Royal Air Force Quotes

“We were a motley crowd. His Majesty’s Life Guards and Royal Horse Guards jostled along in their army trucks beside the Bedouin of the Arab Legion - Glubb’s Desert Patrol, swathed in garish robes, who raced about in light trucks armed with Lewis guns. We even embraced eight Royal Air Force armoured cars. Tough stuff, these boys. They had left Sidi Barrani in the Western Desert on Thursday and were reported in action against the Iraqi guerrillas at Rutbah on Saturday, a thousand miles away. They were all rogues, God bless them, for whom the War had come as an eleventh hour reprieve. They were the sort of men to whom legend clung like the cloak of Mephistopheles.”
― Somerset Declair, The Golden Carpet

“[Kenneth Wilfrid Young Fison] joined the RAF as a radio observer in December 1941. At the time of joining he recorded in his diary the words of Edmund Burke: ‘When Bad Men combine, the good must associate; else will they fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
― David Ross, Richard Hillary: The Definitive Biography of a Battle of Britain Fighter Pilot and Author of The Last Enemy

“The eyes of the men after the war. Like rabbits in headlights. We all were. All of them who never came back. All them going up into the air and then not coming down. A line through the name in the morning. And that was that. Well, we came through, Philip and me.”
― Ali Smith, There But For The