircraft carriers would have massacred us, but we were going to attack in the half-light, as cinema people call the light when the sun has just gone down but the sky is still bright, the light we’ve got just now as you and I are talking, except that then it was well into autumn; we were supposed to arrive over Algiers exactly with that fading light so that we would not be visible to the fighter-planes and the ships, but we were supposed to be able to make them out in outline, in the semi-darkness that lasts five or six minutes on an autumn afternoon, and there’s a fine test of navigational calculation for you, or inner mathematics if you like, one thousand kilometres of distance with twelve planes in formation and a margin of error at the target of a couple of hundred seconds. We took off from Castelvetrano in Sicily, where we had been moved in the meantime, a splendid place for oil, and for wine. Over the Mediterranean we ran into one squall after another, solid columns of rain stretching from the sea to the low banks of cloud overhead, we had to swerve out of their way, changing tack as we went and obviously at every deviation Buscaglia had to adjust the calculations of time lost, wind drift and bow angle to get us back on course, a marvellous feat of dead-reckoning navigation. Finally, in the dark, we caught a glimpse of the outlines of the Atlas Tellien, with the shadows of the great warships over to the west, but we were late, too late, the sun was already down and that was fine, but even the lingering, thin light of dusk was fading second by second, it was five past six on a November evening, Buscaglia gave his orders over the headphones without any trace of emotion – turn back, head for Sicily. Two days later, Buscaglia launched an attack on the Bay of Bougie, to the east of Algiers, along with him he wanted no more than three other planes, commanded by Graziani, Faggioni and Angelucci, who was new to the group, so I stayed at home, not without some disappointment. Instead of attacking from the sea, Buscaglia decided to come at the port of Bougie from the land side, so when they got to La Galite they left the Mediterranean and made for Tunisia, flying very low to the west, turning north to allow them to clear the mountains then swoop down on Bougie harbour; the surprise was less than perfect, because a high-flying German, twin-engined plane saw them emerge from inland, took them for British or American and nose-dived onto them, at which point everybody opened fire from all sides, there was flak from the ships and the anti-aircraft positions on land, the Spitfires took off from the aircraft carriers, Buscaglia and the others bunched together to defend themselves better from the fighters, the bay was a terrifying spectacle for them, they’d never seen so many warships, so many guns and so much firepower, they came down to the usual, harrowing height of seventy or so metres, flying right into round after round of gunfire, they collected a few hits but went straight on, Angelucci and his crew died at that moment, in the barrage the plane was seen bursting into flames, breaking apart and falling into the hills, the corpses were brought back to Italy only a couple of years ago. The others fired off their torpedoes against the cargo ships moored in the harbour, the only target worth bothering about, because warships could be replaced in no time but supplies were still valuable; the problem was that because they were aiming for the docks, they found themselves above the houses and inside the mountainous Gulf of Bougie, they climbed steeply, made a tight turn, grazing the rocks as they did so, at the top of the ascent Faggioni let himself go into a sideslip and lined up under his companions, Buscaglia did likewise and the whole patrol reversed course and formation, came hurtling down from the heights – a right circus number that must have been! a fine dance step with great, lumbering beasts like those! – and all this in non-stop enemy fire, pure instinct guided by rhythm, those three were the best there were, the most skilled of all the torpedo-bombers; they went back across the port, the only escape route open to them, there they were welcomed by more fire from the anti-aircraft guns and then, just as they got out of the port, they were picked up by the Spitfires which fired furiously at them, they huddled together wing to wing once again, at sea level so as to protect their undersides, the most delicate part of the Seventy-nine, and to leave the way clear for their machine-gunners who were firing from the turrets at the pursuing fighters. The Seventy-nine was exceptionally sensitive to the slightest touch, if you had her well in hand you could form a pack by placing your wing between the wing and tail of the next plane, flying so closely together with such an awkward plane was quite scary the first couple of times, eventually you found the courage, but you still needed perfect engine synchronisation, enormous confidence in your patrol leader and an exact level of pressure on the pedal and lever to be able to stay close in without snarling up your companion or having the tip of your wing torn off by the outside propeller. The effect, for anyone pursuing you, was of a solid wall of fire thrown up by the tail gunners, who were limited in their sweep by the need to avoid the rudder and tailplane, so this provided a shadow zone for fighter-pilots who had learned to shelter there while riddling you with shots. I have to tell you all this because it will be important in a short while, as you will see, and because it was by flying and firing this way that the three of them were able to get out of the Bay of Bougie, away from a barrage the like of which had never been seen, leaving a few Spitfires groaning in their wake, pierced with bullet holes or else belching smoke as they vanished among the fish.

