ON THE MORNING of 2 November 1940, the Royal Hellenic Air Force's 22 Pursuit Mira (squadron) based at Thessaloniki scrambled to meet an incoming Italian air raid. None of the squadron's eight front-line pilots knew quite what to expect. None had any combat experience or even combat training. Just five days before, Greece had been plunged into World War II. Italian land forces were advancing over the Albanian border. Their bombers were already pounding Greece's cities.
Among those who climbed nervously into the cockpits of their Polish-built PZL-24 fighters was Pilot Officer (Second Lieutenant) Marinos Mitralexis. That morning it fell to 22 Mira to tangle with the Regia Aeronautica's three-engined CantZ-1007 bombers of 50 Gruppo near Thessaloniki.
Mitralexis got in a machinegun burst at one bomber, sending it weaving erratically around the sky. He didn't know it, but his first fire had killed the Italian pilot, Lieutenant Pasqualetto, and the rest of the crew were trying to keep the lumbering bomber aloft. Mitralexis fired again but missed and soon ran out of ammunition, cursing his bad luck.
Mitralexis' wingman, Sergeant (later Wing Commander) Constantine Lambropoulos, described what happened next: "I was pretty close to Mitralexis and saw him fly his plane straight into the Italian. It was the most magnificent thing I've ever seen."
In one of those gestures often seen in war that defy rational analysis, Mitralexis aimed the nose of his PZL right into the CantZ's tail, smashing the rudder and sending the plane out of control. By some miracle, the bomber made a level landing near the village of Gerakarou, and the four dazed survivors staggered out.
They met a daunting sight. A mob of peasants was descending on them, knives and pickaxes in hand, seemingly determined to finish them off. They heard a shout and saw a diminutive Greek air force officer in flying gear drawing his pistol and warning the villagers away. This was none other than Mitralexis, who had nursed his PZL to earth with nothing worse than a bent propeller. He shepherded the four grateful Italians, now prisoners, to his base on foot.
All Greece thrilled to the exploit. Mitralexis was promoted to Flying Officer (First Lieutenant) and decorated. Artists' impressions, some verging on the fanciful, filled the newspapers and magazines. The midair collision even appeared on a postage stamp.
Constantine Hatzilakos was one of those whose morale rocketed. As an air cadet at the Tatoi air force academy, he and his classmates itched to get into action. With the first air raids they had been ordered to wear their tin hats and man the base's anti-aircraft defences. They had been taught to fly on docile British-made Avro Tutor biplanes, and couldn't wait to grab the controls of the glamorous PZL.
"The PZL's engine made a ferocious noise passing overhead," recalls Hatzilakos, now 88, and a retired air marshal. "It could even do aerobatics and gave our morale a huge boost."
The Tatoi academy was deluged by applicants.
The Royal Hellenic Air Force (RHAF) certainly needed all the morale it could whip up. Rarely has an air force gone into battle as aerially outgunned as the Greeks were in 1940. Whereas the ground forces on the Albanian front (contrary to what is generally believed in Greece) were about equally matched, the RHAF could field just 52 battle-worthy fighters and 27 medium bombers. The Regia Aeronautica, by contrast, had more than 380 fighters and bombers available for Greek operations, their crews' dogfighting skills honed in the Spanish Civil War.
The Greek mainstay was the PZL-24, a strange gull-winged plane made in Poland featuring a rugged structure and twin 20mm Oerikon cannons. There were also some French-built Bloch MB250s and Potez 633 twin-engined bombers, but they did not play much of a part in the
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