Mistral. Sounded a nice innocent name, sort of thing you might call your cat. But the Germans stuck it onto a fearsome new secret flying weapon they had in late ’44 and early ’45. And we would encounter one of the last over a town called Remagen.

Remagen was on the banks of the Rhine, a major German river. A major defense barrier too; an Allied river-borne assault over that would just about be another D-Day operation. And just as costly because their side was a network of gun-emplacements and barbed-wire.

The Rhine would flow red before our troops got across.

So, Jerry blew all the bridges. Including the rail bridge at Remagen — Ludendorf it was called, after the World War One general. But for some reason, it did not fall, holding shakily in place. So the US Third Army got men across into the town and formed a bridge-head on the other side. Not any heavy stuff like tanks, because the bridge was shaking in the breeze. Infantry and light weapons were all.

Jerry did his best to push them out of Remagen and retake the bridge. But reinforcements kept going over and we had air superiority. So Jerry had to knock the bridge down and threw in everything. Bomber strikes, even the new Arado jet, everything, even the V-1 flying bombs. They’d been using all that fire-power to stop the Russians on the Oder River, but Remagen was more important.

Nothing worked, so somebody in the Luftwaffe High Command thought about the Mistral.

Yes, and I remember Remagen for another reason too — tulips.

Our commissary officer was always looking for fresh food and it was damn hard to come by. Civilians were starving, so our officer thought all his birthdays had come at once when someone offered him a sack of onions. Onions were like gold and the trader drove off with some cans of petrol, coffee and army bullybeef. He probably traded that to the Germans — for some reason they loved the stuff.

So, Remagen and tulips were an unlikely mix but they did come together. Yes and Jan Kuiper, our Dutch pilot. He had a black tulip painted on the nose of his kite.

Our squadron was one of several taking turns to fly air-cover over the bridge-head. One night, before a patrol, we were served up a big onion and bullybeef stew. Jingo cheered at the sight of it — onions were his favourite food. He’d only have to breathe on a Jerry to flatten him.

Watching him eat was an experience. Jingo piled his fork like an earth-remover loading rubble and would shove it into his mouth. About three forkfuls, then his eyes bulged and his hands went to his neck. He bubbled half-chewed food on his lips and ran outside, after which we heard loud copious vomiting sounds.

I was feeling it too, and beside me Linus choked and spat. A kind of burning rawness in my throat meant I spat my mouthful back onto the plate. So did the others, all except Jan who had only tasted the stew and put his fork down. Jan never spoke much but he did now, in his careful and polite English.

‘These are not onion — they are tulip bulb.’

Jingo — his face green — had come back in just in time to hear Jan. He roared with fury and gargled a jugful of water. If my throat was sore, his must have been on fire.

‘Get me the commissary officer,’ he growled.

Well, that particular bloke was nowhere to be found. About ten seconds ago, he’d invented an urgent trip to the next village, and I don’t blame him. Jingo would have made him eat the whole lot himself.

Then Jan spoke up again in his precise quiet way. ‘You can fry them. They are good fried.’

So, on that morning of another Remagen mission, we had them fried. The commissary officer had found some real eggs — not powdered — saving him from further abuse and fury. Jan ate his in silence, he almost never spoke before a mission. He never wore his flying-boots in the mess either. Pilots had these quirks, like Ten-Yards Reg always wearing a pair of old college football socks which he claimed were bullet-proof. Considering he never washed them, they probably were.

I caught up with Jan outside, as he pulled on his boots. ‘Thanks, but I thought your lot grew tulips, not ate them.’

‘Yes,’ he replied quietly, not smiling. ‘Now in Holland, I think people eat what they can. There is little food.’

He was a long-faced guy with high cheekbones and light grey eyes, short-cut fair hair. He didn’t drink or get into arguments. In the mess, he’d sit in a corner and work out chess problems with a little set he always carried.

Now — and I still don’t know why — he took out a little photo and showed it to me. Just a snapshot, a young woman with dark hair parted in the middle, and two kids in a little backyard garden. The kids were smiling shyly at the camera and the little girl trailed a rag doll. I suppose Jan had taken the photo.

‘This is my wife, Toos. With Mieke and little Jan.’

