As the minutes passed, the ground beneath him became a mottled canvas of browns, yellows and reds, shifting and darkening as the sun moved toward the horizon. The desert seemed to stretch away forever, featureless and hostile. He felt lonely, but protected, within the tight womb of the cockpit. Sometimes he wondered if he was the only living thing left in the world. The Gladiator’s engine whirred away in front of him, but its deep song no longer delighted his ear. Fifty minutes was up. And now, as the sun began to set, the young man began to sweat. There was no sign of an airstrip anywhere — just an endless vista of boulders, ruts and dried-out gullies. Had he been given the wrong coordinates? Had he miscalculated his bearings? Or become a victim of a sudden change in wind direction? He circled the area — scouring the ground below for aircraft, tents, any signs of human habitation. He flew around to the north, south, east and west, but all he could see was sand, rock and camel-thorn.
The last rays of the setting sun illuminated the desert with a fierce red glow. Soon it would be really dark. His fuel was low. Going back to Fouka was not an option. He had only one possibility left — a forced landing. That was what he had been trained to do in these circumstances. He would land in the desert and spend the night there. Tomorrow morning a search party would be sent to find him. It was not the way he had planned to arrive at his squadron for his first day in action, but now there was no alternative. Desperately, he looked for somewhere to land the tiny craft. He skimmed low over the bumpy ground but could find nothing suitable. The sun disappeared behind the horizon and he knew his time had run out. He must land the plane immediately. He took a chance, throttling back and touching down at about 80 miles an hour, praying the wheels would not strike a rock. But luck was not on his side. The undercarriage hit a boulder and collapsed instantly into a pile of twisted metal and rubber, burying the nose of the plane into the ground. He was thrown violently forward against the front of the canopy. His nose was driven back into his face, his skull was fractured, and he was knocked unconscious.*
It was a humiliating start to a flying career that had promised great things. Dahl had been one of the top trainees on his training course in Iraq, finding “great joy”1 in all the flying exercises undertaken there, despite the fact that he thought the station at Habbaniya — “Have a Banana”, as it was known in RAF slang — tedious and enervating.2 Later he recalled it as “an abominable, unhealthy, desolate place … a vast assemblage of hangars and Nissen huts and brick bungalows set slap in the middle of a boiling desert on the banks of the muddy Euphrates river miles from anywhere”.3 Nevertheless, at least initially, he was awestruck by the sheer size of this city in the sand, constructed 60 miles away from Baghdad and boasting as many as 10,000 inhabitants. Cataloguing its many buildings, which included churches, a cinema, a dental hospital and a mineral water factory, Dahl added ruefully to his mother that “women do not come this way, so amongst numerous other things … they will have to be forgotten. But that will not be difficult because we are working and flying so hard.”4 The trainees flew almost every day, mostly in the mornings. There were navigational, technical and meteorological classes in the afternoons. His instructors had praised Dahl’s flying skills as “well above average”, judging his aerobatic skills “exceptional”.5 His written tests too had been excellent and he was an assiduous student — although he did occasionally find time to venture out into the surrounding territory. Once he went to see the ruins of Babylon and several times he went to bandit-infested Baghdad, shopping in the street markets and playing poker with the infamously knife-wielding, gun-toting natives. They were, he reported, “a treacherous crowd”.6
Dahl’s response to the locals had initially been one of interest and wonder. The Bedouin tribesmen he encountered in Palestine on the way to Habbaniya had fascinated him with their “huge sheepskin coats and furry hats”.7 But in Iraq it was a different matter. There the first responses to the RAF airmen were almost invariably hostile. Iraqis hurled stones at the planes and took potshots at the pilots with their rifles. Dahl’s trips into the capital, to haggle with the coppersmiths and the silversmiths, excited him, and he was filled with admiration for the skills of the jewellers and craftsmen, but he was also horrified by the squalor he found there and revolted by the “horde of horrible little boys” who always followed him around. He described Baghdad as “a bloody awful town. Easily the dirtiest I’ve been to yet. The whole place is literally falling down. On either side of most of the streets you have mud brick ruins, in which people live, with the most loathsome smells issuing from their doorways. The pavements are simply packed with every conceivable kind of person — Arabs, Syrians, Jews, Negroes, Indians and the majority who are just nothing at all, with faces the colour of milk chocolate, and long flowing, but very dirty robes.” After driving back through bandit country, and being chased by pariah dogs, cackling Bedouin hags, and “blokes with guns and knives who don’t think twice about cutting your balls out for the sake of getting your brass fly buttons”,8 he was probably more relieved than he admitted to get back to the air-conditioned tedium of RAF Habbaniya.
“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.
Named after the Arabic word for the oleanders that had been planted along its avenues, in a futile attempt to soften the ferocity of the desert sun, Habbaniya may have been dull, but its conveniences made the harsh desert conditions tolerable. While Dahl was there, however, it was also to prove unexpectedly vulnerable to the elements. The camp had been constructed on a location that was prone to flooding, and that spring, when a swollen Euphrates threatened to burst its banks, thousands of inhabitants were forced to abandon their duties for six weeks, and build themselves a tented city on higher ground nearby. It was a miserable task, made worse by heat, scorpions, flies, sand vipers, and incessant 40mph sandstorms. Eventually the danger passed, everyone returned to the relative luxury of their messes and Nissen huts, and flying training resumed once more. The sandstorms ground down everyone’s spirits. But they also brought out the Stoic in Dahl. “It’s an excellent thing,” he wrote his mother, “to experience discomforts which are so intense that you can be tolerably certain that you will never have to experience ones which are worse.” He concluded that when, if ever, his flying training resumed, he would probably be “a sort of fossilised sand mound”.9
In high summer, as temperatures soared to over 50 degrees Celsius in the shade, the pilots were only able to train between 4 a.m. and 9 a.m. The rest of the day was spent skulking indoors, avoiding the heat. Then the boredom was acute and Dahl could not wait to get away. “All we do is to fly in the early mornings, sleep and sweat in the afternoons, and listen to the news on the wireless for the rest of the time,” he told his mother. “And anything more dismal than listening to the wireless these days it would be hard to find.”10 He likened the heat to that of a Turkish bath, joking that if he got through the war, he would be “well-qualified to become an attendant in one”.11 He was now flying Hawker Harts and Audaxes,