Athens, April 20, 1941. Next Tuesday marks eighty years since that day, when the last act of the "Battle of Athens" drama unfolded, that is, the last air battle over the Attic sky, just a week before the swastika was raised on the Acropolis. On that day the last fifteen remaining RAF Hurricane fighters, from the original force sent to Greece in February 1941, faced in one of the fiercest dogfights in the Greek skies during World War II over a hundred, even two hundred fighters and Luftwaffe light bombers.
For the people of Athens and Piraeus that day a life and death struggle was unfolding over their heads with the engines of the aircraft fighting high in the sky and the German fighters with their swastikas and yellow noses charging furiously at the British Hurricanes, defending a city that the young RAF pilots had heard about with admiration in their school days.
“We were flying at about nine thousand feet. […] Suddenly the whole sky around us seemed to be shaken up by the German fighters. They came at us from very high up. […] We broke formation and now everyone was responsible for himself. What became known as the Battle of Athens had begun', wrote post-war a then unknown young but very inexperienced Royal Air Force pilot with only seven hours' experience in Hurricanes, Roald Dahl, the later author of children's short stories, and the novel that became and movie "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory".
He himself, with his book "Solo march", made known to the Anglo-Saxon world the unknown "Battle of Athens", but also the British air presence in our country during those dramatic hours of the war, when the Greek pilots were decimated and only five British fighter planes had managed to reach Crete unscathed in May 1941. Among the fifteen British airmen who defended Athens was the South African ace Commodore Pat Pattle, who was among the RAF's leading fighter pilots during World War II War, with a record number of over fifty Italian and German aircraft shot down.
Patel, whose star as a fighter pilot rose in Egypt when the British air force was defending the Suez Canal early in the war, reached his peak in Greece when he was posted in November 1940 with the 80th Fighter Squadron equipped with Gladiator aircraft , and tragically died in the Battle of Athens, when he crashed fighting in his burning Hurricane, a few kilometers east of Psytallia, towards the Gulf of Eleusis, before shooting down in the last forty-eight hours of his life, but five German aircraft.
Although the official records of the unit he commanded were destroyed shortly before the British fled mainland Greece to prevent them from falling into German hands, it is nevertheless through his personal diaries and accounts of fellow soldiers that we are able to know most of the confirmed downings of, ranking him as one of the RAF's finest aces. What happened in the last moments of his life, and how this expert chaser with excellent eyesight was taken by surprise without being able to control his back, we will never know. Surely the over-intensity of the five and a half months he fought in the Greek skies non-stop from the Albanian front to Athens and Piraeus contributed to his downfall. After all, according to testimonies, on the last day of his life he boarded his plane having barely gotten up due to flu from the campaign ranch in Eleusis with chills and a high fever.
"Eighty years later, most of the events of WWII have been carefully documented, but not this period. Perhaps the 33rd Squadron under those conditions would have ceased to function as a coordinated unit if it were not for Patel's example and leadership," Edward McManus, a researcher of the aviation history of the period, and head of the Memorial tells APE-MPE Battle of England in London. "Probably the strain led to his exhaustion and as a result his death over Athens. Despite our competition with the European Union, I can tell you that there is a very strong feeling of solidarity with Greece and a feeling that somewhere we have let you down in our retreat from (mainland) Greece and Crete. But the steadfast resistance of Patel and his Fate shows that this was not always the case," adds Mr. Edward McManus.
For other British historians the pilots of these 15 aircraft deserve to rank with the heroic pilots of the Battle of Britain, having destroyed 22 enemy aircraft from a vastly outnumbered air force, and probably eight more, at a cost of three dead, including their commander Pat Patl. The day after the air battle, the Greek forces in the defense sector of Larissa, surrendered to Marshal List, while the airport of Ioannina was occupied by the motorized SS. A race for the gradual withdrawal of Greco-British forces from mainland Greece was underway...
A monument to the forgotten...
In October 1990, a monument was erected at Elefsina airbase by the Air Force, following a proposal by the Association of Veteran Airmen and the RAF Athens club, to commemorate the sacrifice of Ensign Pat Pattle and the other 51 Greek and 79 British airmen, who fell fighting defending the Greek skies from the Albanian front in October 1940, until the occupation of Crete in May 1941.
"Eleusis chooses symbolically because on April 20, 1941, the final act of the Battle of Athens took place in its skies, with the main protagonists being the RAF and the greatest British ace of the war up to that time, the twenty-seven-year-old South African Major Pat Pattle," he reports to APE- The architect Athanasios Kon. Hatjilakos, who had the architectural conception, design and supervision of the Monument.
"Avoiding the established, "academic" standards of monuments, where sculptural compositions usually dominate, here we are dealing with a purely architectural composition where the architectural idea of the construction is also the "soul" of the monument. And the "soul" in this particular case is not the material element but the immaterial, the void, the sky. The structural elements simply frame the void to give it form and make it synthetically recognizable," adds Mr. Hatzilakos. The remains of Ensign Patel were never found, as his plane was blown to pieces in the air by the well-aimed fire of two German twin-engined fighters, as he was trying to help a colleague who was in danger of being shot down.
A legend wants to be still there, at the bottom, strapped to the seat of his plane, fulfilling the words of Thucydides, "Andron epifanon pas gehi tafos". As for young Roald Dahl, he was quite lucky despite his inexperience, and saw several aircraft go down in flames before he himself hit a Ju-88, which strafed him with its machine guns. He managed to return to Eleusis with his Hurricane literally disintegrated.
APE-BE, VASILIS PIAS