Did he realize the significance of what he had done? It is hard to say. The high sides of the Hurricane cockpit gave it a womblike feeling that made a pilot feel strangely secure—both separated and protected from the outside world. Another pilot later remarked that it was hard to believe that only a few pieces of plywood stood between you and a 20mm bullet, so there was already a detachment to the killing.13 Moreover, the “kill” had been detached and cold-blooded—an exercise in aerial skill and accurate marksmanship rather than a bloody close-up combat. Nonetheless, the issue of taking a life, the question “Whom shall I kill tonight?” would doubtless go on to haunt him, as it haunted the pilot protagonist of his 1945 short story Someone Like You. For the moment, however, he and other pilots adopted a manner that was terse and matter-of-fact. Little was discussed or overtly reflected upon. Particularly death. “Formalities did not exist,” Dahl later wrote. “Pilots came and pilots went. The others hardly noticed my presence. No real friendships existed.” Each man was just another flyer, “wrapped in a cocoon of his own problems.”14 This situation caused a certain coolness to develop in his own personality that created a tension with his own natural exuberance. Writing in 1945 to an American friend, he tried to analyze where this indifference “to going home, to losing large sums of money … to everything else which men usually care about” had come from. In a strikingly honest, almost tormented letter, Dahl explained how easily young fighter pilots could become detached from almost everything. “Think,” he wrote, “if you learn to be indifferent to death, sudden death, or if you learn to pretend to be indifferent to it, then you must surely first learn to be indifferent to everything else which is less important. To young people nothing is less important than death because there is very little philosophy in them.”15 As Dahl grew older, and reflected more, that attitude would soften, but the strange disconnection would never completely leave him.
On April 18 he went up on patrol three times without great incident, noting in his logbook that southern Greece was now within range of the versatile and dangerous Messerschmitt 109 fighters. This was a sure sign that the German Army was not far away and that Athens itself would shortly come under attack. That same day, 80 Squadron also lost the happy-go-lucky, ginger-haired pilot Oofy Still. This smiling, freckled flyer would become a curious kind of literary everyman for Roald, who wrote him memorably into an early draft of his very first story, A Piece of Cake. His description was so vivid it provoked his hard-nosed New York agent Harold Matson to declare that it made him feel he knew Oofy personally.‡ When Roald proposed another story, this time set in Greece, he told Matson that “Oofy unfortunately got killed over there tackling about thirty Messerschmitt 109s single-handed. I loved him dearly.”16 His demise left just fifteen Allied pilots in Elevsis to greet the dawn of April 20, a day that would witness the climactic finale of 80 Squadron’s “Greek Adventure.”
Dahl described the Battle of Athens as “a long and beautiful dogfight in which fifteen Hurricanes fought for half an hour with between one hundred and fifty and two hundred German bombers and fighters.”17 That description for once corresponds with the operations record book, which details a series of “confused” encounters fought against “overwhelming odds,” as three fragmented squadrons faced an opposition that outnumbered them by ten to one. For over half an hour these opposing forces engaged one another in a series of memorable aerial combats. It was David against Goliath. The underdog against the bully. However, far from being afraid, Dahl—like many of his pilot comrades—was thrilled by the intensity of the drama in which he found himself.
