Operation Leg – a pilot unlike any other (2020)
91 comments
·January 27, 2025kitd
bloopernova
In WW2, Admiral Ernest King is reputed to have said "When they get in trouble, they send for the sons of bitches."
There were a lot of utter assholes and bullies around at that time. There were huge inter department feuds that resulted in many thousands of deaths. Part of why Eisenhower was a good supreme commander was that he could wrangle the assholes into at least not fighting each other!
potato3732842
>Part of why Eisenhower was a good supreme commander was that he could wrangle the assholes into at least not fighting each other!
That's a spicy take on the British.
(I kid, but the joke is in fact based in historical fact, managing relations with the British was a key reason he was given the job)
pfdietz
And the French.
As General Jacob L. Devers wrote to French General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny in 1945, "For many months we have fought together, often on the same side."
gnfargbl
Bader was also a chief proponent of the Big Wing, essentially flying a shitload of planes together in formation. The Big Wing which is usually considered [1] to have been a worse strategy than the more dynamic, targeted and integrated Dowding System [2] with which it competed.
He might have been a good pilot and a determined escapee, but I don't think history has much else to say in his favour.
[1] https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/battle-of-britain-big-wing-wa...
[2] https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/what-was-the-dowding-system
DC-3
An extremely capable and heroic man. But also an out-and-out racist who was an unabashed supporter of apartheid Rhodesia. People are complicated.
cab11150904
Ben is unlikely to ever be surpassed as in author in my eyes. I have read most of his books, well listened on Audible during my commutes, and they are all amazing. He quite literally brings history to life for me. His descriptions make you feel like you're there. Prisoners of the Castle is the one I haven't really had interest in but I'll probably get it at some point just to hear them all.
simonbarker87
Thoroughly enjoyable book. I read it recently and, having gone to a UK boarding school, the stories about life in Colditz being treated like a high stakes public (posh) boarding school by the British Officers rang very true to me.
lazyeye
Britain setup a holiday/prison camp for high-ranking german officers and bugged everything. It's a fascinating story..
https://www.amazon.com.au/Walls-Have-Ears-Intelligence-Opera...
matthewmorgan
Whereas bagging on a dead war hero due to something you read in a book is highly creditable behaviour
kitd
Mackintyre is a professional historian whose work is based on first hand accounts so I think it can be taken as fact that many found him unpleasant.
I found it interesting & surprising to read of his character, having (possibly like you) only known of him as a war hero, and thought it worth mentioning, that's all.
So no need for vicarious outrage. As you say, he's long gone.
tetris11
We had one member of the troup that did the real life Great Escape visit our school.
He handed out schematics of how they tunneled, their day-to-day logistics, communication with the outside, etc.
It was a really fun talk, but it ended on a somber note where those who did not escape were later punished/executed in revenge for the escape taking place.
In this context, someone asked him, "was it worth it?" and all I remember about his answer was him gripping his handout and giving a monosyllable reply.
byteknight
Both yes and no are one syllable. Your drawn out drama-incucing style of writing left a huge hanger that makes it unpleasurable.
pinkmuffinere
I suspect that’s intentional. Not all writing aims to be pleasurable, and I suspect the parent comment illustrates the gut-wrenching pain of war really well.
What do I as a reader want the answer to be? That it was worth the death of his friends? That he’d rather they never tried? No answer is happy, and I think that’s somewhat the point. Even more touching if it’s a true story, life is sometimes so poetic it hurts.
JumpCrisscross
> What do I as a reader want the answer to be?
Whatever he feels. Would he do it again?
byteknight
Making these types of choices are done in the interest of the writer and not the reader. Plain and simple. It draws intrigue, sometimes undue. This is one of them. That doesn't make it bad or wrong to do. As a side note, generally, its not a good idea to take make stances defending someone acting in self-interest with the guise of "art".
boothby
I see "gripping his handout" as significantly more vivid than the uttered response -- which OP confirms to have eluded their memory. That's the story: the teller's reaction to the question was more visceral than verbal.
Sometimes the truth is inherently dramatic. I know that when I've responded in that way -- clenching and mumbling a monosyllable -- the clench is honest, the syllable may be effectively meaningless.
byteknight
And leaves no meaningful result. Without knowing why he gripped the paper it is purely left for interpretation and does not guide to a singular understanding.
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mikepurvis
If it's the famous Great Escape about which the movie was made, only three men who escaped made it to freedom, and just eleven more were recaptured and survived to the end of the war— the rest of the 77 were shot. Of those 14 survivors, most passed away in the 1990s, so if you actually did get to meet one, that's pretty neat!
Certainly the depiction in the movie is that it was absolutely worth it to the men; maybe in practical terms it resulted in greater loss of life than just cooperating with the confinement, but there is value to the spirit in resisting evil that goes beyond the simple imperative to stay alive.
hbrav
I bet you're right about there being value to the spirit. But if I understand correctly escape was also regarded as a matter of duty. By escaping you would not only stand a chance of making it back to Allied lines, but you would also tie up German forces searching for you.
dataflow360
What syllable?
tetris11
I genuinely can't remember, but it left me feeling washed out.
