The Midair Collision During Headwind Takeoffs at a Libyan Airfield

The Midair Collision During Headwind Takeoffs at a Libyan Airfield was a fatal aviation accident during the opening days of the second offensive against Rommel. In a fierce kamsin, three English Blenheim bombers and three French Blenheims converged on the same take-off path. The collision killed fifteen airmen, while Romain Gary was spared because illness had kept him from flying that day.

Background and Conditions

The accident occurred in the first days of the offensive in Libya. The kamsin was blowing hard that morning, sweeping a cloud of sand across the airfield and obscuring the direction of the approaching aircraft. Under the command of Saint Péreuse, the French formation of three Blenheims was taking off upwind. The three English aircraft, however, had begun moving in the wrong direction, with the wind behind them, and appeared head-on through the sand.

The danger became irreversible as both formations accelerated. Together, the planes carried three thousand kilos of bombs, and they had reached take-off speed, in what the narrator calls the hundred-octane boost position: still on the ground, but committed to going straight ahead and unable to maneuver. The collision arose not in combat but from the convergence of obscured visibility, mistaken direction, and the aircraft’s momentum.

The Collision and Its Casualties

The two formations crashed into one another. Only Saint Péreuse and his observer, Bimont, managed to avoid the impact; six French comrades and nine English fliers perished. The account describes the remaining airmen as pulverized, and conveys the aftermath through the stark image of dogs running across the sand with lumps of flesh in their jaws. The detail turns an aerial mishap into a scene of bodily devastation, without presenting the deaths as the result of enemy fire.

Gary’s Absence and the Event’s Place in the Narrative

By good luck, Romain Gary was not flying that day. At the moment of the collision he was in a military hospital in Damascus, critically ill with typhoid and internal hemorrhages; his doctors gave him only one chance in a thousand of surviving. His absence therefore depended on another near-fatal event, not on a choice to avoid the mission. Set beside the deaths of French and English airmen, his account makes survival contingent: the same morning that destroyed his comrades found him fighting for his life elsewhere.