Biggles of 266

I want to begin by saying that I never realised how funny Biggles was until I read this collection of short stories. Don't get me wrong, not all of the Biggle's stories (and there are an awful lot of them) are comical, many of them are adventure stories, but from John's introduction to this book,

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and the nature of air combat in World War I, the stories can be quite amusing, especially since he indicates that when it came to air combat truth is stranger than fiction (at which point he tells a story of a pilot who flipped the plane, fell out of the cockpit, grabbed hold of the machinegun, and then managed to flip the plane back over).
Captain W.E. Johns was a war veteran so the two things he knew really well was fighting in World War I (he fought in Gallipoli, the Middle East, and on the Western Front) and air combat. The reason I say air combat is because halfway through the war he returned to England, learned how to fly (planes were only beginning to appear in the second half of the war, and were used as scouts, as well as to drop bricks on enemy positions) and then began teaching others to fly. Remember that at this time flight was still a very new invention and there was a high chance that when you went up you would not be coming back. This actually happened to Johns in that he only flew combat missions for six weeks before being shot down by a German and ended up spending the rest of the war in a POW camp (and being in September 1918 he wasn't there for very long).
Johns remained in the Royal Flying Corps until 1927 when he retired and began writing books, his most popular being the Biggles books. This is not surprising since by the 1930s pilots were looked on a heroes, and as such Biggles was created as being the pinnacle of this new hero. In World War I the pilots were on the cutting edge of technology and acted more like special forces operatives than the airforce pilots that are around today. Consider this, you could probably name more World War I pilots than you could name pilots from any other era, even if the only pilot that you can name is The Red Baron (and you can add Captain Johns to that list to make two).
As I said, these World War I stories are much more comical than adventurous. The later Biggles stories have him as a spy and as an air policeman, however it is these World War I stories that everybody remembers. Seriously, Biggles is forever crashing planes (he crashes three of them in this book) as well as shooting down at least 15 German planes (which makes him an Ace, even if the British did not measure success based on how many planes you shot down. Personally I would measure success based upon the number of missions that you come back from, and from what I understand, even surviving one mission is a effort in itself).
As for the stories, the first one has him take the plane up into the air to test it out and while up there he decides to go for a fly over enemy territory. Biggles then proceeds to crash the plane and escapes back to friendly territory by stealing a balloon (and almost get shot down by friendly fire in the process). Another has him flying over enemy lines on Christmas purely to steal a turkey, and another one is a competition as to who can fly the furthest over enemies lines to dump propaganda leaflets on the enemy. Oh, and there is the one with the camera which, surprise surprise, results in Biggles crashing the plane.

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