1

Legacy: 1811–1918

THE FIRST HUNGARIAN AVIATOR TOOK TO THE SKY ON June 3, 1811.1 Dr. Károly Menner climbed into a basket suspended beneath a decorated fabric envelope on the outskirts of Pest, in a meadow that eighty-five years later would host the national millennial celebration.² By 1896, balloon flight had become sufficiently routine that, for the price of a single korona, a visitor to the Hungarian Millennium celebration in the Budapest city park could ride in a captive balloon to a height of 1,500 feet.³ Franz Josef himself visited the exhibitions, and although he apparently did not chance a flight, some 7,000 of his subjects did.⁴ Those Hungarians who took to the air with Monsieur Godard joined the growing number of aviation enthusiasts across Europe. Captive balloon rides were common at major expositions of the time: the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and Antwerp’s 1894 Exposition featured them, as did the 1896 India and Ceylon Exhibition at Earls Court, and the Paris Exposition beginning in 1867.⁵ Paris’s precocity should be no surprise, since Frenchmen pioneered ballooning in 1783, and from the middle of the nineteenth century France “had total unsurpassed dominance in aviation.”⁶

Despite Austria-Hungary’s relatively late start (Italian, American, and Scottish aeronauts had flown as early as 1784), for the century following Dr. Menner’s flight, Habsburg aviation kept pace with global advances and in some cases found itself on the leading edge.7 As long as flight remained the province of visionaries and artisans, Austria-Hungary, blessed with superb technical universities and a small but highly skilled guild of craftsmen, held its own among the European powers. That ceased to be true in 1914, at the time when the world that awarded aviators cash prizes for feats of aerial navigation gave way to one in which airmen earned military honors for artillery observation. The advent of the First World War laid bare the monarchy’s many structural problems that had been masked by the intellectual glitter of fin de siècle Vienna and Budapest. Austria-Hungary entered the Great War with an undersized air service that was starved of funds and plagued by inefficiency; supplied by an industrial base insufficient for mass production of aircraft; and directed by an acquisition policy that stifled competition and innovation. In the end, “the story of wartime Austro-Hungarian aviation is one of inadequacy and dependence upon Germany.”⁸

Such judgments lay decades in the future, and indeed Germany did not yet exist as a united political entity when Austrian forces conducted the world’s first aerial bombardment. Franz von Uchatius, a lieutenant in Marshal Radetzky’s army besieging Venice in 1849, oversaw the construction and release of up to one hundred paper and linen balloons armed with fifty-pound bombs and delayed fuses.⁹ The Austrians hoped the balloon-borne bombs “would devastate the city, and they also launched others from the deck of the side-wheel steamer Vulcano, the first use of offensive ‘air power’ from the sea.” Unpredictable winds favored the Italians, however, and the balloons scattered, some of them falling among Austrian forces, who, fearing for their own safety, did not attempt further attacks.¹⁰

Although successful bombardment from aircraft would be delayed for half a century, the value of balloons as observation platforms was demonstrated during the American Civil War. The chief of the US Army Signal Corps lavished praise on an observer in a telegraph-equipped aerostat: “It may be safely claimed that the Union army was saved from destruction … by the frequent and accurate reports.” One year later, a similar Union observation balloon carried aloft on his first aviation experience a twenty-five-year-old Württemberg cavalry officer, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin.11 Zeppelin, whose airships later terrorized England on behalf of Imperial Germany, fought with the Habsburgs against Prussia in the 1866 Bruderkrieg (Brothers War). The Austrian army hastily formed an aviation unit when the Prussians approached Vienna, but the inexperienced ground crew lost the single balloon, putting an end to the experiment.¹² During the 1871 siege of Paris, balloons were pressed into service as transport, and successfully carried 1.5 million letters and 102 passengers out of the surrounded capital.¹³ In the aftermath of its stunning defeat, the French army undertook serious reform. Among the initiatives was the establishment of a balloon section, the world’s first permanent military aeronautics institution.¹⁴ Great Britain followed the French example in 1882, as did Russia, Germany, Italy, and Spain two years later.

The first Austro-Hungarian balloon section was formed in 1893, although eight volunteer officers had received balloon training in 1890 from Viktor Silberer, a well-known Viennese civilian pilot.¹⁵ The Militär Aeronautische Anstalt (MAA) was established at the Vienna Arsenal under the command of Lieutenant Josef Trieb, the first Habsburg military balloon pilot.¹⁶ The section, initially composed of two officers and thirty men, was attached to the 1st Fortress Artillery Regiment and was considered an auxiliary to the garrison artillery.¹⁷ The MAA acquired its first dedicated military balloon in 1896, a hydrogen-filled spheroid capable of tethered or free flight. Its next purchases would be the newly designed Parseval “sausage” balloons, whose streamlined shape was more stable and therefore could be operated in higher winds than the older round aerostats.¹⁸ The Habsburg navy conducted annual exercises between 1902 and 1907 with one of the army’s balloon sections, but after concluding that the practical problems of wind, storms, and corrosive salt water outweighed advantages in observation, discontinued the exercises and did not adopt balloons.19 At the outbreak of the First World War, Austria-Hungary would have twelve balloon units in service: eight on the northern front and four in the south.²⁰

That the balloon had some military utility was by the 1880s firmly established, but that utility was limited as long as the balloons remained at the mercy of the wind. During the 1871 siege, “though many balloons had flown from Paris, not a single attempt to fly a balloon to Paris had succeeded.”²¹ The first flight of a steerable airship took place in Paris in 1852, and experimentation continued with limited success for three decades before a true breakthrough occurred. In 1884, two French army officers piloted their 165-foot-long, streamlined, electrically powered airship, La France, on a twenty-three-minute flight and returned to the launch site, having completed the first powered flight in history. For a number of administrative and financial reasons, the men were unable to capitalize on their feat and produce a bigger, more capable airship.²² In contrast to the semi-rigid, battery-powered La France, some inventors were pursuing rigid, petrol-engined designs. Among them was a Hungarian-born Croatian timber merchant turned self-taught airship designer named David Schwarz.

Schwarz envisioned a solid all-metal airship, which was a revolutionary departure from the fabric envelopes used by all other airship builders of the time. His critical contribution to the field was an enthusiasm for aluminum: his design used the new metal for both frame and skin. Aluminum had been discovered in 1827, and the first block fit for industrial use was offered at the 1855 Paris Exposition. Schwarz may have become familiar with its properties through a sawmill component, or perhaps only by reading available scientific literature; in any case he was convinced of aluminum’s suitability for airship construction. Schwarz’s proposal was rejected by Vienna, but the Russian attaché recommended him to St. Petersburg, where he eventually won a contract.²³ Although the resulting airship was not successful, his design brought him to the attention of the Prussian War Ministry, which granted him use of the Tempelhof balloon development facilities, to the chagrin of a competitor, Ferdinand von Zeppelin.24 The fruit of Schwarz’s collaboration with the German metallurgist Carl Berg finally flew in November 1897. Kaiser Wilhelm was present for the test flight, but Schwarz was not, having died earlier that year.²⁵ Due to the failure of a propeller belt, the airship crashed upon landing, and no further Schwarz models were built. Zeppelin, present at the demonstration and impressed by the aluminum frame, negotiated with Schwarz’s widow for its rights, and thereafter incorporated the Schwarz-Berg aluminum body into his airships’ designs.²⁶

The growing capability of dirigible airships, particularly those of Zeppelin and the French brothers Paul and Pierre Lebaudy, led to increased interest on the part of military planners. By 1905, both the German and Italian armies were studying the airship’s possibilities as a weapon; the French army had already acquired a Lebaudy dirigible and “had begun a variety of tests with the new airship, including its use for reconnaissance, for directing artillery fire, and for bomb dropping.” There had been less enthusiasm for the airship in Britain, but French and German naval interest was contagious, and in 1909 the Royal Navy began to build its own dirigible.²⁷ The British aviation magazine Flight noted that 1908 German expenditures on aviation had amounted to nearly £400,000 (£265,000 of which came from private subscription). France had spent £48,000, while the United Kingdom allocated £5,270, slightly less than the £5,500 disbursed by Vienna.²⁸

Some of the Dual Monarchy’s aviation budget went to purchase the MAA’s first airship, a Parseval-style blimp designated the Militärballoon Nr. 1, or M I.²⁹ The M I, 160 feet long and 30 feet in diameter, could carry six people at a maximum speed of 24 nautical miles per hour (knots).³⁰ During its acceptance trials, the M I made a seven-hour circuit from Vienna that included flight over Franz Josef’s winter palace at Schönbrunn.³¹ The monarchy’s next airship purchase, a 230-foot Lebaudy (M II) with a semirigid keel, proved a disappointment and was retired after just two years. After cutting its teeth on German and French dirigibles, the MAA turned to domestic airships: first the Körting M III, similar in size to the Lebaudy but powered by two engines and 20 percent faster, and then the Bömches M IV, designed by an Austrian captain and presented to the air service as a gift. Though the M IV was smaller than its predecessors, its excessive operating costs soon drove it from active service.32 As the Austro-Hungarian airship and balloon fleet grew, so did the command’s conception of its possibilities, and organizational changes followed. In 1909 the MAA, at a strength of 14 officers, 28 noncommissioned officers, and 150 other ranks, was transferred from the Fortress Artillery Command to the Transport Troops Command, and two years later, in a move that reflected the emphasis on dirigibles, it was renamed the Airship Section (Luftschifferabteilung, LA).³³

