The final insult?

Douglas Bader

From yesterday's Daily Mail, a piece by John Edwards, worth republishing in it's entirety.
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The room was empty and lit by sheets of sunlight bleaching the folded curtains and lying over the tops of the polished leather chairs. Ghosts go quietly, but you knew they were everywhere. Douglas Bader, the tin-legged fighter ace, was in front of the wood fire which shot smoke up the chimney of a huge marble fireplace.

Bader lost his legs in a flying acident and worried the doctors into letting him fight again. His half-pint in a pewter mug was getting warm on the mantlepiece, while he tapped his pipe in a misty picture floating back through time.
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And that looked like 'Cat's Eyes' Cunningham, the greatest night fighter pilot ever, talking to Johnnie Johnson, who was the number one of all aces. Stanford Tuck was in there somewhere, a bit brash and showing off, but he became a tiger in the cockpit of a Spitfire. He's talking to Sailor Malan. And there was a great fighter pilot for you.
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Which is how it was in the old officers' mess at RAF Coltishall, Norfolk. The Battle of Britain still raged in that cloudless sky of memories.
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"They were all here, you know", said someone who flies fast jet fighters out of the place these days.
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"It's something, isn't it? The best of the best in their day, certainly the most famous, and all here in this room.Them and their colleagues asainst the German Luftwaffe. It's all we had."
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Before there were celebrities, there were only heroes. That is the slot in history where those pilots' names are kept. They really did do something for this once great country. They saved it.
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Whisper it near Blair and watch him squirm. His Government want history buried. Blair will probably end his days apologising to the families of shot-down Luftwaffe crews for the pain they were caused after their relatives bombed London.
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Then there will be angry ghosts in the officers' mess at RAF Coltishall, now in the first sad days of closing down forever.
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A pilot flew from here and shot down the first German plane in the Battle of Britain. Another one went up and shot down the last.
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Oh yes. For anyone denied the chance of learning about it in school, the Batle of Britain was the one which stopped the Germans invading. It wasn't much more than that. Don't go around bragging though. You could be arrested for the newest crime, the one called patriotism.
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Mick Jennings, base historian, with books under his arm, an office full of documents and even a museum in the building behind him, showed you the airport.
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"How important was it? Well, it opened in June 1940 and one month later, Sergeant Pilot F.N.Robertson in a Spitfire shot down a Dornier 17 near Winterton, and that was the first officially recorded kill of the Battle of Britain. Can I still say kill?"
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The first of many. Which was 65 years ago. And the station hasn't changed much. The bulidings are the same ones those young fighter pilots ran put of when someone shouted:"Scramble!"
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Then they flew to 10,000ft and engaged swarms of enemy bombers.

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Coltishall had changed so little that the old Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) sleeping quarters still has the original camouflage spread across the front.

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This was to confuse low-flying German raiders by day and randy RAF pilots coming back from The Goat at night. The Germans never hit it. Nothing about the pilots' results was ever written down.

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Isn't this just another airfield closing down, Mick Jennings was asked.

.Jaguars

"It's closing because it's a Jaguar fighter base.The jaguars are being withdrawn from service.

But it's not just another airfield. It's the only Battle of Britain fighter base which has never changed roles. It was fighters then and fighters now. It's unique."

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Seems a bit far away to have been vital to London.

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"No. The Luftwaffe came from the south, over Kent, Sussex and Hampshire, bombed London, then swung north to go home and flew right into Coltishall's sector. It was one of the most important bases we had."

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One of the locals came around last month and he said he was a boy back then and remembered all the Spitfires and Hurricanes racing into the air and engaging a straggle of Germans heading out to sea.

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Spitfire and Hurricane

It was quite some sight, he said. And did anyone know all of the British and American bombers which crash-landed here after bombing Germany because it was the first airfield they saw after flying wounded into friendly skies?

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In the movie on Bader, Reach ForThe Sky, it was supposed to be Coltishall's Nissen huts he was teetering from on his tin legs to fly into the war over East Anglia.

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Now they've circled March 31st on the 2006 calendars across the airfield. That's it. Finish. The last take-off. The smell and the noise of vistory ends up as words in books.

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"There was talk of a holding centre for asylum-seekers going in there," someone in The Goat said. He was standing in somewhere once called Cat's Eyes Cunninham's Corner.

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"It would be an insult," he said.

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Do you think anyone in this Government would worry about that?

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The man shook his head over his beer, and you knew how he felt.