He was commissioned as an acting pilot officer on 2 March,[5] completed training by the end of the year, and was sent to join 74 Squadron on 20 December 1936.

74 Squadron was dispatched 15 hours after war was declared to intercept a bomber raid that turned out to be returning RAF planes.

Paddy Byrne and John Freeborn downed two RAF aircraft, killing one officer – Montague Hulton-Harrop – in friendly fire, which became known as the Battle of Barking Creek.

[15] On 29 December 1941 Malan was added to the select list of airmen who had sat for one of Cuthbert Orde's iconic RAF charcoal portraits.

[19] After the conclusion of the war, Malan resigned his commission with the Royal Air Force in April 1946, retaining the rank of group captain,[20] and returned home to South Africa, where he commenced a career in sheep farming.

[21] Malan maintained his ties to the RAF community however, acting as president of the Royal Air Forces Association’s South African Area and becoming a life-member of its Johannesburg Branch.

[22] In the early 1950s, he became involved in increasingly volatile South African domestic politics with its radical polarizing atmosphere and racially and culturally divided societal tensions.

In the early 1950s in response Malan joined a liberal politically organized protest movement opposed to the introduction of the apartheid system styling itself as the Torch Commando, of which – with his public recognition acquired from his war career – he was elected president.

Through the early 1950s he involved himself in political opposition to what he perceived was increasing authoritarianism of the National Party in government, which he felt threatened to become fascist in nature.

[23] By the late 1950s, the movement lost momentum as some of the factions that constituted it increasingly moved from a hitherto public liberal position to one of world communism, and splintered away to join the African National Congress (ANC), with which Malan was not sympathetic.

[citation needed] Due to his prominent role in opposition to apartheid, the South African government sought to marginalize the event of his passing in order to further erase any lasting legacy of the Torch Commando.

[27] In the 1969 film Battle of Britain, the character of Squadron Leader Skipper played by Robert Shaw was based on Malan.