If the Lebaudy and Bömches airships failed to live up to the LA’s expectations, the Körting M III exceeded them, logging more than 200 successful sorties in its first four years of flight.³⁴ Unfortunately, while on a photographic reconnaissance training mission near its base at Fischamend on June 20, 1914, the M III collided with a Farman biplane and was completely destroyed.³⁵ According to eyewitnesses cited in a contemporary press release, the Farman, piloted by an army lieutenant and with a naval officer on board, overtook the airship and flew around it several times before brushing the top of the M III’s envelope. “The spilling gas burst into flame, a powerful explosion, after which both aircraft crashed.” All seven men (four officers, two technicians and one engineer) on the Körting and both officers in the Farman were killed. Eyewitnesses described the airship descending slowly, wreathed in smoke, the remaining gas in the yet-unburned section of envelope restraining its fall, the crew’s “horribly frightful death screams” (iszonytatóan rémes halálordítása) clearly audible. Although a 1907 balloon crash in Debrecen that killed thirteen (three officers—two French, one Habsburg—and ten peasants) took a larger toll in human lives, the very dramatic death of nine men of the air service, along with the destruction of the fleet’s best dirigible, made this Austria-Hungary’s worst aviation accident, and hastened the end of the empire’s airship program.36 The service had already mothballed the M IV due to its operating costs, and the realities of the tight LA budget could not be ignored. To one historian of Austro-Hungarian aviation, “it was soon apparent that the vast expense required to house and feed these unwieldy monsters would swallow the total funds allotted to military aviation.”³⁷ In later years, the Germans would find that for the expense of a single Zeppelin they could have had thirty Albatros biplanes.³⁸ That was an opportunity cost the Habsburg air service simply could not afford. The Fischamend crash, although a human catastrophe, increased the LA’s effectiveness in the long run by removing a substantial drain on the air service’s resources and forcing it to focus on the heavier-than-air craft that would soon surpass airships in capability.

With Otto Lilienthal’s death in an 1896 glider crash, European heavier-than-air aviation “had entered a steep decline nearly as precipitous as that which killed the German master.”³⁹ In Lilienthal’s homeland as well as in France, inventors turned “away from winged flight and towards the total embracing of lighter-than-air balloons, blimps and ultimately Zeppelins.”⁴⁰ For a decade, nearly all substantial advances in airplane flight occurred in the United States. Not until 1906, three years after the Wright brothers’ historic first flight at Kitty Hawk, did a European fly a heavier-than-air powered aircraft. Inspired by Alberto Santos-Dumont’s success (he had previously been known for his small, highly maneuverable airships), Europeans took a renewed interest in airplanes, and over the next two years narrowed the gap opened by the Americans. Nonetheless, Wilbur Wright’s 1908 aerial demonstrations in France amazed the public and silenced the doubters. Wright made a total of 113 flights without major incident, one of them lasting nearly two and half hours. American supremacy, while convincing, was fleeting: within a year of Wright’s triumphant tour, Louis Blériot crossed the English Channel in a monoplane of his own design.⁴¹ Perhaps more impressive than the thirty-seven-minute flight is the degree to which Blériot’s craft, with its tractor engine, enclosed fuselage, identifiable tail section with rudder, and wheeled undercarriage, looks to the modern eye like a proper airplane.

Blériot’s exploit mobilized air-minded Hungarians, and across the country they began to build airplanes. Some were unwilling to wait for a domestic industry to arise, and instead headed to France to learn to fly. One of those early French-trained Magyar pilots, a pharmacist named Ágoston Kutassy, returned home in his Farman biplane and in 1910 earned the first Hungarian-issued pilot’s license. Blériot himself performed three aerial demonstrations in Budapest in October 1909 that “dazzled” spectators and left a “tremendous influence on the crowd.”42 On the former cavalry-training field at Rákosmező where Blériot held his air show there soon appeared numerous hangars. Among them could be found Dr. Kutassy’s Farman as well as János Adorján’s homebuilt plane, which in January 1910 made the first flight of an aircraft designed and manufactured entirely within Hungary. Adorján’s flight marks the birth of the Hungarian aircraft industry, and Rákosmező airfield earned the title “cradle of Hungarian aviation.”⁴³ The birth may have been met with joy by most of the family, but some members clearly thought it overdue. After the incredible success of the 1909 Rheims Aviation Week (some half a million visitors), in which seven of the top eight prize winners were French (earning 137,000 francs),⁴⁴ one Magyar wag displayed a characteristic combination of wit and pique, as well as extensive knowledge of international aviators:

Repül a fecske, repül a gólya,	The stork flies, and the swallow,
Repül a franciák Blériotja.	So flies the Frenchman Blériot.
Repül a Paulhan, repül a Latham,	Paulhan flies, and so does Latham,
Warchalowski is repül már tán.	Warchalowski already can.
Repül a gólya, repül a fecske,	The swallow flies, and the stork,
A német sas, az olasz kecske,	The German eagle, Italian goat.
Csak a szegény magyar turul—gurul.45	Only the poor Hungarian hawk—walks.46

Hungarian patriots were not alone in their dismay at the French prowess on display at Rheims. Commenting on the “established fact” of the airplane’s possibilities, David Lloyd George, the future prime minister, felt “as a Britisher, rather ashamed that we are so completely out of it.” The German attaché reported to Berlin that “the French have made in a relatively short time enormous progress in the field of aviation technology.”47 Taken together, these three reactions reveal two important aspects of aviation in the first half of the twentieth century: first, the intensely nationalist feeling that flight engendered, and second, the rapid swings of ascendancy brought on by the speed of technological innovation. Airmen were already aware of the importance of aviation as an instrument of national prestige (and had a growing appreciation for its role in defense), but often that was tempered by a sense of kinship with other fliers regardless of citizenship. Aviation boosters who were not themselves pilots tended to emphasize the importance of national competition. The pace of innovation in the early years of heavier-than-air flight exacerbated these feelings. From the Wright brothers’ flight until near the end of the Second World War, the lead in aviation technology changed hands frequently. Neither despair nor dominance lasted. In the first decade alone, leadership had swung dramatically from France to the United States and back. During the First World War, Germany, France, and Britain would each have periods of unmistakable technical mastery. The rate of technological change slowed immediately after the war, but no single country achieved sustained technological superiority until the United States did so in 1944.

Austria-Hungary entered a brief period of prewar prominence just as the nameless Magyar poet was lamenting its backwardness. The source of the prominence was the widespread acclaim met by the Taube, a “remarkably birdlike and attractive” monoplane designed by Igo Etrich, who began work on the craft as early as 1904 before achieving satisfactory flight control in 1910.⁴⁸ Etrich was an Austrian student of Friedrich Ahlborn, a German professor who had made extensive studies of the Zanonia macrocarpa seed, the influence of which was clearly visible in the shape of the Taube’s wings. More important than the Taube’s provenance was its performance, which was exemplary in all regards, as it “coupled gentle flying characteristics with excellent stability and safety. Well-harmonized controls, a rugged structure, and a powerful Austro-Daimler … engine assured its success.”49 It could also be assembled in thirty minutes and taken apart in eight—a trait whose advantage now is hard to credit, but one that was critical in the days when the airplane was expected “to move with the Army train and reconnoiter in the manner of traditional cavalry employment.”⁵⁰ The LA took delivery of twenty-nine Taubes between 1911 and 1913, and the aircraft was exported to Italy, Russia, Spain, England, China, and especially Germany, where Gotha and Rumpler built them in large numbers under license.⁵¹ Both the German and Austro-Hungarian air services maintained Taubes in frontline units even in the early days of the First World War before relegating them to basic training service.⁵² Germany had entered heavier-than-air flight late, and its initial attempts at aircraft development had been fraught with problems, which forced the government to consider both American and French machines before settling on the Austrian Taube for its earliest suitable military craft.⁵³ Thus at the very beginning of the military aviation relationship between Vienna-Budapest and Berlin, the technology transfer had gone from south to north. That would never again be the case.

Another important Austrian design went into production in the autumn of 1910. In contrast to the curvaceous single-wing Taube, the Pfeilflieger (“Arrow-Flier”) was an angular biplane with distinctive sweptback wings. It was designed by an Austrian army officer and graduate engineer, Hans Umlauff von Frankwell, and was built in the Vienna factory of Jacob Lohner and Company, the same firm that produced the fuselages for Etrich’s Taube. In June 1911, Umlauff won the Vienna-Budapest-Vienna racing prize in a Pfeilflieger, and secured for Lohner a LA contract. Eventually 212 Pfeilfliegers of various versions were built, including six for export to Spain. Austro-Hungarian aviators soon began setting world speed and altitude records in their Lohner Taubes and Pfeilfliegers, such that in 1912 the Dual Monarchy, with eighteen world aviation records, trailed only France (45), and was ahead of Italy (11), the United States (8), Germany (5), and Britain and Belgium (1 each).54 Too much could be made of this brief period in the forefront of aviation, but it does demonstrate a significant intellectual capacity for, and interest in, flight, and therefore points to material deficiencies to explain later failures and shortcomings.

