He sat there still not quite able to believe what I was saying.
‘Have you been here long?’ I asked him.
‘Not very,’ he said. ‘I was in the Battle of Britain before I came here. That was bad enough, but it was peanuts compared to this crazy place. We have no radar here at all and precious little RT. You can only talk to the ground when you are sitting right on top of the aerodrome. And you can’t talk to each other at all when you’re in the air. There is virtually no communication. The Greeks are our radar. We have a Greek peasant sitting on the top of every mountain for miles around, and when he spots a bunch of German planes he calls up the Ops Room here on a field telephone. That’s our radar.’
‘Does it work?’
‘Now and again it does,’ he said. ‘But most of our spotters don’t know a Messerschmitt from a baby-carriage.’ He had managed to thread the string through all the eyes in his shoe and now he started to put the shoe back on his foot.
‘Have the Germans really got a thousand planes in Greece?’ I asked him.
‘It seems likely,’ he said. ‘Yes, I think they have. You see, Greece is only a beginning for them. After they’ve taken Greece, they intend to push on south and take Crete as well. I’m sure of that.’
We sat on our camp-beds thinking about the future. I could see that it was going to be a pretty hairy one.
Then David Coke said, ‘As you don’t seem to know anything at all, I’d better try to help you. What would you like to know?’
‘Well, first of all,’ I said, ‘what do I do when I meet a One-O-Nine?’
‘You try to get on his tail,’ he said. ‘You try to turn in a tighter circle than him. If you let him get on to your tail, you’ve had it. A Messerschmitt has cannon in its wings. We’ve only got bullets, and they aren’t even incendiaries. They’re just ordinary bullets. The Hun has cannon-shells that explode when they hit you. Our bullets just make little holes in the fuselage. So you’ve got to hit him smack in the engine to bring him down. He can hit you anywhere at all and the cannon-shell will explode and blow you up.’
I tried to digest what he was saying.
‘One other thing,’ he said, ‘never, absolutely never, take your eyes off your rear-view mirror for more than a few seconds. They come up behind you and they come very fast.’
‘I’ll try to remember that,’ I said. ‘What do I do if I meet a bomber? What’s the best way to attack him?’
‘The bombers you will meet will be mostly Ju 88s,’ he said. ‘The Ju 88 is a very good aircraft. It is just about as fast as you are and it’s got a rear-gunner and a front-gunner. The gunners on a Ju 88 use incendiary tracer bullets and they aim their guns like they’re aiming a hosepipe. They can see where their bullets are going all the time and that makes them pretty deadly. So if you are attacking a Ju 88 from astern, make quite sure you get well below him so the rear-gunner can’t hit you. But you won’t shoot him down that way. You have to go for one of his engines. And when you are doing that, remember to allow plenty of deflection. Aim well in front of him. Get the nose of his engine on the outer ring of your reflector sight.’
I hardly knew what he was talking about, but I nodded and said, ‘Right. I’ll try to do that.’
‘Oh my God,’ he said. ‘I can’t teach you how to shoot down Germans in one easy lesson. I just wish I could take you up with me tomorrow so I could look after you a bit.’
‘Can’t you?’ I said eagerly. ‘We could ask the CO.’
‘Not a hope,’ he said. ‘We always go up singly. Except when we do a sweep, then we all go up together in formation.’
He paused and ran his fingers through his pale-brown hair. ‘The trouble here’, he said, ‘is that the CO doesn’t talk much to his pilots. He doesn’t even fly with them. He must have flown once because he’s got a DFC, but I’ve never seen him get into a Hurricane. In the Battle of Britain the Squadron-Leader always flew with his squadron. And he gave lots of advice and help to his new pilots. In England you always went up in pairs and a new boy always went up with an experienced man. And in the Battle of Britain we had radar and we had RT that jolly well worked. We could talk to the ground and we could talk to each other all the time in the air. But not here. The big thing to remember here is that you are totally on your own. No one is going to help you, not even the CO. In the Battle of Britain’, he added, ‘the new boys were very carefully looked after.’
‘Has flying finished for the day?’ I asked him.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’ll be getting dark soon. In fact it’s about time for supper. I’ll take you along.’
The officers’ mess was a tent large enough to contain two long trestle tables, one with food on it and the other where we sat down to eat. The food was tinned beef stew and lumps of bread, and there were bottles of Greek retsina wine to go with it. The Greeks have a trick of disguising a poor quality wine by adding pine resin to it, the idea being that the tast
e of the resin is not quite so appalling as the taste of the wine. We drank retsina because that was all there was. The other pilots in the squadron, all experienced young men who had nearly been killed many times, treated me just as casually as the Squadron-Leader had. Formalities did not exist in this place. Pilots came and pilots went. The others hardly noticed my presence. No real friendships existed. The way David Coke had treated me was exceptional, but then he was an exceptional person. I realized that nobody else was about to take a beginner like me under his wing. Each man was wrapped up in a cocoon of his own problems, and the sheer effort of trying to stay alive and at the same time doing your duty was concentrating the minds of everyone around me. 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.
There was a notice-board nailed to one of the tent poles in the mess and on it was pinned a single typed sheet with the names of the pilots who were to go on patrol the next morning as well as the times of their take-offs. I learnt from David Coke that a patrol meant stooging around directly above the airfield and waiting for the ground controller to call you up and direct you to a precise area where German planes had been spotted by one of the Greek comedians on top of his mountain. The take-off time against my name was 10 a.m.
When I woke up the next morning, all I could think about was my ten o’clock take-off time and the fact that I would almost certainly be meeting the Luftwaffe in some form or another and entirely on my own for the first time. Such thoughts as these tend to loosen the bowels and I asked David Coke where I could find the latrines. He told me roughly where they were and I wandered off to find them.
I had been in some fairly primitive lavatories in East Africa, but the 80 Squadron latrines at Elevsis beat the lot. A wide trench six feet deep and sixteen feet long had been dug in the ground. Down the whole length of this trench a round pole had been suspended about four feet above the ground, and I watched in horror as an airman who had got there before me lowered his trousers and attempted to sit on the pole. The trench was so wide that he could hardly reach the pole with his hands. But when he did, he had to turn around and do a sort of backwards leap in the hope of his bottom landing squarely on the pole. Having managed this, but only just, he had to grip the pole with both hands to keep his balance. He lost his balance and over he went backwards into the awful pit. I pulled him out and he hurried away I know not where to try to wash himself. I refused to risk it. I wandered away and found a place behind an olive tree where the wild flowers grew all around me.
At exactly ten o’clock I was strapped into my Hurricane ready for take-off. Several others had gone off singly before me during the past half-hour and had disappeared into the blue Grecian sky. I took off and climbed to 5,000 feet and started circling above the flying field while somebody in the Ops Room tried to contact me on his amazingly inefficient apparatus. My code-name was Blue Four.
Through a storm of static a far-away voice kept saying in my ear-phones, ‘Blue Four, can you hear me? Can you hear me?’ And I kept replying, ‘Yes, but only just.’
‘Await orders,’ the faint voice said. ‘Listen out.’