WWII air force hero dies at age 102
One of Greece’s last surviving heroes of World War II, fighter pilot Konstantinos Chatzilakos, has died at the age of 102, the Association of Retired Air Force Officers announced on Tuesday.
Hadzilakos was born in Larissa in central Greece in 1920 and enrolled in the then-Greek Royal Air Force Academy at the start of the war in 1940, swiftly going on to join the fighting and seeing action on the North African, Mediterranean, Italian, Yugoslavian and Aegean fronts.
He flew more than 200 missions in Hurricanes and Spitfires and was the recipient of 10 medals for his outstanding contribution to the war.
He went on to serve as an instructor at all three of the Greek Armed Forces’ academies and as operations director at various NATO posts from 1945 to 1967, while from 1964 to 1967 he was the defense attaché at the Greek Embassy in Washington.
He retired in April 1967 with the rank of lieutenant general.
Among the more memorable missions of which he had spoken publicly was helping fly British prime minister Winston Churchill to Alexandria in Egypt in November 1943 and two weeks later providing cover for the American bomber transporting US president Franklin Roosevelt to Tehran.
