Flying Start

By the height of the Battle of Britain, in the late summer of 1940, the pattern of Dundas's days had settled into something both monotonous and unbearable: waiting at readiness, the sudden scramble, the climb to meet incoming German formations, the few violent minutes of combat, and then — if you were lucky — the return to an airfield where you counted who had come back. He captures the sheer physical strain of it, the exhaustion of flying several sorties a day, the way tiredness dulled the edge that kept men alive.

He is unsentimental about the fighting itself. There was little of the chivalry that later films would drape over it. Combat was fast, ugly, and largely a matter of who saw whom first. A pilot might loose off his guns at a fleeting shape and never know whether he had hit anything. The romantic image of duels between gentlemen airmen had almost nothing to do with the confused, adrenal reality of a dogfight, where the danger came from the aircraft you never saw.

As the war ground on past 1940, Dundas's rise reflected a hard arithmetic: the pilots who survived became, almost by default, the leaders. Experience was scarce and precious, and a man who had lived through the first battles was worth more than a dozen fresh recruits. He moved from being one aircraft among many to leading a section, then a squadron, and eventually a whole wing — responsibilities that a peacetime air force would have handed only to much older men.

He is thoughtful about what leadership in the air actually meant. It was not about being the best shot. It was about judgement — knowing when to commit and when to hold back, positioning a formation so that it had the advantage of height and sun, and bringing as many of your people home as the fighting allowed. A good leader was measured less by his personal tally than by the survival of the men who flew behind him, and Dundas felt that weight keenly.

The later part of Dundas's war carried him away from British skies to the Mediterranean and the long, grinding campaign up through Italy. The character of the fighting had changed. The desperate defensive battle of 1940 had given way to an Allied advance in which air power increasingly meant supporting the army on the ground — attacking positions, roads, and columns rather than duelling with enemy fighters overhead. The glamour, such as it had ever been, had largely gone; what remained was dangerous, workmanlike, and relentless.

By now Dundas was a senior figure, a Wing Commander and eventually a Group Captain, still remarkably young for the rank. He writes of the strange position of being an old hand in his early twenties, of watching new pilots arrive with the same rawness he had once carried, and of the effort to pass on what he had learned so that fewer of them would die learning it themselves. The apprentice had become the master, without ever quite feeling old enough for the part.

The book closes where its title points — at a flying start, the beginning of a life that the war both accelerated and hollowed out. Dundas went in a frightened nineteen-year-old tumbling out of a burning Spitfire and came out a decorated Group Captain, but he never lets the reader mistake the medals for the meaning. What he remembers most clearly are the faces at the breakfast table and the ones that stopped appearing there.