Benito Mussolini’s declaration of war in June 1940 ended any thought of peace and gave Pattle his opportunity. With 80 Squadron pushed up to Egypt’s western border with Italian Libya, in August his flight confronted an attacking force of Regia Aeronautica Fiat and Breda aircraft that were accompanying Italy’s ground invasion to seize the Suez Canal. He achieved his first ‘kill’ by downing an enemy aircraft, but he was then pounced on by a large number of Fiat CR.42s. Also biplanes of an older design, they were technically a fair match for the British Gladiators, but they were piloted by men who were older and had considerably more wartime experience than Pattle. These included veterans of the Spanish Civil War who had fought for the Fascist camp in the rebellion against the Spanish republic in the late 1930s.
Although Pattle was brought down by his Italian adversary, he managed to bail out and make it safely to ground near the town of Sidi Barrani on the Mediterranean. The episode left him feeling more humiliated about having been shot down than relieved at having got away with barely a scratch. Smarting and annoyed, he regarded the incident as a blot on his airmanship – the pride of an intensely competitive and increasingly scornful man had been pricked. On the surface, Pattle maintained a nonchalant air, shrugging off the clash in which he had come off second best as ‘so unimportant’ a ‘business’. Fear was something to be buried under embarrassment, self-assurance and contempt. ‘Really,’ he reassured his worried parents, ‘these chaps we bump into haven’t got much ability. To have been shot down under those conditions … I’ll never live it down. I assure you it will never happen again.’ Being ‘always well’ and feeling ‘so fit’, he was ready to take on the ‘gang’ of Italian invaders ‘single-handed’.14
In August 1940, Pattle led a flight of 80 Squadron Gladiators into Libyan territory to attack Fiat fighters that were providing air cover for the enemy’s bomber force. With both sides matched numerically, he shot down two of his adversaries in a dogfight. His star was on the rise, and in the following month he was promoted to the rank of flight lieutenant. Once the Italian offensive against Egypt commenced in full strength in September 1940, Pattle’s squadron was assigned to provide close air support to ground operations by British forces. Restricted to performing as the wings of the army, the Gladiators were even instructed to avoid any aerial combat unless they were attacked.
Pattle detested having to observe the restraining discipline of this kind of tactical flying. Perhaps it reminded him of his dispiriting weeks in Palestine. Moreover, like many other fighter pilots, what most excited him was having room for extreme self-expression, to be winning in the air through individual bravado. On the odd occasion, his impatience got the better of him and he peeled off to try to ambush stray Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 medium bombers. But such encounters ended in frustration, as these high-speed three-engine aircraft were able to outrun his slower Gladiator.
In the last quarter of 1940, Pattle’s squadron was withdrawn from Egypt to be re-equipped with faster and more powerful versions of their biplanes. This was done at the large RAF Habbaniyah base, which was a little outside Baghdad in the British-controlled Kingdom of Iraq. Habbaniyah was a welcoming oasis for the short time that Pattle was billeted there. Established in 1936, the extensive base had tennis courts, football pitches, swimming pools, riding stables, cinemas, bars, a library and other leisure facilities. It even had a botanical garden, with green lawns for picnics. Conspicuous in the desert terrain, the nearby Lake Habbaniyah provided a landing post for Short Empire flying boats that had been requisitioned from Imperial Airways to deliver mail and light supplies to the RAF station.
Whisked away from the growing operational demands of the Allied North African campaign, Pattle found that his mood was lightened by this brief interlude in Iraq. Cocooned within a virtually self-contained British cantonment, his enjoyment of what it offered included a yacht excursion with the RAF Habbaniyah Boat Club and ordering a suit from an Arab tailor in the neighbouring village of Humphreya, with which the base personnel did most of their civilian trade.
After the Italian army’s stuttering invasion of Greece in October 1940, 80 Squadron, with its new Mark II Glosters, was transferred early the following month to the Balkans in order to assist the Hellenic Air Force in its fight against Italy’s invasion. After lazing about for a couple of days at the RAF airfield of Abu Sueir, north of Cairo, Pattle’s squadron arrived in Athens and took up position north of the Greek capital. Given that Albania, the country’s north-western neighbour, had been invaded by the Italians and turned into a forward staging area for their ground assault on Greece, Pattle’s flight was then moved up to the Greek border town of Trikala.
