Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

Five: Squadron Leader B. B. E. Duff, Royal Air Force, who gained membership of the Caterpillar Club after being shot down in flames in a Gladiator of No. 112 Squadron in October 1940
1939-45 Star; Africa Star; Burma Star; Defence and War Medals 1939-45, mounted as worn, together with the recipient’s Caterpillar Club membership badge, the reverse officially inscribed, ‘P./O/ B. Duff’, this last worn and somewhat corroded, otherwise very fine and better (6) £400-500

Duff was a pre-hostilities entrant, having qualified for his “Wings” in August 1938, and served as a Hurricane pilot in No. 73 Squadron at Digby in the first half of 1939. By the outbreak of hostilities, however, he was a Pilot Officer in No. 112 Squadron, a Gloster Gladiator unit, at Helwan in the Middle East, and with the entry of Italy into the War, he flew his first operational patrols in June 1940, having been detached to an airfield in the Sudan. Indeed his flying log book reveals a flurry of operations in this period and, by August, regular dogfights with assorted Italian aircraft - Duff shot up an SM 79 on the 17th.

In September, No. 112 moved to the Western Desert, carrying out numerous patrols over Mersa Matruh, and it was while engaged in a similar capacity that Duff won election to the membership of the Caterpillar Club, being shot down in flames by CR 42s in a combat at 16,000 feet - ‘Pilot Officer B. B. E. Duff escaped by parachute and suffered slight superficial burns’ (112’s O.R.B. refers).

Transferred to H.Q., Middle East, in November 1940, and thence to a similar post in Ismailia, he flew in 259 Wing in Cyprus in July-October 1941. Having then held assorted posts in No. 222 and No. 224 Groups, and 293 Wing, in Ceylon and India in 1942-43, he served as a flying instructor back in the U.K. for the remainder of the War.

Sold with the recipient’s R.A.F. Pilot’s Flying Log Books (3), covering the periods March 1938 to April 1944, with interim endorsement ‘Log Book lost during 1941’, May 1944 to July 1945, and July 1945 to May 1947.