It was truly the most breathless and exhilarating time I have ever had in my life. I caught glimpses of planes with black smoke pouring from their engines. I saw planes with pieces of metal flying off their fuselages. I saw the bright red flashes coming from the wings of the Messerschmitts as they fired their guns, and once I saw a man whose Hurricane was in flames, climb calmly out onto a wing and jump off. I stayed with them until I had no ammunition left in my guns. I had done a lot of shooting, but whether I had shot anyone down or had even hit any of them I could not say. I did not dare to pause for even a fraction of a second to observe results.18
In clear blue skies over the harbor at Piraeus, the battered British planes, riddled with bullet holes and in a state that would normally have rendered them unserviceable, achieved twenty-two confirmed “kills,” at least one of which was later credited to Dahl. But they incurred heavy casualties. Five of their own machines were destroyed, and three of their pilots died. South African Harry Starrett tried to get his damaged Hurricane back to Elevsis, but it blew up on landing and he was consumed in the flames, dying of burns two days later. “Timber” Woods was attacked by what a fellow combatant, the Canadian Vernon Woodward, described as “a swarm of Ju88s protected by masses of Messerschmitt 110s.”19 Woods was an experienced pilot who had been flying since the summer of 1940. But he did not have a chance. Not even his trusty silver medallion of St. Christopher could protect him against such overwhelming numbers. Woods and his blazing Hurricane vanished into the deep waters of Elevsis Bay.20
Moments later, the twenty-six-year-old wizard Pat Pattle, stricken with influenza and flying his third sortie of the day, also perished. He had been trying to protect Woods when his plane was hit simultaneously by two German Messerschmitts. The Hurricane exploded in midair, tumbling into the waves to join that of Timber Woods in the depths. Pattle had just registered what was perhaps his fiftieth kill—an extraordinary record, made even more remarkable by the fact that for much of the time he had been flying antiquated biplanes. Dahl shared his fellow officers’ profound admiration for his commanding officer, recalling him in Going Solo as “very small … and very soft-spoken,” with “the deeply wrinkled doleful face of a cat who knew that all nine of its lives had already been used up.”§ Only twelve pilots returned to the aerodrome at Elevsis, soaked in sweat and with their Hurricanes riddled with bullet holes. Dahl was one of them. Years later, he would reflect bitterly on the unnecessary loss of life he had witnessed that day, but his foremost emotion remained one of pride in the part he played in that gallant, if Pyrrhic, Athenian victory. Indeed, many years later he quietly drew Ophelia’s attention to the verdict of the campaign’s historian, Christopher Buckley. “In terms of heroism in the face of odds,” Buckley wrote, “the pilots of these fifteen fighters deserve to rank with the heroes of the Battle of Britain.”21
Early that evening, when the battered Hurricanes had returned to Elevsis and been patched up, some were deposited in hangars on the edge of the airstrip. The Germans had not attacked the corrugated iron buildings in their previous raids and it was felt it might be safer to put some of the planes there rather than leaving them out in the open where they were obvious targets. It was an error of judgment. Just before dusk there was a huge German raid and the hangars were targeted. Four Hurricanes were destroyed.¶ Elevsis was now clearly an untenable base, and on April 22, all remaining British and Greek aircraft were evacuated—initially to Megara a few miles down the coast, and a day later to Argos on the Peloponnese peninsula, the most southerly region of mainland Greece. At Megara, Dahl and the seven remaining pilots of 80 Squadron encountered Air Commodore Grigson, the man in charge of the retreat. There, Dahl remembered, the pilots protested the absurdity of their situation. Greece was being abandoned, they told him, and they felt like sitting targets. Their aircraft were needed elsewhere. They urged him to let them fly their planes to North Africa, where they could play a more effective part in the desert war. But Grigson did not listen. He told them they were there to defend shipping and gave Dahl a package—presumably the records of the campaign—which he wanted delivered to a mysterious stranger, who would be waiting for him back at Elevsis. On no account, he told Dahl, was the package to fall into enemy hands.**
The air commodore’s unresponsive manner touched Dahl’s anti-authoritarian nerve. Perhaps it even reminded him of “Admiral” Murray Levick in Newfoundland. This time, howev
er, there was no mutiny. Only bitter incomprehension. “I stared at him,” he wrote. “If this was the kind of genius that had been directing our operations, no wonder we were in a mess.”22 He got back into his Hurricane, took off, delivered the parcel, and rejoined his comrades. Twenty minutes later, they landed at Argos. Dahl described the landing ground there as “just a kind of small field … surrounded by thick olive groves into which we taxied our aircraft for hiding.”23 It had no defenses and “the narrowest, bumpiest, shortest” landing strip any of the pilots had ever seen.24 Their living quarters, white tents dotted about the olive groves, were easily visible from the air. To compound the absurdity of their situation, next morning five new Hurricanes arrived from Crete as reinforcements. Within hours, a German reconnaissance plane had spotted them, and after that, it was only a matter of waiting for the inevitable.