At this stage, the British Air Force in Greece of the Middle East Air Command comprised no more than around sixty aircraft, divided roughly equally between bombers and fighters. Those who piloted them confronted difficult conditions. Heavy rains in November had made airfields marshy, and flying in poor light was made more hazardous by mountainous terrain and dense hill forests. Moreover, Pattle was constantly annoyed by disruptions to his flights due to aircraft becoming unserviceable owing to a shortage of engine and wireless mechanics and other vital maintenance crew.
Still, when up in the air, he continued to be lethally effective. Flying over Albanian territory in November, he tangled with Fiat CR.42 and Fiat G.50 opponents, inflicting destruction. His combat reports noted the tendency of his Italian enemies to break away from dogfights early when the odds were stacked too strongly against them. They also observed the ability of some Regia Aeronautica pilots to show him a clean pair of heels because of the superior speed of their more modern Fiat G.50 monoplane fighters. These actions left Pattle with mixed views of the Italians. He was contemptuous of what he considered to be their cowardice and limited endurance, and their flying skills didn’t impress him. Predictably, when his enemy was flying slow and shaky medium bombers, he shot them from the sky, as happened at the end of November when his flight broke away from escorting Bristol Blenheim light bombers in order to swoop upon a gaggle of Italian planes. At the same time, he was ruefully respectful of the technical qualities of the best Italian machinery that he was up against over Greece.
Pattle was in the thick of Greek air operations for the next several months and was awarded a DFC in February 1941. In March, a month before Germany invaded Greece to salvage Italy’s spectacularly inept offensive against it, he was promoted to command of 33 Squadron, which had been shifted from desert fighting in the Middle East to prop up defences in what was becoming the Battle of Greece.
Although the unit had initially used the same biplane fighter model that Pattle had made his own, it was re-equipped in October 1940 with modern Hawker Hurricane monoplane fighters. Fast, robust and exceptionally stable, the Hurricane was ‘undoubtedly one of the great fighter aircraft of World War II’.15 Their acquisition immediately improved the odds for Pattle and his pilots: no longer could they be outrun by Italy’s Savoia-Marchetti bombers and some of its Fiat fighters.
In its identity as a flying formation, Pattle’s first command carried a distinctive Anglo-Dominion or migrant Britannic tint, with RAF cockpits coloured by men from several Empire countries, including South Africa, Kenya, Southern Rhodesia and Australia. On first encountering them, he thought them deplorably scruffy and lacking in discipline, disregarding such rules as taxiing in formation. Since Pattle was a dedicated pilot who took his command duties seriously, it was not surprising that he lost no time in imposing a practice regime – including dogfighting, landing in formation and coordinating engine start-ups – to encourage the squadron to maintain a common standard. What seemed to lie behind this was a passionate conviction that it would be possible to create exemplary pilots through the shared attainment of an exactingly high level of airmanship. And he always strove to set this bar through his own example.
