This heightened sense of self was closely linked to the very act of flying. From its ecstatic beginnings, swooping over the Kenyan bush, the sense of being alone and free in an unfamiliar element stimulated Roald’s sense of the mystical. It reinforced his sense of isolation. The sky became an alternative world: a place of tranquility and gentle beauty, a refuge either from the horrors of war or the cruelties of human behavior that could be magical, transformative, even redemptive. Most of his early adult stories are profoundly connected to this spiritual dimension of flying, and it is also a feature of many of Dahl’s most well loved children’s books. In the first of these, James and the Giant Peach, the child protagonist, James, who has escaped from his cruel aunts to find shelter inside an enormous peach, stands at night on the surface of the giant fruit, accompanied by a group of equally outsize bugs. They are all flying high above the Atlantic Ocean because the peach has been borne aloft by a flock of seagulls. Contemplating the heavens above him, James is filled with an overpowering sense of mystery and wonder. “Clouds like mountains towered over their heads on all sides, mysterious, menacing, overwhelming …,” Dahl writes. “The peach was a soft, stealthy traveller, making no noise at all as it floated along. And several times during that long silent night ride high up over the middle of the ocean in moonlight, James and his friends saw things that no-one had seen before.”41 It is a sense of epiphany similar to that which affects Charlie Bucket, the hero of Dahl’s next children’s book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, when, flying high over the factory inside a great glass elevator, Willy Wonka hands over his world to the young boy.
The glory of flight also suffuses Dahl’s last book, The Minpins, in which a small boy, Little Billy, flies on the back of a swan into a dark and magical nocturnal landscape, filled with extraordinary natural wonders. Here, fifty years after he himself last flew on his own, Dahl powerfully evokes that sense of separation between the solitary flyer and the rest of humanity that he had felt when launching his schoolboy fire-balloons, and which, through flying a fighter plane, had been fixed at the center of his psychology. Boy and bird, moving as one, witness things that neither will ever be able to understand or explain. And what they see is theirs alone. “They flew in a magical world of silence, swooping and gliding over the dark world below, where all the earthly people were fast asleep in their beds.”42 This mystical connection between boy and bird was familiar territory for Dahl, who had explored it fifteen years earlier in one of his cruelest and most powerful tales, The Swan. Here, another small boy is hunted and bullied by a ruthless pair of child tormentors. They torture him and deliberately kill the nesting swan he has been watching with their rifle. Cutting the wings off the dead bird, they strap them to the terrified boy and force him to climb high up a nearby tree. Then they dare him to fly. When he refuses, they shoot him in the thigh in an attempt to make him jump. Wounded and bleeding, the boy spreads his wings and dives off the branch. However, he does not fall to the ground. Instead, he soars into safety toward “a light … of such brilliance and beauty he was unable to look away from it.”43 Dahl viscerally understood that situation: the dazzling bright aviator’s light, the fine thread that separates life from death. He had experienced that, too.
In March 1941, after five weeks in Heliopolis, he was surprisingly declared fit enough to be sent up to RAF Ismailia on the banks of the Suez Canal for some further training, prior to joining his squadron. There, he was relieved to discover that the outdated Gloster Gladiators had now been replaced by “a much more modern type of fighter”44—a Mark I Hurricane. But he was also shocked again at how little time he was given to learn to fly it and prepare for aerial combat.‡ His accident was now seven months in the past. But in early April 1941, he once again found himself in almost exactly the same position as he had been in September 1940—ferrying an unfamiliar aircraft into alien territory. Only this time he was going to Greece rather than Libya. Another thing had changed as well. The pilot. He was no longer the nervous youth flying recklessly into the desert night. He had passed though a marking point, a division between innocence and experience, between a kind of happy-go-lucky view of life and a darker, more critical view of human nature. He had not yet flown a sortie in anger, but the crash and his months in hospital had brought him face-to-face with death and had caused him to reflect on the reasons for living. The next two weeks would only intensify this sensation, as each new day brought with it the imminent prospect of his own demise.
