How’s this for an incredible script?
Young lad growing up in Glasgow, starts an apprenticeship as an accountant, and also decides to join the Territorial Army as a gunner. This is, say, 1938.
Off he goes with his unit on a practice camp in late August 1939. Half way through the camp, Germany invades Poland, and his unit are told that they’re not going home.
Eventually, he decides that he doesn’t want to stay in the Army, so he volunteers to fly instead, and ends up in Canada doing his pilot training.
He gets put onto single seat fighters, but then, how about THIS for a twist? Instead of being based on land, he gets assigned to MSFU, the Merchant Ship Fighter Unit. These are the boys who sit for hours on end in the cockpits of Hurricanes which are mounted on catapults on the bows of merchant ships. These boys know that if they get launched, there’s nowhere for them to land…
Eventually, in 1943, off the coast of Spain, his time comes. A German Condor appears out of nowhere, having a running battle with a Liberator. Another Condor appears, and our hero gets catpulted off. He shoots down his Condor, the Liberator gets their one, and another catapult pilot gets one as well. Our guy has to bale out into the sea, but is picked up and eventually makes it back to Blighty.
He then joins a land based squadron, but in 1944 he gets shot down over France. Before he bales out, he calls his squadron commander to say he’s been shot down, and the reply is “Have a nice time in Paris”. He evades capture, gets sheltered by the Resistance, and does indeed have a nice time in Paris, walking around amongst the occupying Germans and even being photographed doing so.
Suddenly his luck runs out. He’s captured by the Gestapo, held in Fresnes prison, and eventually transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp. After enduring some months held there, he ends up in Stalag Luft III, before his eventual repatriation to the UK, exactly twelve months to the day after he was shot down.
Soon after the war, he leaves the RAF, goes back to his accountancy, and emigrates to Canada. Sixty years after his capture by the Gestapo, he returns to the UK on a visit to pay his respects to some of his fallen comrades.
Sounds like a fabulous script doesn’t it? But far from being a movie plot, it’s the story of Jimmy Stewart, ex-609 sqn. An ordinary man, with an extraordinary past.
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