SPITFIRE ACE WHO CRASH LANDED

ALAN ‘AL’ DEERE (above) was an RAF fighter pilot who was forced to ditch his Spitfire on the beach at Dunkirk — an episode re-enacted by Tom Hardy in the new film.

The 22-year-old, a pilot officer with 54 Squadron, shot down six Luftwaffe aircraft over the French coast while protecting the evacuation, before being downed on May 28 by the rear gunner of a Dornier bomber, which also crashed.

‘I crash-landed on the beach between Dunkirk and Ostend, wheels up, right on the edge of the water — and the tide was coming in,’ he recalled.

He was knocked unconscious. When he came round, he made his way to a cafe, where a woman dressed his head wound. He then hitched a lift to Dunkirk on an Army lorry.

‘From miles away you could tell where Dunkirk was,’ he said. ‘ It was completely overcast by black smoke.’

He got back to Britain on the destroyer HMS Montrose, but not before troops on the ship offered their low opinion of the RAF, whose dogfights in the sky over the evacuation were often invisible from the beaches. The men thought they had been abandoned by the flyers when, in fact, they were sustaining bad losses against the Luftwaffe.

‘The troops I met were very anti,’ he recalled, ‘asking “Where the hell were you?”

‘I had been flying non-stop for ten days until I was shot down, and I replied that we were there, “but perhaps you didn’t see us.” It was a bit unpleasant because I was the only airman on board — but you couldn’t blame them. They were pretty worn out.’

Nineteen hours after taking off for Dunkirk on his last sortie, Deere was back in London. By the end of the evacuation, his squadron had been reduced from 17 pilots to eight, a loss rate worse than during the Battle of Britain.

Deere was presented with the Distinguished Flying Cross by King George VI. He went on to become one of the top-scoring RAF aces of the war and later served as an aide-de-camp to the Queen before being promoted to air commodore.

When he died in 1995, aged 77, his ashes were scattered from a Spitfire of the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight.