LITMIR.BIZ

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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 harbour 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.

      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”.¹⁴This 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 analyse 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.” ¹⁵As 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 Mat-son 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

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