War by Roald Dahl

Author:Roald Dahl [Dahl, Roald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-06-23T04:00:00+00:00

The time was 5.15 a.m. There was not a soul on the field except for the man sitting on his steam-roller. We wondered what we ought to do next. If our planes were going to be strafed, then the further away from them we were the better, just so long as we kept them in view. There was a stony ridge about 200 feet high between us and the sea and we decided that this might be as safe a vantage point as any. So up we went and when we got to the top we sat down on the big smooth white boulders and lit cigarettes. Immediately below us and to one side lay the olive grove with the seven Hurricanes half-hidden but still pretty conspicuous among the trees. To the other side lay the blue Gulf of Athens, and I could have thrown a stone into the water it was so close.

A large oil tanker was lying about 500 yards off the shore.

‘I wouldn’t want to be on that tanker,’ somebody said.

Somebody else said, ‘Why doesn’t the silly sod get the hell out of here? Hasn’t he heard about the Germans?’

In a way it was very pleasant to be sitting high up on that rocky ridge early on a bright blue Grecian morning in April. We were young and quite fearless. We were undaunted by the thought that there were only seven of us with seven Hurricanes on a bare field and fifty miles to the north about one half of the entire German Air Force was trying to hunt us down. From where we sat we had a fine view of the Bay of Athens and the blue-green sea and the crazy oil tanker lying at anchor.

Breakfast-time came but there was no breakfast. Then we heard the roar of aircraft engines close by and a group of some thirty 109s came whistling very low over the village of Megara, not half a mile away from us. They flew on, heading straight for Elevsis, the place we had left at the crack of dawn. We had got out just in time.

Only a few minutes later, a bunch of Stuka dive-bombers flew directly over our heads at about 3,000 feet, going straight towards the tanker, and above them a host of protective fighters were swarming like locusts.

‘Get down!’ somebody shouted. ‘Hide under the rocks and keep still! Don’t let them see us!’

But surely, I thought, they would see our planes in the olive grove? They were by no means completely hidden.

The Stukas came over in line astern and when the leader was directly above the oil tanker he dropped his nose and went into a screaming vertical dive. We lay among the boulders on top of the ridge watching the first Stuka. Faster and faster it went and we could hear the engine note changing from a roar to a scream as the plane dived absolutely vertically down upon the tanker. To me it looked as though the pilot

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