The ‘Douglas Bader Story’ has been told in biographies, histories, film, television shows, documentaries and, briefly, in Bader’s own words. Most of these accounts have focused on his wartime RAF career and his role as a fighter tactician, but it is not my purpose to engage with these strategic debates, nor to account for the unpalatable politics and prejudices that came increasingly to the fore in his later life.2 Rather, it is to examine the potency of the Bader myth in its immediate postwar manifestations: Paul Brickhill’s biography Reach for the Sky (1954) and its 1956 film adaptation directed by Lewis Gilbert and starring Kenneth More. The book was an immediate bestseller, while the film ‘topped the British box office for 1956, took close on £1.5 million, and was the most successful film shown in England since Gone with the Wind’.3 These figures, and Harper and Porter’s telling comparison, give some idea of just how big the Bader story was; they also testify to his established wartime celebrity (the media had made much of the legless pilot hero) and to the new appetite for war stories that emerged in the 1950s.4 As critics have shown, the emergent focus of these stories was the individual, usually middle class, leader, a significant change from wartime film representations of combat which largely focused on a diverse group working together to achieve victory. The decision to film Bader’s highly individual story is typical of this transition.5 Yet, while the film of Reach for the Sky appealed for many reasons – its nostalgic recreation of the finest hour, its star power, its inspirational narrative – Bader was not the period’s only air ace, nor was his story the only remarkable instance of adversity overcome; so what made this particular narrative so appealing? Some answers can be found in the construction of Brickhill’s original account, and in a consideration of what the myth of Bader can tell us about the masculine ideal in the aftermath of war.