VE DAY.. 60 YEARS ON: SHOOTING THE ENEMY

STEVE Stevens is a man who day after day made his own war film. For real. Without actors. And with death sitting in the director's chair.

As the Second World War drew to a close and the Germans made their last desperate stand, Steve, a pilot with 19 Squadron, captured the fury of airborne attack through a camera mounted in the nose of his Beaufighter.

The photographs that he and his comrades took are of such exceptional quality that even 60 years on they stand as masterpieces.

Rockets speed towards their targets, enemy ships are destroyed, smoke billows, explosions burst across the landscape.

We sit in Steve's home in the quiet seaside town of Worthing, West Sussex, bathed in spring sunshine and a world away from the terrors of war, the photographs spread out on a table in front of us.

Steve, now a sprightly 85, remembers every detail of the raids he took part in. Each one carried with it enormous risks.

Based on the Adriatic coast of Italy, he was part of the push to drive the Nazis out of the Balkans.

The airfield they flew from at Biferno was a hazard in itself. The runway was made of sheets of perforated steel laid out along a beach.

The dangers were soon brought home to him in the most horrific fashion while watching another plane take off. "It was mid-winter 1944, there was snow on the ground and the runway was very icy. Halfway down, the pilot lost control and the plane skidded off on to the sand. Immediately one of its load of bombs exploded.

"To my horror I saw the body of one of the two Italian airmen on board flying for the Allies being catapulted into the air. He was hurled high into the sky and his parachute opened of its own accord. I watched in amazement as the body - which I could now see was limbless - floated gently down on to the sand. It's more than 60 years since it happened and I still can't forget it."

One of his squadron's most dangerous targets was a German ship with the vaguely comic name of Kuckuck. But the raid was anything but a laughing matter.

The Kuckuck, in Fiume harbour getting its firepower beefed up, was protected by more than 120 anti-aircraft guns. "We had to dive down to a few feet above the ground to escape enemy radar and then try to catch the gunners by surprise. There were four aircraft involved and I know that senior officers regarded it as a suicide mission, but somehow we all got back safely. I was travelling at almost 300mph and at one point I missed a giant harbour crane by less than 20ft."

Steve's amazing photograph shows rockets fired by the raid's leader, Don Tilley, striking the Kuckuck just below the waterline. Shortly afterwards she sank.

The Beaufighters' cameras started taking pictures at the rate of one frame a second whenever the rockets were fired.

One of the most breathtaking shots was recorded by Steve's number two, Stefanos Shonfeldt, showing Steve unleashing his weaponry on a Nazi headquarters in the Yugoslav fortress town of Zuzemberk in February 1945.

He was so close that shell casings from Steve's cannons actually dented the metal skin of his own aircraft. Like many of the raids, the attack on Zuzemberk was carried out after information had been passed to the Allies by the Yugoslav partisans, a guerilla group fighting to oust the Nazis from their country.

"They told us that the Germans had occupied pretty much the whole town," Steve recalls. "They said, 'Leave the church alone but hit everything else'. We planned the raid for lunchtime, hoping the Germans would be more interested in food than watching out for us. It worked perfectly. We caused so much havoc that the partisans were able to storm the town later that afternoon and take it." The war saw Steve change from a young daredevil to a mature and courageous pilot.

When he first started flying in his native South Africa, no dare was too outrageous for him to attempt - he once flew so low that he bent the aerial of a car.

By the time he joined the South African Air Force, his reputation had gone before him. "They used to say about me, 'Oh, that Stevens - either he'll die or he'll get the DFC because he hangs around the target so long'." Thankfully it was the latter and the Distinguished Flying Cross now holds pride of place among all his other decorations.

Typically, he underplays his bravery. "It was the navigators who were the brave ones," he says. "When we were in action, there was absolutely nothing they could do. I was too busy flying the plane to be frightened."

Despite the terrible toll the war exacted on those who fought in it, Steve survived. Two years after its end, he married. He and his wife Kay, 87, have four children and six grandchildren. Today, like most men and women who came through World War Two, his abiding memories are of the slaughter and the friends he lost rather than the excitement and the glory.

"The terrible thing about flying," he says, "is that you kill and don't see. When you are making your run towards a target, all you think about is the building you are trying to hit. You hardly ever think of the people inside. It's only later, years later, when you start to dwell on that. "I know the Second World War was a just war. It had to be fought. The Nazis had to be destroyed. But 50 million people died - that's almost the entire population of Britain - and death on such a scale still seems unbelievable."

Sunshine streams in through the window illuminating Steve's pictures but not interrupting his dark thoughts. "War changes you," he says after a long silence. "I don't know anyone who survived it who hasn't been changed in some way.

"I was at a dinner once with Leonard Cheshire. He was the British observer on one of the American planes that dropped the atom bombs on Japan. My recollection of him that night was how quiet he was. I don't know for sure, but my impression was that he had never really recovered."

Steve lost good friends and hardly a day goes past without his thinking of them. One was Eric Impey, a fellow pilot, who was killed over Poland in August 1944.

Steve fumbles through his files and produces a single sheet of paper. It is a poem, heavy with premonition, written by Impey in the quiet hours before he took off on his final flight. "He was," Steve says, "ready to die."

A verse of the poem reads: "I thank Thee for the life I've had/ For home and all its love/ I thank Thee for the faith I have/ That cometh from above."

Steve himself came close to death innumerable times. On only his second flight he was saved by a small section of armour-plated glass in his cockpit which absorbed an anti-aircraft shell. "An inch either way and I'd have had my head blown off," he recalls.

On another mission, he felt a strange sensation in his feet, reached down and found his flying boot burning. A piece of shrapnel had come right through the floor of the plane and embedded itself in the sole. "The difference between living and dying," he says, "was infinitesimal. I have known aircraft shot down and smashed to pieces, the pilot killed outright and the navigator walking away from it with only a black eye.

"Once I was attacking some German gun emplacements and was so low I was hit by my own explosion. I lost complete control. The plane flipped over on its back and was plunging towards to ground.

"There were a couple of seconds when I actually thought, 'This is it', and then miraculously - I still don't know how - the aircraft righted itself." Little wonder fliers were notoriously superstitious, carrying with them good luck charms of every sort. "The only thing I took with me," Steve says, "was a little Bible my father had given me.

"He'd written a dedication inside the front cover in red ink, drawing my attention to the 91st Psalm. It has a passage in it about the angels taking care of you. Well, all I can say is, they certainly took care of me."

-DO you have a memory from VE Day, May 8, 1945? Please write and tell us about it at VE Day, Sunday Mirror,PO Box 4021, London E14 5BU or email us at veday@sundaymirror.co.uk

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