RAF Mission

Here is a brief passage from one of my favorite books:

On an RAF mission over the north of France in mid-1941, Flying Officer Alex Nitelet got into a vicious dogfight with several German fighters. His Spitfire was riddled, and he suffered a bullet wound in his right eye; nevertheless, Nitelet somehow managed to crash-land his damaged plane not far from the village of Renty inthe Calais area, only 50-odd miles across the Channel from Dover. The young Belgian-born pilot was lucky on two counts. Not only had he survived the crash, but he had landed practically in the lap of an underground organization that already had routed several hundred other downed airmen on a roundabout, 3,500-mile journey back to England.