Thirteen of these young men would die in the air over the next two years. 2 Training Flight, run by civilian instructors from the local Wilson Airways. So in November 1939 he drove to Nairobi in neighboring Kenya, where he joined 15 other trainee pilots at No. In August 1939, with war approaching, Dahl was conscripted into the King’s African Rifles and given command of a platoon of native askaris charged with rounding up and interning some of the hundreds of local German national residents.īut Dahl had no desire to be a soldier. Two years later, Shell sent him to Dar es Salaam in the British colonial territory of Tanganyika (now Tanzania), where he relished the adventurous lifestyle and ventured on regular and sometimes dangerous safaris into the bush.
Educated privately, he joined the Shell Company as a management trainee in 1934. While this occasionally undermines the objectivity of what is essentially a war memoir, it seldom detracts from the impact of a remarkable story.ĭahl was born in Wales to Norwegian parents on September 13, 1916, and named after polar explorer Roald Amundsen. Although written around his flying logbook, the autobiography has a number of discrepancies and omissions that, embroidered with hindsight, tend to depict his RAF superiors in an unflattering light, an anti-authoritarian theme that is a signature feature of his children’s books. Some 40 years on, he would write of his RAF experiences in Going Solo, published in 1986. It was April 14, 1941, and the young Royal Air Force aviator was Pilot Officer Roald Dahl, better known today as the internationally ac – claimed author of highly imaginative children’s literature such as The Gremlins, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Twits and James and the Giant Peach.Īfter a delayed start to what would prove a short but intense operational career, Dahl was about to go to war, fighting in a campaign that was effectively over before he arrived. The pilot was 6 foot 6 inches tall and well built, which meant that he had crammed himself into the Hurricane’s cockpit like a hermit crab in an undersized shell. What you want is a bloody great bomber where you can stretch your legs out.” While the pilot leaned against the wing, waiting for an excruciating leg cramp to pass, one of the airmen joked: “You oughtn’t to be flying fighters, a chap of your height.
The flier was not a casualty of war he had just landed in Greece after almost five acutely uncomfortable hours flying across the Mediterranean from Egypt. Two hefty airmen grunted in unison as they lifted the pilot from the cockpit of his Hawker Hurricane. The celebrated children’s author flew Gloster Gladiators and Hawker Hurricanes for the RAF before he earned fame and fortune as a writer.
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