The Pilot They Rejected 3 Times — Until He Shot Down 22 Planes With No Legs

It is December 14th, 1931.

A 21-year-old RAF pilot named Douglas Bada points the nose of his Bristol Bulldog toward the grass of Woodley Aerad Drrome, 4 miles east of Reading.

Someone at the flying club, a younger civilian pilot probably, has dared him.

I bet you won’t roll at naugh feet ft.

Bader does not hesitate.

He never does.

He pushes the stick and begins a slow roll at treetop height.

The bulldog drops.

He hauls back.

Too late.

The left wing tip catches the grass and the aircraft cartwheels into a shapeless ball of twisted metal.

Propeller splintered, engine ripped clean out of its housing.

A student pilot named Jack Cutendon sprints across the field, reaches into the wreckage and presses his hand over a wound that is pumping blood onto the grass.

Bader, half conscious, glances down at his own legs.

His right is bent at an impossible angle.

His left has vanished beneath the seat.

His first coherent thought, and this is documented, is that he will miss the combined services rugby match on Saturday.

They cut him from the cockpit and load him into an ambulance.

Someone offers him brandy.

“No, thanks very much,” he says.

“I don’t drink.” At the Royal Barkshire Hospital, surgeon J.

Leonard Joyce works through the night.

The right leg comes off above the knee.

It is nearly severed already.

Days later, the left follows, amputated below the knee.

Bad survives barely.

He is 21 years old and his career as a fighter pilot is finished.

Except it isn’t.

His log book entry reads, “Crashed slow rolling near ground.

Bad show.” Over the next decade, Douglas Bada will fight the Royal Air Force harder than he ever fights the Luftwaffer.

They will reject him, discharge him, ignore him.

He will take a desk job he despises, write letters that go unanswered, and watch lesser pilots climb into cockpits while he fills out petroleum invoices, and when they finally grudgingly let him back in, he’ll become one of the most decorated aces of the Second World War, shoot down 22 enemy aircraft with no legs, get captured by the Germans, escape so many times they lock him in a medieval castle, and still find time to insult everyone around him.

This is the story of the most stubborn man who ever flew.

Douglas Robert Stewart Bader arrives in the world on February 21st, 1910 in St.

John’swood, London.

His father, Major Frederick Bada, is a civil engineer who served in the Royal Engineers during the First World War.

Wounded in France in 1917, he will die from complications of those wounds in 1922 at a hospital in Santaare.

Remember that name, it comes back later.

His mother, Jesse, ships young Douglas off to relatives on the aisle of man for his first two years, then to India, then back to London.

When Frederick dies, Jesse remarries quickly.

A mildmannered vicer named Ernest Hobbes and largely loses interest in her younger son.

The boy grows up at a rectory in Spro near Doncaster with no real father figure and a mother who sends him to his grandparents at every opportunity.

The result is exactly what you’d expect.

He becomes feral.

He shoots a local woman through a bathroom window with an air gun.

His brother Derek during an argument about whether pellets actually hurt shoots Douglas in the shoulder at point blank range to settle the question.

At 13, he visits his aunt Hazel who’s marrying an RAF officer stationed at Cranwell.

There for the first time, Bada sees an Avro 504 up close.

Something locks into place.

He wins a scholarship to St.

Edward’s School, Oxford.

Academically, he is mediocre.

His own assessment is characteristically blunt.

I got a zero for maths, but I was quite good at games.

That is an understatement.

He tears through rugby, cricket, and boxing with a ferocity that alarms his teachers.

His first headmaster, William Ferguson, comes close to expelling him multiple times.

A new warden, Henry Kendall, sees something worth saving beneath the conceit.

Kendall makes Bader a prefect.

Despite what the staff calls a strong streak of conceit in the boy and channels his energy into sport, it works kind of.

Bada scrapes together enough academic ability to sit the entrance exams for RAF Cranwell, finishes fifth out of hundreds of applicants and enters the college as an officer cadet in 1928.

At Cranwell, he is magnificent and insufferable in equal measure.

