An Irishman's Diary

IN THE TOWN where I grew up there used to be a butcher named Woods. He was gone long before my time, having moved to England with his family – including their son William (then 12 years old) – in 1925. And they might never have been heard of again locally except that William later joined the RAF and became what every schoolboy knows as a “fighter ace” in the second World War.

Now nicknamed “Timber”, he began his exploits with the defence of Malta in the summer of 1940, during which he shot down several Italian planes, enough to win a Distinguished Flying Cross in December of that year. Then he was posted to Greece where Mussolini, peeved at Hitler’s failure to consult him about anything, had embarked on one of his own adventures.

The Italians were soon in trouble, thanks partly to the Greeks’ heroic resistance and also to Woods and his comrades. Despite flying outdated biplanes, the RAF gave the invaders a torrid time. But this in turn brought the Luftwaffe into Greece, at which point the RAF’s luck ran out.

The Germans invaded from the north on April 6th. Within a fortnight they were on the outskirts of Athens. And for Timber Woods and others, the end came 70 years ago this week, when they were ordered into the skies over the Greek capital in a doomed attempt to slow the assault.

His life’s closing scenes were at least well recorded, because among those up there with him was Roald Dahl. Yes, before he became a famous author of children’s stories, Dahl was also a fighter ace. In time he would be critical of the recklessness with which the military establishment expended both men and machines in such lost causes.

But like all ace pilots, he must have had a certain recklessness himself. He would also recall the Battle of Athens as “a long and beautiful dogfight in which 15 Hurricanes fought for half an hour between 150 and 200 German bombers and fighters”. Which, at least in terms of the competing numbers, was an accurate summary.

In a biography by Donald Sturrock, Dahl gives a more detailed description of that chaotic 30 minutes: “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.” Somewhere in the midst of the frenzy, Woods was attacked by what one witness called a “swarm” of German Junkers and Messerschmitts. Battle- hardened as he was, he had no chance. His blazing Hurricane was last seen plunging into Elevsis Bay, just west of Athens.

Following him into the water moments later was his commanding officer, the South African-born Marmaduke Pattle, who had been trying to protect Woods when he was himself hit simultaneously by fire from two Messerschmitts. Better know as Pat Pattle, he is widely credited as the RAF’s most successful pilot of the war, shooting down 40-odd enemy planes. By some accounts he had just claimed his 50th when his own aircraft exploded.

It was April 20th, 1941, Hitler’s 52nd birthday. The Germans occupied Athens shortly afterwards and opinion is still divided as to whether the Greek campaign fatally delayed Hitler’s invasion of Russia, or whether it was a futile exercise by the Allies. Dahl had mixed feelings, bitterly regretting the unnecessary loss of life while also priding himself in the verdict of one historian, who suggested that the heroism of the pilots over Athens ranked alongside anything in the Battle of Britain.

With one or two exceptions, Dahl does not say much about the personalities of those with whom he fought. He was a late entry into the battle and by then, most of the pilots had been fighting for months in a campaign that was now unravelling. On the first evening, he found them uncommunicative: "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." But he did later give the name of Timber Woods to one of his fictional characters. In the 1954 short story, Poison, the narrator is so identified, although the action is not set in any war. Poisonis, however, one of the many stories Dahl wrote for adults and there are shades of Hemingway in its style and dark subject matter.

Set in India, it revolves around an incident in which another character, Harry Pope, mistakenly thinks a krait – a small, very poisonous rock snake – has crawled under his bed-sheet and is now asleep on his stomach. The local doctor is called, but after a painstaking ritual in which Pope is pre-injected with serum and the bed-sheets soaked with chloroform to drug the reptile, no snake is found. Whereupon the real poison of the situation is revealed to be Pope’s racist contempt for the doctor who dares to suggest he imagined the whole thing. If the story is a tribute to the war-time Woods, the honour may not extend beyond his name. That said, there is a hint that the narrator is a former RAF man – he compares Pope’s facial expression to the suffering a pilot he once saw shot in the stomach. And he does emerge as a kind-of hero: a stoic, Hemingwayesque figure who recognises something ugly in his friend and tries to assuage the doctor’s hurt feelings as, put back in his place by the arrogant patient, he drives away.