Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl - Donald Sturrock

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target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_0cf247c3-f1bd-5675-99a9-5e88fe11b06c">†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.

       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 Noel 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 But despite inferior firepower and an air force that consisted of outdated planes, the Greeks had fought back with unexpected tenacity, and by mid-November the Italians had been forced back into Albania.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 feted 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 manoeuvrable 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 exagger ated the odds, but his scepticism 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 refuelling. 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 grey 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

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