THIS month we’re celebrating the Christmas Season with The Coffin Crew! Yes, Arch Whitehouse’s hell-raising Handley Page bomber crew! Piloting the bus is the mad Englishman, Lieutenant Graham Townsend, with the equally mad Canadian Lieutenant Phil Armitage serving as reserve pilot and bombing officer with Private Andy McGregor, still wearing his Black Watch kilts, rounding out the front end crew in the forward gun turret. And don’t forget the silent fighting Irishman Sergeant Michael Ryan, usually dragging on his short clay pipe while working over the toggle board dropping the bombs with Alfred Tate and crazy Australian Andy Marks or Horsey Horlick manning the rear gun turret.

To Sergeant Ryan there was one square mile of enemy territory that must remain inviolate—yet Fate made it the objective of the most daring raid of that crazy band of bombers, the Coffin Crew! From the pages of the July 1936 issue of the British Air Stories magazine, it’s Arch Whitehouse’s “Bomber’s Luck!”

A Raid, whatever its Objective, was All Part of the Game to that Crazy Band of Bombers, the Coffin Crew of the Independent Air Force—until Fate Decreed that the Hand of Sergeant Ryan should be the One to Loose Death and Destruction upon the One Square Mile of Enemy Territory that, to Him, Must Ever Remain Inviolate!

• Download “Bomber’s Luck” (July 1936, Air Stories)

Be sure to drop by next week for another mad cap romp, or two, through hell skies with the Coffin Crew!