been almost the first word he’d spoken – and although he had worked hard at school and had managed to secure a place on one of the Civilian Pilot Training Programs, his dream of flying for his country in the US Army had so nearly been thwarted time and time again. The son of British Jamaicans, he had feared he wouldn’t get accepted in the first place because neither of his parents had ever got around to applying for US citizenship. Once as a boy he’d been arrested for trying to get on the New York subway using a fake dime, and when asked whether he’d ever fallen foul of the law at his air force interview had wrestled with himself over what to say. He’d decided to tell the truth – and it turned out they’d known all along; they had wanted to test his honesty. And although he’d already got his civilian pilot’s licence, he quickly discovered once he’d arrived at Tuskegee Campus in Alabama to begin his military training that whatever flying hours he already had in his logbook counted for next to nothing.
Of the eleven men who had joined Dryden in Class 42-D, only three had gained their coveted wings. Dryden himself had been warned numerous times he was within a whisker of being washed out. The moment the silver wings had been pinned on his chest, Dryden had scarcely been able to believe the moment had actually come. ‘My heart was racing so fast I feared I might pass out from excitement,’ he recalled; ‘for now, at last it was over.20 All the hurdles that could have killed my dream were now, themselves, washed out.’ At the time, he and two of his classmates had been three of only eight black officers in the United States Army Air Forces. To get to that point they had had to be better than their white colleagues at every stage of the training programme. Most new pilots heading to England or North Africa had around 350 flying hours in their logbooks, but by the time Dryden was posted overseas on 2 April 1943, some twenty-six months after the formation of an all-coloured air force unit had been first authorized, he had accrued some 538 hours, including 207 on the P-40 Kittyhawk and not including the 90 hours from his civilian pilot training programme.
In fact, that the 99th FS was going to war at all was something of a miracle as Jim Crow had attempted to throw a spanner in the works at every opportunity. General Hap Arnold had thought it would take too long to train both aircrew and ground crew to be of any value in the war, and had recommended the 99th FS be posted to a backwater in the Caribbean. It was Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the president, who had done much to overcome such barriers. Visiting a polio clinic in Tuskegee and seeing aircraft flying overhead, she was told they were flown by coloured pilots and introduced to some of the key personnel; she had even been given a flight. Back in Washington, she had urged the president to intervene; and the squadron, with just twenty-eight pilots, had finally been posted overseas.
The 99th had left Oujda on 30 May in two flights of fourteen, headed for Tunis. Dryden was in the second flight but soon after they’d taken off his wingman, Willie Ashley, began having problems with overheating and so they decided to turn back, Dryden accompanying him to make sure he made it all right. This set them back a good while, and when they finally reached the staging post of Blida the following day, the second flight had already taken off again for Fardjouna airfield near Tunis. And by that time the first flight, led by Colonel Davis, had already taken the 99th FS into action over Pantelleria.
Dryden finally flew his first combat sortie on 4 June, as the air bombardment of Pantelleria continued. With a 500-pound bomb slung underneath his Kittyhawk, he dived down, following his flight leader, red tracers streaking past his cockpit. He was concentrating so hard he didn’t have time to feel scared; only as he pulled up from the bomb run did it cross his mind the enemy below had been trying to shoot him. ‘Only then,’ he admitted, ‘did I tweak a bit.’21
He was back over Pantelleria again on 9 June, which was when he ran into the Luftwaffe for the first time. This time, he’d been leading a flight of six when a number of Me109s had been spotted flying above them. The German pilots had tried to manoeuvre with the sun behind them, but Dryden and his flight were able to perform a tight 180-degree turn towards the enemy. The Messerschmitts swiftly scattered. Although none had been shot down, Dryden felt elated and relieved. ‘When I saw the swastikas on those Me109s and felt the urge to go get ’em,’ he wrote, ‘I knew that I had conquered my fear of possibly turning yellow and turning tail at the first sign of enemy.’22
The pounding of Pantelleria continued remorselessly, in conjunction with heavy naval bombardments. On the evening of 8 June, a naval force of four cruisers and six destroyers departed Malta to join the assault on the Italian island early the following morning. ‘It was a perfect dawn we saw breaking this morning,’ jotted Midshipman Peter Hay, ‘but the whole atmosphere was rather tense.’23 Hay was just nineteen and had become a midshipman the previous year, joining the battleship Nelson and taking part in Operation PEDESTAL, the convoy that had relieved Malta in August. He had sat his midshipman’s exams in March and passed with a second – as had most of his fellows – and had then been posted to HMS Tartar, one of the Tribal class that were designed to be fast and agile, with a greater emphasis on fire-power than torpedoes. Tartar, for example, could not only travel at 36 knots – around 41 mph – but was armed with eight quick-firing 4.7-inch guns, one four-barrelled light anti-aircraft gun and two quadruple quick-firing 5-inch guns, which for a ship of 125 yards in length was quite a lot of fire-power and quite a lot of speed.
