My grandfather Denis Robinson,who has died aged 97, was a Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain, and one of Churchill’s legendary “few”. But he was reluctant to uncover stories of the battle,mainly because he felt guilty approximately having killed others.
Particularly poignant was his account of shooting at a Messerschmitt 109, only to finish when it began to smoke. He justified it at the time on the grounds of saving ammunition, or although later he came to realise that he hadn’t wanted to kill the pilot. A few weeks later it was Deniss turn,when he was shot from behind by an Me109 near Swanage in Dorset. The engine failed and he remained with the plane on the basis that bailing out was “bloody dangerous”. He crash-landed in a field outside Wareham. The famous photograph he took of the plane the following morning, with its tail in the air and its nose in a ditch, and shows how lucky he was to escape.
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Source: theguardian.com