YOU’LL THINK IT fanciful, I suppose, but I blame that German plane for my lifelong dislike of surprises and loud noises. It’s an unfortunate dislike, really, because the world, during my long stay in it, has got noisier and noisier. And more and more surprising.

It so happens that I know who flew that Junkers 88 over Bratton Morley, at little more than tree height, on March 9, 1945. Forty years after his suicidal flight, I was in Holland, doing research for a picture book about what were called doodlebugs, the German rocket bombs launched upon England during the last year of the Second World War. In Amsterdam I spent almost a week in a thin and lovely old building full of books and maps and documents and photographs. It was like being in an immensely tall bookcase. On my last day, one of the librarians brought me a book entitled Our Last Days. It was a collection of first-person accounts by German servicemen and civilians of their experiences during the final desperate stage of the war they knew they had lost. I flicked through it and saw the words RAF Beckford, which was the name of the Norfolk air base four miles from where, in an untimely and messy fashion, I was born. I licked my finger and turned the pages back. The piece was a badly written (or poorly translated) story by a former Luftwaffe sergeant called Ottmar Sammer.

I struggle to tell you how I felt when I read it. A bit like looking in a mirror for the first time in years, perhaps.

Here, in my own words, is Sammer’s story.

He’d spent the last two years of the war in charge of the ground crew of a squadron commanded by Oberst Karlheinz Metz. Metz was, as a pilot, both brilliant and fearless. He’d joined the Luftwaffe at the age of eighteen, and by the time he was twenty, he was dropping bombs on Spanish democrats, thus helping to inspire Picasso’s Guernica. During the blitzkrieg on Britain, he’d flown more raids than any other officer. Once, he’d flown his crippled bomber back from Plymouth with all his crew dead. He’d won so many medals that if he’d worn them all at once, the sheer weight of them would have made him fall flat on his face. (That was the nearest that Sammer came to making a joke.) Metz was also a passionate Nazi. There was a photograph of him in the book. The odd thing was that no matter how long I studied it, I forgot what he looked like as soon as I turned the page. He was weirdly ordinary-looking.

In March 1945, Metz’s squadron was stationed in western Holland. His situation was quite hopeless. American and Canadian forces were less than fifty miles from his airfield. He had not flown, nor received any orders, for more than two weeks. Of the twenty-two planes he’d originally commanded, only seven still existed. Of those, only three were airworthy. He had, despite his demands, only enough fuel to get one plane to England and maybe back. On March 7 he received a signal from Berlin telling him to destroy his aircraft and retreat his squadron eastward to the German border.

Metz did as he was told, almost. On the morning of March 9, he assembled the surviving members of his squadron and made an inspirational speech about the defense of the Fatherland. His men raised their hats and cheered him; then they put explosives in all the aircraft except one and blew them up. Imagine that: a row of machines, which had known the inside of clouds, going bang and slumping their flaming arms to the ground. Sammer said that Metz kept his face straight while he supervised it but that tears ran down his face. (I suspect that Ottmar was gilding the lily there.) Metz then ordered his men into trucks and watched them drive away. Not all the men, though. He’d kept Sammer and the armorer and another man behind. Metz got them to fuel up the surviving 88. He also got them to load the belt-fed machine guns, despite the fact that there were no gunners. At this point Sammer realized what the Oberst was intending to do. He claims that he tried to talk Metz out of it but was ignored.

When the plane was ready, Metz led the others to the squadron headquarters, which was a low building made of concrete blocks, its curved corrugated-iron roof covered with camouflage netting. Most of the floor space was the operations room, in which metal chairs were arranged in front of a blackboard and a map easel. Metz instructed his men to bring four chairs through into his personal quarters, which was not much more than a dimly lit cubbyhole containing his camp bed, a wardrobe, and a chest of drawers. A slightly garish color-tinted photograph of Adolf Hitler hung on the end wall. On the chest were an almost-full bottle of Cognac, six glasses, a framed photograph of a handsome young Luftwaffe pilot with dark hair flopping almost to his eyes, and a windup gramophone with a horn like a huge brass daffodil. Metz told the others to sit, then served them generous measures of brandy. He cranked the gramophone and lowered the needle onto the disc. The four men sat and listened to a piano sonata by Beethoven, the Appassionata. During its quieter passages, the gasping and collapsing of burning aircraft was clearly audible. During its turbulent finale, Metz, his eyes closed, made vaguely musical gestures with his fists. When it was over, he remained in his chair for several long moments, seemingly mesmerized by the blip and hiss of the gramophone. At last he got to his feet and deliberately dragged the needle across the surface of the disc, ruining it. The brass daffodil screeched in agony. Metz then stood to attention in front of the Führer’s portrait, jabbed his right arm out, and said, or rather yelled, “Heil Hitler!” The other men hastily, if less enthusiastically, followed suit.