Their force of warships was joined by HMS Whaddon, which, Hay learned, had General Spaatz aboard as an observer. Having closed up at action stations, they saw the bombers fly over. ‘There were literally hundreds of them,’ noted Hay, ‘and we saw Fortresses, Baltimores and Mitchells, to say nothing of the Lightnings, Spitfires and Kittyhawks.’24 The naval forces split up at around 11 a.m.; a quarter of an hour later, ‘Battle Ensigns were broken at the yard’ and the cruiser Euralyus opened fire on the coastal defences from 15,000 yards. Tartar sped back and forth while the bombers started to do their work, then closed in at 30 knots. Peter Hay watched the bombs falling, first into the sea then creeping up on to the beach and inland. Meanwhile, Tartar opened fire with her guns, along with the rest of the force. ‘At first our shots could be seen falling,’ jotted Hay, ‘but very soon the smoke and dust from the bombs obscured the target.25 During all this time I had seen no firing from Pantelleria except a little at the bombers.’ They closed further to around 3,500 yards then sped parallel to the coast, firing continuously. The enemy did reply, but at first their shots were far too high; then a shell landed just ahead of Tartar, producing a huge spume of water through which the ship ran. Everyone out on the fo’c’sle, Hay included, was soaked. A second fell close again, drenching them once more – but that was it: suddenly the enemy guns fell silent. The whole action, Hay reckoned, lasted around forty-five minutes, by the end of which Pantelleria had largely disappeared behind a pall of smoke.
Tartar returned with the rest of the force to Malta, but was back again on 11 June, the day of the planned invasion by the British 1st Division. Also attacking this time were a number of small, fast motor gun boats – MGBs – that sped towards the harbour, raking it with fire. There were some sixteen Italian shore batteries that might have fired back at the MGBs, but only three did so and not with much heart. The will of the defenders, after such a sustained pounding, was beginning to break. Of the town of Porto di Pantelleria not much remained, and especially not after the night-bombing of 10–11 June, which had been heavy and sustained.
By morning on the 11th, the Italian garrison commander, Contrammiraglio Gino Pavesi, had lost the will to continue; many of his men had already deserted. The Allies, he signalled to Rome, had plunged the island into ‘a hurricane of fire and smoke’.26 The situation was so desperate there was no further means of resisting. At 9 a.m. on the 11th, D-Day for 1st Division’s amphibious invasion, Pavesi issued the order to surrender, just as waves of B-17 Flying Fortresses were coming over. Tartar was a mere 3,000 yards off shore. ‘We could distinctly see them coming down,’ wrote Hay, ‘and a few seconds later saw great clouds of black smoke and rubble – mixed a moment later with brown dust.’27
They and the rest of the naval forces soon joined the bombardment, unaware that the surrender had already been signalled – a message that had not reached the assault commander either, so that the British came ashore as planned at around 11.55 a.m. Less than half an hour later, what remained of the town was secured and by the end of the day over eleven thousand Italian troops had been taken prisoner,