“When they got back to Castelvetrano, I was there waiting for them near the hangars with the mechanics and all the others, Faggioni appeared at the top of the steps pale and tense, he went over to Buscaglia who was checking the damage to his own plane and screamed at him that it was utter madness to attack a well guarded stronghold like that in daylight, you were just sending men out to die, he said, and to die for nothing. It was surprising to hear that from a man like Faggioni, an extraordinary and highly disciplined pilot, shrewd and responsible enough to know that you don’t raise matters like that in front of other officers, NCOs or airmen; but Buscaglia was just as disciplined and exceptional, and for that reason he moved off without saying a word. Graziani took Faggioni to one side to let him vent his rage on him, and anyway these three were the oldest officers, the most responsible in command and, as you can imagine, it’s part of the business of command to know what makes men tick and to pay heed to their feelings. Buscaglia summoned Graziani into his office – ‘What’s going on?’ he said. ‘I think Faggioni is partly right,’ said the other, ‘it’s crazy to attempt to slip past a whole escort of warships to get at the cargo ships, three out of the four crews got out of Bougie by sheer good luck, purely because the Americans are still feeling their way and shoot at individual targets instead of throwing up a barrage as the British do.’ Look,” said the elderly gentleman, returning to indirect speech to convey what he could not have heard personally, “Graziani was trying to mediate, there were murmurings in the ranks, the rumour was that Buscaglia was taking too many risks in his pursuit of honours, that he couldn’t care less about the men’s losses or sacrifices, but this was nonsense and Graziani made light of it: ‘You don’t need me to tell you,’ he said, ‘that when we were being pursued by the Spitfires we got away only because all three of us have put in hours of flying in tight formation, wing to wing, but the other officers think that it would be better to drop the torpedoes in the semi-darkness of dusk when they can’t be seen by the enemy fighters, and I’m basically in agreement with them.’ ‘I’m not,’ said Buscaglia, ‘with the rear gunners, if we’re flying in tight formation, like today, you can defend yourself more easily from warplanes in daylight, and anyway it’s easier to ditch the plane in the sea during the day if you’re hit.’” The elderly man came back to the present with the remark, “I wouldn’t like you to think that this dispute of daylight versus darkness was a theoretical or academic problem, there was nothing academic about it, any more than there was any theory which was not converted into an immediate, positive, concrete question of life or death. Anyway, Graziani came out of Buscaglia’s office without any definite conclusion having been reached over the question of the light.

“That evening we ate in icy silence, in part because of the day’s tension and the comments that had been passed, in part because of the death of Angelucci and his crew. Angelucci had a lovely voice, he sang beautifully, it was left to me to gather together his guitar, his new, blue Schöller uniform with which he had probably hoped to make a big impression, his silver cigarette case and a little bundle of letters and pack them all up for his family. We all went to bed early in a big room in the Palazzo Pignatelli in Castelvetrano, Buscaglia had got a hold of a car battery and lamp. When he noticed that I couldn’t get to sleep, he asked if I was afraid, and I said I was. ‘So am I,’ he replied; ‘switch on the light and pass me the map.’ He traced out the route with his finger, ‘We’ll make our way across Tunisia and Algeria, what do you think?’ ‘Good idea,’ I replied. During the night he called to me a few times to check the route again, after all, I was his aide-de-camp. The following morning we were on the airfield at dawn, ready to go, waiting for word from Supreme Command. Buscaglia arrived in his car on the apron, he made Graziani get in and they drove down to the foot of the runway where we saw them get out and walk along a country road that circled the airfield. There they picked up the argument about mid-day light versus nightfall from where they had left off the previous evening, Buscaglia with new arguments in favour of daylight. ‘The level of training of some of the officers,’ he said, ‘does not provide sufficient guarantee of their ability to return under cover of darkness, especially with poor weather or damaged aircraft, so it’s better to launch the torpedo attack in early afternoon.’ Graziani turned the argument around to his own advantage, ‘if the training level of some of them is so modest, how would they ever be able to fly in close formation, wing to wing, and defend themselves from the Spitfires, so your main argument in favour of daytime rather than evening flying doesn’t stand up.” The elderly gentleman interrupted his narrative, “Of course I know this might seem to you nothing other than an academic dialogue on light and darkness held one morning in the year nineteen hundred and forty-two in a military airfield in the province of Trapani, possibly under the influence of the ancient philosophical traditions of the locality, but I would rather invite you to think of them as two young men obliged to debate technical and tactical questions while enclosed inside a shell of their deepest emotions and convictions. Their discussion, far from being purely academic, quickly shifted to embrace the whole progress of the war. Graziani fell silent as he became aware of the other’s need to find an outlet for the tension which had overwhelmed him, and the other released it in a monologue. The war was moving towards its inevitable conclusion, the enemy forces were much superior, we are being driven back onto home territory, he said: ‘Our group will be asked to perform heroics, many of us will be killed, the more fortunate will end up as prisoners of war, the few survivors or escapees will be handed the task of reconstituting the squadron.’ Graziani, fond though he was of Buscaglia, was as sharp as a needle and tried to propose an alternative, at least a short-term alternative, to this catastrophic vision. He began by setting out, in general terms, the case for inflicting the most serious damage possible on the enemy while keeping our casualties to the minimum; he continued with the observation that crews of our sort were suffering a process of attrition and that new ones could not be trained in a short time span and so, Carlo Emanuele, he concluded, why do we not attack at dusk when the odds are stacked more in our favour? Buscaglia, taken aback by this sudden, renewed assault, abandoned the agonised tone and was reverting to the argumentative style when he was interrupted by the arrival of a motorcyclist from the far side of the airfield with the news that he was wanted on the telephone; shortly afterwards in his office he received an order by telephone directly from the Head of Supreme Command, and the order was simplicity itself – back to Bougie, same procedure as yesterday.

