Our Finest Hour   Thomas Turman   © Copyright 2026 by Thomas Turman

Photo by Gene Hunt.  De_Haviland Mosquito, RAF Museum, Cosford, at Wikimedia Commons.

They will come and talk to me, talk to all of us in this chapel of past gallantry and death, the RAF Air Museum at Croydon. Spitfires, Hurricanes; all of us are here. We all are here to listen. They are bent with age now, but I can still hear them and feel them as they tenderly reach out to touch me where they can. The docents always look away for these veterans.

Light bursts in on us in our hulking hangar that keeps us from the weather as the doors open to let them in again. I can hear them shuffling along slowly, sometimes with a walker, but still they come.

“Hello old girl,” they will say. “How are you this day? Still ready to take them on?” They will back away, look up at me with tears proudly in their eyes and on their cheeks and salute. If I could speak, I would thank them for their love, their honor and their courage.

The first to come to me today looks to be about 80 years old. I always think of the first visitor as the ‘Wing Commander’. The Wing Commander is attended by a young man in his 20’s. The boy listens to the old man’s quiet stories of heroics and disasters but makes no effort to respond. The older man’s tales fade away in the lack-of-interest-fog generated by this callow youth. I could tell that young man a thing or two.

Now, two aged couples slip in under my wingtip. The women go straight to the coffee shop and the two men reverently join today’s Wing Commander. In the silent roar of my engines, they hear and see me again with fear and respect. I can tell that they still can’t believe they are here to be reminded of the terror of their time spent in a Mosquito bomber. Friends lost. Friends gained.

“Group Captain Picar,” the Wing Commander whispers.

"167 Squadron…137 Squadron” the others report just loud enough so I can hear them. They squint at one another, looking for lost comrades then up at me, straighten, salute and walk on with as much military bearing as they can muster.

I will wait for them to return as long as I can.