Reach for the Sky: The Story of Douglas Bader, Hero of the Battle of Britain

"If you could have only one author of World War Two books on your desert island, I would say take Paul Brickhill with you. He was an Australian fighter pilot who had been through World War II and just had a nose for a fantastic story. It was almost as if he said to himself, ‘What would make a Hollywood blockbuster? I’m going to write the true story.’ He also wrote The Great Escape —which became a really good movie with Steve McQueen—and The Dambusters. Reach for the Sky was also turned into a movie. So he had a really great strike rate. The books, again, are really short. I think they’re even shorter than The Longest Day . (You’ll note that brevity is a common theme). Reach for the Sky is about Douglas Bader, the legless Second World War flying ace and an extraordinary character. He lost both his legs in a flying accident in the 1930s and somehow—through bluster and bravado and connections and just doggedness—persuaded the RAF to allow him to return to combat and he flew in the Battle of Britain. He was a very good pilot, obviously. The stirrups in the Spitfire were changed for his false legs. It’s a massive inspiration to anybody that’s lost their legs because here’s a guy who thought his world had ended and went on to fly in dogfights in the Battle of Britain. “They’re really gripping reads and over the years, they’re ones that I come back to and enjoy again and again” Then, he was shot down and taken prisoner. He was a legend among the Germans and while he was recuperating in a hospital in Normandy, he was asked ‘Can we do anything for you?’ I believe it was Adolf Galland—one of the leading German fighter pilots—who was involved in that decision. There was a certain gentlemanly conduct between the Luftwaffe and the RAF. It’s been overly romanticized but it wasn’t like on the Eastern Front, where they killed each other whenever they possibly could. Bader replied that he needed new legs and the Germans arranged for the RAF to drop in the legs and they were delivered to Bader. It’s an extraordinary story. The first thing Bader did once he had fitted the legs was to try and escape. He continued to try to escape throughout the rest of the war and was placed in Colditz. Colditz was the maximum-security prison that the Germans had for serial escapers—people who thought it was their duty to try and escape and kept on doing it—along with some high-profile prisoners. Ben Macintyre wrote a really good account of Colditz just last year. That, again, is a wonderful story. Bader escaped from Colditz. Here’s a guy that couldn’t be put down, he was just indomitable. It goes through to the end of the war, basically."