* I have pieced these events together as accurately as I can from Roald Dahl’s own pilot’s logbook, RAF records, interviews with other pilots, and Dahl’s many written descriptions of the events of that day, principally in Shot Down Over Libya (1942), Missing: Believed Killed (1944), A Piece of Cake (1942–46), Lucky Break (1977), and Going Solo (1986). Eighty Squadron’s own accident report is brief, noting drily that “Pilot Officer Dahl was ferrying an aircraft from No. 102 Maintenance Unit to this unit, but unfortunately not being used to flying aircraft over the desert he made a forced landing two miles west of Mersah Matruh. He made an unsuccessful forced landing and the aircraft burst into flames. The pilot was badly burned and he was conveyed to an Army Field Ambulance station”—PRO Air 27, 669.
† Although he told his mother he was only blind for a week, he later told his editor at Farrar, Straus, Stephen Roxburgh, that he had “said that so as not to alarm her. It was much, much longer …”—Letter to Stephen Roxburgh, undated, FSG.
‡ In Going Solo, Dahl claims he was given just a “couple of days” to master the Hurricane and fly it to Greece. Yet in Ismailia, after a refresher course flying Miles Magisters and Gloster Gauntlets, Dahl had been sent on a two-week Hurricane conversion course. As Derek O’Connor commented, this was not “an immense amount of time to come to terms with a monoplane equipped with retractable landing-gear and a variable-pitch propeller, but there was a war on”—O’Connor, “Roald Dahl’s Wartime Adventures,” p. 47.
CHAPTER SEVEN
David and Goliath
IN ONE OF THE drawers of a cabinet in his writing hut, Roald Dahl kept a battered black Herculex address book. Purchased in 1941, and used for more than thirty years, it contains many a famous name: Walt Disney, Hoagy Carmichael, Max Beaverbrook, Ginger Rogers, Lillian Hellman, Ben Travers and Ian Fleming are just a few of the well-known figures from show business, politics and the arts who played bit parts in Dahl’s life and whose contact details ornament the book’s yellowing pages. The scruffy, tattered little volume is more than a testament to his fascination with celebrity: it offers a number of clues to his personality and tiny insights into his life in the 1940s and 1950s. On one page are scribbled memories of a lunch with Noël Coward. On another, a betting forecast. Most intriguingly, on the inside front cover is a list of names. These run in an irregular column down the right-hand side and there are no related addresses or telephone numbers. A corner of the address book is water-damaged and the ink has run off the page, so some of the names are indecipherable. Several are misspelled. Most however are still clearly legible: Tap Jones, Oofy Still, Timber Woods, Trolly Trollip, Pat Pattle, Bill Vale, Keg Dowding, Jimmy Kettlewell, Doc Astley, Hugh Tulloch, George Westlake, David Coke. A digit is scrawled beside each of them and against several Dahl also marked an X. At the end of the list, the writing curling away toward the bottom of the page, he added: “Self 5.” Above all these names, underlined and in capitals, is the heading: “80 SQUADRON, GREECE.”1
When the Italian Army opportunistically entered the northern Greek province of Epirus in late October 1940, it did not expect to encounter any significant resistance. But despite inferior firepower and an air force that consisted of outdated planes, the Greeks had fought back with unexpected tenacity, and by mid-November the Italians had been forced back into Albania. Great Britain, a guarantor of Greek independence, had responded to an immediate call for air support by despatching two squadrons of fighters, one of Gladiators (80 Squadron) and another mixed squadron of Blenheims (112 Squadron) from
their already overstretched operations in North Africa. Based initially in the northern Greek airfields of Larissa, Trikkala and Ioannina, 80 Squadron’s twelve Gloster Gladiators provided support for the Greek ground forces and made several “kills” of enemy aircraft in the border area, before winter rains waterlogged the grass airfields and forced the squadron to return south, to Elevsis, on the coast, a few miles west of Athens.
