Fokking Messerschmitts
Anyone who tries to tell you that WWII soldiers didn’t use “fuck” as punctuation is lying.
No, guys Douglas Bader is the best!
In 1931,at age 21 (!!) Bader crashed after attempting some aerobatics too low to the ground, and he had to be rushed to hospital, and the plane crash pulverized the bones in his legs.
Bader woke up in the hospital to find that one of his legs had to be amputated. Several days later, his other leg was removed. Now a double amputee, Bader was told he could never do anything he loved again. Rugby, dancing, flying, let alone walking. Yet that didn’t stop him. When his legs healed enough to allow for prosthetics, he told the men building them that he needed to get them done quickly, as he “would need them to take someone out dancing later that week”. They laughed at him, as no one had ever walked without a cane, or even regained full mobility with TWO prosthetic legs.
Bader, basically saying ‘fuck you i can do what i want’, then went on to never EVER use the cane. A few months after the initial fitting, he took his sweetheart, Thelma Edwards, dancing in his own, specially modified car.
Eventually he got a job doing desk work at Shell, as the RAF gave him as Medical Discharge, due to the loss of both legs (one above and one below the knee). He was unhappy with this, as he LOVED flying, and knew he could fly the planes if there were only some minor modifications. But the RAF didn’t want, or need, less than 100% physically fit men in these interwar years. Yet Bader kept petitioning the RAF commanders to let him fly, and they eventually agreed reluctantly, if Bader could only prove to them he was physically fit.
To the RAF’s surprise, he passed the tests with flying colours, and basically demanded a plane. Then WWII started, and the RAF needed experienced, trained, officers.
During the Battle of Britain, he pioneered some innovative new flying tactics (called the Big Wing), and Bader was given command after command. He was eventually given command of a motley unit of Canadians who had lost most of their numbers and supplies in the Battle of France. He pulled them together into an effective fighting force, and was commonly seen wandering around with his distinctive rolling gait, yelling at the supply distributors, and with a massive cigar in his lips.
Though, while on one of his flights over Nazi-occupied France, he got shot down. The way the plane went down however, if he didn’t have detachable legs he would have been unable to bail and would have died.
Then Bader was captured by Germans and sent to a hospital, where he received a new prosthetic leg from a German official (who found him hilarious, a pilot with no legs!)
Bader escaped the hospital but was recaptured due to his distinctive gait and relative slowness of walking pace (just wait this is a pretty common theme from here on out).
He was then transferred to Stalag Luft III (a POW camp lead by the Luftwaffe (German version of RAF)), where he was involved with, and had so many escape attempts the Germans threatened to take his legs away.
After a final, most nearly successful escape, Bader was transferred to the Colditz Castle, six hundred and fifty kilometers from non-Nazi occupied land. With walls two meters thick, and which sat on a cliff seventy-five meters above the River Mulde, this castle was escape-proof.
For officers deemed an escape risk, Like Bader, this castle was the last stop. It held the worst of the escape prone POWs. Several other POWs in the castle had ridiculous plans to escape, ranging from paragliding, to using contortion and gymnastics. Yet Bader, with his instantly recognizable gait and lack of legs, would only be a hindrance at best, and would ensure they would all be recaptured, and killed as spies at worst. So Bader spent the rest of his time in Colditz, from Aug 1942-April 1945, when the castle was liberated by the US Army.
Bader was given many awards and distinctions, yet after the war he left the RAF (for good this time) and went on to work at Shell again, this time flying around the world in his own plane with his wife.
More than that he became an activist and a hero for disabled people.
Before, if someone had lost both of their legs, they would have been told, like Bader, that they would have no options but to walk with a cane, or be wheelchair bound, and live a drastically limited life to what they lived before.
After Bader, when kids asked if they could ever walk again, their nurses and doctors would point at Bader and say “Well, if he can, there is no reason why you cannot”.
He was eventually knighted, not for his leadership in war, or his medals, but due to his massive work in propelling disabled activism and repelling the stigmas around the ‘limitations’ of disabled people.
(There is a great biography of his life by Paul Brickhill, called Reach for the Sky, and he is pretty great. I did a book report on it in grade 11 and it is very, very interesting, if you are interested at all in WWII, or stuff like that!)
TL;DR – Man looses both legs in a plane accident at 21, told he could never walk again. Through sheer stubbornness and ‘Fuck You.’ energy, he becomes a pilot and the squadron leader/group leader of many different units in WWII, before becoming POW in the most inescapable POW camp–due to proclivity to escape–until the end of the War. 1976, was knighted for his work on behalf of disabled people, and being a disabled activist.
And yeah, I think he is pretty great.
Borne Ceaseless 