As he wrote just five weeks before his death, he had come to regard himself as ‘quite a veteran now’, and he had got over ever feeling ‘nervous abou
t my own safety’. Subsequently, he had become ‘nervous about other pilots who were less experienced than myself’ and who had lost him ‘a number of opportunities through playing a protective role to too great a degree’. Now, the spectacle of ‘all our chaps’ as a rock-solid group, ‘fighting against hordes of the enemy’, was ‘the grandest sight’. For Pattle, the explanation had a deep personal significance, as it was the influence of his clinical, precise approach to aerial combat. As he explained in a letter that oozes self-assurance,
I regard it as a science and take everything into consideration. I make full use of clouds and sun to make an unseen approach and when fighting always manoeuvre to get the enemy at a disadvantage by a full appreciation of the advantages and disadvantages of my own aircraft as opposed to his. I have by now studied every type of enemy aircraft and have different rules of approach to each. This has proved successful in practice, for in the last few fights not a single bullet has found its mark on my aircraft and I have more time to look around and keep an eye on the remainder of the fight.16
With his growing reputation as an astute tactician with an instinct for timing moves to perfection, Pattle possessed an intellectual ruthlessness – or, perhaps, an intellectual kind of necessary ruthlessness. Flying in support of a Greek counteroffensive in February 1941 to dislodge the Italians from Albania, he led a combined formation of three squadrons in an attack on Tepelenë along the southern Albanian border. In a heavy confrontation that resulted in the downing of almost thirty enemy aircraft, the kills achieved by Pattle’s Hurricane were added to his earlier Gladiator tally, further boosting his recognised standing as a fighter ace. A few weeks later, he received a further bar award to his DFC, just as his war ‘was about to become much tougher’.17
The reason for that, inevitably, lay in Berlin. Fed up with Italy’s bungling of the conquest of Greece, Hitler launched a massive invasion of the country in early April, adding in Yugoslavia for good measure at the last minute. Adopting the rapid blitzkrieg or ‘lightning war’ methods that had been so effective earlier against Poland and France, the Luftwaffe assigned over 1 200 aircraft to the offensive. Faced with being swamped by an enemy that was far more formidable than Italy, the RAF pulled back its three massively outnumbered squadrons to Athens. For the South African ace and his 33 Squadron, the front-line combat in the Battle of Greece amounted to much the same as would soon be mirrored by their RAF counterparts in the Battle of France: doomed aerial heroics in a lost cause.
Acutely aware of what his side was up against, now that waves of Ju-87 Stuka dive-bombers and Messerschmitt Bf 109s and Bf 110s were freely pulverising Piraeus, the port of Athens, while smaller German fighter formations were racing in to shoot up RAF airfields, Pattle displayed courage, nerve and initiative. For days, with little if any rest, his Hurricane pilots were up at 4 or 5 a.m. so as not to be caught napping by any surprise attacks at dawn. Commandeering lorries for the ferrying of ground equipment, he also sought to protect their machinery by switching between whatever serviceable airstrips could be located.
Most of all, he carried the fight against the German invaders to the air. Leading his force, on a single day in the first week of April, Pattle brought down a pair of Messerschmitt Bf 109s as well as a Ju-87 bomber. Subsequent days brought subsequent kills. Pilot Officer Bill Winsland, a member of 33 Squadron who had accompanied Pattle’s Hurricane in action against the Messerschmitts, was in awe of his flying ability and pinpoint marksmanship: ‘I shall never forget it. What shooting too. A two-second burst from his eight guns at the first enemy machine caused a large piece to break off in mid-air, while the machine turned over vertically onto one wingtip as the pilot bailed out. A similar fate awaited a second enemy which went down spirally in flames.’18 The Hurricane had replaced the Gladiator as Pattle’s darling.
But the squadron’s stand could not be sustained in skies that were dominated daily by flights of German raiders. Some of the confrontations involved almost continuous combat, the only respites coming from refuelling and the replenishing of ammunition. As Greek defences continued to crack, RAF aircraft losses climbed. By the middle of the month, the high-scoring Pattle was fraying, at the edge of his endurance through exhaustion. Unable to ward off an infection, he fell sick with fever, sweating and shivering in the grip of a high temperature. Always quietly forceful, he brushed aside any concerns over his fitness to fly and remained unrelenting in his commitment to battle. Even in the conflict that would soon claim his life, the threat of death never caused his resolve to falter. Rather, possessing what Roald Dahl called ‘the deeply wrinkled, doleful face of a cat’, he appeared to be not unlike a cat ‘that knew all nine of its lives had already been used up’.19
On 20 April, a Sunday on which Greek forces in Albania surrendered to Nazi Germany and which also happened to be Adolf Hitler’s birthday, Pattle was out from early morning on yet another gruelling round of air missions, leading a flight of twelve Hurricanes against German waves, which at times numbered over 200 fighters and fighter-bombers. In exactly one week’s time, German infantry would be marching into Athens.
