Wingless Victory is the story of an audacious and desperate man on the run, the record of one of the first wartime escapes through Occupied France. It reads like a first class thriller and as one critic put it, " leaves fiction gasping far behind." On May 27, 1940, Wing-Commander Basil Embry (later Air Chief Marshal Sir Basil Embry, and Commander, Allied Air Forces in Central Europe 1953-56), although appointed to a higher command, decided to lead his old squadron into battle for the last time. Within the hour he was shot down in France and found himself alone, unarmed and in uniform. Capture was inevitable. He was, in fact, captured three times, but refused to submit. Once he broke from a column of prisoners under the muzzle of a German machine-gun. Another time he fought his way out, killing three Germans with a stolen rifle and then hiding in a manure heap for nearly six hours. But perhaps the most amazing of all of Embry's exploits was the occasion on which, in the role of a fanatical member of the Irish Republican Army, he shook his fist under the nose of a German inquisitor, yelling hatred and abuse of Britain until his captors finally turned him loose to find his own way home. At this period there was little of escape technique to guide him and he had no opportunity to lay plans or prepare equipment. Yet, by sheer courage and wit, he found his way back to Britain to fight and fly again. He won the D.S.O. and three bars, and the D.F.C. Anthony Richardson, who relates Sir Basil's story as it was told to him first-hand, served in the same squadron and later became its Adjutant. Established as a writer for over twenty-five years, he is known as a novelist and for his volumes of war poems, many of which dealt with Sir Basil Embry's squadron.
