''biggles defends the desert'' (against whom - and why would anyone bother, anyway: it's a desert - ?) is in fact a rather pointlessly poor retitling of ''biggles sweeps the desert'' (1942 & ff.), q.v. - which title may be faintly reminiscent of a tragic tale involving a largely marine mammal and a time-served worker in wood, but does at least convey some intimation of ''cleaning up'' the place...
indeed, biggles'd've found it a little tricky becoming an ''ace'' in each of the two world wars without killing any in the opposing air forces; and he shot and killed two japanese soldiers making mockery of a dead pilot, as you say, whose crashed aeroplane he'd parachuted down to check on his possible survival, and search for any clues - in ''biggles in the orient'', in fact.
bookcatters may well be able to come up with quite a few further examples outside of service in ww i & ii, and the brief conflict in ''biggles goes to war''. . . - any suggestions ?
A not so guilty pleasure. I'm pretty sure this is an almost straight reprinting of a "Biggles omnibus" which I had as a boy in the mid '50s. All four stories had been previously published as separate books. Biggles Fails To Return was a personal fave and on recently re-reading it I was still entranced, despite all the dodgy dialogue and observations which wouldn't stand muster in the 21st century. An observation: I read somewhere that W.E. Johns insisted Biggles never actually killed anyone, but I'm almost 100% sure that in Biggles Delivers The Goods he comes across two Japanese soldiers abusing the body of a dead British pilot (putting a lighted cigarette between the pilot's lips and laughing) in the jungle and Biggles shoots them both dead. Needless to say this passage (if I didn't imagine it) has been excised from this edition.