Going Solo Read online

  Out in the Middle East, both in Egypt and in Greece, unless it was winter we dressed in nothing but a khaki shirt and khaki shorts and stockings, and even when we flew we seldom bothered to put on a sweater. The paper-bag I was now carrying, as well as the Log Book and the camera, had been tucked under my legs on the flight over and there had been no room for anything else.

  I was to share a tent with another pilot and when I ducked my head low and went in, my companion was sitting on his camp-bed and threading a piece of string into one of his shoes because the shoe-lace had broken. He had a long but friendly face and he introduced himself as David Coke, pronounced Cook. I learnt much later that David Coke came from a very noble family, and today, had he not been killed in his Hurricane later on, he would have been none other than the Earl of Leicester owning one of the most enormous and beautiful stately homes in England, although anyone acting less like a future Earl I have never met. He was warm-hearted and brave and generous, and over the next few weeks we were to become close friends. I sat down on my own camp-bed and began to ask him a few questions.

  ‘Are things out here really as dicey as I’ve been told?’ I asked him.

  ‘It’s absolutely hopeless,’ he said, ‘but we’re plugging on. The German fighters will be within range of us any moment now, and then we’ll be outnumbered by about fifty to one. If they don’t get us in the air, they’ll wipe us out on the ground.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I have never been in action in my life. I haven’t the foggiest idea what to do if I meet one of them.’

  David Coke stared at me as though he were seeing a ghost. He could hardly have looked more startled if I had suddenly announced that I had never been up in an aeroplane before. ‘You don’t mean to say’, he gasped, ‘that you’ve come out to this place of all places with absolutely no experience whatsoever!’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ I said. ‘But I expect they’ll put me to fly with one of the old hands who’ll show me the ropes.’

  ‘You’re going to be unlucky,’ he said. ‘Out here we go up in ones. It hasn’t occurred to them that it’s better to fly in pairs. I’m afraid you’ll be all on your own right from the start. But seriously, have you never even been in a squadron before in your life?’

  ‘Never,’ I said.

  ‘Does the CO know this?’ he asked me.

  ‘I don’t expect he’s stopped to think about it,’ I said. ‘He simply told me I’d start flying tomorrow like all the others.’

  ‘But where on earth have you come from then?’ he asked. ‘They’d never send a totally inexperienced pilot to a place like this.’

  I told him briefly what had been happening to me over the last six months.

  ‘Oh Christ!’ he said. ‘What a place to start! How many hours do you have on Hurricanes?’

  ‘About seven,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ he cried. ‘That means you hardly know how to fly the thing!’

  ‘I don’t really,’ I said. ‘I can do take-offs and landings but I’ve never exactly tried throwing it around in the air.’

  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