He boxes.

The College Journal records one bout where Bader in his usual no time to spare manner went straight at his opponent and knocked him out with two very hard rights.

He plays rugby.

He plays cricket.

He plays hockey.

He also breaks every rule he can find.

Cadets are forbidden from buying motorcars, speeding, and pillion racing.

Bada does all three with enthusiasm.

His commandant is Air Vice Marshal Frederick Halahan.

Halahan hauls Bader into his office for a private warning about his conduct.

He does not expel him.

This will matter enormously 8 years later.

Bad graduates in July 1930, commissioned as a pilot officer and is posted to number 23 squadron at RAF Kennley.

He flies Gloucester Gamecocks and then Bristol Bulldogs.

He is a natural in the cockpit.

Everyone acknowledges this.

He is also addicted to unauthorized low-level arabatics which are explicitly forbidden below 2,000 ft.

Seven out of 23 accidents caused by ignoring this rule have already proven fatal.

Bada treats the regulation as a suggestion.

His commanding officers, Harry Day and Henry Walllet, give their pilots more latitude than most, but the CEO of the neighboring number 25 squadron watches Bader’s stunts and tells anyone who will listen that he would court marshall the man if he were in his unit.

Bader is selected for the RAF cricket team.

He plays a first class match against the army at the Oval in July 1931 and scores 65.

He’s reportedly on the verge of selection for the England rugby team.

He is 21.

He’s one of the finest athletes in the service and he has exactly four months left with his legs.

Fellow pilot Pete Tuntol will later say of Bur during this period, “Wobert tied any young who thought he might share the roost.” The recovery at Royal Berkshire Hospital is grueling.

Morphine for weeks a pair of stumps where his legs used to be right above the knee left below.

The Doutter brothers who manufacture artificial limbs from lightweight aluminum alloy fit Bader with two prosthetic legs.

He is reportedly their first customer who needs both.

By April 1932, Bader is walking without sticks or crutches.

He refuses them on principle.

He learns to drive a modified MG.

He plays golf.

He dances.

In June 1932, Air Under Secretary Philip Cissoon arranges for him to fly an AVO 504 and he handles it competently.

A medical board examines him and declares him fit for active service.

For a few weeks, it seems like the impossible has happened.

A legless pilot cleared to fly.

Then the bureaucracy catches up.

In April 1933, the RAF reverses the decision.

The reason is almost comically institutional.

His situation is not covered by King’s regulations.

There is no rule for or against a legless pilot because nobody has ever imagined one.

Without a rule to permit it, the answer defaults to no.

Bader is invalided out of the RAF on the 30th of April 1933.

He receives a full disability pension and an offer of a desk job.

He finds the desk job intolerable.

He resigns his commission entirely and now begins the worst period of his life.

He takes a position with the Asiatic Petroleum Company, a subsidiary of Shell, working in the aviation department, selling petrol from behind a desk.

For a man who played first class cricket and flew upside down at treetop heights 6 months earlier, the job is a kind of death.

He does his work.

He does it well enough.

He marries Thelma Edwards on October 5th, 1933.

She’s the daughter of an RAF left tenant colonel, a steady and patient woman he met during his convolescence at a TA room in Surrey.

But he cannot let it go.

Year after year, as Europe tilts toward war, Bader writes to the Air Ministry requesting reinstatement.

Year after year, the letters come back with the same answer.

Number not covered by regulations, no precedent.

Number.

His sister-in-law, Jill Lewis, later recalls his state of mind during the late 1930s.

He was very excited indeed.

He was the only person in our household who was absolutely longing for war to come because he said, “They’ll have to have me now.” In April 1939, with Hitler annexing Czechoslovakia and the continent visibly crumbling, Bada receives a letter from Air Vice Marshall Charles Portal, head of RAF personnel.

The letter is the first crack in the wall.

Should a war break out, you can almost be sure we will gladly make use of your services as a pilot within a short time, provided the physicians give their consent.

On September the 3rd, 1939, the day Britain declares war on Germany, Beder writes immediately to Portal Secretary.

