Colin Hodgkinson: the ‘other Douglas Bader’
To mark the 80th anniversary of the forming of the Guinea Pig Club – set up for those who underwent pioneering plastic surgery during WWII – we retell the story of Association and club member, Colin Hodgkinson, who lost both legs and sustained severe facial injuries, yet still carried on flying.
“Throttle back. Throttle back more. Hold her straight on two three zero. You’re doing beautifully.”
The instructor’s voice came clearly through the intercom to young pupil-pilot Colin Hodgkinson.
Flying only on instruments in the rear cockpit of a Tiger Moth, and hating every minute of it, he was making a landing approach at Gravesend airfield.
His flight – carried out beneath a hood to simulate flying at night or in cloud with no reference to the horizon – was nearly over, thank goodness. He had dreaded it, feeling certain that something terrible was going to happen. But he was more relaxed now. There were only a few minutes left.
Then a shivering blow struck the Moth on the port side. Solid light hit Colin between the eyes. He felt as if he were being cleaved upwards. Then nothing. No more sound. Nothing.
Another Moth, flown by an instructor whose pupil, like Colin, was ‘under the hood’, had entered the circuit at the same height and speed. Neither pilot had seen the other, and the aircraft had collided.
The port wing and part of the tailplane of Colin’s aircraft were sheared away, spiralling down to earth. The instructor was killed instantly, while Colin had both legs trapped and smashed between the instrument panel and the rudder-bars.
A de Havilland DH 82A Tiger Moth, photographed in 1989. Image CC BY-SA 3.0.
For four days after the crash, which occurred on May 12, 1939, Colin was delirious in hospital. His right leg, which was merely pulp and splinters, was amputated. Then gangrene set in and a further amputation was carried out just in time.
His left foot was shattered, and he had deep incisions on his face. In dreadful pain, Colin was moved to the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich. On the way the pain became so intolerable that he tried to throw himself out of the moving ambulance.
Hospital
After another operation on the stump of his right leg, which very nearly killed him, Colin’s grasp on life began to slip away. But at the last minute his mother, keeping a constant bedside vigil, rallied him. Soon after, the war began and he was taken to another hospital in his home county of Somerset.
Colin had been a midshipman in the Fleet Air Arm. He gained an ambition to fly from his father, who was a pilot in the First World War and won the Military Cross and bar.
After only a few hours in the air, however, he had realised that, far from liking flying, he positively feared it. And the chances are that if he hadn’t crashed he would soon have given it up anyway. But, by a surprising twist, the crash and his grave injuries eventually made him determined to fly again. And that determination carried him through to an adventurous and distinguished wartime career.
Bader influence
As he lay in hospital, racked with pain, he decided that he had to come to terms with himself. He had to prove to himself that he could still be a man among men. And to do that he had to get into the war, and in a fighting role. But how? There was only one way, he decided. He had to emulate a fellow double-amputee – Douglas Bader – and fly again.
In spite of continual surgery, his left leg had refused to heal. With it, the chances were that he would be a permanent invalid. Without it, he could, and would, do what Bader was doing.
“Chop it off” he said to the surgeons one day. “Chop the damned thing off and let’s be rid of it.” The operation was successful. Colin was transferred to Roehampton Hospital, where he was given ‘tin’ legs. And with extreme pluck and skill, he learned to walk again, first with two sticks, then with one, then with none at all. He was 19 years old.
Getting back into the air was not easy. But his fanatical persistence, coupled with some invaluable help from others, eventually succeeded.
Surgeon’s aid
His greatest ally was Sir Archibald McIndoe, the distinguished plastic surgeon. Colin went to a convalescent home near Sir Archibald’s famous clinic at East Grinstead, and the surgeon operated on his face – earning him entry to the Guinea Pig Club.
Archibald McIndoe conducting an operation at his East Grinstead clinic. © Art.IWM ART LD 6001.
As Colin became more and more confident on his tin legs and took a couple of trips in an aircraft, Sir Archibald presented his case at a very high level.
Before the end of 1940 Colin Hodgkinson was back in the Fleet Air Arm as an acting sub-lieutenant. He was made air watch officer at St. Merryn, Cornwall; probably the first man ever to return to service while drawing a pension for the very injury that caused his invaliding.
An application to return to flying was promptly turned down flat. But a letter direct to Sir Victor Warrender, Secretary to the First Lord of the Admiralty, who had helped him get back into uniform, had better results.
He was given a flying test – in the back seat of a Tiger Moth. The date was September 21, 1941. Three weeks later came the signal: “Accepted for flying duties. Join R.N. Air Station Lee-on-Solent.”
After just over four hours’ flying he went solo. One of Colin’s instructors, ‘Dotty’ Dammers, had one artificial leg, the result of being shot down in a Swordfish during the Norway campaign.
Not only was he Colin’s instructor, but they shared the same cabin. Newcomers arriving late at night, and sometimes officers who had taken a little too much to drink, were more than startled to see three tin legs ranged for shoe cleaning outside the pair’s door.
Because of his legs Colin was told he would never be able to go to sea, where he would be obliged to mount ladders rapidly and keep himself upright on heaving decks. To see action, therefore, he applied to transfer to the RAF. Permission was eventually granted in September, 1942.
