Richie’s point – Richie landed after a wild sortie complaining to his ground crew that the back of his cockpit seat was very uncomfortable. His ground crew went immediately to inspect the seat. They came back to the Flight hut with grins on their faces and they wanted Richie to go back out to the kite with them to see what the uncomfortableness was all about. Richie was aghast at the object which had annoyed him while he tried to settle back into the seat. An armour-piercing bullet had entered the quarter-inch thick steel plating on the back of the seat, and the bullet had expended its energy with the point sticking out far enough to nag Richie’s back every time that he leaned back in the seat.
It was a tough day – Even the Winco (Bader) caught a packet, and when he landed at Westhampnett his Spitfire, in a haphazard, dead-engine way, rolled to a clumsy stop. Everybody said under their breath, “Oh no, not the Winco too.” A number of us jumped into our small van and drove out to the Winco’s kite. The air around the kite was blue. DB was a scholar in the art of cursing. When we jumped up onto the mainplanes and were looking for the worst, he pointed down to his legs. His artificial limbs were a mess; they were splayed all over the place. He cursed, “Goddamn, I wouldn’t mind if they were my own, but you can’t get these nowadays.”
The day that DB collided with a ME 109 over France, and had to bail out, did have a demoralizing effect on the Wing –- at least in “B” Flight. Later on, we escorted an old Blenheim bomber carrying a box containing artificial limbs and the box was dropped in the St. Omer area. Evidently, Bader had made his mark there also. It was a very eerie feeling flying over France and trying to look for enemy aircraft which, supposedly, were not to appear.
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