the talented pilot. Forester also informed Dahl that the Post was paying $1,000 for his maiden effort, and enclosed a check for that amount, minus his agent’s 10 percent commission. *
Like many postmortem adventure tales, Dahl’s romanticized autobiographical account had only a glancing relationship with the truth. In the version he sent Forester, instead of ferrying his plane to his forward unit and crash-landing after he ran out of fuel, Dahl is pursued by an Italian patrol, and his Hurricane is hit by machine-gun fire before plummeting to earth in a ball of flame. Eager to impress his celebrated collaborator, Dahl could not resist the urge to fictionalize. He embellished freely, dressing up his desert misadventure with ground strafing, scrambling soldiers, and a trusty sidekick named Shorty. His literary license is perhaps somewhat excused by his bedridden narrator’s struggle to remember exactly what had happened to him: “Slowly it all came back; not clearly and brightly at first, but a little dimly, as though by moonlight.” The story unfolds in brief, vivid scenes and snatches of terse dialogue that owe a considerable debt to Ernest Hemingway, a writer Dahl much admired.
By the time the piece appeared in the August 1942 issue of The Saturday Evening Post , it had been packaged as a heart-pounding battle yarn, appearing under the title “Shot Down over Libya,” and touted as a “factual report on Libyan air fighting” by an unnamed RAF pilot. Dahl had requested that his name be removed, citing “an old RAF custom.” Adding to the anonymous pilot’s allure was an editors’ note explaining that he was in the United States “for medical reasons,” an allusion to yet another corrective surgery, and a neat diversionary tactic to obscure Dahl’s presence as an official envoy of the British government sent to cheer on the Allies. *
“Shot Down over Libya” was just the sort of patriotic fare the British Information Services wanted to peddle to the American press, and Dahl’s superiors encouraged him to do more pieces for the magazine. As a staff officer, he was required to submit everything he wrote for approval to the BIS, which deemed his action-packed tales effective propaganda. Even his correspondence with his new literary agent, Harold Matson, and various interested magazine editors was read by the British Embassy censor and bore a stamp for file references. Determined to make the most of this new opportunity and happy to have a way to earn some extra money, Dahl kept coming up with more stories about his adventures as an ace fighter. Virtually everything he wrote during this period was a mélange of personal experience and observations gleaned from fellow pilots, re-creating thrilling air battles, the fear of death that strangely vanished the moment the enemy appeared, and moments of mad abandon in the midst of so much brutality. He invented dialogue with the sure hand of a novelist, not the novice that he was. When he exhausted his supply of memories, he switched to fiction, his style becoming, as he later put it, “progressively less realistic and more fantastic.”
Dahl’s tightly plotted battle stories proved popular and resonated with American readers who were caught up in the patriotism and fighting spirit that swept the country in its first summer of the war. He soon began getting offers from other influential American magazines, and in the months to come his short stories would appear in Collier’s, Harper’s, Ladies’ Home Journal , and Town and Country , among others. “It’s almost impossible to understand what an emotional time it was,” he recalled. “The Americans and British against Hitler and the Nazis, [we] were fighting for a tremendous cause, I mean saving the world, literally. And emotions were running endlessly high.”
Raised on stories about Norwegian trolls and wee people, Dahl decided to try his hand at a fanciful children’s story about the hazards of being an
Like many postmortem adventure tales, Dahl’s romanticized autobiographical account had only a glancing relationship with the truth. In the version he sent Forester, instead of ferrying his plane to his forward unit and crash-landing after he ran out of fuel, Dahl is pursued by an Italian patrol, and his Hurricane is hit by machine-gun fire before plummeting to earth in a ball of flame. Eager to impress his celebrated collaborator, Dahl could not resist the urge to fictionalize. He embellished freely, dressing up his desert misadventure with ground strafing, scrambling soldiers, and a trusty sidekick named Shorty. His literary license is perhaps somewhat excused by his bedridden narrator’s struggle to remember exactly what had happened to him: “Slowly it all came back; not clearly and brightly at first, but a little dimly, as though by moonlight.” The story unfolds in brief, vivid scenes and snatches of terse dialogue that owe a considerable debt to Ernest Hemingway, a writer Dahl much admired.
By the time the piece appeared in the August 1942 issue of The Saturday Evening Post , it had been packaged as a heart-pounding battle yarn, appearing under the title “Shot Down over Libya,” and touted as a “factual report on Libyan air fighting” by an unnamed RAF pilot. Dahl had requested that his name be removed, citing “an old RAF custom.” Adding to the anonymous pilot’s allure was an editors’ note explaining that he was in the United States “for medical reasons,” an allusion to yet another corrective surgery, and a neat diversionary tactic to obscure Dahl’s presence as an official envoy of the British government sent to cheer on the Allies. *
“Shot Down over Libya” was just the sort of patriotic fare the British Information Services wanted to peddle to the American press, and Dahl’s superiors encouraged him to do more pieces for the magazine. As a staff officer, he was required to submit everything he wrote for approval to the BIS, which deemed his action-packed tales effective propaganda. Even his correspondence with his new literary agent, Harold Matson, and various interested magazine editors was read by the British Embassy censor and bore a stamp for file references. Determined to make the most of this new opportunity and happy to have a way to earn some extra money, Dahl kept coming up with more stories about his adventures as an ace fighter. Virtually everything he wrote during this period was a mélange of personal experience and observations gleaned from fellow pilots, re-creating thrilling air battles, the fear of death that strangely vanished the moment the enemy appeared, and moments of mad abandon in the midst of so much brutality. He invented dialogue with the sure hand of a novelist, not the novice that he was. When he exhausted his supply of memories, he switched to fiction, his style becoming, as he later put it, “progressively less realistic and more fantastic.”
Dahl’s tightly plotted battle stories proved popular and resonated with American readers who were caught up in the patriotism and fighting spirit that swept the country in its first summer of the war. He soon began getting offers from other influential American magazines, and in the months to come his short stories would appear in Collier’s, Harper’s, Ladies’ Home Journal , and Town and Country , among others. “It’s almost impossible to understand what an emotional time it was,” he recalled. “The Americans and British against Hitler and the Nazis, [we] were fighting for a tremendous cause, I mean saving the world, literally. And emotions were running endlessly high.”
Raised on stories about Norwegian trolls and wee people, Dahl decided to try his hand at a fanciful children’s story about the hazards of being an
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