ITEMS OF INTEREST | RECONNAISSANCE REPORT
Publisher: Osprey
ISBN: 978-1472828279
Hardback, and eBook
320 pages
RRP £18.99
SEVERAL decades after the end of World War Two, the amazing memoirs of RAF fighter-bomber pilot Robert Neil Grieg Allen ‘Bob’ Allen CBE DFC were hidden away in a black tin box. Now his daughter Suzanne has liberated the previously locked and tightly sealed typewritten story of his wartime life and turned it into a well-crafted must-read biography. Bob grew up in Gillingham, Kent, and his family had close links to the Short Brothers aircraft factory in nearby Rochester. He joined the RAFVR in the spring of 1940, aged 19, but missed the Battle of Britain, because he “was learning to march up and down and polish brass buckles”!
August 21, 1940 saw fairhaired Bob jump into a Hurricane cockpit for the first time. He had also recently married his sweetheart, Alice Arnold. He was proud to have been posted to the prestigious 1 Squadron on 1 June 1941 and by the time the book’s author was born in November 1941, her 21-year-old father Acting Flight Lieutenant Allen was flying a Hurricane in his first dogfight over the English Channel. Soon afterwards he joined 95 Squadron…