CornishFlameHen
I want to think it was "nuts"
lovegrenoble
Aleksey Petrovich Maresyev (1916 – 2001) was a Soviet and Russian military pilot who became a Soviet fighter ace during World War II despite becoming a double amputee.
untouchable
Small note, the airdrop was to Saint-Omer, a Luftwaffe airbase in France not a castle. Bader was later imprisoned in Colditz Castle.
xpl
> Bader then used this leg to mount multiple escape attempts from various prisons
Oh, that reminds me of the prosthetic leg joke from 'Guardians of the Galaxy'. So it was a reference?
blitzar
I have not read the book (Reach for the Sky - 1954) nor watched the movie (Reach for the Sky - 1956) in a very very long time however I recall them fondly from my youth.
kylecazar
"Bader then used this leg to mount multiple escape attempts from various prisons"
Coming soon to Netflix...
jonp888
A film was made about his life a few years after the war, which is now something of a classic, if only due to how often it is shown on British Television. It was a flop in the US though.
chgs
Probably because it didn’t have an American saving the day
lern_too_spel
The screenwriters could simply insert American characters into the story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Escape_(film)
nullbyte
This is an awesome story
Onavo
Pilots (that are not bombers) were treated pretty well by the Luftwaffe. Aviators share a comraderie that's hard to describe (very similar to software engineers in a sense).
cperciva
In a remarkable piece of wartime diplomacy, German General Adolf Galland notified the RAF of Bader's missing right prosthetic leg and, with Hermann Goring's permission, the RAF was given safe passage to parachute in a replacement prosthetic in a mission called 'Operation Leg'.
Not so remarkable when you consider that tying up RAF planes and burning their fuel on missions like this reduces their combat capabilities. It's the same logic which says that seriously injuring enemy infantry is more effective than killing them, since one dead soldier is one soldier who can't fight but one injured soldier is one soldier who can't fight plus one or two who won't fight because they're evacuating him.
(Of course, Russian doctrine now seems to counter this by leaving seriously injured soldiers on the battlefield to bleed out...)
bb123
I don't think that was the rationale. For captured senior/important figures were given all kinds of affordances and gestures made which contrast shockingly with the conditions we know people endured in concentration camps.
For example Senior officers at Colditz often received parcels from home with stuff like cigars, chocolates, and spirits, sometimes through diplomatic agreements with the Red Cross. This was at a time when Germany in general was starving. They also organised theatre productions, orchestras, and even sports events.
I think this is just a relic of a different era and a different code of war - similar to how long before this Naval captains from opposing sides often shared meals after a ship's surrender. It is hard to imagine now.
advisedwang
> I think this is just a relic of a different era and a different code of war
It's worth noting that this kind of civility only happened on the Western front. The eastern front was a no-mercy teeth out display of barbarism. I think the conclusion is that it's to the era, but the specific conditions that resulted in acts like this.
cperciva
For captured senior/important figures were given all kinds of affordances and gestures made which contrast shockingly with the conditions we know people endured in concentration camps.
It wasn't just senior and important figures; POW camps generally were nothing like the Nazi concentration camps since their purpose was internment rather than extermination. People tend to conflate the two, partly because Eisenhower worked so hard to document the Holocaust.
Western POWs were also treated better than Eastern POWs out of fear of retaliation; the USSR wasn't a signatory to the Geneva conventions and already treated their prisoners poorly so there was no similar incentive to treat Eastern POWs well. (And also layered on top of this was Nazi ideology about Slavic races being inferior etc.)
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permo-w
if somehow two Western European countries ended up at war with each other in this era, POWs would be almost certainly be afforded better respect than ever.
I feel like it's more about the relationship between the two countries than it is the era. the royal family of Britain is and was quite German, and the Nazis believed that the English were part of the Aryan race.
carabiner
Germans and British were on friendly terms even right before war. When the Germans completed a test flight of a new aircraft (forget which), British engineers sent a "congrats!" message to them to which the Germans were appreciative.
hindsightbias
The older cadre of Luftwaffe officers considered themselves better than other forces, with a generational code of honor/conduct. Their highest award was the Knight's Cross, so the concept of chivalry among peers was at least a thing. Aircrew POW camps were run by grounded/older Luftwaffe officers.
Goring was a WWI ace, Galland was younger so maybe eager to please.
Rebelgecko
At least towards the end of the war, Galland was not a fan of Göring (he was a ringleader of the Fighter Pilots' Revolt)
schroeding
Göring also directly gave the order to Reinhard Heydrich to organize the "Final Solution of the Jew Question" aka Holocaust. So code of honor with strict restriction to "Aryan" pilots of the western Allies, if at all, IMO.
reaperducer
Not so remarkable when you consider that tying up RAF planes and burning their fuel on missions like this reduces their combat capabilities.