The Luftwaffe attack came shortly after 6 p.m., while Dahl and four other pilots were on patrol, searching for nonexistent Allied ships to defend. They returned two hours after the attack to find the olive grove shrouded in a thick cloud of black smoke. Using the large rock that marked the end of the landing strip as a guide, the five planes plunged into the gloomy haze, each pilot wondering what vision of destruction he would find if he managed to land successfully. The runway, it transpired, was clear of debris, but Dahl alighted from his machine to discover that the Germans had destroyed thirteen Hurricanes and a huge number of the “peculiar, ancient”25 Greek planes that had been parked with them in the olive groves. From the deep slit trenches where they had run for cover, those on the ground had been reduced to using rifles to defend themselves against the ground-strafing Messerschmitts.26††
A few hours later, the Greek “fiasco” was officially over. The most senior pilots ferried the five serviceable Hurricanes that remained back to Crete. Dahl was among those evacuated back to Egypt in a light bomber with nothing but their logbooks and the clothes they were wearing. He had been in Greece barely ten days.
The Lockheed plane landed in a remote part of the Western Desert in the early hours of the morning. The passengers disembarked: filthy, tired and without any Egyptian money. Dahl hitched a ride into Alexandria and went straight to the home of Teddy and Dorothy Peel. In Going Solo, he claims that he also took the other eight pilots there, but his letter to his mother makes no mention of this. He simply says that he arrived on the doorstep “looking like a tramp with nothing but my flying-suit and a pair of khaki shorts.”27 This is the more plausible image. For, despite occasional attempts to suggest otherwise, Dahl, like many successful fighter pilots, was essentially a loner who kept himself to himself. He had come late to his squadron, when its winter glory days were over, arriving just in time to witness its rout and the death of two of its most senior pilots.28 On top of this, he was still struggling to keep his persistent headaches at bay and needed to conserve his energies, to concentrate on survival. He wrote to his mother a few days later from the Peels’ garden, summarizing his time in Greece, and reassuring her he was in good health. He tried to make light of it all, to reconnect with the swashbuckling schoolboy optimism of ten years before. But he could not do it. He simply concluded: “I don’t think anything as bad as that will happen again.”29
While 80 Squadron was being re-formed in Palestine, Dahl spent almost a month relaxing as a house guest of the Peels. His mother had arranged for him to be sent some money. With it he bought a small car, which in early June he drove across the Sinai peninsula and up toward Haifa (now in Israel), where the squadron was now based. “I loved that journey,” he wrote later. “I loved it, I think, because I had never before been totally without sight of another human being for a full day and night.” The harsh magnificence of the desert inspired him. He revelled in the sense of solitude it gave him. It was an interlude in sharp contrast to the three weeks that followed. In Haifa, his squadron’s task was to provide support for an expeditionary force of British and Australian troops whose aim was to occupy Syria and Lebanon, where planes from Vichy French air bases had been regularly attacking Allied shipping. Dahl reserved a particular venom for these “disgusting pro-Nazi Frenchmen.” In his eyes, not only had they willingly acquiesced to the occupation of their homeland, but he blamed their “fanatical loyalty” to the pro-German Vichy regime in France for the unnecessary loss of thousands of lives.30
When he got to Haifa, he found some familiar faces—including David Coke’s—and twelve new pilots.‡‡ The biblical landscape around the air base excited him and he delighted in the proximity of a warm sea and in the many orange, grapefruit and lemon groves that lay scattered across the rolling hillsides. It was, as he told his family, a land “definitely flowing with milk and honey.”31 But he had little time to enjoy it. Though the campaign, which began in early June, was ultimately successful, the flying was intense and also dangerous. In the course of the first three weeks, Dahl shot down two French planes, while his squadron lost four more of its pilots. “What a lot of flying,” he told his mother. “We never stopped—you see there weren’t many of us. Ground-strafing, escorting, intercepting etc. etc. Some days we did seven hours a day which is a lot out here, where you sweat like a pig from the moment you get into the cockpit to the moment you get out.”32 In fact, the pressure was too intense. As he wrote that letter, the headaches from which he had been suffering in Greece began to become unbearable. He described them later as like having a knife driven into your forehead. Then the blackouts started. Five days later, he was suspended from flying. A few days after that an RAF medical board examined him, declared him no longer fit to fly, and sent him home. His days as a combatant were over.
