Going Solo

It was now about noon. The Argos landing strip was surrounded by those ever-present olive trees and in among the trees we could see that a whole lot of tents had been put up. Nothing stands out from the air more than a bunch of tents, even when they are tucked away among the olive trees. Oh brother, I thought. How long will it take them to find us here? A few hours at the most. No one should have put up any tents. The ground-crews should have slept under the trees. So should we. Our Squadron-Leader had his own tent and we found him sitting in it behind a trestle table. ‘Here we are,’ we said.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘You’ll be doing a patrol over the fleet this evening.’

We stood there looking at the Squadron-Leader as he sat behind his trestle table that had no papers on it.

There is something wrong about this, I told myself. There is no way in the world the Germans are going to allow us to operate our seven aircraft from this place. Our superiors were evidently expecting the worst because deep slit-trenches had been dug amongst the olive trees. But you cannot hide aeroplanes in slit-trenches and you cannot hide tents anywhere, especially tents that are a brilliant shining white.

‘How long will it take them to find us here, sir?’ I remember asking.

The Squadron-Leader passed a hand over his eyes, then rubbed his eye-sockets with his knuckles. ‘Who knows?’ he said.

‘They’ll wipe us out by tomorrow,’ I said, greatly daring.

‘We can’t run away and leave the army with no air cover,’ the Squadron-Leader said. ‘We must do our best.’

We all trooped out of the tent feeling not very happy about anything.

The Argos Fiasco

When we left the Squadron-Leader’s tent, David and I wandered off together to have a look around the camp. What we were really searching for was something to eat. We had been up since four-thirty that morning and it was now about two in the afternoon. None of us pilots had had anything at all to eat or drink since the night before. We were famished and very thirsty.

There must have been twenty-five tents scattered around that olive grove, but David and I soon located the mess tent. In the rush to move out of Elevsis during the night, it seemed that somebody had forgotten to bring the food. The local Greeks very quickly got wise to this state of affairs and they were now streaming into the camp bearing vast quantities of black olives and bottles of retsina wine. David and I bought a bucket of olives and two bottles of wine and found a shady patch of grass under a tree where we could sit down to eat and drink. We chose a spot right between our two Hurricanes so that we could keep an eye on them all the time. The number of Greek villagers mooching around was amazing. We must have been the first operational military airfield in history that was open to the public.

So we sat there, the two of us, in the shade of an olive tree on a lovely warm April afternoon, eating the small black juicy olives and drinking the retsina out of the bottles. From where we sat we could see the whole of Argos Bay, but there was no sign of an evacuation fleet nor of the Royal Navy. There was just one fairly large cargo vessel lying out in the bay and there was a plume of grey smoke rising from her forward hold. We were told that she was yet another fully-laden ammunition ship and that the Germans had been over and bombed her that morning. There was now a fire below decks and everyone was waiting for the enormous explosion.

‘Well, here we are,’ David said, ‘sitting in the sun and drinking pine juice and what a terrific cock-up it all is.’

I said, ‘The Germans know very well that there are seven Hurricanes left in Greece. They intend to find us and they intend to wipe us out. Then they will have the sky all to themselves.’

‘Exactly,’ David said. ‘And they’re going to find us very quickly.’

‘When they do, this camp will be an inferno,’ I said.

‘I shall be in the nearest slit-trench,’ David said.

It was curiously peaceful sitting there chewing the delicious slightly bitter black olives and spitting out the stones and taking gulps of retsina in between. I kept looking at the ammunition ship out in the bay and waiting for her to blow up.

‘I don’t see any army getting into any ships,’ David said. ‘Who are we going to patrol over this evening?’

‘Tell me seriously,’ I said, ‘do you think we’ll come out of here alive?’

‘No,’ David said. ‘I think we’ll be dead within twenty-four hours. We’ll either cop it in the air or they’ll get us right here on the ground. They’ve got enough planes to totally annihilate us.’

We were still sitting in the same place at 4.30 p.m. when there was a sudden roar overhead and a single Messerschmitt 110 swept in low over our camp. The One-One-O, as we called it, was a fast twin-engined fighter with a crew of two and with a longer range than the single-engined 109. We stood up to watch him as he banked round over the water of the bay and came back again straight towards us, still flying low. He showed utter contempt for our defences because he knew we had none, and as he flashed over the second time, we could see both the pilot and the rear-gunner peering down at us with their cockpit hoods wide open. A fighter pilot never expects to come face to face with an enemy flier. To him the machine is the enemy. But now it was only the humans that I saw. All of a sudden those two Germans were so close they made my skin prickle. I saw their pale faces turned towards me, each face framed in a black helmet with the goggles pushed up high over the forehead, and for one thousandth of a second I fancied that my eyes looked into the eyes of the pilot.

That pilot made three workmanlike passes over our camp, then he flew off to the north.

‘That’s it!’ David Coke said. ‘That’s done it!’

Men were standing up all over the camp. They were discussing the consequences of the 110’s visit. It hadn’t taken the Germans long to find us.

David and I knew exactly what the sequence of events would be from now on. ‘We can work it out,’ I said. ‘It’ll take him roughly half an hour to get back to his base and report our precise whereabouts. It’ll take his squadron another half hour to get ready for take-off. Then another half hour for the whole lot of them to arrive back here and knock the daylights out of us. We can expect to be ground-strafed by a squadron of One-One-Os in an hour and a half’s time, at six o’clock this evening.’

‘We could jump them,’ David said. ‘If the seven of us are all airborne and waiting for them directly overhead at six o’clock we could jump them beautifully.’

The Adjutant came up to us. ‘CO’s orders,’ he said. ‘All seven of you to patrol over the fleet for as long as you can this evening. Take-off is at six o’clock sharp.’

‘Six o’clock!’ David cried. ‘But that’s just when they’ll be coming over.’