We were on the Rhine again and heard a squawk for help that sounded near. In fact dead below were two Liberator bombers, one trailing smoke from the inboard port engine. Big white American stars on their wings and Linus already breaking out of formation and diving.

‘Follow him, Gus,’ chuckled Jingo.

Linus was one of the best pilots in the squadron, eight kills and you never got bounced if he was your wingman. Following, I saw why he hadn’t waited for orders. His eyes were even sharper than Jingo’s: he’d seen that tiny cross-winged shape streaking in after the bombers.

Now, in ’45, fighters had the range to escort the big heavies to the target and back. These two had somehow separated from the mainstream and the ME-109 was moving in behind like a sleek green-spotted shark. It was closing as we streaked down, lining up to unleash a weight of cannon-fire. Outranging the 50-cals in those rear-gunner turrets.

The ME-109 could have got them both if Linus had wasted seconds waiting for Jingo’s order. Instead, as the cannon-lines twinkled, Linus opened fire at long-range. Like all great pilots, mastering the art of deflection-shooting — ahead, so the aircraft flies into it. This ME-109 did, catching the blast of cannon-fire and cartwheeling sharply sideways, streaming fire and broken, toppling into the grey hungry Rhine.

So that was it. The Liberators squawked their thanks and we went back up, reformed, and kept watch on the Liberators until they were clear and near an airfield. And that was it — or so we thought.

Some days later, a jeep drove up to the airfield and two smartly-dressed American pilots got out. They walked into our mess, nice kids, chubby-cheeked and well-fed. One saluted smartly and spoke in the same soft drawling way that Linus did.

‘We’d like to sincerely thank you for getting that Jerry,’ indicating the fresh-faced guy beside him. ‘Me and Lee Joseph, here, we’d like to meet the guy who shot that ME-109 off our tails.’

Jingo was seated at a table but stood up. A grim set to his lips under that black ‘handle-bar’ moustache, jerking his thumb to where Linus sat at one side — as he always did.

Both the Americans turned and the first — Tommy Shelby — looked uncertain. ‘Is this some kind of joke?’

‘Those people don’t fly aircraft,’ said Lee Joseph.

‘Never heard of the Tuskagee airmen?’ asked Jingo softly. An all-black Yank fighter outfit and a top one. There was silence in the mess now. Pinky shifted and gave a nervous titter.

Shelby’s uncertain look vanished and he smiled broadly. ‘I get it. This is a put-on, right? Any minute now this nigra offers to shine our shoes?’

I don’t know what Jingo was about to say (no doubt something very rude) but Ten-Yards Reg beat him to it. He spat across the room, directly in front of the two officers. ‘Bloody dingo. You’re not fit to shine his with your tongue.’

The two officers left very shortly afterwards.

I saw Linus about an hour later. He was outside, sitting by himself — he often did that — and it was another cold winter’s evening with a touch of icy rain in the air. I didn’t talk about what had happened earlier — even I could sense he would resent that.

‘You’re gonna freeze, Linus.’

He got up and stretched, looking around. The airfield was its usually muddy and depressing combat zone, but he gave that slow grin. ‘I just might. Point is, I got the freedom to do it.’ he looked around. ‘There’s going to be nowhere like this for me in peacetime.’

He slapped me on the arm and we went back into the mess. A couple of days later a little wrapped parcel arrived, address to ‘the guy who shot the Nazi off our box-cars.’ ‘Box-cars’ being Yank slang for Liberators.

Linus opened it. A box of cigars was inside, and he stuck it on the mess table for anyone to help themselves. I like a cigar as much as the next man, but nobody touched them. They disappeared a week later, I think the cook pinched them.

Linus was one of us. Not touching the cigars was our way of saying that.

Young Peachey was seventeen (joined under-age and proud of it) and arrived at the same time as I did. He was a little skinny guy with a big nose and mop of black hair, always grinning: specialist on gun-calibration and nobody could strip an engine faster. Like a lot of wartime skills which were no use in peace, he’d go back to his dad’s pie stall near Covent Garden.

Peachey would ask me about New Zealand. He was born within the sound of Bow Bells, therefore a true Cockney — had spent all his life in the same street. He was fascinated by my stories of our kea, a mountain parrot that attacks sheep. And one morning I found a snapping hook-beaked kea painted on the nose of my fighter and the words ‘Tearing Kea’ underneath. Peachey’s artwork. He grinned bashfully as I thanked him.

