On Spartan Wings by John Carr

Author:John Carr
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781844685479
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2012-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

Winter arrived at Aqir in the midst of a heavy night flying training schedule. As darkness fell on 10 December and cold winds screamed down from the Golan Heights, Pilot Officer Philip Plastiras tightened his harness and gunned his Hurricane down the runway, the propeller flinging sprays of rainwater into the slipstream. Moments after take-off, the ground crew observed the Hurricane’s tail light describing an arc right into the ground. The countryside lit up with the flash of the explosion. Plastiras’s squadron mate and best friend, Flying Officer Kartalamakis, stood rooted to the spot in horror until he saw a figure racing towards another Hurricane. It was Varvaressos. Tight-lipped and silent, the squadron commander climbed into the cockpit, tightened the harness and fired up the engine.

‘We all realized what he was doing,’ Kartalamakis wrote later. ‘He was going to risk his life to save the morale of his pilots.’ Kartalamakis went up to his commander and advised him to correct his altimeter, which was 500 feet in error. He was pretty sure it was a faulty altimeter that had caused Plastiras’s crash. Varvaressos roared off down the wet runway and rose over the burning wreckage of Plastiras’s plane. Many anxious pairs of eyes stayed glued to his tail light. After circling the airfield once, Varvaressos headed in to land, guided by a searchlight. But something seemed to be wrong — instead of aiming for the runway Varvaressos was on a collision course with the searchlight and the men around it! ‘Oh, God, not another accident,’ Kartalamakis found himself thinking. ‘It’ll be the end of the squadron.’ The CO, buffeted by a stubborn crosswind, had come in too far left of the runway. He corrected just in time, touched down with a great thump, skidded and surged into the air again for another try, this time successful. His crews revered him even more after that.2

Christmas 1941 found the men of 335 Mira living the high life for a few precious hours in the Piccadilly Club on the slopes of Mount Carmel above Haifa. The unexpected star of the show was the squadron’s medical officer, Pilot Officer George Dasios. Rakish in his fur-lined jacket and floor-sweeping scarf, a pipe seemingly glued to his mouth, Dasios would impress crowds of gullible clubbers with dramatic recreations of fictitious heroic stunts in the air, while the actual aircrews pretended to be engrossed and theatrically astonished. The revellers staggered back to their base at half past six in the morning to find a scramble order waiting for them. Italian bombers had just attacked a convoy including Greek ships off Cyprus. The bombers slipped under the radar to wave-top height and escaped. That night an enemy submarine slipped into Haifa harbour and set an Allied tanker aflame. The blaze turned the sky over Haifa into day.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.