 Online College and University Degree Guide
|
Douglas Bader, bottom row in the centre of the photo, was a famous fighter pilot from World War Two who had twenty-two kills credited to him. Douglas Bader flew and fought in the Battle of Britain with no legs – the result of a pre-war plane crash. A post-war book ‘Reach for the Sky’, written by Paul Brickhill, and a film of the same name that followed the book and starred Kenneth More as Bader, cemented in the minds of many the image that Bader wanted – the hero respected by all around him in the RAF.
Douglas Bader was born in 1910. His father, who was a major in the Royal Engineers, died in 1922 of wounds received in World War One. At school, Bader quickly showed great skill at sport and he joined the RAF in 1928. Bader gained a reputation as a rugby player and turned out for Harlequins and nearly got a place in the national squad. Bader was also a skilled boxer. In 1930, he got a commission as a pilot officer after passing out at Cranwell.
On December 14th, 1931, allegedly as a result of a dare by two civilian pilots, he took to the air at Woodley airfield in a Bristol Bulldog to give a demonstration of low level flying. According to the rule book, the Bulldog should not have been used for any aerobatics below 1000 feet. Bader took the plane so low that the left wing clipped the grass and the plane crashed. Bader suffered severe lower body injuries and he had his legs amputated – one above the knee and the other below the knee.
Bader was invalided out of the RAF and took up an office job with the Asiatic Petroleum Company. A desk job barely suited his temperament and the outbreak of World War Two in September 1939, gave him the chance the badger the RAF to join up once again. Bader had mastered walking again using artificial limbs and he managed to persuade the RAF’s medical board that he was capable of flying fighter planes. He was posted to 222 Squadron to fly Spitfires. Bader flew in the Dunkirk evacuation where Fighter Command gave invaluable cover to the men stranded on the beaches.
Bader was given the command of 242 Squadron – part of 12 Group based at Duxford. The 242 was a Hurricane squadron that fought in the Battle of Britain. Bader, along with Trafford Leigh-Mallory, was a supporter of the ‘Big Wing’ theory – the massing of large numbers of fighters north of London in readiness to confront the Luftwaffe as they crossed over south-east England. Bader was a vocal opponent of what 11 Group was doing which was to use tactics that did what could be done to be effective but to retain what were seen as limited resources – i.e. pilots. Bader preferred the more aggressive ‘Big Wing’. How effective this tactic was is open to debate as simply just getting so many fighters into position prior to attacking the enemy took time. However, when the ‘Big Wing’ worked, Bader was frequently at the front of a number of squadrons as they attacked the enemy. Accurate numbers for how many German planes the ‘Big Wing’ specifically accounted for are also hard to acquire given the common problem of exaggerating successes.
In 1941, Bader was promoted to Wing Commander and stationed at Tangmere in West Sussex. He became one of the first ‘Wing Leaders’ and had the letters DB painted on the fuselage of his Spitfire. Bader led flights over north-west Europe to tie down the Luftwaffe so that it could not be sent to the Russian front to support ground troops in ‘Operation Barbarossa’.
On August 9th, 1941, Bader’s Spitfire was damaged to such an extent that he had to bale out over France – just to the south of Calais. He lost one of his artificial legs as it got trapped in the steering mechanism of his Spitfire but after an initial delay in taking off the straps, he safely bailed out. Bader was captured by the Germans who arranged for the RAF to drop off an artificial limb to replace the one lost in the crash. Bader’s fame was such that he met Adolf Galland and other German fighter pilots despite being a POW.
Sent to a POW camp, Bader tried to escape despite his handicap. It is said that Bader’s ‘goon baiting’ did not endear him to other British POW’s held at Stalag Luft III as they feared that his behaviour would result in a backlash that would affect them all. Eventually Bader was sent to Colditz where he remained until the end of the war.
In June 1945, Bader was given the honour of leading a victory flypast over London in a flight that consisted of 300 planes. After leaving the RAF, he worked for Royal Dutch Shell.
In 1976, Douglas Bader was knighted in recognition of his work for the disabled. He died on September 5th, 1982 aged 72 as a result of a heart attack brought on, it was said, by an unending workload.
How Douglas Bader lost his plane in August 1941 remained a mystery. In ‘Reach for the Sky’ his Spitfire collided with a Messerschmitt 109 which took off his tail plane that necessitated Bader to bale out. While a POW, Bader repeated the tale of a collision. Yet when he met Adolf Galland before his incarceration in a Stalag, he asked the German fighter ace if he knew the name of the pilot who had shot him down. No mention was made of a collision and Galland was not aware of any German pilot shooting down Bader and none had reported it. German records indicate that only one fighter plane was lost to the Luftwaffe in that region of France on August 9th and that was a credited ‘shot down’ – not lost as a result of a collision.
Recent research indicates that Bader was shot down – but by a Spitfire. By 1941, the shape of the Me 109 had changed to resemble the more curved shape of the Spitfire. It is possible that Bader, in the chaos of battle, joined a flight of Me 109’s (mistaking them for Spitfires) before pulling away from them once he realised his mistake. Another Spitfire pilot, Buck Casson, saw the ‘lone’ Me 109 and attacked it to such an extent that the tail of the Spitfire with the DB recognition was shot off. In his post-flight report, Casson clearly stated that he saw a lone Me 109 peeling away from others. He attacked it and shot it down. Yet the sole Luftwaffe plane shot down that day has been accounted for. Given the speed both planes flew at and the merest of seconds any fighter pilot had to make a decision, it would appear that Bader was shot down by another Spitfire.
If you have any enquiries or notice any problems please contact me at enquiries@historylearningsite.co.uk | | |||
| © 2000-2008 historylearningsite.co.uk | |||||
