Books: Battle Above Olympus

SIGNED WITH THEIR HONOUR—James Aid ridge—Little, Brown ($2.50).

This is the story of Squadron 80, a group of British pilots who flew up from Egypt to help the Greeks against the Italians and Germans. It is also the love story of Flying Officer John Quayle and the Greek girl he married in the welter of the British retreat to Crete. But above all it is the story of the planes, the mechanical heroes of Squadron 80.

They were fighting planes of a breed that is almost extinct—old Gladiator biplanes with none of the weight and speed of Hurricanes and Spitfires. But they could do “tight loops and tight turns” that their newer rivals never could. When Quayle and his mates flew their Gladiators above the front lines in northern Greece, their orders were to ignore the enemy fighter escorts and get the bombers.

It wasn’t so hard on the handful of Gladiators at first. They were outnumbered, but the outnumbering Italian fighters were biplanes too. Soon the numbers of the enemy increased hugely. But the British flyers’ order remained the same —ignore the vicious fire power and get the bombers. Then the Messerschmitts arrived. Their arrival meant the death of the Gladiators as surely as the arrival of the German army meant the British evacuation from Greece.

The fierce, unequal battle for the air is accompanied in this novel by the battle for the land. War Correspondent Aldridge reports this fighting from personal experience (he was correspondent for North American Newspaper Alliance). Heroic place names of the Greek campaign appear again with the old ring—Argyrokastron, Janina, Larissa, the Pindus, Arta. Greek soldiers, ill-equipped, ill-led, climb slowly down the mountainsides in reluctant retreat. They shoot their pro-Nazi officers who talk of surrender, filter silently into hiding in the forests when their units are shattered. Their tragicomic air ace, Nitralexis, goes out on reconnaissance in a French biplane of 1918, taking along the nearest things to bombs he can get—empty bottles, old boots, tin cans rolled up in a bag. When Pilot Quayle is shot down in the Greek retreat, it is Nitralexis and a wild mountaineer (“a fine boy if he doesn’t kill us”) who lead him to safety through the Italian lines and restore him to his Greek sweetheart, paying for their loyalty with their lives.

But heroism and loyalty are helpless to prevent the slow, inexorable killing of the pilots of Squadron 80. Quayle himself (one of two Squadron survivors after the fall of Greece) dies in action flying a Hurricane. His pregnant bride is held in Nazi-occupied Greece.

Author Aldridge is most at home and most himself among the technical intricacies of plane engines and aerial combat tactics. But as a novelist he takes off clumsily. Some readers may enjoy watching Novelist Hemingway guide Novelist Aldridge’s hand as he writes. Others may tire of the cracked echo of For Whom the Bell Tolls. (“Then he could feel her because his arms were around her back and she was crying, enormous crying, great crying, and everything was loose inside him and he was part of her crying and the soft smell, and his arms moved with her crying, and his body was warm with it and his hands were with it as her body moved, and his head thick. . . .”) Such flaws reduce the effectiveness of Author Aldridge’s derivative saga of human courage defying overwhelming mechanical odds in the war-torn air above Olympus.