Douglas Bader After a 1931 plane crash resulted in the amputation os his legs, Douglas Bader was fit with metal legs and tried to resume his career as an RAF fighter pilot. But the RAF was unwilling to keep him on even in a ground job, and forced him to retire. For eight years he repeatedly applied to rejoin the RAF, and was finally re-instated as a fighter pilot when the war broke out in 1939. Bader quickly mastered the art of flying a hurricane, and in June of 1942, he was appointed commander of 12 Group's 242 Squadron. This squadron of Canadian pilots had previosly been lacking in morale, but under Bader, it became a crack flying team, achieving a kills-to-ratio of twenty to one, the best in RAF. Bader developed the big wing theory of fighter combat, and best put it to use on Septemver 15, 1940, when he led five squadrons against Luftwaffe bombers over London and helped rack up the greatest single-day tally of enemy losses in the Battle of Britain. Bader himself became an ace in the summer's fighting, and shot down a total of twenty-two planes from July 1940 to August 1941, when his fighter was cut in half in a collision with a Bf 109 over France. He bailed out, was captured, spent the remainder of the war in German prison camps.

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