The LA began procuring aircraft in 1909, a full year before Etrich introduced his Taube. Of the first five acquisitions, two were Farman-Voisin products, one a Wright Flyer, one a Blériot of the type demonstrated at Rákosmező, and one a domestic design by Hungarian engineer Sándor Svachulay. Three of the airplanes, like the Bömches M IV airship, were gifts from wealthy citizens.⁵⁵ Austrian officers Miescislaus Miller and Hans Umlauff, the first two Habsburg military pilots, had taken instruction on the Farman-Voisin. The Dual Monarchy’s third army pilot (and first Magyar), Captain István Petróczy, learned to fly the Wright machine, and established the army’s first flying school two years later at Wiener-Neustadt.⁵⁶ Conrad von Hötzendorf, the chief of the General Staff, became convinced of the advantages of aerial observation after a September 1910 flight with Adolf Warchalowski (becoming on that occasion perhaps the first army chief of staff of any nation to fly).⁵⁷ Conrad issued a staff directive the following month that called for an air force of 200 planes and 400 pilots. This force was to be distributed in pairs of aircraft to the General Staff, army, and corps headquarters, as well as to the forty-eight infantry regiments, while the four primary fortresses (Cracow, Przemysl, Pola, and Cattaro) would receive three planes each.⁵⁸ Conrad’s “clear appreciation of the importance of aviation in a future war was influential in counteracting the conservatism of the War Ministry.”⁵⁹ In addition to increasing the LA’s funding he also initiated the domestic airplane competition in which the Taube made such an impression. Such full-throated support of aviation was unusual among contemporary chiefs of staff, but it should be remembered that Conrad was an avowed social Darwinist who campaigned ceaselessly for a preventive war against Serbia.60 His embrace of air power might therefore have owed more to a general enthusiasm for war than to his shrewd perception of the efficacy of a new arm. Whatever his motivation, Conrad’s 1910 directive was not realized. Four years later the Dual Monarchy entered the First World War with fewer than one hundred aircraft of all types.⁶¹

In France, meanwhile, the situation was very nearly reversed: even as some military intellectuals dismissed the airplane’s potential, the army began to purchase them in large numbers. In 1910, Brigadier General Ferdinand Foch, then the commandant of the French staff college and later the supreme commander of Allied forces, observed an aerial display and was not impressed: “L’aviation pour l’armée, c’est zéro.”⁶² Nevertheless, the French army ordered more than 200 airplanes in 1910–1911, with plans to add 100 machines in the years 1913–1914 and 600 in 1915.⁶³ British producers continued to rely on French designs for inspiration and translated French aviation documents to keep abreast of current aeronautical trends. The degree to which French technology dominated British thinking is demonstrated by the Royal Aircraft Factory’s type designations of B.E., F.E., and S.E., which stand for Blériot, Farman, or Santos Experimental.⁶⁴ Germany, whose early struggles with airplane design and fascination with dirigible airships stymied domestic production, started to make up lost ground, spending twice as much as Britain on military aviation in 1911–1912.⁶⁵ Italy established an aviation service in 1910 and appropriated 10 million liras (approximately £400,000) for its equipping. The tsar’s brother-in-law founded the Committee for Strengthening the Air Fleet and organized Russian air forces along French and German lines, with an initial outlay of 900,000 rubles (£10,000).⁶⁶

Public enthusiasm for flying grew faster even than government interest. It was estimated at the end of 1910 that there were 500 licensed pilots in the world. Of those licenses, the Aéro-Club de France had issued 345 (of which 272 were to French nationals, 27 to Russians, 19 to Britons, and the remaining 36 to citizens of 18 other countries).67 The Deutschen Luftschiffer Verbandes, a distant second in pilot production, had certified sixty-three pilots by that time, and the Royal Aero Club forty-seven pilots.⁶⁸ Austria-Hungary had eighteen certified pilots, all of whom earned their licenses within the Dual Monarchy. Russia could boast of more licensed pilots, but had no domestic training establishment—all of its fliers were foreign-trained.⁶⁹ Two years later, nearly 2,500 certificates had been granted around the world, and although Austria-Hungary’s share remained the same (91 pilots for 3.6 percent), Russia had also maintained its position (162 pilots, 6 percent), and Italy had grown its pilot corps from three in 1910 to 186 in 1912. The 1912 world records show a qualitative Habsburg edge over its future adversaries in both men and machines, but the large disparity in numbers of trained pilots should have alarmed the General Staff in Vienna.

During this time aircraft first participated in large-scale military maneuvers. In the September 1910 French army exercises, airships were grounded due to high winds, while airplanes managed to get airborne and were praised as “indispensable to armies as the cannons and the rifles.”⁷⁰ British pilots flew in Indian maneuvers in 1911 and in the United Kingdom in 1912, in each case providing important intelligence about opposing units’ dispositions. The Italians followed a similar scheme in their 1911 war games, each side having five airplanes, with a dirigible at the disposal of the general directing the exercise.⁷¹ The Austro-Hungarian army first experienced airplane reconnaissance in its V Corps’ 1911 autumn maneuvers, during which both military and civilian pilots took part, flying Etrich and Pischof machines. Despite the mountainous terrain and river fog in the Pilis hills north of Budapest, the “red” pilots were able to track the progress of “blue” forces attacking from Komárom. Their written observations, dropped into a meadow near the red force headquarters, proved crucial to the successful defense of a key Danube bridge. In the course of the exercises, the aircraft flew hundred-nautical-mile missions, and the M I Parseval airship stayed aloft five hours. These maneuvers demonstrated to the military leaders of Austria-Hungary the significance of the airplane and the necessity for attending to the further development of the air arm.72 Implementation was not immediate, and X and XI Corps’ exercises later in the month in the vicinity of Przemysl did not include an aviation component.⁷³

Just weeks after the conclusion of the Habsburg maneuvers, Italy mobilized its embryonic air fleet for service against Ottoman forces in Libya. Nine aircraft (three Nieuport, two Taube, and two Blériot monoplanes, along with two Farman biplanes), eleven pilots and thirty enlisted men formed the initial cadre; three airships and additional aircraft and pilots arrived later (including a squadron of civilian fliers).⁷⁴ Italian aviators “immediately began to claim a number of ‘firsts’ in aerial warfare”: the first combat reconnaissance missions, the first bombardment from an airplane (a Taube), as well as the first casualties from ground fire and the first captured airman.⁷⁵ The Italian General Staff was well aware that these were pioneering efforts. Its own summary report of the war praised the value of aerial reconnaissance and photography, and credited bombardment with “a wonderful moral effect,” although it “did no material damage.” “The value of this experiment,” the report continued, “which Italy had the fortune to effect for the first time in history, will furnish a treasure for the future.”⁷⁶ One officer who embraced that future was Giulio Douhet, a forty-year-old captain of artillery, who had predicted in 1909 that the air force would someday join the army and navy as an equal combatant.⁷⁷ In 1912 he was more emphatic: “A new weapon has come forth, the sky has become a new battlefield.”⁷⁸ Italian leaders apparently agreed and began a rapid expansion of the air force. A national subscription raised an additional three million liras (£130,000) for aircraft purchases, and by 1914 the Battaglione Aviatori had thirteen squadrons, two flying schools, and fourteen military airfields.79

Closer to the lands of the Dual Monarchy, the 1912–1913 Balkan Wars provided additional, if somewhat less dramatic, examples of the utility of air power. Neither side in the conflict had a substantial air force, and most aircraft were French or German, as were many of the pilots (joined by Britons, Russians, and Americans). Due to technological constraints as well as moral scruple (the foreign pilots being in some cases unwilling to bomb), there was little offensive action or innovation. Nevertheless, the conflict gave “more convincing evidence that aerial reconnaissance was of great benefit in learning the enemy’s dispositions and movements.”⁸⁰

The years 1911 to 1913 were a time of disruption in the senior ranks of the Austro-Hungarian military establishment. In September 1911, Franz von Schönaich was replaced as minister of war by Moritz von Auffenberg, and Conrad, chief of the General Staff since 1906, was forced out in favor of Blasius von Schemua. The proximate cause of Conrad’s fall was his attempt to instigate a preventive war with Italy while Rome was preoccupied in Libya. Dismissed on December 2, 1911, Conrad was recalled by the emperor only fifty-three weeks later.⁸¹ In the midst of this turbulence, Major Emil Uzelac, an engineer serving in the transport corps, was selected for promotion to lieutenant colonel and appointed head of the LA. Uzelac, an “ideal choice to imbue the LA with substance and character,” was a bit of a character himself.⁸² His own origins—he was born in Komárom to an Orthodox smallholder from Croatia—illustrate the ethnic variety of the Habsburg empire as well as the opportunities available in its army to talented men of any extraction. Uzelac learned to fly after taking command in April 1912, earning his pilot’s certificate (Austria-Hungary’s sixty-first) in August of that year at the age of forty-five.⁸³ He became an accomplished and respected pilot and insisted on flying many of the LA’s new models himself before they reached operational units. Promoted to colonel in 1914 and brigadier general (vezérőrnagy) in 1918, he led the LA until being replaced in the closing weeks of the war.⁸⁴ The length of his tenure as Austria-Hungary’s chief of the air service exceeded that of any other major combatants.

Table 1.1 Aviation spending, 1912–1914

Although Uzelac was an energetic and capable leader, and Conrad a supportive chief of staff, Austria-Hungary’s expenditures on military aviation in the years immediately preceding the First World War were dramatically lower than those of other major European powers.85 As Table 1.1 shows, the population of the Dual Monarchy was 26 percent larger than that of France, but France spent fifty times more on military aviation than the Habsburgs (more than sixty times per person). The government in Vienna even declined to lend its support to the Austrian Air Fleet Fund, a civilian revenue-generating scheme copied from the successful German effort that raised 7 million marks (£340,000) for military aviation from 1912 to 1914.⁸⁶ German outlays brought the two future Central Powers nations to near parity with Great Britain and France, but the enormous discrepancy between spending in Vienna and Berlin was a precursor of future wartime dependency.

