No. 603 Squadron — City of Edinburgh

No. 603 (City of Edinburgh) Squadron was an Auxiliary Air Force unit raised at RAF Turnhouse in 1925 and manned in peacetime by part-time Scottish volunteers. Flying Spitfires by the outbreak of war, its pilots shared in shooting down the first enemy aircraft destroyed over Britain in the Second World War, a Heinkel He 111 brought down near the Firth of Forth on 16 October 1939. Moved south to RAF Hornchurch for the Battle of Britain, the squadron was one of the highest-scoring units of the campaign but paid for it with heavy losses in pilots and aircraft. One of those shot down in September 1940 was Richard Hillary, who survived terrible burns to write the classic memoir The Last Enemy.

In 1942 the squadron was sent out to the embattled island of Malta, and from 1943 it re-equipped with the Bristol Beaufighter for long-range convoy escort and anti-shipping strikes over the Mediterranean and Aegean. It returned to Spitfires and the fighter-bomber role in the last months of the war before disbanding in August 1945. Its motto, in Scots, was Gin ye daur — “if you dare”.