Tottering under the hammer blows from East and West, smashed and swiftly disintegrating, the German Armies fell back on all fronts into the heart of the Third Reich. Striking north-east across the frontier, the British forces had already begun their tremendous drive which was to carry them deep into Germany, while to the south, the Americans were hurling men and armour in a vast thrust towards Berlin.

For the men who fought their way across Germany, there were other problems than those concerned with fighting the last fanatical remnants of the German army. They found themselves suddenly plunged into a country which had been forced to endure privation and near starvation, a defeated civilian population.

This is more than just a story of war, more than a graphic picture of the battle for Europe in its final, all-important stages. This is a far-ranging novel of the ordinary men and women who fought and suffered, British and German, of how war changes people - for no one, conqueror or vanquished, comes out of war unscathed.

In those days for a time they were as a race apart, the golden boys, the skymen, "the few". They had their own customs, their own superstitions, their own jargon. They lived in a closely-knit community. At times they seemed over-occupied with beer and girls and rickety sports-cars. The English fields and the pubs were their battlefields.

But that life was but a fragment of theirs, it was the part that only the earthbound creatures knew. For at dawn the loud, sport-coated boys were transformed into helmeted and goggled knights, their steeds the silver planes, their jousting-ground the skies, the real battleground.

Their story can be told over and over again.

It is so many stories.

Here is one of them.