Profoundly moved by the stories of wartime casualties as a child,
Dilip Sarkar has since spent a lifetime reconstructing the lives of
many of the fallen and is passionate about recording and sharing
this very personal hidden history. In Spitfire Down he explores the
stories of thirteen pilots who failed to return, all killed, either
in action or flying accidents, whilst a fourteenth, Flying Officer
Buck Casson, was brought down by a German ace over France and
captured. There is, for example, the virtually unknown story of The
Baby of the RAF', Sergeant Geoffrey Painting. Posted to fly
Spitfires with 118 Squadron at RAF Ibsley in Hampshire, Painting
was hit by flak during an attack on enemy shipping off Cherbourg on
30 September 1941. Still listed as missing, at just 17, he is
believed to have been the youngest RAF pilot killed during the
Second World War. The author has reconstructed Painting's short
life with help from his family, and forensically deconstructed that
last flight with the help of the now late Wing Commander Peter
Howard-Williams DFC, who was flying with the teenage pilot that
day. The author also explores the heart-rending story of an
American trainee fighter pilot, Pilot Officer Jim Bob' Lee, whose
Spitfire collided with a Wellington bomber over Gloucestershire -
resulting in the loss of all airmen involved. Two Canadian pilots
perished on Pen-y-Fan, the highest peak in South Wales. The
multi-national effort that defeated Hitler is further emphasised,
in fact, through the stories of both Wing Commander Piotr Laguna
and Flying Officer Franek Surma. But perhaps most tragic of all is
how lightning struck Joan Welch twice: her first fianc e, Flight
Lieutenant Lester Sanders DFC, was killed test-flying Spitfires in
1942, and her second, Pilot Officer Ian Smith, was killed flying in
Palestine in 1945. Using correspondence, diaries and other personal
papers of the pilots concerned, the author has reconstructed their
all-too brief lives and provided a lasting and profusely
illustrated record of these sacrifices.
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