MAN OF ACTION
NINE LIVES, by Alan C. Deere; Hodder & Stoughton, English price 15/-. (GROUP Captain Alan Deere, D.S.O., O.B.E., D.F.C., was the most successful New Zealand fighter ace of World War II. He is officially credited with 22 enemy aircraft destroyed, 10 probables, and 18 damaged. Unlike the inflated
claims made by the combatant air forces, including the R.A.F., this individual score was chalked with such care and restraint that it is probably close to correct. His reference, early in this book, to Kingsford-Smith’s Fokker tri-motor as a tri-plane need not cast serious doubts on his ability to recognise aircraft of German make. His capacity to seek out and destroy, his "luck" in bringing damaged aircraft to earth, his mere survival of four years’ fighter operations (700 hours) mark him as a pilot of unusual skill. From his eighth year, when a small biplane landed on the beach near his home at Westport, Alan Deere’s ambition was to be an aviator. He achieved it in time to serve briefly in the R.A.F. before war broke out. (His arrival in England after a sea voyage which took him between Cristobal and Colon, and into Tilbury by way of the Pool of London, make it evident that his destiny was as a pilot and not a navigator.) He took part in the air-cover of Dunkirkfrom which he returned by boat-be-fore making his mark as one of the famous Few of No. 11 Group in the Battle of Britain, and ending his active career at what must have been the summit of a fighter pilot’s ambition, command of a wing at Biggin Hill. For a man of action, the commission of this distinguished war record to paper must have seemed as "dicey" an undertaking as his descent by parachutewith the ripcord jammed. Equipped only with a long experience of writing opera-tion-reports and a line of dialogue. straight from the Mess at Biggin Hill, Deere ploughs into these superior odds as determinedly as ever his Spitfire, Kiwi I, did into the Luftwaffe. If the result is not exactly a kill, for readers of war memoirs it can at least be classed
as a probable.
A. S.
F.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1051, 16 October 1959, Page 12
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364MAN OF ACTION New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1051, 16 October 1959, Page 12
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