"He Is One of Us Now."

From a Nationalist newspaper in the 1990s:

In a small village in the Norfolk fen country is a war memorial cemetery for the local dead in both wars. In one corner stands a small white obelisk bearing a Luftwaffe eagle and Swastika. In the early 1980s some of the "anti-fascist" scum came up from London to squawk and deface and attempt to destroy the headstone. The police and a number of local men came to the cemetery and "saw them off", apparently none too gently. The "Antifas" scurried back to London screaming about police brutality and right-wing vigilantes. In the course of reporting this, the press also retold how the stone came to be there.

In 1944 and 1945 a lot of British and American air groups were operating out of fairly small airfields all across East Anglia. One such was this place in Norfolk. One day there was a massive daylight raid against what was left of Hamburg, using planes from all over these various fields. They dropped their load of death and were headed home when they ran into a number of German fighters.

"We broke up and flew our separate ways back to base, but there was this one German who stuck with us and wouldn't give up," recalled an American pilot. "He shot down at least two planes in our group and probably some more when the dogfight first began, but we just couldn't shake him. Our radio operator spoke some German and he could hear this guy's flight commander ordering him to come back, he would run out of fuel if he didn't, but the German pilot told him something like, 'You saw what they did today. They left nothing. I have nothing to go back to.' Evidently we'd bombed this guy's house, probably killed his family.

"We dodged into a cloud formation and for a while we thought we'd lost him, but over the coast of Holland we had to drop down and get our bearings, and there he was, still on our tail, still shooting at us,shredding us up pretty bad and wounding two of our crew. Our gunners shot back but could never hit him. Damn if the SOB didn't chase us all the way back to England!

"Our flak opened up on him as we came over the English coast, but they missed. By the time we got back to our field he had two British Spitfires on his tail, but they couldn't seem to tag him either. The guy seemed bulletproof. I got her down and we all jumped out of the aircraft and ran like hell, dragging our wounded with us, and he crashed his Messerschmitt right into our B-17. He finally got us, even though it was at the cost of his own life. His plane didn't catch fire because his fuel tanks were bone dry; he must have been flying on fumes. When they pulled him out of the wreckage dead, it was this blond kid, couldn't have been more than 19 or 20. He didn't have any papers on him, and we never learned his name."

The incident had been witnessed by the local villagers, who were so impressed by the boy's courage that the vicar offered him a burial plot in the church's war cemetery, where he lies to this day, unknown.

There is a quote on this young hero's grave in an enemy land. They were composed by an RAF colonel who also witnessed his death:

"Call them misguided, call them even wicked if you must; but no nation or cause ever brought forth defenders of greater courage and worth. They fought like the Northland gods of their ancient and warlike race, and few indeed are those among us who can say that ever we saw their backs".