Colin Bell is a regular at the RAF Club in London where he pops in for a G&T and a chat with other members in the Churchill Bar.
Smartly dressed, and walking without a stick, it is a week before he turns 104 and he has a twinkle in his eye. Congratulating him on his upcoming birthday, I ask him what he puts his longevity down to.
“It’s a combination of exercise, alcohol, and the love of good women; with the odd bad one thrown in!”
He has an infectious laugh.
Colin joined the RAF aged just 19, and after his flying training joined 608 Squadron (Pathfinder Group) based at Downham Market in Norfolk.
He flew a Mosquito bomber and carried out 50 bombing raids over Germany, 13 of them over Berlin.
“It was rather a hairy business,” he tells me. “The Germans had perfected, to a very fine art, the ability to shoot down enemy aircraft.”
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He recalls one incident when a shell exploded under the aircraft, cutting power to both engines. Eventually Colin and his navigator Doug Redmond limped home.
The following day an engineer inspected the bomber, before giving Colin a memento of the raid.
Colin recalls: “He handed me two slivers of shrapnel, each about 4 or 5 inches long, and I said ‘where did you find them?’. He said, ‘well, they were in the parachute you were sitting on!’, which made me thoughtful.”
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We talk about the VE Day 80th anniversary and Colin recalls being at an airbase in North Bay Canada when the news broke, early in the morning.
“I was woken by all this palaver, people shouting and firing pistols… I said to one of the guys, ‘what the hell’s going on?’ And he said ‘I think they are celebrating the end of the war, the end of the war in Europe’.
“And I said, ‘well that’s nice, now let’s get back to sleep!'”
Inevitably conversation turns to the conflicts of today. He worries about defence spending, NATO, and hesitating to confront aggression decisively.
“Bear in mind that I’ve seen all this happen before, from the time that I was a teenager living, as Churchill put it, in the wilderness years and a time when appeasement was rife.
“The situation is different now, but the dangers are the same.”
He has a message too for the current generation: “People talk too much about their rights and not enough about their duties,” he tells me.
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Opposite the RAF club in Green Park is the RAF Bomber Command Memorial, commemorating the young crews who embarked on missions during the Second World War. I ask Colin what goes through his mind as we gaze up at the impressive sculpture.
“Sadness,” he simply says. “So many brave young men lost their lives fighting the war against an enemy that should never have been.
“You must understand that what we were doing at the time was a battle for survival, and that’s what we were concentrating on. And it’s not just a matter of the people.
“Some people feel gratitude for what we did, but really we had no option. We just had to make sure that we won the war. And thank God we did.”