Weeks later, a telegram summons him to a selection board at a dastil house in London’s Kingsway.

He is examined.

He is declared medically fit, and then he is told he is eligible only for ground jobs, desk work again.

This is the third wall.

He has been cleared, discharged, rejected by letter for years, and now with a war on offered a chair instead of a cockpit, but Frederick Halahan is still alive.

The same air vice marshall who warned a reckless cadet about his conduct at Cranwell a decade earlier now picks up the phone and personally endorses Douglas Bada for flying assessment.

Halahan contacts the central flying school at Upperon and asks them to test the legless pilot.

On October 14th, the CFS sends Bada a request to report on the 18th.

Bada does not wait.

He drives to Upavon the very next morning and begins refresher training immediately.

By the end of November 1939, squadron leader RHA Lee at Upavon has assessed him.

The evaluation comes back exceptional.

Douglas Bada is recommissioned as a flying officer on November 26th, 1939 with seniority backdated to January 1932.

Eight years after losing both legs, he is back.

On November 27th, 1939, Bada takes off solo in an Avro Tutipy plane from Upupon.

He is airborne for the first time in 8 years.

Once above the field, he cannot resist.

He rolls the aircraft upside down at 600 ft inside the circuit area.

Classic Beta.

Nothing has changed.

He progresses through the fairy battle, the Miles Master, and the North American Harvard.

His prosthetic legs create specific challenges with the rudder pedals, but he adapts.

He’s posted to number 19 squadron at RAF Duxford in February 1940, flying Spitfires.

The commanding officer is Jeffrey Stevenson, an old Cranwell friend.

Bader is 29, older than most of the pilots around him.

There is an incident early on.

Beta crashes a Spitfire on takeoff after forgetting to switch the propeller pitch from coarse to fine.

The aircraft careen down the runway at 80 mph.

His prosthetic legs buckle under the rudder pedals.

He climbs out with a head wound, looks at the damage, and notes dryly that if he still had real legs, he would definitely have lost them this time.

He gets into a second Spitfire and takes off again.

He transfers to number 222 Squadron as a flight commander in April 1940.

still flying Spitfires over Dunkirk on June 1st.

He scores his first kill, a messmitt BF 109 at 3,000 ft.

The German takes no evasive action.

Bader thinks he’s a novice.

Then comes the assignment that defines his war.

On June 24th, 1940, Ber is posted as acting squadron leader to number 242 squadron at RAF Culttershaw.

The squadron flies Hawker Huracans and is staffed largely by Canadian pilots.

They’re a wreck.

They fought in the Battle of France, lost friends, lost aircraft, and came back demoralized and bitter.

Their equipment is shabby.

Discipline has collapsed.

Bader goes to work with characteristic subtlety, which is to say, none at all.

He fires ineffective section leaders.

He badges the bureaucracy until the squadron has proper equipment.

He drills the pilots relentlessly.

He fights every administrative battle personally and wins most of them.

The Canadians initially resent this abrasive Englishman with tin legs who storms around barking orders.

They come around fast.

Aces like Willie Mcnite and Stan Turner recognize that Bader is the real thing.

A pilot who leads from the front and refuses to ask anything of his men that he will not do himself.

There is also the matter of his legs, which confer an unexpected advantage.

In violent combat turns, blood drains from a pilot’s brain to the lower body, causing blackouts.

Bader has no lower legs.

He can sustain higher G-forces than any pilot with intact limbs, staying conscious through maneuvers that would put other men out cold.

By July 9th, 1940, number 242 Squadron is fully operational.

The Battle of Britain has officially begun the day before.

Bader’s tactical philosophy is simple and brutal.

He teaches his pilots three rules drawn from the First World War.

He who has the sun creates surprise.

He who has the height controls the battle.

He who gets in close shoots them down.

July 11th, 1940.

Bada scores his first kill with 242 Squadron, a Dornier do 17 that crashes into the sea of Chroma, confirmed by the Royal Observer Corps.

More follow through August.

