THE aircrew sat on the grass beside their bomber, idly whiling away the time before they embarked upon their 13th mission.

One of them spotted a four-leaf clover. He picked it, twirled it between his fingers like a tiny aeroplane propellor and then handed it to his closest buddy.

"Here, Pat," said Andrew Mynarski to George Patrick Brophy. "You take it."

Hours later, the Canadian crew would be shot down over France. Brophy would survive in "a miraculous escape"; and Mynarski would go down in a blaze of bravery that would win him the Victoria Cross - the British Empire's highest award for valour.

On the night of June 12, 1944, 671 aircraft took off from airfields across Britain to attack the German supply lines in France, which were endangering the advances made since D-Day.

Two hundred of those bombers came from Group 6 of the Royal Canadian Air Force, which was based in seven airfields in North Yorkshire and South Durham: Croft, Dalton, Dishforth, Topcliffe, Skipton-on-Swale and Middleton St George.

One of Group 6's planes was the Lancaster KB726 VR-A, from Middleton St George. It was piloted by Canadian-born Flying Officer Art de Breyne, whose mother came from Durham City and whose grandfather was from Winston, near Darlington.

Among de Breyne's six crew members were the mid-upper gunner, Pilot Officer Mynarski, and the rear gunner, Flying Officer Brophy.

They took off a couple of hours before midnight with orders to hit an important railway junction at Cambrai.

As they crossed the French coast they were caught in first one, then three or four, searchlights. De Breyne threw the Lanc into a dive to escape the deadly glare. But even when he had eluded the light, his crew sat in anxious darkness, knowing the Germans sometimes let a bomber go once their fighters had fixed on to it.

And so it was. As De Breyne descended towards 2,000ft, Brophy screamed through the intercom that there was a fighter at six o'clock.

Again the Lancaster corkscrewed, but this time it was too late. Three shots from the Junkers tore into it: two knocked out the port engines; the third ripped into the fuselage.

As the red light flashed on signalling that the pilot was ordering his crew to bail out, Brophy looked at his watch: in a magazine article he wrote some ten years later he swore the time was 13 minutes after midnight on June 13 - and this was the crew's 13th mission.

De Breyne fought to keep control of the plummeting plane as his crew jumped. At 1,300ft, with his own time running out, he too abandoned ship.

Behind him, Mynarski was about to jump when he glanced through the flames and smoke filling the fuselage and saw Brophy, his best friend, frantically trying to break out of the glass-domed rear turret. The explosion had jammed the escape mechanism; Brophy was doomed to die in the turret.

Mynarski forsook his opportunity to jump to safety and crawled through the flames and burning hydraulic oil. He grabbed an axe and tried to smash the glass. Then he crazily dived at the dome with his bare hands.

"By now he was a mass of flames below the waist," recalled Brophy. "Seeing him like that, I forgot everything else. Above the roar of the whine of our engine, I screamed: "Go back, Andy! Get out!'."

Mynarski slunk back on his hands and knees through the flames, never taking his eyes from his condemned friend. When he reached the escape hatch, he pulled himself up to his full height. In his flaming clothes he came to attention, saluted the stricken Brophy, and jumped.

All hope gone, Brophy prepared to die. He curled into the crash-landing position knowing it was pointless - just beneath his feet was five tons of high explosives.

"Suddenly time caught up," wrote Brophy. "Everything came at once: the ground's dark blur, the slam of a thousand sledgehammers, the screech of ripping metal."

Remarkably, the Lancaster slid on its belly. A wing was ripped off by a tree, throwing it into a demented spin. This miraculously released the escape mechanism and tossed Brophy clear.

As he hit the ground, he blacked out momentarily. He came round to an earth-juddering explosion as the broken bomber was engulfed by a ball of flame.

Brophy moved first his arms, then his legs. He had escaped without a scratch!

The fire had taken its toll, though: when he pulled off his helmet, most of his hair came with it.

For 11 weeks, French farmers passed Brophy from safe house to safe house until, on September 13, he made it back to England.

There he learnt the fate of his colleagues. Two had been taken prisoner; three had been rescued by the Resistance. Which left one unaccounted for - Mynarski.

The Lancaster's wireless operator Jim Kelly, who had also been smuggled out by the Resistance, said a farmer had reported seeing a burning airman falling out of the sky with his parachute in flames.

The airman had crashed into a field, said the farmer, and had lived for a short while before dying of severe burns. The farmer had then held out a flying helmet. Painted across the front of it was "Andy".

Andrew Mynarski is buried in a war cemetery near Amiens. Two years after his death, the 27-year-old was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross - only the second Canadian airman to receive the award, and one of the very few to win it on the uncorroborated account of a single witness.

In his homeland, he became revered as a symbol of courage, and on the tenth anniversary of his death a school was dedicated in his honour in his home town of Winnipeg.

Today, in the year that marks the 60th anniversary of the end of the war, the North-East catches up.