The impact had knocked him out and badly injured his spine, leaving him temporarily blinded and without feeling in his legs. The injured soldier had not set eyes on the enemy: he had jumped out of a plane, without a helmet or proper training, ripped his parachute on the tail and plummeted to earth at roughly twice the recommended speed. A letter to his mother from the War Office stated that he had suffered “a contusion of the back as a result of enemy action.”
The twenty-five-year-old officer had been brought into the Scottish Military Hospital on June 15, 1941, paralyzed from the waist down. Five months before Operation Squatter, a tall, thin soldier lay, grumpy and immobile, in a Cairo hospital bed.
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