Word: badere
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...