“We took off at eleven o’clock in the morning, six warplanes with their respective crews, Buscaglia at the head; as he opened up the throttle, he waved to Graziani who, together with Faggioni, had been grounded since they had both taken part in the previous day’s operation. We headed for the open sea, and once we sighted La Galite, came down to sea level and made for Africa; we flew over Tunisia, continued towards Algeria, keeping to the far side of the mountain range which stands guard over the coast, until we were able to bank to the north and enter a valley in the spine of the Atlas Tellien. I have already described that route to you, but it was new to me; we followed the ascent of the valley, the mountainous flanks closing in until they reached a ceiling of cloud; as we climbed, we felt the cliffs pressing in on us, like reservoir walls on river water, and we were squeezed between the ceiling of cloud and the floor of the valley until we soared over the top and went plummeting like a waterfall down from the sky onto the sea and onto Bougie. Obviously, the British were desperately trying to figure out how we’d got there and why no one had picked us up earlier. Buscaglia gave the order over the headphones to get into assault formation, we drew up behind him, my Seventy-nine reached speeds it had never previously approached, everything – controls and bodywork – was shaking, a mad nose-dive in a hellish din of metal and wire, not just the whiplash of the cloth on our panels, above us the twenty-millimetre guns of the Spitfires crackled and beneath us the barrels of the naval batteries were spewing out one almighty, violent grand barrage, they had mastered it in a single day. The fighter planes made a bee-line for Buscaglia, singling out the big prize and ignoring us small-fry, his plane burst into flame at the first bursts of gunfire, he went on fearlessly, I can still see in my mind’s eye that plane deviating neither to right nor left, dragging a widening trail of smoke in its wake. I was right behind him, I tried to catch up and shelter him, I tried to get in close and fly wing to wing with him but I couldn’t reach him, I was already on full throttle, I dropped the nose and that way gained a few feet, but at the cost of losing height; I was out of line and directly underneath him, my machine-gunner was firing non-stop but the Spitfires were buzzing frantically on the other side, they got in between us and positioned themselves in the shadow of Buscaglia’s plane. They let up only when we came within range of the naval batteries, I was hoping against hope that Buscaglia’s crew would manage to control the flames on board, but as we passed over a destroyer the plane received several more strikes and the trail of smoke suddenly expanded. Buscaglia got clear of the ring of escort ships, his plane was blazing furiously but he took aim at a massive liner at anchor and fired off his torpedo. The plane was already low over the sea, it came gliding down and crashed in the bay; when it made contact with the water, it exploded and the burning petrol spread out over the sea.”

The elderly gentleman gave an unexpected sigh which hung in the heavy silence, throwing a furtive glance around him as he did so: “We returned to Castelvetrano in the early afternoon,” he said, “arriving one by one. Graziani, who was standing waiting with the mechanics, counted five planes and knew immediately whose was the missing sixth. As we were coming in, Faggioni’s plane was returning from Catania and he waited his turn to land. On the ground, passing by our bullet-riddled planes, his photographer and machine-gunner made signs to enquire of the mechanics whether anyone was missing, and they indicated with raised forefinger, joined thumb and ring finger the rank of squadron-leader. The photographer went along to the cockpit to tell Faggioni, who slammed on the brakes, put his head on the control column and burst into tears.