With the city’s fearful inhabitants instructed to confine themselves to their homes ahead of the looming occupation, it is tempting to wonder if Pat Pattle was ever aware of the implications of what he was doing with so desperate an act of bravado. Was it to raise the spirits of the watchers below? A show of defiance by still flying the flag – or a red, white and blue RAF roundel? A forlorn vindication of ‘how powerful and noisy and brave’20 they could still be? As another RAF Greece officer wondered later, had it simply been a brave decision taken behind some desk in Cairo or Athens? If viewed in that light, I’m reminded of the famous 1960s British satirical sketch from Beyond the Fringe in which Peter Cook sends Jonathan Miller out to his death: ‘We need a futile gesture at this dire stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war.’
At the end of that day, around half of the dozen British planes had been lost, among them Pattle’s, which had crashed in flames into Eleusis Bay, having been shot down by two or more Messerschmitt fighters. When the action was over, Dahl recalled his hand shaking so badly that he had been unable to light a cigarette. A little earlier, an apprehensive but also resigned Edith Pattle had confided in her close friend Dorothy Mason, who was a Cape Town newspaper reporter. While she was praying that Tom would survive the war, she was under no illusions about ‘the terrible odds’ that he was confronting in Greece and realised that ‘good fighter pilot though he is, he might not live through it all’.21 Like other fighter pilots of his generation, such as the Australian Richard Hillary, author of the classic 1942 memoir The Last Enemy, Marmaduke Thomas St John Pattle would go, in his ‘own way, knowingly, and without illusion’.22
In at least one obvious respect, he was like his British-born grandfather and South African father – they shared a personal awareness of their heritage, of being among those who took up arms in South Africa for a British cause. In his case, however, that cause pulled him away, pitching him into a wider – and deadly – international world. He became a South African at large. Simultaneously, British service shielded him from having to reckon with what the Union of South Africa was in the short-lived time that he spent at war. He escaped what its home front represented: a country in the Allied camp against the Axis powers, but with a dominant white minority, which was split over that participation, and where a geographically distant conflict was experienced largely as ‘second-hand’.23
With what he achieved in that war in mind, it is time to turn to the present day to consider how Pat Pattle has come to be remembered. For a start, he can be spotted on obsessive websites like www.theaerodrome.com, where air-war enthusiasts discuss – and argue over – his total score or tally of ‘kills’: Was it thirty-two or forty-four or sixty-three? Where they try to establish how many were achieved in Gladiators and how many in Hurricanes. And where contributors puzzle over his background and name: Who was this guy? Was he Marmaduke Pattle? Was he Tom Pattle? Or m
ight he even have been a Victor Pattle?
He also merits a mention in highly specialised histories of the 1939–45 air war as one of ‘the Hurricane aces’24 who had a far higher score than others who ended up as legendary war heroes. Yet, in the words of a leading authority on British Second World War aircraft, ‘there is some justification for describing him as the greatest Hurricane ace of the war’. In his short-lived war of just nine months, ‘he had shot down at least 34 aircraft and possibly as many as 50. If the latter figure were true, it would make him the greatest RAF ace of the war.’ What made him an exceptional fighter pilot was that in his attributes, he was so perfect a model, ‘a quiet, serious man with a natural authority, crack marksmanship and excellent eyesight’.25
Confident, self-contained and somewhat inscrutable, he is undoubtedly a fascinating figure in his own right, although there doesn’t seem to be much in his known story for any psychobiographer. In a world torn by destruction and chaos, was he able to find distraction in intimate comforts and sources of hope? As a healthy young man blanketed by the all-male atmosphere of the mess and exposed to a new and looser wartime sexual climate, what Pat Pattle might have got up to in Alexandria or Athens to release the stress of his life remains a mystery.
That aside, why, then, has not more been made of the life of Squadron Leader Pattle? The answer lies, perhaps, in a combination of where he was, what he fought with, and who he was. In the general imagination, the Middle East and the Battle of Greece are not the English Channel and the Battle of Britain – he was not one of ‘The Few’ immortalised by Winston Churchill. He didn’t survive for as long as a year of the war in his lonely aircraft. Nor, in the end, was his flying-ace identity achieved solely at the controls of one of those iconic modern fighters of the 1940s: the Supermarine Spitfire or the Hurricane. Many of the blows he delivered were with an elderly and obsolete mid-1930s biplane – a machine less glamorous and less like the cavalry than the Gladiator would be hard to imagine.
Illuminating Lives Page 10