Douglas Bader seemed to be able to generate the most widely-polarised sentiments in those he encountered in life; truly a 'love or hate' character, with seemingly no middle-ground opinion of him. His acolytes, such as Johnson & Crowley-Milling, would clearly have flown through the gates of Hell with him.
I read somewhere an anecdote told by Kenneth More, who played DB in Danny Angel's 'Reach for the Sky' film. More was a guest at a Dining In night somewhere, & mentioned to the PMC that he intended to speak about DB & the film in his after-dinner speech. The PMC strongly advised him not to, as some at the dinner had been PoW with DB and had suffered considerably from his 'performances' with the German guards & officers.
Personally, I feel that the only reason DB ever got back into the RAF & the cockpit of a Spitfire was precisely because of the character traits which many colleagues found so objectionable. Did the same traits lead to his terrible Bulldog crash in 1933, perhaps......?
HB