The Luck of The Devil

Tony Dudgeon flew for most of the Second World War. One of the few of his Cranwell term who lived to see the end of it he had, he says, "The Luck of the Devil".
He also had a lot of fun. His story bubbles with it — whether he is joining the Royal Air Force College from Eton in 1934 (the year Hitler came to power in Germany), perilously flying Hawker Hart biplanes amid the Himalayan peaks and valleys of India's north-west frontier, or repelling Iraqi rebels in one of the oddest episodes of the war.
But Air Vice-Marshal Dudgeon does not allow his sense of fun and the ridiculous to obscure important issues. His clear descriptive account of exciting and dangerous personal experiences — he is a natural storyteller — throws new light on Blenheim operations in North Africa and supplements the scantily recorded siege by the Iraqi rebel leader Raschid Ali of the RAF's No. 4 Flying Training School at Habbaniya. He found himself a vital figure in this desperate five-day desert mini-Battle of Britain fought in obsolete or second line aircraft by instructors, tour expired pilots and partly trained students. He describes vividly what really happened in 1941 at the remote base built by Britain in a bend of the Euphrates in the 1930s. The late Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Tedder — Air Commander-in-Chief Middle East — held no illusions about the importance of this extraordinary action. He told Dudgeon afterwards that it was "an RAF epic". Had Raschid Ali succeeded "we might well have lost the war."
The telling of this episode evokes, as does so much of Dudgeon's story, the spirit of the times which took a young pilot from peace into war.




by Air Vice Marshal A. G. Dudgeon
Published by Airlife 1985 1st edn. 214pp illustrated, index. 16x23 yellowed, otherwise fine, including d/j.



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Note:
"Long" descriptions, where shown, may have been taken from the book's dust jacket notes, and as such are relevant to the date of publication (e.g. any references to "new edition" "previously unpublished photographs" etc.) and not the present.