Uncle Tony

From a work in progress

Tony had a magnificent war and it smashed him up inside. He was bloodthirsty, brave, and technically skilled. He was also lucky, as all the survivors of the Battle of Britain needed to be. In one of his first dogfights his plane was hit and he was preparing to bail out over France when he realised the enemy would shoot him as he drifted down beneath the parachute. So he managed to spin out of the dogfight instead, and hedge hop home. When he landed he discovered that his parachute had been shredded by enemy cannon fire and would have killed him if he’d tried to use it.

One of commanders remembered him attacking a formation of German bombers flying in successive Vee shapes, or VICs as they were known:

“He went down the starboard side of the stream, shooting them up one wing and I distinctly saw him leapfrog over one VIC under the next, then up over the third, and so on. He did the whole side of the formation like that and he tumbled at least one - maybe two - as flames at that single pass. It was just about the cheekiest bit of flying I’d seen. The chaps in his section tried to follow him, but they managed only one or two of the ‘jumps’. Tony made every one.

In February 1941 he was awarded his first DFC. There is a photograph of eleven young men from the RAF, taken after the investiture, which Patricia has annotated. They stand in a line around “Stuffy” Dowding, who led Fighter Command in the Battle of Britain. Richard Hillary stands slightly behind the line with his head dipped so that the disfigurement of his face is shadowed by the brim of his uniform cap. He had disdained the fire resistant mask and the gauntlets in which they were meant to fly, and been so terribly burnt when he was shot down in flames over the channel that he tried to drown himself before the rescue boat could reach him. To die like that – or to survive so dreadfully injured – was a risk on every mission, and Tony flew more than 300.

In the intervals when he was rested from the front line he worked as a test pilot. In 1941 he did the stunts for a propaganda film about the Battle of Britain. This was his first contact with show business and it would change his life once he’d stopped fighting in the air.

By the winter of the winter of 1943 he was commanding a Spitfire squadron in Tunisia. These were no longer the finest fighter planes in the world as they had been two years before in the Battle of Britain. They were now old: slower, worse armed, and less manoeuvrable than the German Focke Wulfs they fought, Their airstrips were primitive, unsafe and often bombed. In England his war had seemed an affair of noble fighting in the sky with other young men; in Tunisia he found himself ordered to assassinate a German general and his mistress in their love nest. He machinegunned them as they ran from the house he’d had bombed.

On January 14th 1943, his 365th combat mission, he broke down. His autpbiogra[phy records it:

We were ground-strafing some enemy gun emplacements, when attacked by some FW 190s. A huge dogfight ensued, and lead was flying in all directions, as well as aeroplanes.

I hit one, and then another, but didn’t see whether I had made a kill. There wasn’t time, and suddenly the sky seemed empty. Then, as suddenly, something seemed to snap in my brain. I didn’t know where I was, nor what I was doing.

Two of the boys reappeared, and reformed on me, but I didn’t know where I was leading them. I had lost all sense of direction. Everything seemed strange, and I burst into a cold sweat as I circled, trying to find my location.

I cursed the boys for following me with their implicit faith. Couldn’t they see that I was lost? Why couldn’t they find their own way home? I screamed over the RT to return to base, individually, and they left me alone, at last. I circled aimlessly, to give me time to think what had happened to me. Then, I got my bearings.

Arriving back over the landing strip, I decided I must come straight in, without making my circuit. I had to get on the ground. Get away from my aeroplane. All aeroplanes.

I overshot twice before I judged my proper approach for a final, terrible landing.

The next day he was ordered home on medical advice. On the night of the 29th of January he was being flown home from Gibraltar in a Liberator bomber when one of the engines burst into flames and fell into the Bay of Biscay. The plane limped on to Wales, and had barely crossed the coast when it crash landed. He broke three vertebrae and would spend the next six weeks in a cast. But he could walk and his body would heal. Five other men had died in the crash; two were seriously injured; the two pilots had survived, as had four fighter pilots, returning from a spell of duty in Malta, whom Tony had judged too drunk to bail out when the engine caught fire. He would never be passed fit to fly in combat again. What could he do with the rest of his life, now it had been saved?