The Habsburg parsimony extended well beyond aviation to all areas of the armed forces, and “in the years before 1914 Austria-Hungary gradually dropped behind her competitors.”⁸⁷ Russia, for example, had trebled its military expenditures from 1871 to 1914, while the Dual Monarchy’s spending had only doubled. “Romania, with a population of seven and a half millions, most of whom lived in abject poverty, provided almost as much money for her armed forces as Hungary, with a population three times as great as that of Romania, did for the Common Austro-Hungarian Army.”88 The Hungarian parliament in fact refused to pass laws approving credits and increasing recruitment for the Common Army until Magyar became the language of command for regiments raised from Hungarian lands, and until the Honvéd was permitted its own artillery units. The pro-Habsburg orientation of Franz Josef’s army is well established, and its role in holding together the fragmenting monarchy is not in doubt.⁸⁹ Among many Hungarians, however, the army was unpopular, a “remnant of royal absolutism [that] contradicted the spirit of dualism and the country’s Hungarian character.”⁹⁰ Parliamentary opposition to the increased military budget was overcome only in June 1912, when István Tisza, then speaker of the national assembly, “ordered the parliamentary guard to escort recalcitrant MPs from the debating chamber and got the government majority to vote through the program.”⁹¹ The new army bill would not take effect until 1915, which meant the Dual Monarchy went to war with a force whose size was constrained by an 1889 law. In terms of raw manpower, Austria-Hungary fielded 2.3 million men in 1914, while France, with 10 million fewer inhabitants, put nearly 4 million in uniform.⁹² Nor could Vienna hope to make up with firepower what it lacked in soldiers: “the Austro-Hungarian army was the most under-gunned in relation to its (already inferior) strength of any army in Europe.”⁹³ It was also the most “underplaned,” with only fifty-three frontline aircraft in both the army and navy.⁹⁴ In contrast, Germany fielded 232 combat machines, and among the Allies, France had nearly 300, Russia 190, and Britain more than 90.⁹⁵

An exceptionally well-managed acquisition process would have made the most of the few koronas available for aircraft purchases and, given the high standard of Austro-Hungarian aviation technology in 1912, might have made the numerical gap less significant than it seemed. Unfortunately for the Dual Monarchy, its aviation procurement was marred by mistakes and inefficiencies at nearly every turn. After the early success with the Taube and Pfeilflieger, the War Ministry decided to order, at least temporarily, exclusively from Lohner. This “grievous lack of judgment” put Lohner in a position of monopoly and forced smaller firms (such as Autobiplan Werke, the builder of the Pischof planes that flew well in the 1911 maneuvers) out of business. The dwindling opportunities in Austria-Hungary also caused a minor brain drain, as many engineer graduates of Vienna’s Technische Hochschule sought work abroad.96 As long as peace prevailed and the Lohner airplanes continued to perform well, the effects of the monopoly remained hidden. An investigation that followed the crash of a new Pfeilflieger in the spring of 1914 revealed that Lohner’s wings were understrength, and that the LA’s entire fleet required retrofitting. Lieutenant Colonel Uzelac blamed complacency for Lohner’s mistake and claimed they employed “shoddy and primitive design practices” when compared to German and British firms he had visited. With its air force grounded, “the war ministry had no choice but to reverse its policy and permit the establishment of German-owned companies in Austria-Hungary.” Albatros and Aviatik quickly set up subsidiaries in Vienna, and Deutsche Flugzeug Werke founded the Lloyd factory outside Budapest. Austrian financier Camillo Castiglioni, a major investor in Lohner, bought Igo Etrich’s Brandenburg company, the first of many acquisitions that would eventually give him enormous power over Austro-Hungarian aircraft production.⁹⁷

While Uzelac’s description of the “shoddy and primitive” work on the Pfeilfliegers was undoubtedly accurate at the time, it was not a fair characterization of all Habsburg aviation handiwork, the quality of which was generally quite high.⁹⁸ That Austro-Hungarian aviation industrial policy was a marvel of inefficiency, however, is absolutely clear. Throughout the war Vienna consistently overestimated its ability to produce aircraft and underestimated the resources required to achieve its unrealistic goals. At the beginning of the war, the LA’s commander had estimated that domestic industry would need to produce forty-six aircraft per month by the end of the year. Even with the new factories, only sixty-four planes were built from August to December 1914. German imports added forty-eight machines to the inventory, but still the increase did not meet the LA’s need. Uzelac then raised his estimate to sixty per month, but saw deliveries decline from twenty-four to seven aircraft per month due to the introduction of new types.99 Austria-Hungary’s aircraft industry expanded from 218 workers in August 1914 to 5,983 in January 1917, an increase of 2,600 percent, but demand continued to outstrip supply. After the Aviation Department successfully appealed to the War Ministry for exemptions from service for some critical workers, it still received less than 60 percent of the requirement, and many of those craftsmen were not suited to their tasks. Machinists capable of precise work found themselves assigned to mass production in munitions factories even as less-skilled lathe hands labored to build engines. “Skilled furniture makers and carpenters passed their time in frontline companies ‘making ingenious war mementos to amuse themselves’ while the aircraft industry had to utilize ordinary carpenters for extremely intricate work.”¹⁰⁰ Production efficiency did increase over the course of the war as a result of greater standardization and experience, but through 1918 Austro-Hungarian firms required twice as many employees to build an aircraft as in German factories (thirty-nine versus nineteen).¹⁰¹ With nearly one-fifth of its population—almost all the men aged eighteen to fifty-three—under arms, the Dual Monarchy could ill afford this level of inefficiency, but the relative lack of mechanization required skilled labor.¹⁰²

Elements of Vienna’s commercial policy exacerbated the existing problems of an underdeveloped industrial sector, increasing scarcity of natural resources, and deficiencies in labor. One of the most troubling aspects was the encouragement or tolerance of monopoly. After suffering the consequences of its decision to award an exclusive contract to Lohner in 1914, the War Ministry, by not acting to stop mergers and buyouts, was faced in 1916 with a cartel that was largely immune to government pressure. Domestic industry’s inability to supply the Luftfahrtruppen (LFT, as the LA became known in July 1915) with sufficient aircraft forced Austria-Hungary to rely on German machines. The German government was naturally concerned with its own aircraft needs and permitted only a small number of companies to export planes to the Dual Monarchy, most notably Brandenburg, Fokker, Rumpler, Albatros, and Aviatik (the last two of which also had licensed production factories in Austria-Hungary).

Brandenburg was by far the biggest exporter, delivering more aircraft to Vienna in the war’s first two years (243) than all other German firms combined.103 After October 1915, it was in the hands of Camillo Castiglioni, whose involvement with Habsburg aviation dated back to 1909, when his trading company, Motor-Luftfahrzeug-Gesellschaft (MLG), brokered the LA’s purchase of the M I and M II airships. MLG later bought the Austrian patent rights for Etrich’s Taube and secured global sales rights for Lohner’s products. Lohner and Castiglioni, along with a pair of Hungarian firms, Ganz and Manfréd Weiss (WM), also founded Ungarische Flugzeugfabrik AG (UFAG), the first aircraft factory in Hungary, which became the Dual Monarchy’s second-largest aircraft producer. Austria-Hungary’s most productive company was the local branch of Albatros, which, after its purchase by Castiglioni in early 1917, changed its name to Phönix. By March 1917, the Castiglioni conglomeration of Brandenburg, Phönix, and UFAG had produced half of all the Dual Monarchy’s aircraft.¹⁰⁴ Brandenburg’s importance to the LFT had already given Castiglioni leverage to “dictate comparatively high prices to the Austro-Hungarian Army, which had no choice but to pay them,” and UFAG was able to squeeze a price increase of nearly 60 percent from the navy.¹⁰⁵ The navy staked its hopes in 1918 on new types from the Castiglioni concerns, but after the failure of a 350-horsepower flying boat, had no new aircraft models to meet the Italian threat in the Adriatic. Meanwhile, Castiglioni further strengthened his position early that year by acquiring Bayerische Motoren Werke. In the wake of a rumored consolidation of all Habsburg aviation industry under a single head, Uzelac requested that Castiglioni, then in possession of a navy deferment, give up control of his companies and “be immediately inducted and sent to a service post, for example, with the eastern corps in Palestine, that hinders any commercial transactions with the rear.”106 Nothing of the sort occurred, and the Castiglioni cartel did not prove fatal to the LFT. In fact its constituent firms produced some very fine products for the air service. The role of Brandenburg in keeping the Habsburg air troops aloft in 1915 cannot be denied. But the cost was high, not only in the actual prices the firms exacted from the ministry, but also in missed opportunities for promotion of other designs and developers, and in the damaging failure to deliver the navy’s flying boat. The War Ministry awoke too late to the dangers of centralized ownership, and then directed an emotional and ineffective personal attack on Castiglioni.

Each of the major combatants approached the problem of aircraft production differently. France, befitting its position as the world’s major aviation power, encouraged creativity among its designers and, as a result, had the greatest diversity of types. That approach sacrificed efficiency but gained ability to hedge against obsolescence. French engines—rotary, radial, and in-line—powered the Allies. Britain favored fewer designs and standardized production centered at Farnborough, an approach nearly the opposite of the French, but one that suited a relative latecomer with enormous experience in mass production. Germany also limited production types but did not insist on interchangeability between private companies and therefore did not reap the full benefits of standardization.¹⁰⁷ Austria-Hungary, after early attempts to choose single types for production proved problematic, was obliged to accept whatever designs could be manufactured and delivered in quantity, however insufficient.

Austria-Hungary’s limited industrial base and small air service fleet magnified any acquisition errors, because it did not possess the requisite reserves in either capacity or inventory to cushion falls. After Italy entered the war in 1915, LFT requirements spiked. At the same time, the rugged conditions on the Italian front exposed the inadequacies of earlier domestic designs, and forced the Dual Monarchy to rely on Brandenburg imports. In an effort to direct and improve Austro-Hungarian production, the LFT placed orders for an untested biplane designed by Professor Richard Knoller of the Vienna Technical University. Four domestic factories, Lohner, Aviatik, Phönix, and Wiener Karosserie und Flugzeugfabrik (WKF), were directed to build the Knoller craft. “Hamstrung from the start by a conflicting chain of command, diffused responsibility, and inept engineering, the Knoller program became a major scandal and a vituperative political affair.”108 One hundred eighty-four aircraft were produced in the fiasco, few of which ever flew, at a tremendous cost in money, time, and diversion of resources. The incident tarnished Knoller’s reputation and made it difficult for his university research center to gather, analyze, and distribute technical reports.

