After flying Wellingtons with 99 Squadron in raids over Germany against appalling odds, he joined the newly-formed 159 Squadron, which operated initially in Egypt against Rommel’s Africa Korps, before being transferred to India to target the Japanese in Burma.

The scenes described include meetings with Air Marshal ‘Bomber’ Harris and Lord Louis Mountbatten, seeing Major-General Orde Wingate (founder of the Chindit Special Force in Burma) take off on his fateful final flight, shooting a rogue leopard with his service rifle in Poona and witnessing the front line troops in jungle combat during the Siege of Imphal.

Yet his flight to Gibraltar marked the start of a long separation from his wife and small daughter, whom he was not to see again before their reunion in the Savoy Hotel on VE Day in 1945. The pain of these cruel years is touchingly revealed in his letters home, which have been posthumously inserted by his daughter.