With the RAF
Later that same month he flew a Spitfire. “To say it was the high moment of my life so far would be feeble,” he said. “It was the moment.”
After three months’ intensive Spitfire flying he was posted to 131 Squadron at Westhampnett. There, his doubts that he would be looked upon by his fellow pilots as a freak were quickly dispelled when he was accepted warmly into the officers’ mess and given the nickname ‘Hoppy’.
After he had done a few operational flights, the squadron, due for a rest, was ordered to Scotland. That didn’t suit Colin at all. It was absolutely necessary, he felt, to prove himself in action.
So he transferred to 610 Squadron at Tangmere, commanded by the already famous ‘Johnnie’ Johnson. At the time the RAF was keeping up a continual and hostile penetration of Northern France and the Low Countries. 610 Squadron was in the thick of the fight, each pilot flying an average of two operations a day, and Colin got all the action he wanted.
First kill
His first ‘kill’, though, came almost by accident. After a cine-gun exercise with another pilot, Colin broke cloud at 3,000 feet about two miles west of Brighton and immediately he saw four plumes of black smoke gush up in the middle of the town. Four German Focke-Wulf 190s were in action. He pounced on one and shot it down into the sea a hundred yards off the end of the pier.
When 610 Squadron was posted, Colin, to stay in the fray, obtained another transfer to its replacement, 501 Squadron.
Spitfires of 501 Squadron flying in line astern. © IWM CH 2826.
On one sortie with it he was hit by flak over Caen and got home only with difficulty. Then 501 Squadron was moved to a less exacting sector, so he wangled yet another posting, this time to 611 Squadron at the famed Biggin Hill.
More hectic action followed. In one engagement with about 20 Focke-Wulfs Colin Hodgkinson nearly ‘bought it’ when his cockpit canopy, just beside his head, was hit.
He moved with the squadron to Coltishall, and on August 16, 1943, celebrated his 100th operation with the fiercest battle of his experience. The squadron was escorting 36 Marauder bombers on a raid on an airfield in France, and as soon as the bombers turned for home the nine Spitfires were engaged by 50 Focke-Wulfs. Colin sent one attacker down in flames and colleagues accounted for five others.
A month later Colin’s engine packed in over the North Sea. He just reached the Norfolk coast to make a successful forced landing. Then he moved back to 501 Squadron, now at Hawkinge, as a flight commander.
Soon afterwards, on November 23, came a one-way trip to occupied France. Sent up on a lone weather reconnaissance patrol of the Amiens area, he climbed through cloud to 30,000 feet and then discovered, too late, that he was suffering from oxygen starvation.
Quick descent
He plummeted through the cloud mass, his engine cut and, with the last shreds of consciousness leaving him, crashlanded. When he came to, Colin was in a German military hospital at St. Omer with severe facial injuries. He was about 48 hours floating back to full consciousness.
Then he was taken on a nightmare journey to the interrogation centre at Frankfurt. Though in pain and completely exhausted, be held out against incessant questioning.
Transferred to a Luftwaffe hospital near the centre of Frankfurt, he found himself in the midst of heavy Allied bombing raids. The building he was in was repeatedly shaken by near misses.
In bad shape
By the time he was transferred to another hospital he was in a very bad way. Although injuries to his mouth and jaw had been skillfully treated, he was feverish and partly blind in his left eye. In addition, he had lost nearly three stone, his stumps had wasted and his tin legs, which had also been badly damaged in the crash, barely supported him. Escape was completely out of the question.
He was determined, however, to get back into a Spitfire. And he went all out to achieve it by the only practical way: repatriation.
Colin managed to convince a German repatriation selection board that he would be no possible further use to the Allied war effort. After a spell at the notorious Stalag Luft III prison, he was sent home in the late summer of 1944.
Archibald McIndoe, the plastic surgeon who pioneered treatment techniques for badly burned airman and those with severe facial injuries. His patients formed the ‘Guinea Pig Club’, a social club and mutual support network. © IWM HU 86461A.
He renewed his acquaintance with Sir Archibald McIndoe for more plastic-surgery on his face. Then he returned to Roehampton, as he puts it, “to see about my undercarriage”. To his surprise and delight he was eventually passed by a medical board as fit again for flying duties, but the war in Europe finished just too soon for him to return to operations.
Post war
Though demobilised in June 1946, Colin soon rejoined when the Royal Auxiliary Air Force was re-formed the following year. Graduating from Spitfires to Vampire jets, he continuing flying till 1952. It was about this time that he joined the RAF Association.
Colin Hodgkinson gets a leg-up into his Vampire for a test flight during the Korean crisis in 1950. © Air Mail.
Summing up Colin Hodgkinson and the many trials he had faced during his recovery, Sir Archibald McIndoe said:
“By the conquest of his disabilities he has turned defeat into victory. He no longer balances himself carefully and warily on his tin legs, but stands steadily upright, sure of himself. This man has made his world and it belongs to him.”
Featured image: Colin Hodgkinson in the cockpit of his Spitfire. © Air Mail.
Air Mail
This article was first published in Air Mail’s May-June 1957 issue. For more articles like this and about today’s RAF, sign up for membership and include Air Mail magazine, the official magazine of the Royal Air Forces Association, in your subscription.
