Young Bradman

138 Chapter ten: The Himalayan Men La guerre, mon vieux, c’est notre jeunesse, ensevelie et secrete. [ The war, my old friend, it’s our youth, buried and secret. ] Last words of Guy Chapman’s memoir A Kind of Survivor (1975) In his moving and honest memoir No Moon Tonight , the Australian Don Charlwood told of flying, like Charlie Walker, on a Royal Air Force squadron in Lincolnshire in 1942. After 29 missions – one more and his crew survived their ‘tour’ – Charlwood went for interview in front of Group Captain Hughie Edwards VC to become an officer. Charlwood wrote: Edwards and such other men as Gibson, Cheshire and Pickard were mountains, far above our heads. We, who had merely a tour behind us, were foothills; above us again were men of two and even three tours, but towering over us all were a few Himalayan names, men with a richer combination of skill and luck than comes to more than one in ten thousand. Below us were the broad plains, the average men of Bomber Command, for squadron life had convinced me that the average man, however great his skill, reached no more than ten operations before he was lost to sight. At an investiture at Buckingham Palace in July 1943, with cigarettes in hand, the highly decorated and senior Bomber Command airmen Percy Pickard, the Sydney man William Blessing (killed over France in 1944) and Leonard Cheshire.