Station's literary giants
RAF Digby is also famous for its wartime contribution to literature - young pilot officer and poet John Magee thought up High Flight, the world's most famous aviation poem, when he was flying his Spitfire above Lincolnshire's fields.
John was an American serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force because he so badly wanted to fight fascism. He was born in Shanghai, China in 1922, the son of missionary parents, Reverend and Mrs. John Gillespie Magee; his father was an American and his mother was originally a British citizen.
He came to the U.S. in 1939 and earned a scholarship to Yale, but in September 1940 he enlisted in the RCAF and graduated as a pilot. He was sent to England for combat duty in July 1941. In August or September 1941, Pilot Officer Magee composed High Flight while testing a new Spitfire at heights of up to 30,000 feet - and sent a copy to his parents. Several months later, on December 11, 1941 his Spitfire collided with a trainer aircraft from Cranwell in clouds and Magee, only 19 years of age, crashed to his death.
His remains are buried in the churchyard cemetery at Scopwick, Lincolnshire. Lines from his poem are witten on his gravestone:
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
Only a few feet from his grave lies a plaque to Belgian fighter pilot called Jean Offenberg. Jean first fought the Luftwaffe with outdated fighters in his home country before joining the RAF and fighting in the Battle of Britain. He was killed on a training flight collision in January 1942.
Throughout his war he had kept diaries which were published after the conflict under the title The Lonely Warrior with a foreward by admirer Group Captain Peter Townsend. The book was a post-war best seller. Offenberg was buried just feet from fellow literary airman Magee but later reburied in a Belgian Military cemetery and the plaque now lies where his grave was in Scopwick cemetery.