Or, sometimes human beings act like human beings, even in a time of war. In addition to the whole notion of "rules of war," there are thousands of examples, but here is a famous one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce
> The truces were not unique to the Christmas period and reflected a mood of "live and let live", where infantry close together would stop fighting and fraternise, engaging in conversation. In some sectors, there were occasional ceasefires to allow soldiers to go between the lines and recover wounded or dead comrades; in others, there was a tacit agreement not to shoot while men rested, exercised or worked in view of the enemy.
People like you and me work at computers all day and start to think like computers and try to use "logic" to explain everything away. Fortunately, there are real people in the real world who are free of our burdens.
cperciva
Christmas truces were absolutely a thing, but they came about through the action of troops on the ground -- and the commanding officers absolutely hated them.
short_sells_poo
I'm not condoning it at all, but I think it's easy to understand why commanding officers didn't like their troops fraternizing with the enemy. If GI John and Soldat Hans share a coffee and a cigarette together, and perhaps even a pleasant chat, they will quickly come to realize that both of them are human beings, with human feelings, a family worrying about them, children possibly, hopes and dreams, and so on. And once you are acutely aware that your enemy is just like you, only perhaps speaks a different language, you are much-much less inclined to shoot them and stop being an efficient soldier.
I've never been in a war, and hope I never live to see myself in one, but the only way I can see one human viciously trying to kill another is by not thinking of their enemy as a human being, but rather just a thing.
aja12
> Fortunately, there are real people in the real world who are free of our burdens.
You might be right about the general, who knows. But Goring? No, that man was definitely a computer.
Slava_Propanei
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gambiting
I don't know, I cannot accept in my head that in one part of Europe Nazis were shaving men, women and children to use their hair as industrial filling before throwing them in gas chambers by the thousands, but somewhere else Nazi general was gracious enough to allow British troops to airdrop a prosthetic leg for their pilot - they even remained friends after the war! I'm sorry but it just sounds like.....some kind of joke? Like it happened in a different reality than the one that happened in Europe at the time? Why was that general even allowed to visit the UK and not in prison? Oh that's right - because Churchil has personally advocated against prosecuting nazi generals because it would be "unsporstmanlike".
I'm sorry, I cannot enjoy this article in the spirit it was written in. I grew up next to Auschwitz and the idea of borderline friendly(sorry, "diplomatic") relationship with nazi forces makes me sick.
schroeding
They maybe just forgot the extend of it. Don't forget that many don't even know the difference between the "normal" (already incredibly horrible and vile) concentration camps like Dachau and the pure extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka or Sobibor. The Brits and Americans only liberated the first kind, and it (mostly) wasn't their citizens who were gassed or shot by Einsatzgruppen.
Also doesn't help that some think it was only done and caused by the SS or Hitler / Himmler / Göring, as if there was no connection with the remaining government, the police or the Reichsbahn, and as if the Wannseekonferenz[1] and Reichskristallnacht[2] had never happened.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference, also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URSNN5mnI2g
lukan
It makes more sense, if you consider that the Nazis did not really wanted to fight the british in the first place, but would have rather fought with them against the communist hordes in the east and the jews in general. Racism in the british empire was pretty established at that time, so it was not an outlandish goal. Hitler was fine with the british empire oversea (white rule) while he ruled the continent..
But luckily the Nazis were really bad at diplomacy.
appleorchard46
It makes the horrible things the Nazis did even more horrifying. It's easy to think of the Nazi regime as a pure, isolated evil, but when articles like this show that there was room for even a little humanity, it makes it clear how many individual choices for evil were made elsewhere every step of the way.
simonbarker87
The reason the two co exist in the same regime is (awfully) that they didn’t consider Jews to be people while they considered the British worthy opponents. It’s horrible and disgusting but if one can wrap their head around the idea that a population can be indoctrinated into believing there are two levels of people (effectively people and not people) then Nazi Germany becomes more … comprehensible. The shockingness of it doesn’t go away though.
I thought Churchill was against the trials because he thought the Nazi leadership should just simply be executed or imprisoned for life without the bother of a trial? Churchill was very much a fan of unsportsmanlike behaviour, the more devious the trick the better in his view.
lmm
Humans are complex. If we want to be serious about preventing a re-occurrence of the Holocaust, we should remember that it was carried out by ordinary people like you or me. Even today, many - perhaps most - people will make excuses for any amount of evil as long as it's being done by their side.
Slava_Propanei
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abuMZ
[flagged]
Ben Mackintyre's book about Colditz reveals that Douglas Bader was actually a pretty unpleasant character, often tolerated by his peers at best, and often loathed by his subordinates whom he would bully. He was an outstanding pilot though and was given the benefit of the doubt as a result.
To his credit, after the war he used his fame to become a vocal advocate for the disabled. I remember him as such when I was young.