AUSTRIA: Red Writer

One morning last week citizens strolling on Vienna’s central Ring-Strasse watched a small black sport biplane droning through some unusual acrobatics. They stopped when the plane spewed a trail of smoke. They gasped when the skywriter left a huge, white woolly Communist hammer & sickle floating over Austria’s capital. The little black biplane then flew on to suburban Modling, traced the initials U.S.S.R. against the blue. Up went six slow Austrian army planes in pursuit. Audaciously the skywriter jazzed the municipal airport, disappeared, leaving the army flyers to their humiliation, the populace to speculate on the motive for the deed. Some patriots thought the scribbling pilot was a German agent provocateur sent up to bolster the Nazi thesis that Czechoslovakia is a “Bolshevik outpost.” Best explanation: an unreconstructed Austrian Red commemorating Vienna’s abortive Socialist-Communist counterrevolution of February 1934.