Jim Kelly,the last surviving member of the crew who were with Canadian airman Andrew Mynarski on his final mission died earlier this year, aged. Nathalie Bibeau, a researcher for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, who interviewed him for a documentary, recounts their meeting.

ON the second floor of a drab, overlit nursing home, I found the last chapter of one of the most famous military stories in Canadian history. It was a drizzly morning in February, the nurse at the desk was impassive, and Jim Kelly was in a room at the end of a wide, barren hallway. He sat in an oversized wheelchair, and with his long legs crossed at the knee, he was so thin and narrow, the space around him looked swollen.

Dressed neatly with a plaid shirt, he was leaning back, holding the newspaper close to his chest. His wife, on one of her long visits, was sitting closer to the window, staring out.

Sixty years ago, Jim flew Lancaster bombers from their base at Middleton St George, near Darlington, over Nazi-occupied France. In the spring and early summer of 1944, he was the wireless radio operator on a crew whose last mission would become one of the legends of the Second World War.

On the night of June 13, 1944, while on their 13th mission, they were shot down. In the few minutes it took for their burning bomber to fall out of the sky, as most of the crew at the front bailed out, a grim drama unfolded in the rear.

The tail gunner, Pat Brophy, was trapped in the turret, plummeting to certain death. His friend, mid-upper gunner Andrew Mynarski, had safely reached the escape hatch and was about to jump when he turned and saw Brophy. He crawled over to him, through a wall of flame, and tried to pry him free. Clawing at the door with his bare hands, he was on fire from the waist down.

What transpired in those few moments, at 13 minutes past midnight, is one of the most selfless acts of valour in the history of the war and it would earn Mynarski a posthumous Victoria Cross.

Jim Kelly, sitting before me that February morning, was the last man left alive from that mission, which is why I was there. I was working on a CBC documentary commemorating the 60th anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1944. But there was one last story waiting for me in this room.

While Jim talked of D-Day and his excitement over crushing the Nazi advance, he noticed his wife leaning over his tray, quietly mashing a banana in a bowl for him. He stopped, and he said to her: "That time was different for you, wasn\rquote t it?"

Regine - bold and charming - is Jim's second wife. She's German. She spent the war married to a German naval officer, and living with her mother in Aurich, a town 30 kilometres from the North Sea coast, directly under the flight path of Allied bombing raids.

"At eight months pregnant, I was riding my bicycle begging the neighbours for food, jumping into ditches every time I thought the planes were getting too close," she said.

Her village was never the target, but the bombers flew overhead day and night on their way to the industrial heartland of Germany. The sound of those bombers haunted her.

"The air drummed, the houses trembled. It happened so often, I kept my baby in a laundry basket to be able to run down to the cellar," she said.

In the spring of 1944, while Regine's husband was away fighting, she and her daughter fled further inland to the Harz Mountains to get away from the bombing raids.

Jim, meanwhile, was miles up in the sky, and just as fear-stricken. He was a kid who had enlisted at 17 to fight the Nazis, and left his young wife in Winnipeg. Within months, he was part of the greatest air armada in history. On big raids, there could be 1,000 Lancasters in the air at once in a bomber stream one mile high, one mile wide and ten miles long. It was cold, the flights were long, and he was usually sitting on at least 8,000lbs of bombs.

"I could hear and smell the flak exploding around me, and when I looked outside, I saw airplanes blowing up," he said.

All he could do was count down the time that was left: "I only have this many hours to live through - just this many."

After they were hit the night of the 13th, Jim parachuted out of the flaming plane and landed safely in a field. He was taken in by a family and spent three months as a fugitive with the French

Resistance.

By the time Jim made it home, the Nazi empire was unravelling, and Regine was fleeing back to the coast to escape the Russians who were coming from the East.

It was sheer anarchy. "The years after the war were almost worse than the war itself, once we learned what Hitler had done," she says.

In 1953, Regine, her husband, Ernst, and their daughter were accepted into Canada as immigrants.

For more than half a century, Jim lived with his wife, Lee, and their two children. Regine worked in restaurants and chocolate factories, her husband was a barber, and they raised their daughter, Anke, as a Canadian.

Four years ago, there was a Christmas party in the basement of a condo building where Regine and Jim were introduced. Both had by then lost their spouses; they were alone. When the party ended, they took the elevator and realised they lived on the same floor.

It started with him taking home leftovers from Regine's; it progressed to Sunday dinners. One impulsive morning, two years later, a 78-year-old Jim and an 80-year-old Regine walked into City Hall, yanked two witnesses off the street and said their vows.

When I met Jim, Parkinson's disease had devitalised his voice and hand gestures, but all the life was concentrated in his eyes, so that when he spoke, I could see the kid in him. He was playful, sharp-witted, and kind. Regine was indomitable, warm and loyal. I admit I was totally charmed. Sixty years ago, these two people were bobbing corks in a ferocious tidal wave, but on that February morning, they were just in love.

When Regine finished mashing the banana, she lathered on the whipped cream. Jim flashed her a beaming grin, and she was radiant. This is how the last chapter closes. Two polarised war experiences converged in this quiet, unremarkable room. And no one in the North York nursing home seemed to have any idea.

Jim Kelly, last survivor of a mission that would enter Canadian school books, died five days after I saw him. On May 17, Regine joined him.

* This article first appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail.

* Earlier this year, The Northern Echo launched a £40,000 appeal to commemorate Andrew Mynarski's bravery. The 27-year-old from Winnipeg plunged to his death after trying to save gunner Pat Brophy, trapped in their plane.

The plane had flown from the Royal Canadian Air Force base at Middleton St George, now the site of Teesside Airport, and the campaign aims to fund a statue of Andrew Mynarski at the airport.