The Oberst picked up the photograph from the chest, tucked it under one arm, and led Sammer and the others briskly out to his plane. The radiance from the white-hot aircraft carcasses wobbled the air. He shook hands with each of the men in turn, wished them good luck, and climbed up into the cockpit. When the engines were firing steadily, Sammer pulled the chocks away from the wheels and Metz taxied bumpily onto the runway.

Metz’s last orders to Sammer had been to take his — Metz’s — staff car and catch up with the rest of the evacuated squadron. Sammer disobeyed. As soon as the Junkers was airborne, the sergeant returned to the Oberst’s room and stripped the sheet from the bed. He attached it to a tent pole, and with this white flag of truce sticking out of the front passenger window, he and his colleagues drove south, not east. They surrendered to the first Canadian troops they came across, who apparently treated them as a bit of a nuisance. I was a little surprised that Sammer jovially admitted to all this in his memoir, which ends at this point. I’ve patched together the end of Metz’s story from other sources, one of which is my imagination.

Metz flew extremely low over the North Sea in an effort to sneak under British radar. At first the weather was on his side: it was very murky. It cleared, however, just before he reached the coast of East Anglia, and he was spotted by a coast-guard station just north of Great Yarmouth. (He could hardly have been missed; he nearly took the station’s radio mast off.) Seven minutes from his target, he came under attack by three Spitfires.

That target was RAF Beckford, and Metz’s plan was simple: he would dive his plane onto the damned place and purge it with fire. That he himself would die was no matter. To all intents and purposes, he’d been dead for almost two years already. This had to do with the photograph that he’d propped up in the copilot’s seat, the beautiful young flier with the tumbling hair. The boy had joined the squadron in the autumn of 1942, and for six months Metz had experienced an agonizing happiness. He’d felt a need to nurture and protect that went against the grain of himself. The friction had been delicious.

Then, in May 1943, the boy had been killed. Metz, frozen at the controls of his own plane, with his flight engineer screaming in his headphones, had watched it happen. Had watched the two British Hurricanes following his darling’s smoking machine down like frenzied sharks following a blood leak, triangulating the bullets in as if there were an infinity of bullets. Had watched the boy’s plane do a half cartwheel into the sea and simply cease to exist. Joy and love gone, bang, just like that, swallowed into the crinkled gray texture of the English sea. The Hurricanes were from RAF Beckford; Metz intended to end his war with a vengeance.

Flying solo, he had no way of defending himself from the Spitfires. Flying at so ridiculously low a height, he had very limited options for evasive action. So he stuck grimly to his course, watching the Norfolk landscape race toward and under him while his plane took an absurd number of hits and disintegrated around him. Just before he overflew a hamlet called Bratton Morley (did he glimpse a bulbous woman lifting her shocked face and falling over?), his starboard engine caught fire.

Metz didn’t make it to Beckford, although he got close. Two miles from the air base, he plunged, burning, into a sizable tract of forest known locally as Abbots Wood. He had almost certainly died by the time the ancient and heavy English trees ripped the wings from his fuselage. Jolting in the smoking cockpit, he tobogganed through the woods and plunged into a stretch of water called Perch Lake.

The woods were wet and sullen after the long winter. It didn’t take long for the crews from Beckford and Borstead to hose and beat the smoldering out. They hadn’t the equipment to lift the remains of the plane from the lake, so Metz was left sitting next to the shattered photograph of his lover under fifteen feet of silty water. Four months later, a courting couple were put off their stroke when his black and gassy body parts bobbed to the surface.