Six weeks later, in February 1941, an Allied Expeditionary Force, made up largely of Australians and New Zealanders, was sent from Egypt to bolster the Greek resistance. Then, as the weather improved, 80 Squadron—assisted by reinforcements from 33 Squadron—moved north again toward the Albanian border to support them. Under the command of South African–born Marmaduke “Pat” Pattle, the RAF’s top fighter ace in the war, and flying largely in outdated biplanes, they scored a remarkable series of victories, destroying over a hundred Italian aircraft, against the loss of eight British fighters and two pilots. On one memorable day at the end of February, the RAF destroyed twenty-seven enemy planes without a single loss of their own. It was 80 Squadron’s finest hour, and their victories were celebrated across Greece, with the pilots fêted as heroes by the grateful locals. Their successes were rewarded with the arrival of six brand-new Mark I Hawker Hurricanes, a single-engined, highly maneuverable fighter, whose fuselage, though still covered with doped linen, was constructed from modern high-tensile steel rather than the wood of the Gladiators. Each was equipped with eight wing-mounted Browning machine guns which fired simultaneously when the pilot’s thumb depressed his gun button. Pattle himself claimed the new plane’s first victim over Greece, a Fiat G.50, which exploded before his eyes in a spectacular fireball with his first touch of the button. Beyond the mountains to the east that separated Greece from Yugoslavia, however, lurked vast numbers of the German Luftwaffe, who were advancing south through the Balkans. As their Italian allies struggled to hold the Greek counterinsurgents, it became inevitable that they would soon be drawn into the conflict.
On April 6, 1941, the Nazi invasion of Greece began. It was a ruthlessly effective assault. Within two days the Germans had occupied the northeastern city of Salonica (now Thessaloniki), and soon the Allied forces were in full retreat. While 80 Squadron withdrew south to Elevsis to be refitted entirely with Hurricanes, the inspirational Pat Pattle was despatched from 80 Squadron to the front line to command 33 Squadron, which—alongside 112 Squadron—was now bearing the brunt of the German offensive. Eighty Squadron remained behind at Elevsis to defend Athens. The odds against the British and Greek pilots were enormous: approximately 800 German and 300 Italian planes against a motley force of 192 British and Greek machines—or, as one the pilot described it, “a pleasant little show. All the wops in the world and half the Jerries versus two men, a boy and a flying hearse.”2 The mountainous terrain and the thick clouds and driving rain ensured that there were occasional lulls in the fighting. One lasted almost a week. But the calm was only temporary. And everyone was aware of it. It was into this gloomy mind-set that Dahl was despatched from Egypt on April 14. He evoked its awful fatalism in an early short story, Katina: “The mountains were invisible behind the rain, but I knew they were around us on every side. I had a feeling they were laughing at us, laughing at the smallness of our numbers and at the hopeless courage of our pilots.”3
As he climbed into his Hurricane at Abu Suweir, once again Dahl felt that the military establishment were being reckless both with human life and with their own machinery. “I had no experience at all flying against the enemy,” he was later to write. “I had never been in an operational squadron. And now they wanted me to jump into a plane I had never flown in before and fly it to Greece to fight against a highly efficient air force that outnumbered us by a hundred to one.”4 He may have exaggerated the odds, but his skepticism was more than justified. Dahl was entering a conflict where the only possible outcome was defeat. The cockpit of his Hurricane was cramped and uncomfortable, particularly for someone of his height. He was also carrying gallons of extra fuel in tanks strapped to the wings just so he could complete the journey without refueling. For nearly five hours he flew over the Mediterranean, contorted into “the posture of an unborn baby in the womb.”5 When he landed on “the red soil of the aerodrome at Elevsis,” dotted with tents, temporary latrines, washbasins, and gray corrugated iron hangars along one side,6 he was suffering from “excruciating cramp” and could not climb out of the plane. He had to be lifted out by ground crew.7
In Going Solo, Dahl dwells on the pointlessness of the Greek campaign. His spanking new plane “won’t last a week in this place,” declares one of the men who help him out of the cockpit, while explaining the full extent of the awesome opposition the squadron is facing. Half an hour later, a fellow pilot confirms the situation, telling Roald that their position is “absolutely hopeless.” None of this unduly worried him, he claimed. “I was young enough and starry-eyed enough to look upon the Grecian escapade as nothing more than a grand adventure. The thought that I might never get out of the country alive didn’t occur to me. It should have done, and looking back on it now I am surprised that it didn’t.” He was surely being disingenuous. Naturally he felt a sense of triumph that he had overcome his injuries and made it to the front line. He was a member of his squadron at last—even if, as his commanding officer Edward “Tap” Jones sarcastically noted, he was reporting for duty “six months late.”8*
Yet, since his crash, Dahl had also lost the young pilot’s protective sense of invulnerability. Walking across the airfield, with its myriad wildflowers “blossoming blue and yellow and red,”9 he must have pondered with foreboding what the future held in store. In the desert he had brushed against death and lived to fight another day. Now, in the ancient blue skies of the Mediterranean, once again he had to face its cold, silent whisper. That sense of dread, of death as a character, haunts many of his early short stories.
