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A Downed Pilot Who Ran Away in a Stolen Enemy Plane and Other Historic Escapes

Khalid Elhassan September 13, 2020 28 min

A P=51 making a low level pass on a German airplane. Art Station

18. A Doctor’s Lucky Escape

Dr. William Brydon, the last survivor of the British retreat from Kabul, arriving at Jellalabad. British Battles

In 1842, Afghanistan was as messy and wracked by strife as it is today. On January 13^th, British sentries in Jellalabad, Afghanistan, were on high alert. They were on the lookout for a British army that had recently evacuated the Afghan capital, Kabul, and was expected to arrive any day now.

No army arrived, but late that afternoon, the sentries saw a single rider approaching. It was Dr. William Brydon, a surgeon in the East India Company’s Bengal Army. He was the sole survivor to complete the British retreat from Kabul, and escape an epic disaster that had annihilated an entire army. The ordeal that had consumed his comrades was a harrowing one.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.