A Hero's Story

REACH FOR THE SKY (312 pp.) -- Paul Brickhill-- Norton ($3.75).

The lone Spitfire sped down into a pack of Messerschmitts and knocked down two of them. Then something hit the Spitfire.

The pilot turned and saw that the entire fuselage behind the cockpit had been sliced off. He struggled to get up, rose, and then was violently sucked at by the screaming wind. The wind smashed against his exposed body, whipped and cut his face, clawed at his "cringing, sight less eyeballs." but did not pull him out, because his right leg was caught in the cockpit. Down plunged the pilot and the plane. Then, under the inhuman pressure, the man's right leg snapped off his body.

Only a Beginning. Luckily for the pilot, Squadron Leader Douglas Robert Steuart Bader, R.A.F., it was an artificial leg. He parachuted to German-occupied France, losing his freedom but not his life. Bader is a square-jawed Englishman with a remarkable past and an even more remarkable spirit. He was only 21 when, in 1931, he suffered his first and most serious accident as an R.A.F. pilot officer. His right leg had to be amputated at the thigh, his left leg below the knee. For many it would have seemed an end. For Douglas Bader, it was only a beginning.

Reach for the Sky is the unique story of how Airman Bader rose to heroic heights. Author Paul Brickhill, a wartime R.A.F. flyer himself, tells Bader's story without slushing about in sentimentality. He combines hard, muscular prose with a dignified simplicity that will bring tears to the eyes and laughter to the lips of many a reader.

A Pair of Tin Legs. Bader's first try on a pair of flexible-jointed legs was discouraging. At the R.A.F. hospital, he was greeted with gruesome good cheer: "Long John's got his ruddy undercarriage back." But as they watched him learn to walk--lurching, stumbling, falling, refusing help, getting up, falling again--the affectionate kidding stopped, turned to silent encouragement. Soon Bader was turning somersaults, playing squash and golf (he now has a handicap of 4), and flying a plane. Once he went dancing with a girl he liked very much, and fell in her presence. She helped him up, while he grinned to hide how he felt. That was the first time she ever referred, even obliquely, to the loss of his legs. "You know," she said, putting her hand on his arm, "I think you're really amazing." They were married.

A Wing Leader. The peacetime R.A.F. would not have Bader without legs, but when war began, not even the King's Regulations could hold him back. He got back into the R.A.F. as a fighter pilot, eventually led five squadrons of more than 60 planes, and became "the R.A.F.'s first wing leader." He was a swashbuckling, pugnacious, fearless flyer who would fly ten sweeps in seven days, then stomp about on the ground, hungering to get into the air again. He was one of the few to whom so many owed so much through the Battle of Britain, and even among those few, he stood out. Only two men before him won bars to both the D.S.O. and D.F.C. At the time he crashed and became a prisoner, he was the fifth R.A.F. top-scorer, with 22 1/2 enemy planes.

Bader proved as extraordinary in prison camp as in the cockpit of a Spit. He immediately demanded that the Germans search for the leg snapped off in the crash. The Germans found it badly crushed, but repaired it expertly and handed it back to Bader. He gratefully strapped it on--and within days escaped. One night Bader simply knotted some bedsheets and climbed out of the hospital where he was recuperating. A waiting guide led him off, saying: "C'est bon. C'est magnifique!" But before he could move on to England he was betrayed to the Nazis by a French girl.

New Horizons. The Germans took elaborate precautions to hold onto their legless prisoner. They took away his legs, held him in a room with locked windows, and guarded him with loaded rifles. But after Bader was shipped to Germany, he got his legs back, escaped twice more, was caught both times. When not escaping or planning escape, he was an intransigent troublemaker for the Germans. He considered that to be his duty. Courageously challenging, baiting and tormenting his captors, he worked himself to the very end of the war prisoner line--the moated punishment camp at Kolditz Castle in Saxony. There Bader waited out 3 1/2 years of imprisonment, was liberated in 1945.

Back again with the R.A.F., Bader was named a group captain (equals U.S. colonel), and in 1945, on the fifth anniversary of the Battle of Britain, his plane led the huge air parade over London. Today he flies about the world as an executive for Shell Oil. "[Bader's] main triumph," concludes Biographer Brickhill, "is not his air fighting: that was only an episode that focused a world's attention on the greater victory he was achieving in showing humanity new horizons of courage, not in war, not only for the limbless, but in life."

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