The dynamics of a small fleet also made anticipating obsolescence and preparing aircraft replacements more critical and difficult. Existing contracts on operational aircraft would sometimes be canceled to make way for more advanced designs, which often failed to meet expectations. By the time production had been resumed on the proven craft, its technology was even farther behind.¹⁰⁹ This phenomenon was by no means restricted to Austria-Hungary, but without the depth of German production, the variety of France, or the standardization of Britain, it was far more damaging to its aviators. An anonymous letter to the war minister in 1916 illustrated the destructive effects of these reactive procurement policies coupled with excessive fear of enemy bombers:

The initial, mostly accurate reports concerning the superior qualities of enemy bombers were accepted as fact with no attempt at verification. This led to a precipitous rush to issue production orders—generally incapable of being fulfilled—to the detriment of normal supply. Priority contracts, at unreasonably high cost, were awarded to many factories. The capture of a Caproni had a sobering effect: further development was neglected and interest waned. The bombers, rushed to completion are now stored at Aspern (Brandenburg, Lloyd) or lie incomplete at factories (Aviatik, Lohner, Öffag and Phönix). No one of authority cares a whit about them. Frontline requests are passed off with excuses. Not a single test has been performed to finally bring the bombers to the Front.110

The bombers in question never reached full operational capability, although Gotha did supply thirty-nine twin-engined G.IVs for bombing missions in 1918.¹¹¹

The final production tallies show that Austria-Hungary’s aircraft factories fell far short of those of the other major European combatants. The incredible disparity manifested in prewar expenditures was reduced, but not nearly enough. Austro-Hungarian firms built 5,181 airplanes during the war, while Germany produced roughly 46,000. Great Britain led the Allies with 54,000 airframes, France made 52,000 (but over twice the number of engines as Britain), and Italy contributed an additional 12,000 machines. Using the population figures cited above, Austria-Hungary produced 101 aircraft per million people; Germany 676 per million. Italy constructed 3.5 times as many planes per capita as the Dual Monarchy, and British and French fabrication rates were approximately twelve times that of Austria-Hungary.¹¹² Habsburg production of other weapons also trailed the other major powers, but by a smaller margin than its aircraft production. For instance, Austro-Hungarian firms (primarily Škoda) made 225 artillery pieces per million people, while Italy produced 338 per million (only 50 percent more, or one-seventh the disparity in aircraft production). British and French munitions plants created only twice as many cannon per capita as did Austria-Hungary (one-sixth the difference in airplanes).¹¹³ One could conclude from this disparity that the Habsburg General Staff was more resistant to innovation and failed to embrace air power, but Conrad’s 1910 expansion of the LA and the appointment and subsequent support of the able Uzelac suggest otherwise. A more plausible explanation can be found in the relative complexity and novelty of the weapons: artillery, although a critical component of modern warfare, was considerably less complicated to design and produce than aircraft; was a more stable technology; and the empire had a long history of manufacturing its own guns. Airplanes, on the other hand, were new, technologically volatile, and required nimble manufacturing processes to avoid obsolescence.

If Austro-Hungarian aircraft manufacturing and procurement were far behind the other combatants, the organization of its air service was on lines very similar to leading European powers. The French escadrille was the archetype, “built around six aircraft and their crews, a force that prewar maneuvers had seemed to indicate was adequate to supply the reconnaissance needs of an army corps.”114 German Feldflieger Abteilungen conformed to the French model, while the British doubled the number of aircraft in their squadrons because of a lack of experienced officers for command. Uzelac also settled on six airplanes (plus two in reserve) as the number for his Fliegerkompagnien (fliks), when in July 1914 the LA “converted the pre-war, static Flugparks into mobile combat units.”¹¹⁵ Within the first three months of the war, fifteen fliks had been created.¹¹⁶ The six-aircraft flik remained the basic combat unit for the entire war, but units became increasingly specialized as air power matured. After the first fifty fliks were activated as reconnaissance units, flik 51 began its service in summer 1917 as a fighter unit. Bomber fliks soon followed, and after a 1918 reorganization, the LFT comprised seven types of Fliks: D-fliks, general purpose units that reported to army divisions; F-fliks, for long-range reconnaissance; G-fliks, equipped with multiengined bombers (Grossflugzeug); J-fliks, the fighter (Jagd) units; K-fliks, for corps-level reconnaissance (of which few were formed); P-fliks, for photo reconnaissance; and Rb-fliks, equipped with automatic cameras for strip photography (Reihenbild).¹¹⁷ This reorganization amounted to an intellectual recognition of the distinct forms of air power, but came too late to have any real effect. Even in August 1918, most (fifty-one) fliks were D-fliks; ten were F-fliks, thirteen J-fliks, and five G-fliks.118 By war’s end however, all of the D-fliks had been converted into specialized companies (some had become Schlacht-Fliks executing rudimentary close air support). Reconnaissance remained the LFT’s primary mission, with thirty-eight of the final seventy-seven fliks devoted to corps, photo, or long-range reconnaissance.¹¹⁹

In this development, the Habsburg air service followed the trend in the other combatants’ air forces. In 1914, all operational military aircraft were devoted to reconnaissance. By the summer of 1915, 10 percent of the planes were fighters. The next year the percentage of reconnaissance craft had fallen to 51, fighters had climbed to 42 percent, and bombers accounted for the rest. In 1917, the proportion of reconnaissance units remained constant, while fighters dropped to 30 percent, with bombers and “battle planes” devoted to ground support, each making up approximately 10 percent of the forces. The war’s final year saw a slight decrease in the number of reconnaissance craft and a commensurate rise in fighters, but no significant change in bombers or strike planes.¹²⁰

When Austria-Hungary began mobilizing in July 1914, aviation units were first sent to the Serbian front, although the Russian front eventually received the preponderance of forces. Two fliks had departed from Austria for the south, and two were activated near the front itself (at Mostar and Újvidék) before any LA units headed east. As a result of Conrad’s strategic indecision, Fliks 1 and 5 were redirected to the Russian front within days; in the case of Flik 1, without having flown a single operational sortie in the south. Flik 7, the first on the Russian front, was activated at Cracow on August 6, 1914. It was eventually joined by nine others, so that at the end of 1914 there were ten fliks serving in the east and four in the Balkans.¹²¹

It appears that LA aerial reconnaissance did not play a significant role in the early fighting against Serbia, but there were a few examples of successful air attacks. Habsburg aviators (it is unclear if they were LA or Seefliegerkorps crews) struck one of the war’s first offensive aerial blows on August 15, 1914, against Montenegrin gun emplacements at Lovćen, a 5,800-foot-high mountain overlooking the Austro-Hungarian naval base at Cattaro.122 No damage to the guns was recorded (they were eventually destroyed by naval gunfire), but the attempt shows an understanding of the potential of aerial bombardment and a spirit of innovation among Austro-Hungarian fliers. The Lovćen attacks were conducted with primitive bombs that had match-lit fuses, and one Austrian plane was nearly destroyed when the pilot dropped the bomb after lighting it and saw it roll under his seat. He was able to retrieve it and toss it overboard, where “it burst only a few hundred feet below him.”¹²³ The pilot, Lieutenant Adolf Heyrowsky of Flik 2, was undeterred by this mishap. In September, he and his observer, flying in a German-built Aviatik B.I, destroyed a pontoon bridge at Kupinovo, “thereby cutting off a few thousand Serbian troops who were taken prisoner.”¹²⁴ The Serbian campaign showed that the rigors of active operational flying were too much for the aged Taubes, and they were quickly removed from frontline service.¹²⁵ In the war’s second year, observation crew performance improved, and their value to the army commanders increased. Aerial reconnaissance missions around Belgrade provided detailed sketches of Serb artillery positions, which enabled accurate counterbattery fire and contributed to the successful siege of the capital.¹²⁶

The impact of aerial reconnaissance was mixed on the Russian front as well. There were, to be sure, instances of individual bravery and initiative. Fliers from Fliks 5 and 11 flew at extremely low altitudes in order to draw Russian fire that would reveal enemy positions and strength.¹²⁷ Unfortunately for Conrad and his army commanders, and in spite of such efforts by some Habsburg airmen, the LA failed to account for all the Russian forces in Galicia (the Austro-Hungarian cavalry fared no better). In late August 1914, Conrad’s initial plan for a cautious movement to the Vistula had become instead an attempt at an envelopment of the tsar’s forces in Poland. His staff estimated fairly accurately the size of the Russian armies—about fifty divisions—but could not pin down their locations. A concentration to the north around Brest-Litovsk would make Conrad’s pincer movement viable, so he trusted information that confirmed this wish. And when “aerial reconnaissance reported that there were no major Russian formations on the roads between the line Proskurov-Tarnopol to the north and the River Dniester to the south,” Conrad’s course was set.128 Undetected, however, were the Russian and Third and Eighth Armies, “advancing from the east, marching by night but protected by the woods from overhead observation by day.”¹²⁹ Those armies proved critical to blunting the Austro-Hungarian offensive in Galicia, and later formed part of the Russian force that besieged Przemysl.

