One Valuable Man

"I propose that Douglas Bader be prohibited from ever stepping into an aircraft again. Such men as he--and there are many like him--are too valuable to England. . . . The race should be allowed to keep their finest types."

So wrote London Daily Mirror's Cassandra last month of Acting Wing Commander Douglas Robert Stewart Bader, 31, who has no legs. Last week the British race was suddenly without his services.

Douglas Bader cracked up bringing an R.A.F. plane out of a slow roll in 1931, woke up with both legs amputated, one at the thigh, one at the knee. He fitted himself with a pair of four-pound, duralumin, flexible-jointed legs designed by the brothers Desoutter, one of whom also lost a limb in an air crash. Douglas Bader learned to fox trot, play cricket, turn a backward somersault, finally had one leg shortened for further agility.

He took up flying again, wangled his way back into the R.A.F. in 1939, within a few months became an ace and walked off first with the D.S.O., then the D.F.C. Said the officer who readmitted him to active service: "He rattles all over the place on his tin legs, gets 'em smashed and straightened out with a can opener and he's off again."

Last fortnight Douglas Bader went out on another daylight sweep over France, did not come back. Last week the Berlin radio announced that Douglas Bader's plane had been shot down over the coast of France, he had bailed out, been found by the Germans, and was now a prisoner of war in Germany. When Pilot Bader parachuted to earth, he suffered no injury but some damage: one of his duralumin legs crumpled. While his pretty wife and some friends drank a champagne toast to him "wherever he was," the Luftwaffe sent a message to the R.A.F. through the Red Cross offering safe passage to any British pilot who would fly over with a new tin leg.

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