On the 30th, the squadron intercepts a mass raid and claims 10 to 12 enemy aircraft in a single engagement.

BA personally destroys two BF-100s.

This is the day that changes everything, not just for Bader, but for Fighter Command’s entire tactical approach.

After the fight, Bader contacts his station commander, Wing Commander Woody Woodh Hall, and Wood Hall connects him to Air Vice Marshal Trafford Lee Mallerie, commanding number, 12 group.

Bader’s argument is straightforward.

If three squadrons can do this much damage, five squadrons flying together can do far more.

Lee Mallerie agrees and authorizes the experiment.

The Big Wing is born.

Three then five squadrons assembling into a single massive formation before engaging the enemy.

On September the 7th, the first three squadron Duxford wing flies into action.

Bader claims two BF 109s and a Yunker’s JU88 in the same sorty.

On September 15th, Battle of Britain Day, his wing reports 52 confirmed kills.

The numbers are staggering.

They are also, as postwar analysis will reveal, wildly inflated.

Historian Dillip Sarkar, who has written six books on barter, documents that the bigwing overclaimed by as much as 7 to one on some occasions.

In the chaos of mass aerial combat, pilots in good faith count the same aircraft falling multiple times.

The propaganda value is enormous.

The tactical reality is murkier.

This is the heart of what historians call the bigwing controversy.

Bader and Lee Mallerie sit on one side arguing that concentrating fighters delivers devastating blows.

On the other side stand air vice marshal Keith Park, commanding number, 11 group in the southeast and air chief marshall Hugh Dowing, head of fighter command.

Park’s pilots are scrambling in ones and twos to meet incoming raids.

And he needs 12 group to protect his airfields while his squadrons are airborne.

Instead, Lee Mallalerie’s big wing takes 20 to 30 minutes to assemble.

frequently arrives after bombs have already fallen and on at least one occasion fails to protect Debton airfield which is bombed killing five people.

Park’s strategy is less dramatic but more sound.

He does not need to annihilate the Luftwuffer in pitched battles.

He needs to avoid losing small flexible formations that respond quickly, bleed the enemy steadily and preserve fighter command strength for the long fight.

This is what wins the Battle of Britain.

Modern historians overwhelmingly agree Park and Dowing had it right.

Air Commodore Alan Deere one of the few will later write that in 10 large formation sorties from Duxford into 11 groups area nine were unsuccessful and the 10th destroyed a single Messesmid 109.

Johnny Johnson ber’s own protege in the RAF’s eventual top scoring ace offers the most balanced verdict.

There was room for both tactics, he conceds, but warns that if Park had tried assembling big wings in the southeast, the results might well have been fatal.

The political fallout is ugly.

Bader’s agitant at 242 Squadron is Peter Macdonald, a member of Parliament, who takes the big-wing case directly to Winston Churchill.

Whether Bader knows about this is disputed.

He will later deny it.

Regardless, by November 1940, both Dowing and Park are replaced.

Lee Mallerie takes over 11 group.

The architect of victory is sacked.

The man who nearly undermined it is promoted.

Dowing will later say bitterly, young Bader was the cause of a lot of the trouble.

Saraka’s assessment is more nuanced.

Bader was naive rather than malicious, used by men with axes to grind and personal ambitions to further.

But the damage is done.

Through it all, the kills keep coming.

Bader receives the distinguished service order in October 1940.

the distinguished flying cross in January 1941 and bars to both over the following months.

By March 1941, he is promoted to acting wing commander and given command of the Tangmir wing.

Three Spitfire squadrons conducting offensive sweeps over France.

His aircraft carries his initials DB, giving him the radio call sign Dog’s body.

Between March and August 1941, he flies 62 fighter sweeps across the channel.

By summer 1941, his official tally stands at 22 confirmed individual victories.

Four shared, six probables, and 11 damaged.

Under his command, 242 squadron has claimed 62 enemy aircraft destroyed during the Battle of Britain, losing only five pilots.

But colleagues notice something else.

Bader is exhausted.

He refuses to rest.