“Buscaglia was dead. An ace aviator, you will say, and yes he was certainly that, in spite of the conventions, because ours was not an age of aces, the term belongs to the First World War, a vague definition, indicating exceptional technical and moral qualities, later tightened up by the introduction of precise standards to avoid its abuse; they even went as far as drawing up an official list of First World War aces, a distinction awarded principally to fighter pilots. But we did not shoot down other planes, our targets were ships and with the passing of the years the concept of fighter pilot underwent a change, it lost its overtones of individual duellist, our training was all about crews and groups, that was the basic mental, I might almost say emotional, unit, an anti-prima donna spirit enforced by Supreme Command’s rigid regulations, they moved us around constantly from one mission to the next to avoid the accumulation of honours, in the dispatches, no matter how sensational the actions were, the principal characters were indicated by their initials followed by rank, so as to discourage swollen egos. And yet, as torpedo-bombers we enjoyed a special status, it was spontaneous and involuntary, perhaps because there were so few of us, as was evidenced by the emblem of Buscaglia’s squad – four cats lined up on a torpedo, four dumbfounded and perplexed cats under the motto Pauci sed semper immites – or perhaps because our line of combat made us amphibian, aero-aquatic, like submariners operating at sea level, or rather taking wing, or perhaps, when all is said and done, it was simply because we were a group. Whatever the reason, the bulletin of the 13th of November 1942 gave the announcement of the death of our commanding officer with name, surname and decorations awarded for the one hundred thousand tons of shipping he had sent to the bottom of the sea during his various sorties, including the last, and from that day we became the Buscaglia group.

“Pauci we were, and becoming fewer by the day, eight officers out of twenty had died in less than eight months, and as for the immites, had we the guts to get back into a Seventy-nine, or any other aircraft for that matter, after the death of Buscaglia? And yet, scared as we were, we started flying again; Graziani and Faggioni assumed command, the one of the group the other of the squadron, but everything became more demanding, the Allied defence was such that we had to cut out daytime and even evening sorties, too many things needed to come together, too many elements all constantly shifting – us, the convoys sailing the Mediterranean, the sun in its brief, twilight span. Night and night attack was all we had, darkness saved us from the Spitfires but tied us to the moon and its phases, we began to think in terms of waning and crescent moons as though we were Red Indians, at full moon we could make out the surface of the sea, attacking into the moon we could make a guess at the ships’ silhouettes, but even so, often you couldn’t see as far as your nose, one night in the bay of Philippeville pulling out of a dive I glanced at the altimeter, it stood at ten metres below sea level, I pulled back the throttle with all my might and shut my eyes, the altimeter was still calibrated to Castelvetrano pressure which was different from that of the Algerian coast, but how great was the difference in metres, in centimetres?, how close had I come to the surface of the water without seeing a thing? With night flying we became familiar with the unsettling effects of the searchlight, beams of light which shone on the windscreen then veered off to the side at the last moment, it was a new and alarming optical effect, disembodied blows which it became instinctive to ward off by making the plane yaw one way then another, or by air-braking and diving desperately. We flew with lights out, in constant fear of the wings touching, but out of nowhere, from land or sea, on would go the searchlights: the first time it was like a cannonade of blinding light, I couldn’t see the phosphorescence of the instruments, nor could I make out what was going on and for a few seconds I completely lost control of the plane. The Seventy-nine had blinds over the wide, side windows and over the big windows above the windscreen, and for a while we flew with blinds down. Soon afterwards the Spitfires adopted the tactic of waiting for us above the airfield as we returned from our mission, we would get back in the dark totally worn out, sometimes with a damaged plane or with wounded men on board, they would make out the reverberations of the engine exhaust, or see the rocket we fired to alert ground crew to switch on the runway lights, and at that point they would open fire and come chasing after us, forcing us to race off, scared witless, at the level of the fields and up over the hills, in total darkness.

