Stars bow to hero of missions impossible

Les Munro, above and right, flew 57 bombing sorties over Europe during World War II and put his survival down to 'Lady Luck'. Photo / Bay of Plenty Times

The last surviving pilot from the famed World War II Dam Buster raids has emerged from retirement in Tauranga to advise Peter Jackson on his new movie. Peter Bromhead meets him.

There is a macho glamour to the image of the leather-jacket-clad bomber pilot, hurling his heavy payload low across the forests and farmland of wartime Germany to lead the assault on Hitler's dams.

Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson is remaking the 1955 Dam Busters movie, using hitherto classified War Office documents to reveal new details of the raids.

Tom Cruise has visited Masterton to inspect the replica Lancaster bomber the movie crew has built in a hangar there, prompting speculation he could star as pilot Guy Gibson - accompanied by the contentiously named dog "Nigger".

This month, there is even a new PlayStation and XBox game out, Heroes over Europe, allowing this generation's war junkie to imagine himself as a pilot in the cockpit of an Allied plane.

Yet, as retired Tauranga farmer Les Munro discloses, there was little glamorous about it.

How does he know? Unlike Tom Cruise and the teenage gamers at their consoles, 90-year-old Munro did it for real.

He knows the knot of fear in the stomach that no computer game can ever replicate. He knows what it is to lose friends to enemy fire.

And, worst of all, he knows what it is to lose his own son who, in a tragic irony, died in a low-flying topdressing plane crash years after the war.

It is now 70 years since the beginning of World War II. This week in 1939, the number of New Zealanders volunteering for the Special Force hit 15,000; enlistment also began for the 28th Maori Battalion.

To many of these young men, the distant European war must have held the same attraction computer games have to today's generation. They were soon to discover a different reality.

ALL IN all, Squadron Leader Munro had a lucky war. In 1942, his first operational sortie targeting Dusseldorf had turned into a disaster for the RAF, with 38 aircraft lost. Munro and his crew, still combat greenhorns, survived.

Three nights later, on a moonless night, they took off to raid Bremen fully armed with 500lb bombs. Engine problems meant his Wellington bomber failed to climb above 15m on take-off and, after clipping trees, Munro crash-landed in complete darkness in a paddock.