There is something particularly compelling about how people are taught to fight, with machines, in war. The machines mean that you have to learn how to use them, and the obvious dangers associated with using them incompetently make the "discovery method" unsatisfactory. Children may safely be allowed to explore the possibilities of what can be done with a set of coloured pencils and a pile of scrap paper, or with a box of plastic bricks or the contents of a sandpit. Allowing a trainee pilot to discover for himself the results of landing an airplane the wrong way, or a trainee soldier to discover what happens when he takes that pin thing out of a grenade while neglecting immediately after that to throw it anywhere … that's a different matter. So military education interests me a lot. Simply, it has to be done, and it has to be done well. If not: disaster.

And what is more, since what people are being trained to do is, among other things, to risk their lives, a lot of thought also goes into creating the sort of men whom other men will follow into battle. This is not merely a matter of teaching people to push the correct buttons and to follow orders accurately. There is more to the training soldiers and their commanders than "training", if you get my drift.

This posting is the first of what I now intend will be several about one particular military leader and educator, the legless World War Two fighter pilot Douglas Bader. (Bader is pronounced "Barder" by the way.)

Bader was a mega-celebrity in Britain, to all those Britons who fought – or who merely endured – World War Two. Tin legs, and a fighter ace. Imagine it. A celebrity biography was written about him after the war called Reach For The Sky, and a film of the same title was made in the nineteen fifties about Bader, starring Kenneth More.

Follow those links and you immediately get that Bader was famous, and that he was courageous. That he was. Not surprisingly, Reach For The Sky (in both its manifestations) concentrated on the personal battles of Bader - his battle to stay alive after losing his legs, then to walk without crutches despite having lost his legs, and then to get back into the Royal Air Force despite having lost his legs. Then, of course, there were his personal battles with Luftwaffe pilots, and subsequently with various German prison camp commandants.

But I suppose most people's knowledge of Bader stops, if it now even gets that far, after: no legs, wartime fighter pilot. (Some might add, "right wing politics", to the short list of Bader attributes. And that's true. He had no liking for socialist politics or policies, and from time to time in his later years he said so. He remained belligerently patriotic to the end of his days.)

What is somewhat less well known is that Bader was probably the most influential trainer of fighter commanders in the World War Two RAF. Although himself captured by the Germans in 1941, his pupil-subordinates continued to fight on after him using his methods, and increasingly, to command those fights.

I have recently acquired another biographical study of Bader, which complements Reach For The Sky nicely, in that it concentrates on his flying and fighting, and on the flying and fighting that he taught to others. It is by Michael G. Burns, and is called, significantly, Bader: The Man and His Men. It says a lot about this book that it is over three hundred pages in length, but that Bader himself gets shot down on page 188.

Here is my first excerpt from this book, which consists simply of its brief (and very much to my point) Introduction:

This book treats Douglas Bader as an officer and professional fighting man. It seeks to discern why and how he was such an outstanding air combat tactician, inspired leader and gifted teacher. The contribution made by Bader's education at RAF College Cranwell and his training as an officer and fighter pilot in the early 1930s was paramount to his wartime success. Cranwell encouraged its officers to be innovative and challenging thinkers. The system turned Bader into a total professional.

Bader championed using the fighter wing instead of the squadron or flight to intercept bombers during the Battle of Britain. What is important about wings is not their marginal effect on the 1940 Battle, but what Bader did with the tactical insights he got from leading the Duxford Wing.

Bader analysed and discussed tactics for months. When he led the Tangmere Wing in 1941, he built it from small combat units not massed squadrons, honing timing to stop-watch perfection. With such a flexible force, he controlled a great volume of sky before and during combat defensively and offensively.

This book explores why so many of Bader's pilots became 'greats'. He moulded his squadrons by controlling postings, and by choosing from the squadron pool only the best to fly with him. They learnt by proximity to him. He had a sure eye for pilots who would learn - men like Cork, Donaldson, Crowley-Milling, Johnson, Dundas and Turner, who subsequently developed distinctively as leaders and significantly influenced the tactical employment of fighters and wings.

The small unit Bader developed in 1941 was the legendary 'finger-four' upon which British fighter tactics for the rest of the war were based; the flexible wing he developed in 1941 became the basis of the mid- and late-war fighter and tactical wings; and many pilots who flew with him in 1940 and 1941 became the leading fighter exponents of World War Two. These are the measures of Douglas Bader's greatness as a warrior.

I will comment no more on this than to note that the word "teacher" occurs in Burns' second sentence.