If you've read this far, then you've got a good grip on the plot and basics. I'd just like to add that this film helped me through a semi-crippling bone disease, couple of years around 1957/9, so I'm among the legions of similar crips who have much to thank Bader and More for. Seriously.
However, time and history have been unkind. Without boring all with the story, let me just remark that Bader's charity off-screen was very conditional and snobby-Christian/lodge based. Further, I later got to know the Dowding family quite well for a while, where his name was mud. A whole political Pandora's box of nastiness hung on the 'big wing' theory (which didn't actually work in the end), and Bader was the thin end of the wedge that split Dowding so rudely and inappropriately away from the position he had filled with such honour and restraint.
There's another film in there, now they're all dead, with much to say of the folly of letting heroes near politics, or front-line whizz-kids near strategy.
However, time and history have been unkind. Without boring all with the story, let me just remark that Bader's charity off-screen was very conditional and snobby-Christian/lodge based. Further, I later got to know the Dowding family quite well for a while, where his name was mud. A whole political Pandora's box of nastiness hung on the 'big wing' theory (which didn't actually work in the end), and Bader was the thin end of the wedge that split Dowding so rudely and inappropriately away from the position he had filled with such honour and restraint.
There's another film in there, now they're all dead, with much to say of the folly of letting heroes near politics, or front-line whizz-kids near strategy.