‘I never knew you had a family.’

‘I do not. They are dead in the Rotterdam bombing.’

He slipped the photo back inside his flying tunic. He zipped up the jacket and grabbed up his leather helmet. Together, we squelched over the muddy ground to our fighters.

Bootprints in mud — always somehow a vivid memory for me.

Jingo squelching up, with other pilots trailing behind. He paused to roar: ‘Alright you bloody shower, this is important. Jerry is simply not allowed near that bridge.’

Jan almost never asked a question in briefing, but he did now. ‘So the bridge must stay up — yes?’

‘Bloody hell yes,’ returned Jingo, and with another fruity belch of fried tulips he stumped off to his fighter.

So we did the same. Alfie gave his crafty twitching wink as I closed the canopy and went through flight-check, whispering that poem because it was important — like tapping the watch on my wrist. And the deep breaths and the sudden little quaver of going in harm’s way once more.

Touch the face of God.

The signal light flared up and I trundled my shaking roaring monster out onto the runway, wheels skidding over the steel netting; gathering speed and letting that snarling powerful engine lift the massive snout skyward, up and up. The six aircraft settling into a flying pattern and headed for the Rhine.

The Rhine is Europe’s longest river, and therefore not hard to find. Striking it, we turned north-east and flew up-river. There was low cloud and smoke from the banks below, drifting over the waters, grey as gunmetal on the surface.

‘Should see the bridge in a few minutes.’ Jingo’s terse command. ‘Keep your eyes skinned.’

Jerry’s ‘last fifty’ fighters would be up in strength, so we kept our eyes skinned.

‘Bandits, nine o’clock high.’ Jan’s voice on the intercom.

He was as good as Jingo at spotting trouble. These about two thousand yards above, black dots whirling in those tight fighting circles. Looked — and sounded from the intercom-chatter — like Focke-Wulfs and American Thunderbolts, a fighter built like a flying tank, which could even take cannon-shells and laugh.

Thunderbolts could look after themselves and we had our orders, so went on. We were looking for low flyers, even an Arado jet bomber. Jerry had chucked everything at this bridge because they badly wanted it down.

Afterwards — in blessed hindsight — we realised what that dogfight was all about. Those FW 190s were a high-flying escort for the Mistral, which we’d missed in the low cloud. Now, making a turn and Nessie on the intercom.

‘Hell, what’s that?’ Correcting himself, ‘Flying ah … two o’clock below …’

Nessie and I had been briefed on these things but never seen one. And as we did, the thing separated itself — not often an aircraft does that in midair. Jingo’s explosive snort.

‘Cripes — bloody Mistral!’

Mistral. Take an unmanned twin-engine bomber (Junkers or Heinkel) and fit a shaped-charge high-explosive warhead into the nose and cockpit. Then, via wingstruts, fit a single-engined fighter atop. The fighter-pilot controls both aircraft and guides his unmanned bomber to the objective before disconnecting and banking away. The Mistral becomes a flying super-bomb. They could — and did — take out a battleship.

It was not a precise weapon; sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. But this ‘sometimes’ it was headed for that rickety falling-down bridge. So as the parent fighter slipped away, Jingo led us in a tight turn — because ahead was the sagging railway-bridge and a Mistral strike would blow it in two.

I had no idea how to stop a Mistral, I suspect even Jingo didn’t. But the anti-aircraft crew knew what it was and the sky was already spotted with darting lines of explosion. We formed in a firing pass to trigger our rockets, not that there was the slightest chance of knocking it down: it was more likely the anti-aircraft barrage would shoot us down.

‘Alright, break,’ said Jingo. Then again, urgently: ‘All aircraft, break!’

One of our section hadn’t turned but kept going after that flying monster. It closed, within gun-range, also shaken by the exploding barrage but it kept going. Closer, for a non-deflection clear shot. A ray of sunlight shafted through the low cloud and dazzled on the black tulip of Jan’s fighter.

‘Jan — pull out! Pull out!’

Even as he yelled that, Jan flew closer, I think hit by the anti-aircraft fire. I swear I heard him mutter into the intercom — or just to himself. Then his wing-cannon flashed and yellow lines danced up the green-and-grey spotted airframe, shattering the cockpit — and smashing into that payload of TNT.