Before Dahl departed from Palestine, he was involved in one other curious incident. He was sent to report on the viability of an alternative landing ground, in the event that the runways at Haifa were bombed. This potential airstrip was at a small village called Ramat David. It had been cut in a field of maize that was part of one of the earliest kibbutzes—one named after the British prime minister David Lloyd George, whose government had issued the 1917 Balfour Declaration that Great Britain “viewed with favour” the idea of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Quite ignorant of this background, Dahl was startled to encounter a Zionist settler and a group of Jewish orphans when he landed there. The settler, a bearded man with a strong German accent, who, Dahl remembered, “looked like the prophet Isaiah and spoke like a parody of Hitler,” tried to explain to the naive RAF pilot the need for a Jewish homeland. Dahl was unconvinced, but also fascinated by the settler’s quiet sense of conviction and particularly by his startling eyes, whose pupils “seemed larger and blacker and brighter than any I had ever seen.” “ ‘You have a lot to learn,’ ” the man told Dahl as he got back into his Hurricane. “ ‘But you are a good boy. You are fighting for freedom. So am I.’ ”33
Dahl, who later in life became publicly anti-Zionist, returned to Haifa and reported to his commanding officer only that the landing strip was “quite serviceable” and that there were “lots of children for the pilots to play with” should the squadron need to relocate there.34 They did. Within days, Haifa had been attacked and 80 Squadron, following Dahl’s advice, decamped to the kibbutz, to live once more among tents and olive groves. But by this time Dahl himself had moved on.
Dahl profoundly regretted the fact that he was no longer able to fly. “It’s a pity,” he commented when he told his mother the news, “because I’ve just got going.”35 Alfhild also later recalled that being invalided out of the war “hit him hard.”36 From now on he would no longer be in the thick of the battle. That solitary joy of being a flyer—of swooping, diving and floating in the air—would be his no more. He would miss it for the rest of his life. Combat, however, had altered him and made him more reflective, more inclined to relax and to celebrate life. “All the dreadful masculine aggressions of youth” had been “squeezed out” of him. From now on, Roald would live his life in a “lower gear.”37
And he was going home. He drove back
to Egypt, sold his car, and two weeks later boarded a troop ship, travelling back to England around the coast of Africa, stopping at Durban, Cape Town and Freetown in Sierra Leone, where he indulged himself buying presents for his family: sackfuls of citrus fruit, chocolate, marmalade and expensive silks for his sisters. On the final leg of the journey, the convoy in which he was sailing was attacked by German bombers and U-boats and three ships were sunk. After disembarking at Liverpool, Dahl took a train to London, where he spent a night with his half sister Ellen and her husband Ashley Miles. In the morning he travelled by train and bus to Grendon Underwood in Buckinghamshire, where his mother was now living. She was waiting for him by the roadside. “I signalled the bus-driver and he stopped the bus for me right outside the cottage, and I flew down the steps of the bus straight into the arms of the waiting mother.”38 He had been away from home for almost three years.
That is where Dahl himself left off his memoirs. But Going Solo ends as it begins—with a liberal measure of embroidery and fabrication. Not satisfied with the relief of an ordinary homecoming, Dahl could not stop himself injecting an extra measure of tension for his readers: he tells us that he has heard nothing from his family for months, that he has no idea they have moved from Bexley, and that he is haunted by the fear that they have all been killed by a stray bomb. A disconnected phone line at his former home seems to confirm his anxieties, while a helpful telephone operator searches through phonebooks for other Dahls. An S. Dahl in Grendon Underwood is ignored because he has never heard of the village. All of this was untrue. Dahl was quite aware his house in Bexley had been bombed, and that his family was safe. He also knew exactly where his mother was living. He had been writing to her there ever since he recovered from his crash in the desert. Yet just as tales of lions and snakes animated the reality of endless sundowners in Dar es Salaam, so here, in war-torn London, he used these invented details to heighten a mood he wanted to create.
Storyteller Page 18