Cirrus@Austlit

Dedication: To my supportive and very patient wife Maureen, who now knows more of the first air war than she considers necessary, and to our children and grandchildren, who may appreciate here individual and collective loss beyond understanding on both sides of wars. And to my late father, VX48603 Lt John Rosel, who would never talk to his six children of what a former Melbourne bank clerk endured in 1941 to win a Military Cross as one of the Rats of Tobruk. His children agreed with the English poet Chaucer, writing of another warrior almost 600 years earlier:' A verray parfit gentil knyghte'.