That the LA was not able to find the tsarist armies should not necessarily be attributed to incompetence. The Russians had learned the importance of concealment from aerial observation in the first days of the war, German aircraft having begun reconnaissance flights over Russia as early as August 2. Movement at night and exploitation of overhead cover were the first of many tactics employed by land forces to negate aerial observation. Those countermeasures notwithstanding, German airmen were able to follow the progress of the Russian and First and Second Armies, which kept their own aircraft in reserve. Even when Russian planes were aloft, Russian commanders rarely trusted their observations. This decided advantage in aerial reconnaissance certainly contributed to the tremendous German victory at Tannenberg. At this time, the Central Powers’ air services were similarly organized, trained, and equipped. But the Russians’ rapid adoption of deception tactics made for a significant difference in the effectiveness of German and Austro-Hungarian air power in the first battles in the east. The German experience resulted in the high command’s fervent embrace of aerial observation, and led Hindenburg to declare, “Ohne Flieger kein Tannenberg!”¹³⁰ Conrad spread blame for the Austro-Hungarian defeat liberally (his allies, his staff, his intelligence services), so the LA did not suffer in relation to the other arms, but neither was it able to capitalize on the promise showed by aerial reconnaissance in the prewar maneuvers.131

The LA did deliver in other trying circumstances on the Russian front. In a development that called to mind 1871 Paris and presaged the airmail boom of the 1920s, the planes of Fliks 11 and 14 made fourteen mail-carrying flights from Przemysl in the course of its four-month siege (balloons from the fortress balloon section were also used, as were homemade balloons). All but one successfully reached Austro-Hungarian lines.¹³² The flights transported military dispatches as well as postcards and letters. This liaison function was especially critical since all ground communication with the fortress had been severed since early November, and the defenders relied on wireless telegraphy for contact with higher headquarters. Allied press agencies noted this use of air power, although they overestimated the frequency of the flights. The Daily Telegraph reported that “communication between the fortress and the Austrian lines seems to have been maintained almost daily by means of aviators, who kept up a regular post, taking out letters and bringing back as much stores as their machines could carry.”¹³³ In fact, the flights averaged only one per ten days of the siege. When Przemysl fell to Russian forces on March 22, 1915, over 130,000 Austro-Hungarians surrendered, including elements of Flik 11.¹³⁴ A contemporary Hungarian magazine included the number of cannon lost (“1,050 of all calibers, for the most part completely obsolete, 1865 and 1875 patterns, which in any case were blown up”), but did not mention captured aircraft.¹³⁵ Presumably the fliks destroyed their aircraft before they fell into Russian hands.

The air war on the Eastern Front progressed at a much slower pace than in the west. In the east, the forces committed were smaller, they were dispersed over a wider area, and technological improvements tended to originate in the west. The lower density of forces meant that aerial combat occurred much less frequently in the east. Thus the Luftstreitkräfte (German air force), the only air service to field major forces on both fronts, sustained only 189 of its 3,128 total aircraft losses in the east, and counted just 358 Eastern Front kills among the 7,425 credited to its fighter pilots.136 Since air-to-air engagements largely drove the air services’ requirements for higher performance aircraft, the relative lack of these engagements contributed to the slower rate of innovation. Obsolescence came more slowly in the east, and older aircraft remained viable weapons long after they had been abandoned in the west. This did not mean that flying was easier on the Eastern Front. The larger area and more dispersed formations required airmen routinely to operate farther away from their aerodromes, which placed a premium on both navigation skills and mechanical reliability. “A French pilot who flew with the Russians in the Carpathians said that he reacted with ‘intense stupefaction’ when he discovered that his airfield was 80 kilometers from the front lines. Each mission thus entailed a flight of 200 kilometers ‘in a glacial cold’ unknown in France.”¹³⁷ Just as the Habsburg aviators were settling into difficult but somewhat stable air wars in Russia and the Balkans, Italy joined the war against the Central Powers. Aerial combat over the Dolomites promised to be a combination of fighting on the Eastern and Western Fronts: environmental conditions equal to the worst previously encountered—rugged mountains, harsh weather, airfields too few and too small—as well as the prospect of up-to-date Allied fighters.

Italy fielded in May 1915 a Corpo Aeronautica Militare (CAM) of 169 aircraft (including 19 seaplanes of the naval section), primarily prewar French designs. That put Italy, entering a one-front war, at rough numerical parity with the Dual Monarchy, whose “air service consequently faced opposition on three fronts with a production base inadequate for one.”¹³⁸ Austria-Hungary’s domestic production and German imports made good on operational losses, but were not sufficient for creating new fliks for the Italian front. The first unit active in the southwest was Flik 8, pulled from Galicia on May 13, 1915 and sent to defend the naval base at Pola in anticipation of hostilities in the Adriatic. Other fliks moved from the Serbian front (2 and 4) or were converted from training companies (12).¹³⁹ By the end of 1915 the LFT had seven fliks serving in operations against Italy, three against Serbia, and eight against Russia.¹⁴⁰

Figure 1.1. A LFT Fokker B.I on the Italian front in 1915. Photo: Fortepan/György Punka.

Operations on the Italian front began, as in the east, as observation missions, and eventually grew to encompass the entire range of air warfare: offensive and defensive fighter sweeps, air interdiction, close air support, and strategic bombing. Austro-Hungarian airmen had conducted small-scale aerial attacks intermittently since the Lovćen raid in the war’s earliest days, but had not yet attempted long-range, multiship attacks, lacking both rationale and equipment. By mid-1915, the Italians had both. Giulio Douhet, the Italian officer who was an early air power proponent, had been promoted to colonel and was convinced that aerial bombardment offered a path to victory that would avoid the human wastage he was witnessing in the bitter Alpine warfare. Through his interest in aviation he had come to know Giovanni Caproni, a young airplane designer. Caproni had begun work in 1910 on large cargo aircraft before turning his hand to building bombers, and his aircraft equipped the Italian air service’s first bomber squadron.141 On August 20, 1915, the CAM launched its first raids against Austria-Hungary. Many more were to follow. The Douhet-Caproni partnership was responsible for the increasingly powerful three-engine bombers that attacked targets in Austria-Hungary in formations of up to thirty-six machines.¹⁴² Italian forces with their superior airplanes ultimately bombed Habsburg cities on 254 occasions, while the LFT, flying less capable aircraft but aided by the geographical proximity of Italian cities to the front, managed 503 raids.¹⁴³

The first of these targeted Venetian port facilities. A viable multiengined bomber was not available to the LFT until Gotha G.IVs arrived from Germany in 1918, so Austro-Hungarian bombing missions were generally conducted by the versatile two-seat B- or C-type reconnaissance planes. These single-engine craft ranged as far as the west coast of Italy, striking Spezia, Genoa, and, most dramatically, Milan. On February 14, 1916, a force of ten Lohner and Lloyds from Fliks 7, 16, and 17 launched from airfields around Trento for the 240-mile flight over the mountains and Lombard plain. In spite of Italian antiaircraft artillery (AAA) and attempts at fighter interception, all the LFT planes dropped their 150-pound bomb loads and returned safely to their bases.¹⁴⁴ This attack, fifteen months before the first raid on Britain by German airplanes, may have been the first strategic bombardment carried out by heavier-than-air craft.¹⁴⁵ One of the observer/bombardiers, a Magyar lieutenant from Transylvania, recounted the raid for Csíki Lapok, his hometown newspaper. During the approach to the city, a sudden change in the wind ruined his aim and forced the flight to turn around for another attempt at bomb release: “Once more here is the target. I wave: a little left, a little back to the right; I aim—now! Away with all five [bombs]. One spot is already covered in smoke. Something burns. I see four explosions from mine. They are in a good place.”¹⁴⁶ A Daily Telegraph reporter described the reaction of the Milanese to their first aerial attack:

Firemen galloped through the town warning the inhabitants, most of whom, however, even after the anti-aircraft guns had begun sending shells into the sky, failed to realize the danger. The appearance of a number of Italian airplanes, which were gradually circling to the height of the assailants, gave the impression to the vast majority of the spectators in the streets that only aerial defense practice was in progress. Soon, however, the bombs dropped by the Austrian machines … revealed the real nature of their attack, but this hardly prevented the crowds satisfying their curiosity and standing in the streets and public squares to watch the progress of the aerial battle, which at a certain moment was of thrilling intensity.147

Twelve people, including two children, were killed in the attack. There was no damage reported to military installations, nor was there widespread panic among the population. The CAM retaliated four days later with a raid on Ljubljana by seven Capronis, one of which was seriously damaged by a LFT fighter.¹⁴⁸ Subsequent Austro-Hungarian bombing missions had some tactical success (one raid sank a British submarine in port at Venice), but most of the damage was to noncombatants, including ninety-three killed in a casemate in Padua—“the worst incident involving civilians taking shelter from an air raid during the entire course of the First World War.”¹⁴⁹

After months of reciprocal city bombing (more than 400 Italians died in Austro-Hungarian air raids on towns), the new Habsburg emperor Charles I prohibited bombardment that could endanger civilians or cultural landmarks.¹⁵⁰ Italian authorities did not extend the same consideration to Austrian landmarks, but they were concerned about civilian casualties—as long as the civilians were ethnic kin. “The Italianità of Venezia Giulia, Istria, Dalmazia and the Trentino prevented us from making the cities our targets and limited the objectives to those of strictly military nature,” in the words of one Italian general.¹⁵¹ Despite this restraint, the CAM bombed Trieste, Ljubljana, and Innsbruck. To defend against increasing Italian attacks on lines of communication, the Dual Monarchy fielded AAA and a rudimentary air raid warning system that also covered major cities far behind the front.152

The shortcomings of the early-warning system were made evident on August 9, 1918, when an air defense supervisor in the Graz district took more than two hours to inform his superiors of a squadron heading northeast. Defensive pursuit planes took off from Wiener-Neustadt too late to intercept the intruders: Italy’s 87th Squadron was already bombarding Vienna with half a million propaganda leaflets. This raid was the brainchild of Gabriele D’Annunzio, a “legendary poet-adventurer” who flew on the mission in a two-seater and personally composed one of the propaganda messages.¹⁵³ The mission over Vienna “electrified the world,” but it was only the most audacious element of a robust Italian airborne propaganda campaign against Austria-Hungary.¹⁵⁴ In July 1918, the Habsburg Tenth Army reported that “plane propaganda has become even more intensive than earlier. Almost every day planes appear and shower not only the front but also the rear areas with a host of leaflets.” By September, the CAM was dropping 90,000 leaflets per day on Austro-Hungarian formations. The LFT initially resisted participation in propaganda flights due to fear that captured pilots would be executed, but it was Allied air superiority that ultimately prohibited effective Austro-Hungarian aerial propaganda.¹⁵⁵