Each time now it gets worse. At first it begins to grow upon you slowly, coming upon you slowly, creeping up on you from behind, making no noise, so that you do not turn round and see it coming. If you saw it coming, perhaps you could stop it, but there is no warning. … It touches you gently on the shoulder and whispers to you that you are young, that you have a million things to do and a million things to say, that if you are not careful you will buy it, that you are almost certain to buy it sooner or later, and that when you do you will not be anything any longer; you will just be a charred corpse. It whispers to you about how your corpse will look when it is charred, how black it will be and how it will be twisted and brittle, with the face and the fingers black and the shoes off the feet because the shoes always come off the feet when you die like that.10
It was not an easy situation for the young pilot. He was joining a squadron at the end of a campaign which many of his fellow pilots had been fighting for almost six months and which was now falling apart. By the time he got to Elevsis, the remains of 112 Squadron had abandoned its northern bases and retreated south to join 80 Squadron there. The following day, 33 Squadron did the same, merging to fight the unhappy endgame of a campaign that could only have one outcome. It was hardly surprising then that on his first evening Dahl found most of his eighteen fellow pilots uncommunicative. An exception was David Coke, a son of the Earl of Leicester, who took Dahl “under his wing” and gave his tentmate some useful tips on how to shoot at the kind of German planes he was likely to be facing the following day. The rest kept themselves to themselves. “They were all very quiet. There was no larking about. There were just a few muttered remarks about the pilots who had not come back that day. Nothing else.”11
The next morning, at 10 a.m. on April 15, Dahl’s logbook indicates that he went out on his first patrol and intercepted a German plane attacking shipping coming into the harbor at Piraeus, just outside Athens. Next day near Khalkis, some 40 miles north of the airfield, he chased six Junkers 88 bombers back into the mountains and downed one of them. He did not actually see the aircraft
hit the ground, but he saw all three crew bale out and abandon their machine to its fate. He had shot down his first enemy plane.† However, when he returned to Elevsis, his sense of triumph was swiftly stifled by the discovery that one of his small band of pilots, Frankie Holman, had been killed. And the manner of Holman’s death must have been particularly chilling for Roald because it was so familiar: a crash-landing. Hitting a rock at around 100 mph, his plane turned over on itself. There was no fire. But Holman was found lifeless, hanging upside down in his straps with no visible wounds. He had broken his neck.12
On April 17, the sense of impending defeat was reinforced by the departure of the remaining RAF bombers from Elevsis to Crete. It seemed to the fighter pilots and their maintenance crews that everyone was getting out except them. The local Greeks were dejected. In an attempt to boost Athenian morale, the British sent their sixteen serviceable Hurricanes up together to make a low pass over the city. It was an impressive sight and Dahl himself revelled in his dramatic proximity to one of the ancient cradles of civilization. But this stirring exercise in formation flying could not disguise the fact that, further north, the Allies were now completely on the run. The following day, on patrol near Khalkis, Dahl passed yet another combatant’s milestone. He intercepted a Junkers 88 that was attacking a Greek ammunition ship. Diving down from above over the brilliant blue waters of Khalkis Bay, Dahl shot at the German plane and sent it plunging headfirst into the sea, in full view of the ships below. He had claimed his second victim. This time, however, the pilot did not bale out. This time it was not just a machine he had destroyed. This time he had killed someone.
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