We were some distance off, but even so that massive yellow clap of explosion chucked my Tempest back like wind slapping a drifting leaf. Below me, Nessie’s fighter was slapped up too and we missed each other by scraping inches. Above, Jingo was first to recover, shouting with a hoarse note of horror I had never heard before.

‘Jan — report!’

The intercom was silent and of course it would be. That Mistral warhead was seventeen thousand kilos of Hexogen TNT and able to penetrate twenty metres of concrete. Enough to smash Remagen’s bridge into the Rhine, enough to flick away all trace of Jan and his black tulip fighter.

I was thinking about Jan all the way back to base. He’d been fighting as long as Jingo, knew all about Mistrals and knew exactly what he was doing. So, the bridge must stay up — yes? Well he made sure of that.

We landed. Normally Jingo’s inexhaustible batteries would have kept him super-charged, joking, waving us over to the mess. This time he aimed a savage kick at the tyres, snarled something to his ground crew and stalked off to his quarters.

He’d never done that before — but he’d known Jan a long time.

The cook had enough tulips left for the evening meal. Nobody wanted them.

Two days later the sagging Remagen bridge collapsed into the Rhine. By then a major American force was across and the bridge-head secure. It did shorten the war and saved countless lives. Of course that Mistral might have missed — but Jan didn’t. And I remembered those last muttered words, I think the names of his wife and kids.

Before he joined them.

Writing this, it sounds like Jerry did nothing in the last months of the war but chuck secret weapons at us. Well he did chuck a fair few and gave one division of our Air Force a really tough time. The ‘Big Friends’.

It was a nickname for the heavy bombers — four engines and some thirty tonnes deadweight, flying in formation of up to a thousand. In ’43 and ’44 they copped it hard, the Brits at night and the Yanks in daytime. Fifty to sixty aircraft shot down, sometimes more, and hundreds of men. But they never turned back.

For the night, Jerry had twin-engined hunters, the Junkers-88 and ME-410 and the feared Heinkel ‘Uhu’ — the ‘Owl’. Owl-fighters had upward-firing cannon behind the cockpit, so they could sneak up and blast the underbelly or set the wing-tanks ablaze. ‘Slanting music’ was the Jerry nickname for this — but this music was pure black murder at night.

And daytime? The Yank ‘Big Friends’ were Flying Fortresses and Liberators, each with eight to ten heavy machine-guns for defence, and they needed them when the single-engined fighters, the Mustangs and Thunderbolts, had to turn back, in the days before drop-tanks gave extended range. So they ploughed on alone and pure flaming hell came up to meet them.

Jerry threw everything. Not only the new fighters but anything that could fire a gun. Obsolete bi-planes even, armed with underslung rockets. ME-109s with bombs to drop on the bombers, even a suicide squadron, sworn to ram or chop out the tailfins with their propeller — another form of suicide.

With every ingenuity that the German mind could devise, they clawed the Big Friends out of the skies. But they ploughed on: in daytime we would see those thousand-plus bombers flying in perfect formation, like a thundering machine of doom aimed at the industrial heartland of Germany.

Jingo said that he nearly went into bombers. ‘Sitting there like a bus-driver, taking all that crap — not for me.’ He would look at them passing overhead with a queer twist on his lips. Admiring their courage and consigning them to a special hell.

Because we would see them come back from that special hell, a few hours later. The formation would be broken, dipping and ragged, aircraft missing like giant fingers had flicked them apart. Some flying lower and some higher, with the same sunlight sparking off their wings. Some trailing smoke from burning engines and dipping lower and lower as the pilot fought a hopeless battle with height and flames.

Sometimes the escort was long gone, caught up in air battles over Germany. Or they had drifted away from the main stream, battling fire and tending wounded crew. So we would go up and patrol the flight-routes home — give protection against any prowling fighter.

I remember one daytime incident vividly. The aircraft was a Flying Fortress; all of them had bright names and characters painted on their nose. This was ‘Buffalo-boy’ with an American buffalo, standing on its hind legs, forelegs ending in boxing gloves.