Billy Burton, the CEO of 616 Squadron, reports that Bader’s obsession with adding to his personal score has brought pilots in the wing to a near mutinous state.

On August 9th, 1941, Bader takes off from Tangmir for what will be his last mission.

The Tangmir wing crosses the French coast at 30,000 ft near Lut.

Below them, Messmitt BF109FS from Yakashada 26, Adolf Gallen’s outfit.

Bad’s section dives after a group of German fighters.

The sky fills with turning diving machines, and within seconds, Badger is alone.

Something strikes his Spitfire from behind.

The entire rear fuselage, tail, and fin disintegrate.

The aircraft drops into a slow spin at 400 mph.

bad jettisonens the canopy, releases his harness, and the slipstream begins dragging him out, but his right prosthetic leg is jammed in the cockpit.

He hangs half in, half out, falling.

He pulls the rip cord.

The parachute deploys.

The sudden jolt snaps the leather strap holding his artificial leg, and he tears free.

The right leg falls with the Spitfire.

The left stays on.

He lands in a field near Santo, the same town where his father died of war wounds 19 years earlier.

Two German soldiers unbuckle his parachute.

Who shot him down remains one of the war’s minor mysteries.

Bader himself believes he collided with a BF-109.

Adolf Galland investigates personally, but cannot identify any German pilot who made the claim.

No JG26 pilot reports the kill.

Modern historian Andy Saunders, after years of research, concludes that Bada was almost certainly hit by friendly fire.

that flight left tenant Buck Cassen of 616 Squadron, his own wingman squadron, mistook his Spitfire for a messes and shot off his tail.

The Germans are astonished to discover their prisoner has no legs.

Galland himself invites Bada to tour his airfield at Odonair.

Bada, ever tactful, asks if he can climb into a BF-109 and take a little trip.

Galland laughs.

A German officer keeps his pistol trained on Bada the entire visit.

Gallen contacts the British and offers safe passage for a plane to deliver a replacement leg.

The British refuse the gesture.

They will not give Germany a propaganda victory.

Instead, on August 19th, 1941, six Bristol Blenheim bombers with fighter escort carry out operation leg.

A bomber drops a wooden crate containing a prosthetic leg, bandages, socks, and straps by parachute over Santo.

The bombers then proceed to their actual target.

Gossn power station near Bethun.

The Germans are not amused.

With his new leg fitted, Bader escapes almost immediately, knotting bed sheets into a rope and climbing out of his hospital window with the help of another patient.

A French couple shelters him.

He is betrayed and recaptured.

The Germans begin confiscating his legs each night.

Over the next 3 years, Beda passes through a succession of camps.

off 6B at Warberg, Stalag Luft 3 at Sean, Stalag 8b at Lamsdorf, escaping or attempting escape from each one.

At Lamsdorf, he and an Australian named Keith Chisum obtain photos of a Messmitt 110 cockpit and travel 150 mi to a training airfield at Gllyitz, intending to steal a twin engine fighter and fly to England.

They find only single seat 109s, not enough range.

The plan collapses.

By August 1942, the Germans have had enough.

They send Bada to Culitz Castle, Offlug 4C, the escape proof fortress reserved for the most troublesome prisoners.

He demands to travel first class, accompanied by a Batman and an officer of equal rank.

He stays at Culitz for nearly 3 years, spending his time dropping water bombs on guards, disrupting roll calls, and trading Red Cross chocolate on the black market during supervised walks through the town.

On April 15th, 1945, soldiers of the 69th Infantry Division, United States Army, enter Culitz.

Douglas Bader is free.

5 months later on September the 15th 1945 the fifth anniversary of the greatest day of the Battle of Britain group Captain Douglas Bada leads a fly past of 300 aircraft over London flying a Spitfire from North.

It is the last great gesture of the war.

He leaves the RAF in February 1946.

The peaceime service has no idea what to do with him and he has no patience for instructing younger pilots who consider his tactics outdated.

He returns to Shell where he becomes managing director of Shell Aircraft Limited and spends two decades making Goodwill flights around the world.

