No Ordinary Pilot

One young man’s extraordinary exploits in World War II

No Ordinary Pilot cover

Description

The compelling, previously unknown story of the wartime adventures of Bob Allen: pilot, aerial photographer and prisoner of war.

After a lifetime in the RAF, Group Captain Bob Allen, finally allowed his children and grandchildren to see his official flying log. It contained the line: 'KILLED WHILST ON OPERATIONS'. He refused to answer any further questions, leaving instead a memoir of his life during World War II.

Joining up aged 19, within six months he was in No.1 Squadron flying a Hurricane in a dog fight over the Channel. For almost two years he lived in West Africa, fighting Germany's Vichy French allies, as well as protecting the Southern Atlantic supply routes. Returning home at Christmas 1942, he retrained as a fighter-bomber pilot flying Typhoons and was one of the first over the Normandy beaches on D-Day.

On 25 July 1944 Bob was shot down, spending the rest of the war in a POW camp where he was held in solitary confinement, interrogated by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the infamous Stalag Luft 3 and suffered the winter march of 1945 before being liberated by the Russians.

Fleshing out Bob's careful third-person memoir with detailed research, his daughter Suzanne Campbell Jones tells the gripping story of a more or less ordinary man, who came home with extraordinary memories which he kept to himself for more than 50 years.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Prologue
1 Head in the air
2 Overseas
3 At war in West Africa
4 Eyes in the sky
5 This island home
6 Summer in France
7 Behind the lines
8 A prisoner in Germany
9 'Raus raus' – 'out out'
10 Last lap to freedom

Postscript: What happened next
Notes
Select bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index

Product details

Published Mar 09 2018
Format Ebook (PDF)
Edition 1st
Extent 320
ISBN 9781472828262
Imprint Osprey Publishing
Illustrations 20 black and white photographs and maps
Series General Aviation
Short code GNA
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Suzanne Campbell-Jones

For most of her working life Suzanne Campbell Jone…

Resources

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