Deep penetrations of the enemy’s homeland were spectacular feats and were therefore the focus of many news accounts of the time. Perhaps even more fascinating to the warring publics were the fighter aces who joined in individual combat above the clouds and died gloriously and young. The Dual Monarchy was no less susceptible to this romanticization of dogfighting than any other European nation. The LFT produced its own aces: fourteen pilots were credited with the required ten victories; another thirty-five scored five or more kills, the number that made one an ace in the French and American air services.¹⁵⁶

Measured in weight of effort, however, most of Austria-Hungary’s air power was used in direct support of the ground forces. Even the fighter and bomber units flew most of their missions near the front, either as escort for reconnaissance or doing battlefield interdiction. The LFT flew over 700 sorties during the Tenth Battle of Isonzo (May 1917), only 210 of which involved encounters with Italian airplanes. For Caporetto (Twelfth Isonzo), Uzelac was able to mass air power for the first time. His 150 Austro-Hungarian aircraft were joined by 90 German planes. He sent them “in formations of up to fifty machines, attacking Italian positions, lines of communications and reinforcements, and harried the retreating enemy to the Piave.”157 Attrition through the winter of 1917/1918 outpaced production, however, and for the June Piave offensive, Uzelac could only scrape together 170 planes including the German contribution. These airmen faced an Italian force augmented by British, French, and American pilots, and the Allies took control of the air. LFT losses increased dramatically. Only ten Habsburg planes and crews had been shot down in the first two weeks of June, but on the opening day of the summer offensive, they lost twenty-one aircraft. July brought no relief, with thirty-two LFT planes confirmed destroyed.¹⁵⁸ Allied aircraft attacked Austro-Hungarian lines with increasing impunity, the superiority of design evident to those watching from below. One Bosnian battalion commander, blessed with insight many airmen lack, observed, “In aviation, too, morale is very important, but technology is even more so.”¹⁵⁹

By September 1918, the LFT could no longer muster large formations, and on October 24, it made its last major contribution to the Dual Monarchy, attacking Allied columns advancing toward the Piave.¹⁶⁰ This last effort, against an Allied army fifty-five divisions strong, came one week after Charles I had declared the establishment of federalism within Austria, and one week before he released his officers to serve in the newly created national armies. Thus the LFT, like the Austro-Hungarian army itself, “outlived the empire and dynasty it had been meant to defend.”161

How well did the LFT serve the empire? And what legacy did it leave to the Hungarian national air service that followed it? That Austria-Hungary’s grand strategy failed is indisputable. Franz Josef and his ministers fundamentally misunderstood the nature of modern warfare, and in particular its dependence on mass production of arms and materiel. They were certainly not alone in this error, but the combination of late national industrialization and decades of economizing on military spending left the Habsburg armed forces at a disadvantage that they could not overcome. This problem was especially acute in military aviation, where the situation called for strong leadership from the War Ministry or strong support from its coffers for innovative manufacturers. A directed war economy or a truly free market economy would have served the Dual Monarchy best, but it arranged itself instead as near monopoly with indecisive ministerial guidance and little financial incentive to producers. This was the worst possible, but most predictable, approach to aircraft acquisition, and it did nothing to mitigate Austria-Hungary’s structural weaknesses.

At the operational level and below, however, the LFT was an effective fighting force. After the early reconnaissance mistakes in Galicia, Habsburg airmen provided solid intelligence, liaison, attack, and aerial defense to the imperial army and navy. The air services adapted well to improvements in aircraft technology, even when those improvements came to them later than to their opponents, and they recognized that increased specialization of air power required reorganization for maximum effect. First World War air-to-air victory claims are unreliable as a sole means of measuring air services’ effectiveness due to irregularities in national rules and problems of confirmation, but loss rates and unit histories confirm that the LFT gave as good as it got. Its pilots were not easy prey for Allied fighters, even when outnumbered and outgunned. That reflects well on the quality of LFT pilot training and leadership from the fliks up to Brigadier General Uzelac.

The national Hungarian air force that grew out of the LFT therefore had a mixed inheritance. The men who would build and lead the flying corps had experienced aerial combat, and in some cases had excelled at it. Yet the Habsburg air service had struggled from a lack of domestic industrial capacity that forced excessive reliance on a demanding ally, and had proved unable to avert a disastrous national defeat. Could a national Hungarian air force, formed in secret following its prohibition by the Great War victors, avoid the same fate?

NOTES

1. Bödők, Magyar feltalálók, p. 21.

2. Holló, A Galambtól a Griffmadárig, p. 8.

3. Price and height: see “Ballon Captif Godard” poster. One korona was approximately 1 shilling (the 1896 exchange rate was 1 GBP to 24 Kr). See Denzel, Handbook of World Exchange Rates, 1590–1914.

4. Franz Josef’s attendance: Holló, A Galambtól a Griffmadárig, p. 12; number of balloon flights: see text accompanying “Ballon Captif Godard” poster.

5. Chicago: see “Balloon Park” poster; Antwerp: see “Chateau Aerien” broadside advertisement; Earls Court: see “India and Ceylon Exhibition of 1896” advertisement, The Times, Apr. 18, 1896; Paris: see “Ascension Captive” broadsheet advertisement.

6. Hallion, Taking Flight, p. 123.

7. In this chapter I include in Hungary’s aviation heritage those developments within the Dual Monarchy that may have been achieved outside the borders of St. Stephen’s realm. While one should expect that innovation by ethnic Magyars would have had special resonance for the Hungarian public, there is every reason to think that for Habsburg aviators themselves proximity and access to the results of technical advances would have counted far more than the nationality of the innovators. In particular, I treat the experience of the Dual Monarchy’s Common Army and its air service as a legacy shared by all the successor states.

8. Morrow, German Air Power in World War I, p. 267.

9. Uchatius: Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, p. 2; up to 100 balloons: Hallion, Taking Flight, p. 66; Rothenberg, “Military Aviation,” p. 77; 25-kilogram bombs: Nagyváradi et al., Fejezetek a repülés történetéből, p. 11.

10. Hallion, Taking Flight, p. 66.

11. Ibid., pp. 68, 94.

12. Rothenberg, “Military Aviation,” p. 77.

13. Hallion, Taking Flight, p. 72.

14. Kennett, First Air War, 1914–1918, p. 3.

15. Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, p. 2.

16. Holló, A Galambtól a Griffmadárig, p. 12.

17. Rothenberg, “Military Aviation,” p. 77.

18. Nagyváradi et al., Fejezetek a repülés történetéből, p. 11.

19. Csonkaréti and Sárhidai, Az Osztrák-Magyar Monarchia tengerészeti repülői, p. 21.

20. Holló, A Galambtól a Griffmadárig, p. 12; Nagyváradi et al., Fejezetek a repülés történetéből, p. 11.

21. Hallion, Taking Flight, pp. 81–83, 87. Airborne messages went into Paris via carrier pigeon.

22. Ibid., p. 87.

23. Bödők, Magyar feltalálók, p. 27.

24. Hallion, Taking Flight, p. 97.

25. Ibid.; Berg: Bödők, Magyar feltalálók, p. 28.

26. Botting, Giant Airships, p. 31.

27. Kennett, First Air War, pp. 5–7.

28. “The Great Powers and Aviation,” Flight, Apr. 24, 1909, p. 232. All Flight articles cited in the notes can be accessed online from the Flightglobal Archive at https://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive.

29. Holló, A Galambtól a Griffmadárig, p. 13.

30. Nagyváradi et al., Fejezetek a repülés történetéből, p. 14. One nautical mile = 1.15 statute miles = 1.85 kilometers.

31. “Austrian Military Dirigible,” Flight, Dec. 11, 1909, p. 801.

32. Holló, A Galambtól a Griffmadárig, p. 14.

33. Ibid.; MAA name change: Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, p. 2.

34. Holló, A Galambtól a Griffmadárig, p. 14.

35. Nagyváradi et al., Fejezetek a repülés történetéből, p. 15.

36. Debrecen crash: “Forty-Seven Lives Lost in Airship Accidents,” New York Times, July 14, 1910; airship program end: Nagyváradi et al., Fejezetek a repülés történetéből, p. 16.

37. Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, p. 2.

38. Hallion, Taking Flight, p. 278.

39. Lilienthal, Wrights, and Santos-Dumont: Hallion, Taking Flight, pp. 165–166, 221, 231–232.

40. Kennett, First Air War, p. 7.

41. Ibid.

42. Blériot, Kutassy, and Adorján: Holló, A Galambtól a Griffmadárig, pp. 9–10.

43. Adorján: Bödők, Magyar feltalálók, p. 55; cradle: Holló, A Galambtól a Griffmadárig, p. 10.

44. Hallion, Taking Flight, p. 264.

45. Bödők, Magyar feltalálók, p. 54. Paulhan (French) and Latham (English) figured prominently at the Rheims meet, and Latham attempted a Channel crossing a week before Blériot’s success.

46. “Stork” (gólya) and “swallow” (fecske) are transposed in each line, to retain in English some sense of the rhyme. Likewise, “hawk” doesn’t do justice to the mythic Hungarian turul, which is usually rendered “eagle.” The turul played a large role in the Honfoglalas, the foundational story of Magyar history in which the Árpád clan occupied the Danubian basin in the ninth century. It was the totem for Árpád’s army and remained a powerful image of Hungarian military pride. See Dienes, A honfoglaló Magyarok, p. 55.