I can say that because I spent some twenty minutes flying alongside Buffalo-boy and because I got to know her crew. I can remember them — their voices, because I did not see their faces — but they are still real people who cut deep into memory.

There were a few Big Friends shot up that day and, one by one, Jingo detached Red Section as escort. So I peeled off and took station off the crippled bomber. Crippled, as in shot through with the ugly holes that cannon and bullets leave, one engine leaking black smoke, the propeller still.

It looked bad, but the Boeing Company in America built their aircraft bloody well and Buffalo-boy would get home on three engines — even two — and the steel frame could stand a lot of battering. The rear-turret was a mess of shattered perspex and twisted iron. Chunks were missing from the tail, but Flying Fortresses were not called that for nothing. This one had plenty of life.

So I took up station and the pilot waved to me. His voice came over the intercom, young and full of that joking careless strength that Yanks had. ‘Hi buddy, don’t let looks fool you, we’re in good shape. Rear-turret gone, flak took out the starboard-outer, maybe the starboard-inner too. Couple of guys shot up but we’ll make it.’

‘I can take you far as the front-line,’ I said back.

‘Far enough buddy, that’s fine.’

So I set my fighter into a wheeling and swooping pattern over Buffalo-boy to keep pace with the slower aircraft. All the time, the pilot kept up chatter with his crew and also with me. As though linking us together, kept his Fortress flying. He told me about all his crew in that jocular dismissive way, meaning he knew they were a great bunch of blokes.

Bombardier (the guy that aims the bombs) Donald ‘Duck’ Ogilvy — who couldn’t hit a barn door with buckshot. His co-pilot, Ivy-Leaguer Lewis Ayres (not to be confused with the film-star). Radio-operator Konrad (Connie) Joblonski.

So he went on, introducing me to all the people in this little air-borne community. Navigator, Saul Goldblum, upper-gunner and lower-gunner — the Katzenjammer Kids, after the comic-book. Rear-gunner, Williard (Peanut) Anderson.

On a Brit bomber, nobody would talk like that, joke between officers and other ranks. But it worked with the Yanks and, introductions over, the pilot talked about himself. About his folks running a drugstore in New Baden, Milwaukee; his ‘girl’ Jessie Turner, who worked in a steelyard, making parts for the Liberty Ships, a regular ‘Rosie Riveter’. His kid brother was a Leatherneck (Marine, in the South Pacific), based someplace called New Zealand. Waiting to move out and take on the last Japanese strongholds.

He was Manny Grunewald Jr (yeah right, his dad was a first-generation ‘Kraut’ immigrant). They had come over just before World War One, so he was old enough for World War Two.

Manny had nearly done his twenty missions and was looking forward to his ticket home. Buffalo-boy had been shot up a few times but never this bad. Anyway, soon they’d be over Allied lines, then the first airfield, or parachuting out.

They were bounced (he said) by rocket-firing Focke-Wulf 190s, who took out the rear-turret and nearly the whole damn tail. So they had fought them off, but Peanut Anderson had had one leg smashed by a cannon-shell, one Katzenjammer Kid (upper-turret) was bleeding badly from a torso wound.

Then (over the impersonal intercom) he asked about me. So I wheeled and swooped, the roaring sounds of my Tempest around me, the leaking smoke-wounds of his Fortress, and we talked.

I realised how little I knew about myself. An only son, my parents dead in the ruins of their Croydon bungalow, a married older sister who was back in New Zealand. And like a lot of young blokes, I had no girlfriend either. If you were serious about a girl, then you married her. Talking to Manny made me realise how little I had outside the squadron — no friends, nobody.

It was unreal, talking like this over the radio to Manny with the whole crew listening. It didn’t seem strange, nothing mattered but keeping that stumbling smoke-leaking Fortress in the air. Manny talked back — hell he was shy about girls himself; understanding how I felt, that my loss of family was a tough break. He and the crew would take me out to dinner, stand me the best horsemeat steak and french fries that money could buy.

Even when I flew close, Manny’s face was a blur under the close-fitting leather helmet; our contact were those crackling radio voices because his crew chipped in too. Connie Joblonski said he’d get his little sister, Frida, to write — she’d been on at him to get her a pen-pal. Lewis Ayres said he’d show me how to mix a real New York dry martini.

