Bader Was Kind, Generous Helpful To Young Airmen

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28155, 19 December 1956, Page 22

Bader Was Kind, Generous Helpful To Young Airmen

Praise for the kindness and generosity of the famous air ace, Douglas Bader, was given by another wellknown pilot, Group Captain A. B. Woodhall, at the Christmas tattoo of the Christchurch Tin Hat Club last evening. Apart from beng a magnificent leader, Bader “was the most kind and generous chap you could ever have in the way he helped young and inexperenced airmen,” he said. He led and encouraged them and he was doing the same thing today with crippled children.

During the Battle of Britain, Group Captain Woodhall was station commander at both Duxford and Tangmere. Later he commanded fighters in Malta during the critical period between January and August, 1942, before he transferred to fighter stations in England until 1944. He finally commanded a heavy bomber formation in Italy until the end of the war.

Group Captain Woodhall said that he was flying in the Fleet Air Arm in the days when it was “dicey.” There were three clubs —the bathing club, the pallisade club and the perch club. He wag an original member of the perch club for which a member had to have done 100 landings without becoming a member of the other two clubs. They ' had a badge with the motto “perchance.” Vice-Admiral Sir Connolly Abel Smith, Fag Officer Royal Yachts, was another member of the club. He was posted to the Air Ministry in 1938 “just at the time when Chamberlain was wandering around with hs umbrella,” Group Captain Woodhall said. He had to get the figures of the number of operationally-trained, bomber crews. “I will never forget the figure—l49J. So we were not surprised that poor old Chamberlain played for time.”

Group Captain Woodhall was transferred to Fighter Command and, just before Dunkirk, Douglas Bader joined them, he said. “I had known him in the old days before he lost his legs and he really was a finished pilot.”

He recalled an anecdote of Bader's period in an ai;my prison camp in Germany. The first thing he had asked was how an escape could be made and he was told it would be almost impossible. There was one thin piece of wire which it would be possible to cut through, but it was right under a sentry box, said Group Captain Woodhall. Bader and a New Zealander staged a little fight beside the wire during which the New Zealander was able to throw Bader's artificial leg over the wire. Thinking “you brutal English,” the sentry had climbed down from his box to retrieve the leg and while he did so the two men cut their way through the wire.