“One night in January ’43 my turn came, my number came up, one night with no moon, not that you could rely on her for a good turn if you were going into combat. We took off at eight in the evening from Decimomannu in Sardinia for the Bay of Bona in Algeria, we fired our torpedo against a ship in the most perfect darkness when all of a sudden the sky was lit up with a firework display of piercing beams and machine-gun fire. Outside the bay we found the usual fighters lying in wait, but we shook them off by swooping down to sea level. We had been holed in several places but without any too serious damage, so we stayed low and headed back to Sardinia. All of a sudden, an hour into our flight home, there erupted from the darkness beneath us a geyser of shells and dazzling jets of light, the night was so dark and the sea so black that we had been overflying a convoy without even being aware of it. We were hit in various places and just when it seemed we were going to get away with it, all three engines suddenly packed up. At that altitude, there was no chance of keeping airborne and no time to think, we sent an uncoded SOS, I got ready to ditch for what was the umpteenth time, but the first when I couldn’t see a thing, neither the horizon nor the sea line. I stared at the instruments on the flight deck, the anemometer and altimeter, and waited. We entered the water at two hundred an hour, one almighty crash into a gluey wall, the power of the deceleration hurtled us all forward, I banged my head against the bomb sight with its handles and racks. When the plane bobbed back up onto the surface, my thumb was pulp and one eye was oozing blood. I raised my good hand, groped for the door above the pilot’s seat, got it open and crawled out into the biting wind and driving rain, and if I’d been emerging from a submarine at sea in the middle of the night, it couldn’t have been worse; I leaped onto one of the wings and it was like plunging into a frozen well of utter darkness. Someone got a life-raft into the water, we managed to get in, each one of us wounded somewhere, and the Seventy-nine floated off with its nose under water and its tail in the air. We drifted, numb with cold, sprays of salt water burning our wounds, but at least they kept us awake. We had no way of knowing we were only fifteen miles off Capo Spartivento, nor that the signal station on the island of Sant’Antioco had seen us go down and given the alarm, although we only learned the worst at day break when an auxiliary vessel picked us up; we had ditched in a mined area, so to rescue us they had to clear the whole zone, then lay down the mines again.

“I woke up in hospital swathed in bandages, I had come out of it the worst but I’m a fast healer and some weeks later they took off the dressings and let me out of bed. But in the following days, as I wandered around the corridors, I seemed to be constantly bumping my shoulder into the walls or into the doorways, as though I had lost that instinctive balance we all have when we walk. I mentioned this to the doctor and was immediately sent back to bed with the strict order to stay absolutely still. They gave me a weird pair of glasses with only one tiny hole to see through, and a couple of weeks later they announced that when I banged my head and eye against the bomb sight, a film had formed over the retina and closed it up, but maybe, just maybe, with treatment it would reopen. San Remo, where I spent the spring, was beautiful, one huge convalescent centre for the wounded of all the services. In the evening I would go for a stroll along the promenade, I knew only too well that I would never be going back to the group, for me the war was over, but staring at the sea from the shore gave me an odd feeling of solidity and protection. The Riviera was magnificent, I was one of Fortune’s favoured and yet I felt a nostalgia for the old times, at any moment of the day I knew exactly what the others were up to, it took no effort to picture it in my mind’s eye, especially on my evening strolls when I stopped to gaze at the moon, which was no longer for me a source of the light you needed for survival but had reverted to being a poignant, metaphysical embellishment of night’s landscape.

“Out of the blue in autumn I received two letters, one from Graziani and the other from Faggioni. The armistice had taken Graziani by surprise while he was on leave in Rimini, and he had wasted two days talking to the Germans and contacting Rome for orders; finally, under a hail of bullets from an Italian artillery squadron, he stole a Seventy-nine from the airfield at Fano and landed in Catania. As he was taxying along the runway, he was met by a jeep driven by a smiling American soldier, a lieutenant who spoke perfect Sicilian; on the ramp, he shook hands enthusiastically with each member of the crew, offered them cigarettes, then produced a cine camera from the jeep and asked them to get back inside and make their appearance at the door one more time while he shot his film. Graziani had to repeat the scene several times, the final time for the Catania airport commander, a colonel of the United States Air Force. There was enormous excitement among the Americans when they discovered it was a torpedo-bomber, they stuck under his nose a wodge of photographs taken from various ships during torpedo attacks, among the planes racing about like cats on heat Graziani picked out his own more than once, and it was only then he realized that certain ships really had been sunk. Then the Intelligence Service put to him various detailed questions about the system of air defence in Italy, matters about which he had no knowledge. The Americans didn’t believe him, and were not persuaded by the fact that he had headed south immediately and of his own accord, they put him in charge of a group of Seventy-nines transporting mail and officers between the mainland and the islands, and for some months he had a military policeman sitting at his back, whose job was to file a report every evening on every single thing he had done during the day.