Dec 4, 2017 3 min read

Some people are born lucky, including Allan “Al” Deere, who arrived this week in 1917. A World War II pilot in the Royal Air Force, Deere is credited with shooting down 18 enemy aircraft, and among his many honors was the Distinguished Flying Cross, awarded to him by Britain’s King George VI.

But far more astonishing than the number of enemy planes he destroyed was the number of times his own plane was destroyed, and yet he survived. In May 1940, while fighting Germans in the skies over the French city of Dunkirk – the “Battle of Britain” – in which the Royal Navy was desperately trying to rescue a trapped British Expeditionary Force, Deere’s plane was shot down and he was knocked unconscious while attempting a landing in German-occupied Belgium. Miraculously, he survived and was later rescued.

Two months later, after notching his sixth enemy kill, Deere collided head-on with a German fighter plane, destroying his engine and his rudder. Still, he somehow managed to glide back to the English coast, where he crash-landed but again survived.

In early August 1940, after notching five more enemy kills, he was returning to base when several German fighter craft surrounded him, forcing him to bail out of his plane at a low altitude, causing injuries that resulted in his hospitalization. He discharged himself the very next day, and on Aug. 28, 1940 was back in the air, where he was again shot down, but again parachuted to safety.

Temporarily assigned to less hazardous duty, Deere was training replacement pilots in January 1941, when a trainee’s plane collided with his, and because his parachute wouldn’t function and he was partially trapped inside the aircraft, Deere was still in the plane when it crashed. Fortunately, the plane landed in an open sewage area, which cushioned his fall.

He was later flight commander of an RAF squadron when his plane’s engine died over the North Sea.

Again, he glided back to the coast and safely crash-landed, although he had to crawl out a side door of his plane because it had flipped over, destroying the canopy.

As one report of Deere’s adventures later summed things up, he “was shot down seven times, bailed out three times, collided with an ME-109, had one Spitfire blow up 150 yards away by a bomb, and had another explode just seconds after he had scrambled from its wreckage.”

In 1965, Deere, whose biography was fittingly titled “Nine Lives,” was chosen to lead his fellow surviving fighter pilots in the funeral procession for their commander-in-chief during World War II, Winston Churchill. Deere himself died of natural causes 30 years later at the age of 77.