In 1954, Australian journalist Paul Brickill publishes Reach for the Sky, a biography that sells 300,000 copies in its first printing and becomes the bestselling hardback in postwar Britain.

Two years later, Kenneth Moore stars in the film adaptation, the highest grossing British film of 1956, winner of the BAFTA for best British film.

It makes Bader a national icon.

It also makes him a fiction.

The Kenneth Moore version is charming, quiet, amiable.

The real Bader, as historian Dilipa notes, is dogmatic, uncompromising, invariably new best, and only a team player when leader of it.

Bada himself acknowledges the gap.

People still think he’s the dashing chap Kenneth Moore was.

He refuses to attend the premiere after falling out with Brick Hill over royalties.

He does not see the film for 11 years.

The truth about Bader is more complicated than any film could contain.

He is genuinely courageous.

Nobody disputes this.

His return to operational flying as a double amputee remains unprecedented.

His work after the war for disabled people is real and sustained.

He writes letters to amputees, visits them in hospitals, and tells them, “Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that you can’t do this or that.

Make up your mind you’ll never use crutches or a stick, then have a go at everything.” The Douglas Bada Foundation, established after his death, continues this work today.

He’s kned in 1976 specifically for services to disabled people.

But the same force that drives him through every obstacle also makes him brutal to those around him.

His orderly at Culitz, a Scotsman named Alec Ross, carries Bada up and down two flights of stairs daily, washes his stump socks, cooks his meals.

But never says please or thank you.

When Ross is selected for early repatriation in August 1943, 18 months before liberation, Ba blocks it.

Look here, Ross.

You came here as my lackey, and you will stay with me as my lackey until we are both liberated.

Ross spends an extra 21 months in captivity.

He never speaks to Bader again.

Fellow prisoners celebrate when Bader is transferred to Culitz because his constant provocation of guards brings collective punishment down on everyone.

Ben McIntyre in his 2022 history of Culitz calls him a supremely brave man who was also a monster, arrogant, doineering, selfish, and spectacularly rude.

His postwar politics are equally combative.

He voices support for Ian Smith’s white minority regime in Rhdesia and the apartheid system in South Africa during the Suez crisis when African Commonwealth nations criticize the Anglo French intervention.

Bada says they can bloody well climb back up their trees.

He writes the forward to the autobiography of Hans Olrich Rudel, the most decorated German pilot of the war and an unrepentant Nazi who helped war criminals escape to South America.

When asked if knowing Rud’s politics would have changed his mind, Bada says no.

His first wife, Thelma, who waited through the desk job years, the rejections, the war, and the captivity, dies of throat cancer in January 1971.

They had been married 38 years.

Bader marries Joan Murray in 1973.

On the evening of September 5th, 1982, Bader attends a dinner at the London Guild Hall honoring the 90th birthday of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Bomber Harris.

He speaks at the dinner on the drive home through Chisik heading toward his house in Barkshire.

He suffers a heart attack.

He is 72.

Adolf Galland, the man who hosted him at a Luftvafa airfield four decades earlier, flies from California to attend the memorial service at St.

Clement Danes, the central church of the RAF.

A journalist writes that had Bada been present, he would have stomped over, banged Galland on the back, and bellowed, “Bloody good show.

Glad you could come.” His ashes are buried beneath the altar of St.

Clement Danes.

A 6-foot bronze statue stands at Goodwood, formerly RAF West Hampnet, the aerad drrome from which he took off on his final mission.

Streets across Britain, Canada, and New Zealand bear his name.

The Royal Aeronautical Society offered what may be the most honest assessment in 2020.

Stubborn, defiant, and disabled, yet determined to do his bit in fighting the Nazis, Bad summed up the pugnacious attitude of a nation fighting for its life.

He was undoubtedly the right man in the right time and place.

Flawed human being aside, even today, Bad’s incredible story of overcoming disability to fly again remains a powerful source of inspiration and courage.

He was not a good man exactly.

He was not a kind one, but he was beyond any argument an extraordinary one.

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