So we kept this up as Buffalo-boy lurched along on three engines, one of those starting to misfire. Ogilvy the bombardier said he’d take my photo for his folks, when we landed. When we landed, that unspoken heart-cry of hoping like hell. And all the time, Manny fighting to control the Fortress, sometimes flapping a hand at me through the cockpit window.

Ten then fifteen minutes we kept this up. The side-gunners leaned on their 50-calibre machine-guns and extended gloved fingers in a V for victory sign. And Buffalo-boy lost more height, but soon we would be over the lines and they would hit the silk. Manny was ordering the Bombardier and forward-gunner up onto the main deck, all had their parachutes on.

My neck always ached like hell on these missions because you never stop turning your head. Up and down, sideways, a gloved hand over my goggled eyes and peering through the fingers at the sun — always a favourite ambush position. So looking, listening to Manny chatter about his baseball team. Looking down, seeing a tiny flash below — and then this tiny object zooming up with awesome speed for such a tubby odd-shaped thing.

‘Manny, a Komet, seven o’clock below —’

A Komet rocket plane, that flash was the launching. Stubby and barrel-shaped, powered with a rocket engine and a total flying time of about eight minutes. But that was all the time a Komet needed.

It took me about half a minute to turn and level. But in that half-minute, the Komet went past, doing nearly a thousand k’s. Buffalo-boy was turning too, tracer from all her guns spitting at the Komet as it closed. Closing so fast that it would have a bare three seconds’ firing pass — but three seconds was enough.

Komets carried two 30mm cannon in the wingroots and a double blast of bright yellow stars hit Buffalo-boy. The top-gunner Katzenjammer Kid was still firing as his turret shattered, one gun spiralling out. Another shell exploded the belly-turret, the second Katzenjammer Kid falling into space. In that same split-moment, shells exploded around the cockpit and nose, down the side-ports, and the rear-turret was torn clean from its mountings.

Even as I lined up, the Komet streaked by, faster and faster — twice as fast as I could go — and was gone. But that single firing pass had battered Manny’s aircraft into a flaming scrapyard wreck that was scarcely airborne. A flaring yellow tongue burst from the port inner-engine — fuel-tank hit.

Manny had no time for me now. Tersely ordering his crew out of the escape hatches, he struggled to hold the ruined bomber steady. The Komet had disappeared — it would not return — and I could only make a helpless pass around the stricken aircraft and watch as the parachutes went out, only four of them and one dangling limp, a wounded man.

Then I watched the death of Buffalo-boy.

Bombers always died hard, but this was on fire and slipping. Manny, as pilot and commander, had discharged his final duty — to hold the Fortress steady while his crew got out. But only for minutes — fewer minutes than it took for that evil little Komet to reach him. Buffalo-boy slipped and slipped, then went nose-down.

I could hear Manny gasping over the intercom as he struggled to pull out, give himself those moments to reach the escape-hatch. And once, as the flaming aircraft spiralled hopelessly out of control and down — just once — his voice, catching and desperate: ‘Gus, don’t let them tell my folks it was like this —’

The intercom cut then. Manny would not get out now, the spinning centrifugal forces would hold him trapped and I wondered about his last thoughts — of his life ending, of his folks, Jessie — but at least he would black out in the endless two minutes it would take Buffalo-boy to hit the ground.

The parachuting crew were helpless spectators to this and I went around in a turn, pulling back the canopy and waving. One waved back. I dared not go too close because my backwash would collapse their parachutes. I could only hope they did not land near a German town. The German propaganda named them as ‘terror-flyers’ and sometimes they were lynched. I never did find out what became of them.

A rising cloud of black smoke marked where Buffalo-boy had hit the ground. Fuel was low, so I headed back after radioing their position. I did write to his Wing, relaying Manny’s last wishes. But they would have had plenty of experience in wrapping bad news in comforting words. And somehow I felt his loss the more keenly because he was only a voice on the intercom and his last words were to me.

And those evil little Komets? Like the other secret weapons, they were too late to make a difference. Although not too late for one Milwaukee family.