A lot of the pilots had that. Ten-Yards Reg had a kookaburra with a beak like a bayonet and Linus, a snapping catfish. Lars, his Viking helmet, Jan his black tulip and Emile a stamping bull. Nessy decided on a battling kiwi (ignoring Reg’s suggestion about a sheep with wings) and Pinky, a black wriggling eel. Sven just had ‘A.L.’ The initials of his fiancée, killed in a cross fire between German troops and resistance fighters.

Jingo disliked the whole business of naming and decorating the planes. He had nothing on his fighter, not even a row of crosses to mark his kills. He just muttered that this was a fighter squadron, not a circus. He did tell Nessie to change his kiwi, however. A flightless bird on the side of an aircraft? Nessie settled for a ram’s head with big curling horns.

Peachey was proud of his artwork and asked if he could photograph me against the Tempest Tearing Kea. He wanted to send it back to his parents and his girl, who was a ‘Pole Cat’ — Woman’s Timber Corp and a mean hand with an axe. I was busy doing something and just nodded: tomorrow. I was busy then too. I promised the day after.

At about twelve o’clock, we were between sorties and I was eating a hasty lunch of spam sandwiches in the mess. Spam was an acquired taste. Some shouts outside and a ball being booted around. Mist was closing in and we might not do another sortie.

It happened so quickly. The engine-noise of an oncoming aircraft. Rolls-Royce Merlin, a Spitfire, so we relaxed. Then the sharp sudden tac-tac of cannon, a black shape rushing over, and the shouts became yells of horror. We’d been strafed. I ran outside with the others, the station cat streaking through my legs. One limp form on the ground. Peachey would never get that photograph.

You might say it didn’t matter, only a missed photo. But some things stayed with you and this did. I still have that feeling of shame — yes, and the stupid loss of a nice young guy who would never get back to that pie stall.

Peachey was ground crew, those guys are a breed apart,

They work long hours and they’re very bloody smart.

They know more about our kites than us, like knowing more our wives,

We trust them with our lives.

He was young and keen, still had the peach-fuzz on his cheeks.

Work all night then lark with a soccer ball — he’d been with us ten weeks.

Then a Spitfire comes our way, lost in the mist, sees the field ahead.

Sees our Resident Heinkel, thinks we are Jerry and sprays us with lead.

Scares the station cat to hell and drops Peachey, his ball deflated — stone dead.

We won’t tell his people how stupidly he died — or how the Spit pilot came here and cried.

And, a day later, put a gun to his head.

‘This is my first liberated German town,’ I said.

Jingo just grunted, and behind me in the jeep Linus laughed. ‘Gus, that sure is an odd choice of words.’

Linus was right of course. I doubt whether the Germans felt liberated. We were conquerors, or at least the Rifles were, that took this town. Jingo, Linus, Ten-Yards Reg and myself were here to coordinate new air strikes with their H.Q.

There was a staff conference on so we had an hour to wait, and decided to go for a walk. The town is knocked about by shellfire but too small for the bombers to pay it a visit. It was one of those little steep-roofed places; broken red tiles all over the street, crunched into powder by the tank-treads.

We passed some prisoners. Volksjager, sort of Dad’s Army, like the Brits had early in the war. Old men with white hair and grey wrinkled faces, one holding his broken false teeth in a shaking hand. They tried to stop the Rifles with some panzerfausts — rocket launchers — and antique French rifles. They didn’t stop them for long.

Further on were some kids, also part of the ‘regional defence force.’ Eleven to fourteen years old, armed with knives, grenades and pistols. They had fought harder than the old men. One scowled at us and gave the Hitler salute. The others did the same, one with tear-marks down his grimy cheeks. Jingo grinned and extended two fingers in a ‘V’ for Victory sign.

The women were huddled in doorways, wrapped in shabby layers of clothing. They eyed us with a sidelong resignation, their gaze flicking away when we looked back. They were too pale, cold and hungry for anything else. Everyone looked hungry and a Rifles sergeant whom we met said there was no food in the town. Retreating German troops had taken everything.

‘Have a look in there, sir,’ he said to Jingo. ‘Fair beats bullfighting.’

His thumb indicated a big building with bullet-scarred pillars flanking smashed double-doors. It was the local town hall, all windows blown out, the broken glass entangled with the torn remains of a large swastika flag. Inside an overturned marble bust of Hitler lay on the floor, the nose broken. A big portrait of him was peppered with bullet-holes.

‘Upstairs,’ yelled the sergeant, from the entrance.

So we went upstairs. Another Rifleman was there, examining a silver cigarette-case with delight. Ten-Yards Reg muttered about thieving Poms not leaving anything for a decent Aussie. He just grinned and motioned two big ornate doors ahead, so we went inside. It looked like the council chambers and four people were seated at the top of a long table.

