Russell Margerison was a working-class lad from Lancashire when he decided to join Bomber Command as a teenager and fight for his country in the Second World War – one lad among so many who were desperate to help beat Adolf Hitler.
  In his book, Boys At War, he writes of the dangerous but strangely unreal world of a mid-upper air gunner with 625 Squadron, sitting high in the turret of a mighty Lancaster bomber over occupied Europe, wrapped in several layers of clothes and awed by the destructive beauty of the scene below.
  He vividly evokes the cramped and freezing conditions, the sights, smells and sounds and the sheer gut-wrenching terror that was the daily lot of bomber crews. The courage displayed by Russell and his comrades is all too evident and the book deserves to be read not only by war veterans but also by today’s generation.
  Russell begins by describing the harsh realities of gunnery school, then on to operational training, crash landings, bombing raids and the daily fear of never returning alive. His role was to keep a lookout for enemy fighters and to take a shot at them if they gave him the chance.
  After many fearsome raids his plane was inevitably shot down. The author tells of the last dramatic moments caught in his blazing Lancaster followed by weeks on the run with the Belgian Underground, and then as a POW.
He describes a long, terrifying march of January 1945 when for 18 days he joined nearly 1,500 prisoners being forced to walk through blizzards to another camp, surviving on an inch of soup a day.
  Russell gives an honest account of his own behaviour when he was starving and desperate which was not always selfless. It is this candour which makes his book a fascinating war-time memoir. Russell was just 20 when he was finally liberated and found his way home to Blackburn.
  Poignantly, the sequel added to the second edition tells of his return to Belgium in his 70s to visit the crash site and a tearful reunion with the Belgians who risked everything to help him survive.

Russell, who lives in Pleckgate, Blackburn, Lancashire, with his wife Bette, is a member of:
The Airgunner’s Association, Ex-Prisoners Of War Association, The Caterpillar Club and is the chairman of his local Air Crew Association.