I know a man, a very old man, who was a pilot during World War Two. He flew a four engine bomber called a Lancaster. Now, for any of our American readers who aren’t too familiar with the history of the Second World War, that was the war that followed on from the first one, with a rather long tea break inbetween. Herr Hitler used the time to grow himself a moustache and develop a severe personality disorder. World War II was also the second, rather large, come as you are global conflagration that America was late for. You remember, wear what you want just as long as it was green.

I don’t know why America was late. I mean, we were at it for three years while the ‘Lights went out all over Europe’ while America got on with whatever it was doing at the time. Now, I have to say. That the lights went out, not because someone forgot to put fifty pence in the meter. It was because Adolf Hitler and several million other men with names like Gunther blew it out.

Not that I’m complaining; better late than never I always say, and at least Dubya is making up for it by getting a head start on World War III. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not comparing Dubya to Hitler. Hitler was shorter for a start and didn’t avoid the draft by having a word with his dad. Hitler was a whole different magnitude of fuckwit. Besides, can you imagine Bush at Nuremberg? It would be more a case of Nuremhamberger; hold the relish. I just thank the Lord we didn’t have to rely on Bush or Blair to lead the Western powers during World War II. Can you imagine Blair saying ‘we will fight them on the beaches', but he'd have added 'just as soon as we get clearance from the Health and Safety Committee'.

But all of that is beside the point. I mentioned the old man who was a pilot during the war. Today we took him down to Lincolnshire, to the airfield where he was based. He was with 626 squadron, Royal Air Force, and joined up when he was barely more than a boy. Every year, the people who served at Wickenby airbase gather to commemorate those who died. Each year, the numbers diminish as old age takes a few more away. We took the old man along this year.

It was a beautiful, sunny September day. We stood by the gate of the airfield with about a hundred people, heads bowed as the vicar read out the service. Our passenger sat, too old to stand for the length of a sermon. The old man in our charge, his face, lined with the thought and worry and wear of eighty five years of life, was shaded by the straw hat he wore. His walking stick was by his side, like a faithful old dog. A cool breeze blew across the open expanse of green fields, as the vicar led us all in the Lord's Prayer.

At one time, that breeze carried the noise of engines, a throaty roar from the planes returning from Germany. The ground crew would anxiously peer into the watery light of the dawn to see how many of the aircraft had survived the mission; counting them in, one by one.  Some of them would have stood where we are now, as the noise grew louder with each bomber that joined the circuit around the airfield. Priority to land would be given to any Lancaster that had dead and wounded on board, having been hit by flak, and pounced on by fighters, perforated with shell and shot. The survivors were lucky men. Some of the bombing raids suffered catastrophic losses. The raid on Nuremburg alone saw almost ten percent of the bombers destroyed.

Today, at the memorial, there were only a handful of men who had served during the war; they are now the survivors of old age, of heart attacks and slippery pavements, colds and arthritis. I wonder if there were any among them who, after the service stood in a quiet corner of the airbase and felt the sun on their face. Saw themselves once more dressed in R.A.F blue, strong limbed and smooth skinned, smelling faintly of aftershave and the distinctive, damp wool smell of uniforms on a hot day? I imagine they saw faces of all of their comrades as they gathered in the mess, the click of glasses and the laughter of those who know they may die the next day and so must crack the bone and suck the marrow out of life while they can.

And then decades passed as the years wearied them and bent their backs until they found themselves standing before a simple stone memorial on an abandoned airfield. On the memorial is a cross, crafted out of the wreckage from a crashed Lancaster.

Some of the pensioners here were from 12 Squadron, and some from 626 Squadron, both of which were stationed at Wickenby. They'd slipped, somehow past the sickle to make it this far. They stepped up in their youth to pay the sacrifice in blood to appease the God of War, the vengeful God who was on the belt of the German soldiers. They had ‘Gott Mit Uns,’ on their belt buckles; God with Us.

A bugle call, mournfully melodic sounded across the airfield as an RAF bugler played it into the stillness of the afternoon. The sun was strong in the sky, and when I looked through my camera lens, the pensioners were standing a little straighter, silhouetted, and statuesque as I knelt to take the shot. Did they think of fallen comrades, resurrect the memories of faces long gone? I imagined so. I thought of them seeing the eyes of old friends twinkling in the half light of the past; the half heard rumble of a Lancaster, taxiing along the runway; the smell of petrol and hot oil, the stink of cordite, the odour of sweat, sitting in the Ops room during the briefing for the next mission to turn part of another German city into an inferno, like the mouth of hell had suddenly opened beneath the bombers as they passed in the night.