They would go on sitting there until they were moved.

‘Oh hell …’ breathed Linus.

At the head of the table sat a balding man aged about fifty; he had a heavy moustache and was dressed in a well-cut grey pinstripe suit. He was slouched against the high-backed chair as though asleep but his blue eyes looked blankly through gold-rimmed spectacles. There was black-edged hole in his forehead, and his hand — complete with pistol — had fallen back onto the table.

Beside him was a woman, also middle-aged, his wife? She was dumpy and well made-up, wore a smart dress and fur coat. Her hat was on the table and she was slouched back too, head on one fur shoulder. There was no bullet-hole but her half-open lips pouted a strange blue.

Opposite her sat two younger women, a family resemblance so maybe daughters. They were in their late twenties, early thirties, and on the table before one, was a neatly-folded pair of gold-rimmed spectacles.

Both had the same pouting blue lips and, also on the table, were broken little capsules of glass. Jingo picked one up and sniffed.

‘Prussic acid or cyanide.’ He flicked it away. ‘Looks like the old boy supervised them, then blew his brains out. Last act of defiance for the Fatherland, eh?’

‘Or fear,’ said Linus quietly. ‘Can you imagine being that afraid?’

‘No rings on their fingers,’ muttered Reg. ‘I bet the Rifles copped those. Honest thieving’s one thing but —’

‘And bloody welcome to them,’ interrupted Jingo. ‘Let’s go.’

We went back downstairs and Reg aimed a kick at the overturned bust. Through the smashed doors and our boots scrunched on the broken glass. Jingo looked back up.

‘Maybe they just couldn’t stand the thought of peace.’

It was an odd thing to say. Fanatics maybe, but afraid of peace? Like a lot of what Jingo said, I would understand it only later.

It was time for the briefing, to plan more death and destruction on the next village or little town.

We were called out to another crash. They wanted the advice of ‘seasoned pilots’ said Jingo with his ‘silly-bugger’ laugh. Jingo dragged me along. ‘You’re not seasoned, Gus, but with a little salt and pepper you’ll be alright.’

Jingo’s jokes were bloody awful.

The crash was just inside our lines; a disjointed spread of exploded metal and burned fragments, through a crushed hedge. The plane had blown up on landing — hell of an explosion from the look of it — and the pilot was scattered among all the debris on the white snow.

For some reason, this crash had really upset the Germans. Jerry was really short on tanks by then, but had scraped up a Tiger and two mobile 88mms, plus a company of S.S. Grenadiers with panzerfausts. Artillery, air-strikes and Sherman tanks with the long-barrelled 76mm guns took care of them, but not without a bitter fight.

The Tiger was burning like a broken armour-plated dinosaur, the long gun twisted back, the crew still inside the black smoke and dark-red flames. Around it, the tumbled bodies of the grenadiers, S.S. fanatics who always fought to the last. One near me, his face upturned to the grey sky. Drifting snow had covered the bullet-holes and masked his open eyes, making him a snowman — snowboy rather, he looks about fourteen. His shattered helmet upturned beside him, his frozen hand clutching a last grenade.

The Germans really did not want us seeing the wreck.

But why? We couldn’t work that out. There was almost nothing to see, bits of wooden framework, some metal. Something barrel-shaped and charred, that broke up on landing. A jet engine? But I’d seen an ME-262 crash and this thing didn’t look strong enough to be a jet.

There was a civvy bloke there, a scientist, and he pronounced judgement. Prototype flying bomb, he thought. No problem, let Jerry design new toys: he’s lost the industrial base to make them work, and all his airfields are bombed to hell.

Jingo was very quiet as we jolted back in the jeep. Even when I drive through a shell crater, he just grunted. We stopped under some trees and shared a flask of coffee. ‘That was a whole damn aircraft, unless I miss my guess. And why do these silly fools always think Jerry’s had it?’

As we would learn later, Jingo was right. That shattered crash-site marked the first flight of a ‘Volksjager’ — ‘People’s Fighter’. A little cut-price jet fighter made of wood and metal with one big engine. No airfields? Well Germany had all those nice long autobahns as excellent makeshift runways. Industrial base gone? Sure, long since split up into little manufacturing plants.

But even that day, driving back to base, we knew Jerry was not out of the running. Jingo scowled and spat out his toothpick.

‘They’ve got a song and dance to lead us yet.’

He muttered this in an expressionless tone. As though it were an epitaph for that snow-covered field and the dead teenager with a grenade frozen to his fingers. But it was the way he muttered it — a curious tone, as though telling himself the sky would not cloud over yet.

It was the uncertain passion of a man too long at war — who did not want the war to end.