I heard a story today I thought was worth sharing:
During the Battle of Britain a young man, a fighter pilot in the Tiger Squadron of the Royal Air Force, one of many flying those famous Spitfires, was in a furious dogfight over the English Channel. His opponent had just gained the advantage of him and, with a rush of adrenalin, he heard the metallic rattle of bullets striking his flying machine as he desperately flung it across the sky. With a sudden searing pain, he felt a bullet enter his back. For a moment he felt shock and he pushed his hand between his body and the seat to feel the damage. He felt only warm dampness and drew his hand back out, coated with blood.
Instinct kicked in and he kicked at the foot controls to twist the plane out of danger – but his feet wouldn’t do what he told them – wouldn’t in fact do anything at all. With another shock, he realised that that one bullet had paralysed him. No longer able to fly his machine, his only chance for survival was to bail out. He started to unstrap himself then stopped, with a bitter laugh, his hand still on the buckle: with his legs out of commission there was no way he’d be able to climb out of the plane. After a moment’s thought, he flipped the plane upside down, released the hood, and forced the buckle open, wrestling his shoulders free of the straps that were holding him in. Out he fell, towards the sea…
Nine months later he died of his wounds.
His story didn’t make the headlines, doesn’t even seem to have been reported – there were so many young men, so many courageous acts in the great Battle that the papers and the history that the papers slowly coalesced into didn’t have room to hold them all, even reduced as they were by the subsidence of many of them, with those who lived them, into the darkness of death before they ever had a chance to be told.
The young man’s initials were TBK. I heard his story one evening while watching a few minutes of the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow, when a relative of his brought in a beautifully carved wooden plaque, crafted in his memory at the request of his mother.
I didn’t catch his name.