Between 500,000 to 800,000 German civilians died in the cities devastated during the air raids. People criticise the offensive as being unnecessary as it didn’t affect the industrial capacity of the German military machine in such a way as to shorten the war. Next time we have a world war, perhaps we will just ask the apologists and the revisionists to pop over and ask, politely, if the Germans would mind handing back Europe and to turn the gas off in Buchenwald. There were no surgical strikes possible back in the forties and when the bombing offensive started it was the only way to bring the war to the heartland of Germany. Before this, the standard of living in Germany had actually increased. The German soldiers were the sons, brothers and cousins of those left at home, contributing to the war effort, keeping the home fires burning, while their kin spread the terror that was rampaging across Europe. That the civilians at home should increasingly become embroiled in the inferno was a necessary act of brutality. The bombing didn’t stop the war, perhaps it didn’t shorten it, but it did make a difference as part of the sum total of the allied war effort. The Germans had to use immense quantities of fighters and anti aircraft guns to defend the cities. These would have been used to great effect by them elsewhere had they not been needed over German cities.

That we would win the war was not a foregone conclusion. The world forgets that Britain and the Commonwealth stood alone against Nazi Germany. The country traded an Empire, bankrupted itself to fight the war and to be the bastion against which the ambition of the Nazis stalled in the West. In fact, Britain has only recently paid off the money it had to borrow from the Americans to pay for what it needed to continue the fight. Empires come and go, as do all other things, and some are worse than others, but if it is possible to atone for the sins of Empire then the British Empire, some believe, paid the price with its courage and endurance and sacrifice during those few years. These were not the thoughts of the men at the memorial when they were young, as they walked across the grass with flying boots slick with dew, toward the aircraft that may well have turned into their coffins. They just wanted to finish the job and not be killed or maimed whilst doing it, though they knew the cause was just, even before the world learned about the concentration camps and the other dirty secrets of the Third Reich.

The memorial service ended. Pensioners wandered slowly off, looking for cups of tea and to reminisce and wait for the highlight of the day. There was going to be a fly past by the only Lancaster still operational within the United Kingdom.

When it came, it was just a dot in the distance, moving slowly like a bird on the air, heavy in the sky but graceful; no longer pregnant with munitions. The faint noise of the four Merlin engines betrayed it as being something more than a bird. As I watched, I remembered the story told to me by the old man we had brought; about how he had nursed the plane home after one mission. He landed with a jolt, thick black wheels rolling along the runway, until he could bring the aircraft to a halt. He looked out of the cockpit and saw the ground crew running toward them, whilst behind, he heard the rest of the crew as they started to wearily get themselves off the plane by dropping through the hatch in the belly of the fuselage. He joined them; weary himself, desperate for a cigarette. Through the hatch he passed, out into the clean air, swaddled in his flying suit, waddling over to join the crew as they waited to be picked up for debriefing. He took out his Zippo and flicked it open to light up his cigarette, watching the ground crew running toward them, and then noticed the fire wagons coming too; noticed them all stopping dead and turning to run in the opposite direction. He had the lighter held in front of the tip of the cigarette, about to spark up when he heard the unmistakable sound of petrol, pouring onto the ground. One spark and he, the crew, the plane, and anyone unfortunate to be too close would have gone up in a ball of flame; burned to death.

Many, many bomber's moons ago. When the airfield was operational, in the 1940’s, the ground crew would stand around, much as we are now, counting back the aircraft as they returned from their bombing missions. Sometimes they would be trailing smoke. Sometimes those minutes in the sky would be their last, as they crashed on landing, a petrol fumed funeral pyre of young men.

The man we brought today was part of that generation. He is, in fact, Lesley's father. One of my own relatives was hurt during the war. He was a young man in Jamaica at the time and he received his injury during an attack on a German submarine. He was standing on the beach observing the attack smoking some ganja, when a coconut dropped on his head.

Anyway...

We'd set out that morning from Manchester for the two hour drive. I did the usual pre-flight checks, keys, check, cigarettes, check, map, check, fuel, check, flask, check, wallet, check, credit card, no...cheque.

When I was younger, I used to think that these men were all heroes, warrior saints fighting evil. The truth is far more mundane. They were just ordinary men and women in extraordinary times. I looked around me at the pensioners, as they watched the plane approach, growing from a bird into the distinctive shape of the Lancaster. Just ordinary men, now shielding their rheumy eyes with bony, frail fingers, they had seen planes like this flying over the airfield countless times; and for some this will be their last time.

It is easy to forget that these old men, these brittle bones, now loosely draped with withered skin over slack, wasted muscles, are some of the men who flew into the black heart of Nazi Germany and helped to kill the beast.

It's ironic really, because all over the world religious groups await the Apocalypse; but it was men like these who fought it.

And one by one, these men, these ordinary men, slip quietly away...