The Airmen's Stories - P/O D W A Stones

Squadron Leader (Pilot Officer during the Battle) Donald "Dimsie" Stones, the fighter ace who has died aged 81, survived continuous combat in the fall of France, the Battle of Britain, the Battle for Malta and the Burma campaign.

He was 19, and had not long joined his first operational squadron - No 32, equipped with Hurricanes at Biggin Hill in Kent - when he acquired the nickname with which he became stuck for life. It was in March 1940, while the squadron was detached to Gravesend; Stones had absent-mindedly stuffed a book into his greatcoat pocket before appearing for breakfast in the mess; his fellow pilots observed the title, 'Dimsie goes to School' - a book for five-year-olds. On another occasion, Stones was visiting the Hawker mess in the former flying club at Brooklands. Accepting a whisky mac from an avuncular character he took to be some unimportant old codger, he teased the man that he would never get a chance to fly a Hurricane. Taking Stones aside, his flight commander Mike Crossley exploded: "You bloody young fool!" Stones's "unimportant old codger" had been George Bulman, Hawker's chief test pilot who had flown the Hurricane on its maiden flight. As he saw combat, however, Stones's cockiness began to transmute into an exuberant confidence bred of the success which brought him a DFC while he was still 19, then a Bar as well as the rank of squadron leader aged 21.

In May 1940, having moved to No 79, another Hurricane squadron, Stones was sent to France, where he claimed five victories, and one shared, inside a week. He was later shot down and returned to England to receive a DFC - only to be greeted by his mother with the words: "I hope you haven't got into bad habits in France at your age." Shortly afterwards, on the eve of the Battle of Britain, his flight commander got wind that the young pilot officer was sexually innocent: "Can't have you killed as a virgin. I'll take you straight up to Jermyn Street and ask Rosa Lewis [proprietress of the racy Cavendish hotel in St James's] to see to your education."

Donald William Alfred Stones was born at Norwich on June 19 1921, and educated at Ipswich Grammar School before joining the RAF on a short service commission in May 1939. He frustrated his parents' efforts to obtain him a place with an insurance company, and was sent to learn to fly at a de Havilland civilian flying school near Maidenhead in Berkshire.

Stones remained with No 79 Squadron throughout the Battle of Britain. On September 7 he was shot down by an Me109; with shrapnel wounds in one leg, he crash-landed at West Malling in Kent. But by September 29 he had resumed operations, and destroyed a He111 bomber. From Christmas 1940 he was rested as an instructor, before rejoining No 79 on May 26 1941; in July he moved on to serve with No 249 in defence of the beleaguered island of Malta, and was soon flying with the Malta Night Fighter Unit. On the night of November 9-10 the engine in Stones's Hurricane failed after take off, and he baled out at only 500 ft above the airfield. After he was picked up by a gunner officer, the pair celebrated with a rare bottle of malt whisky. Then Stones called his dispersal hut to report; he was greeted with an instruction from the flight commander to get off the line, because Flt Lt Stones had just been killed in a blazing Hurricane.

From January to April 1942 Stones was in temporary command of No 605 Squadron; he was then again rested as an instructor, this time in Egypt. Within a month, however, he was on his way to India to command No 155 Squadron, which was re-equipping with American Mohawk fighters at Peshawar. Here Stones discovered that, at 21, he was the youngest pilot in the squadron. At the end of October he led 155 to the front at Imphal, on the Indian border, and was preparing for an operation when, to his dismay, he was ordered to Madras, where an Army provost officer, with whom he had clashed over some piffling matter of red tape, had started court martial proceedings against him. In the event Stones was severely reprimanded, lost his command and squadron leader's rank, reverting to flight lieutenant, for using bad language to the provost officer - or the "jumped-up policeman", as Stones referred to him later.

Stones next joined the Hurricanes of No 67 Squadron, at Chittagong on the Arakan front, as a flight commander. On May 15 1943 he was wounded by ground fire while leading an attack on a landing ground at Kangaung, and this incident ended his operational career; he was posted as a test pilot to units in Bombay and Karachi. Having returned to Britain, where he was seconded as a test pilot to Vickers at its Weybridge works, Stones was watching a fellow officer fooling about with a detonator when it exploded, causing Stones to lose his left eye.

When Stones left the RAF in 1946, he had scored a tally of seven enemy aircraft destroyed; five officially credited as shared; three kills unconfirmed; and several probables. It was a fine war record to carry with him into the next phase of his career, which was with the Colonial Service. Shortly after joining, he was asked whether he was an experienced shot. Stones replied that he was. "Birds or buck?" he was asked. "Neither," he replied. "Men."

Stones served in Kenya, Tanganyika and Malaya as a district officer and magistrate. On some mornings during the Malayan Emergency, before going into his office Stones would pilot a light aircraft to drop sacks of money on plantations, enabling the managers to make up pay packets. In the late 1950s, following Malaysian independence, he farmed for a while in the West Country before returning to Africa. It was in Africa, in the 1960s, that he established an agency for British and European aviation companies. Acting as salesman and demonstrator, Stones managed to do business in the face of coup d'etats and other discouraging difficulties. He did not return home until the mid-1970s, when he gave up his flying licence.

Having retired to Hampshire, Stones kept busy by crewing for a yacht delivery syndicate. He also published two volumes of autobiography: Bograt (1990) and Dimsie (1991).

Stones married, first, Betty Thompson in 1945; they had a son. In 1952 he married Caroline Crawford, with whom he had two daughters and a son, Oliver, who served with the Army in the Falklands. He married his third wife, a Dutch woman, in 1965. His fourth wife was Beryl Thompson, whom he married in 1984.

With acknowledgments to the Daily Telegraph October 2002