47. Lloyd George and attaché: Hallion, Taking Flight, p. 265.

48. Ibid., pp. 279–281.

49. Ibid.

50. Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, p. 2.

51. Ibid.; Gotha, Rumpler: Nagyváradi et al., Fejezetek a repülés történetéből, p. 21.

52. Morrow, German Air Power, p. 10.

53. Hallion, Taking Flight, p. 279.

54. Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, pp. 11, 4.

55. Holló, A Galambtól a Griffmadárig, p. 14. This was not an uncommon practice at the time. Zeppelin’s airship program was rescued from financial ruin by a massive public subscription scheme, and in the United Kingdom a National Aviation Fund was established in 1912 with a goal of 1 million shillings to be used for aviation prizes.

56. Third army pilot: Holló, A Galambtól a Griffmadárig, p. 14; school: Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, p. 2. Petróczy was the ninth person in Austria-Hungary to earn a pilot’s license.

57. Nagyváradi et al., Fejezetek a repülés történetéből, p. 17; first chief to fly: Hallion, in Taking Flight, p. 286, gives that distinction to Prince Chakrabongse, the Siamese chief of staff, but Conrad’s flight took place three months earlier. Warchalowski also took the grand duke and duchess for flights at the 1910 Budapest flight meeting. (Flight, July 9, 1910.)

58. Nagyváradi et al., Fejezetek a repülés történetéből, p. 17.

59. Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, p. 2.

60. Strachan, First World War, 1:54–55.

61. Morrow, German Air Power, p. 167.

62. Quoted in Hallion, Taking Flight, p. 310.

63. 200 in 1910–1911: Morrow, “Defeat of the German and Austro-Hungarian Air Forces,” pp. 102; 100 in 1913–1914 and 600 in 1915: Kennett, First Air War, p. 20.

64. Hallion, Taking Flight, pp. 272–276.

65. Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, p. 3.

66. Hallion, Taking Flight, 280, 283; 900,000 rubles: Palmer, Dictatorship of the Air, p. 18. The exchange rate in mid-1910 was 25 Italian liras and 94 Russian rubles to the pound sterling (“City Intelligence,” The Times, July 1, 1910, p. 19, col. 2).

67. 500 pilots: “Accidents to Flyers,” Flight, Dec. 3, 1910, p. 997; “354 Aero Club de France Pilot Aviators,” Flight, Feb. 4, 1910, p. 88.

68. “German Pilot Aviators,” Flight, Mar. 18, 1911, p. 230; “Aviators” Certificates,” Flight, Jan. 7, 1911, p. 11.

69. “More Continental Aviators,” Flight, May 6, 1911, p. 402; “Federation Aeronautique Internationale,” Flight, Apr. 5, 1913, p. 387.

70. French general Pierre-Auguste Roques, who soon became inspector of military aeronautics. Quoted in Hallion, Taking Flight, p. 310.

71. Kennett, First Air War, p. 17.

72. Nagyváradi et al., Fejezetek a repülés történetéből, pp. 17–18.

73. Imperial and Royal General Staff, Die Armeemanöver in Nordungarn.

74. Kerr, “Against All Comers,” p. 293.

75. Kennett, First Air War, p.18; captured airman: Hallion, Taking Flight, p. 314.

76. Italian General Staff, Italo-Turkish War (1911–12), p. 100.

77. Hallion, Taking Flight, p. 314.

78. Kennett, First Air War, p. 18.

79. Kerr, “Against All Comers,” p. 293.

80. Kennett, First Air War, p. 19.

81. Sondhaus, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, pp. 104–107.

82. Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, p. 3.

83. Kerr, “Against All Comers,” p. 292.

84. Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, p. 3.

85. Expenditures from Die Militärluftfahrt bis zum Beginn des Weltkrieges 1914 (Berlin, 1941) quoted in Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, p. 3. Sums were converted from 1914 US dollars using an exchange rate of 4.7 USD to 1 GBP. Population in millions of inhabitants, excluding colonies, from Ellis and Cox, World War I Databook, p. 245.

86. Morrow, German Air Power, p. 10.

87. Stone, “Army and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1900–1914,” p. 96.

88. Ibid.

89. See ibid.; Deák, Beyond Nationalism; and Rothenberg, Army of Francis Joseph.

90. Jeszenszky, “Hungary through World War I,” p. 278.

91. Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century, p. 56. The next day an enraged opposition minister of parliament tried to kill Tisza but managed only to wound himself.

92. Stone, “Army and Society,” pp. 104, 107.

93. Strachan, To Arms, p. 285.

94. Morrow, German Air Power, p. 167.

95. Kennett, First Air War, p. 21.

96. Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, p. 4.

97. Ibid., pp. 13, 4.

98. Ibid. Lohner’s own seaplanes were finely crafted, robust, and effective; UFAG’s quality of work was praised by the War Ministry even as its organization was criticized, and many licensed-produced versions of German aircraft were built to higher standards than in Germany.

99. Morrow, German Air Power, p. 167.

100. Ibid., pp. 171–174.

101. Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, p. 4. In many cases due to license agreements, the aircraft would have been of the same model. In some cases (e.g., the German multiengine G and R planes), those built in Germany would have been substantially more complicated.

102. Romsics, Hungary in the 20th Century, p. 85.

103. Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, p. 5.

104. Ibid., pp. 65, 264, 511; Holló, A Galambtól a Griffmadárig, p. 43.

105. Morrow, German Air Power, pp. 169, 173.

106. Ibid., p. 179; Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, p. 66.

107. Morrow, German Air Power, p. 12.

108. Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, p. 5.

109. Morrow, German Air Power, pp. 176, 180.

110. Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, pp. 6–7.

111. Ibid., p. 448.

112. Austria-Hungary’s figure of 5,181 from total acceptance tables in Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, p. 511. Nagyváradi et al. give a total production number of 5,431 (Fejezetek a repülés történetéből, p. 38). The other combatants’ numbers and Italian population figures are from Ellis and Cox, World War I Databook, pp. 245, 287. Ellis and Cox put A-H production at 4,338. Russian numbers are incomplete, and the United States entered the war too late for valid comparison.

113. Ellis and Cox, World War I Databook, p. 287.

114. Kennett, First Air War, p. 85.

115. Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, p. 541.

116. Ibid.; and Kerr, “Against All Comers,” p. 295.

117. Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, p. 541.

118. Nagyváradi et al., Fejezetek a repülés történetéből, p. 34.

119. Ellis and Cox, World War I Databook, p. 253. The final LFT order of battle: 20 J-, 18 P-, 17 K-, 14 S-, 5 G-, 2 Rb-, and 1 F-flik.

120. Holló, A Galambtól a Griffmadárig, pp. 23–24.

121. Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, p. 542. On Conrad and mobilization see Strachan, To Arms, pp. 281–296.

122. Csonkaréti and Sárhidai, Az Osztrák-Magyar tengerészeti repülői, p. 26.

123. Kerr, “Against All Comers,” p. 295.

124. Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, pp. 388, 536.

125. Holló, A Galambtól a Griffmadárig, p. 22.

126. Nagy, “A 3. Hadsereg átkelés a Dunán és Belgrád elfoglalása 1915 október 6–10,” pp. 314–315.

127. Kerr, “Against All Comers,” p. 295.

128. Strachan, To Arms, p. 348.

129. Ibid., p. 349.

130. Hallion, Taking Flight, pp. 340–341.

131. Conrad: Strachan, To Arms, p. 348.

132. Kupiec-Weglinski, “Siege of Przemysl, 1914–1915,” pp. 544–555.

133. Quoted in “Aircraft and the War” Flight, March 26, 1915, p. 298.

134. Kupiec-Weglinski, “Siege of Przemysl,” p. 545.

135. “Przemysl leltára,” Huszadik Század, Apr. 1915.

136. Kennett, First Air War, pp. 175, 179.

137. Ibid., p. 178.

138. Morrow, German Air Power, p. 170.

139. Grosz et al., Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft, pp. 542–543.

140. Ellis and Cox, World War I Databook, p. 253.

141. Kennett, First Air War, p. 46.

142. Hallion, Taking Flight, p. 359.

143. Czirók, “Az első légi háború Magyarország felett-1919,” p. 335.

144. Kerr, “Against All Comers,” pp. 306–308. The strike force composition is given as twelve Lohner B-VIIs in Holló, A Galambtól a Griffmadárig, p. 25.

145. Harvey, “Bombing and the Air War on the Italian Front,” p. 37.

146. Quoted in Nagyváradi et al., Fejezetek a repülés történetéből, p. 95.

147. Quoted in “Aircraft and the War,” Flight, Feb. 17, 1916, p. 144.

148. Kerr, “Against All Comers,” p. 309.

149. Harvey, “Bombing and the Air War on the Italian Front,” p. 38.

150. 400 killed: ibid.; Charles’s restriction: Rothenberg, “Military Aviation,” p. 81.

151. Kennett, First Air War, p. 56.

152. Rothenberg, “Military Aviation,” p. 82.

153. Cornwall, Undermining of Austria-Hungary, p. 370.

154. Woodhouse, Gabriele D’Annunzio, p. 310.

155. Cornwall, Undermining Austria-Hungary, pp. 372, 85–86.

156. Chant, Austro-Hungarian Aces, p. 90.

157. Rothenberg, “Military Aviation,” p. 82.

158. Kerr, “Against All Comers,” pp. 343–345.

159. Quoted in Thompson, White War, p. 345.

160. Rothenberg, “Military Aviation,” p. 82.

161. Rothenberg, Army of Francis Joseph, pp. 217, 221.