HISTORY

Ugo drago

Maurizio Di Terlizzi

When looking at the world ranking of “Aces” – fighter pilots with

more than five aerial victories – Italian pilots are substantially

far from their US and German colleagues. Luftwaffe numbers are

rather superior to all others, often going above 100 and in some

cases exceeding 300! The modest numbers of Italian victories

are the result of an attribution and validation method which was

substantially different from all other nations. From the start and

for a good part of the war, victories were acknowledged to the

whole squadron, in order to avoid protagonism among pilots. As

it happens, aerial victories for Italian pilots were even a bigger

challenge than average, as they were often achieved in inferiority

conditions, both from a technical and strategic perspective. In this

context, the exploits of pilots like Visconti, Tarantola and Drago

bear an even bigger meaning, as they were conducted against

all odds in the Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana (also known

as ANR, the Republican National Air Force, founded after Italy’s

Armistice and faithful to Mussolini), fighting in the knowledge that

their future was likely doomed.

What was then the spirit that kept these young pilots united? What

was the ideal stronger than the thousands of pounds of bombs that

American Flying Fortresses dropped every day over Northern Italy?

Whilst it’s not my role to analyse the social and political aspect of

my country – which is still a subject of much debate in Italy – but as

an historian and researcher I can say that if so many young aviators

gathered around leaders like Visconti and Drago, it was surely

because they were charismatic figures. People like Drago, admired

equally by lower and higher rank colleagues, were true leaders,

capable of motivating others and that never sat idle, but were in

fact often times the first ones to take off and attack the enemy.

My brief description of Drago’s exploits won’t delve too much

on early career and life, as numerous authors have written on

that; I would like to focus more on the aspects that will explain is

character better.

After his beginnings with the Regia Aeronautica biplanes

and monoplanes, in 1943 Ugo Drago got acquainted with the

Messerschmitt Bf 109 whilst based in Sicily, during the dramatic

times of Italy’s invasion by the Allies, which saw the opposition of

few aircraft from the 150° Gruppo Caccia (150th Fighter Group).

Drago and his faithful comrades – many of which will follow him in

the ANR – fought desperately and managed to achieve some success

against Anglo-American fighters, and being able to use the Bf 109

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later on in the war proved to be a comforting reality, as by then

they were very familiar with the aircraft.

The late variants such as G-10 and K-4 confirmed the “warrior”

nature of the Bf 109, an aircraft built for combat and designed for

mass production.

In the “Gigi Tre Osei” (Gigi Three Birds) Squadron, Drago was a

true motivator, an admired and esteemed Commander who showed

its worth and was amiable. One of his trademarks was yelling on

the radio ”L’è buna!” before an attack, which is comparable to

the German “Horrido!” or the British “Tally-ho!”, which had more

of a cheeky nature (it was in fact something you’d usually say

in Northern Italian dialect when you saw a pretty girl, meaning

“That’s a good one!”), but which helped to keep the young pilots’

spirits high.

Drago had a passion for the number 7, which he had painted on

all its aircraft, several of which suffered damage in combat. For

instance, on December 1st, 1944, his aircraft was heavily damaged

by enemy fire, but he managed to get out of the ordeal unscathed;

the regime propaganda exploited the episode, with the title “The

day that Drago lost his feather in flight”, and which referred to a

bizarre incident that occurred during the dogfight: Drago had in

INFO Eduard - February 2020