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 harbour 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 judgement. 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, however, 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”.23It had no defences 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 se nior 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