WHILE Britain was celebrating the end of war in Europe, one city airman’s war dragged on for another 18 months.

Leading aircraftsman Cyril Knight was watching soldiers from the Red Army across a river in east Germany when the surrender was announced.

While the bunting went up back home, LAC Knight snatched a few lagers and a bottle of German schnapps courtesy of the locals to toast with pals the end of the fighting.

But guard duty, patrols and killing time would go on for Cyril in Allied-occupied Germany until September 1946.

Now living in a terraced house in Dines Green, Worcester, Mr Knight, originally from Stoulton, swapped hard shifts at the Morganite Crucible castings factory in Norton to join the men and women of the RAF.

“I’d had enough at Crucible, I could never get any time off. It was good money but long hours and you came home covered in black carbon,” he said.

“I worked 72 hours one week and 84 hours the next.

“So I volunteered when the war broke out with two other mates from Crucible, Percy Collet and Basil Everett.

“Percy joined the paras – the red berets – and was killed at Arnhem. Basil survived – he was with the Fleet Air Arm.”

Posted for combined arms training in Scotland and then Catterick, north Yorkshire, a taste of the hard-slog route marches convinced him to volunteer for the transport section of 2773 squadron, now the RAF Regiment.

At one stage he was sent home for six months in 1941 because the British Government “wouldn’t cough up to kit us out”, returning to his unit in1942. “I was dreading going back,” he said.

His fondness for motorised transport saw him become a motorcycle dispatch rider for the squadron’s headquarters run by John Watney, of the famous Watneys Brewery clan. “On D-Day we went over just hours after the landings, and they gave me the first Harley-Davidson motorcycle to be shipped from the States to England,” he said.

“It went all across France with me until I crashed it into a truck in Belgium.”

The squadron would spend the rest of the shooting war shadowing the front line of the British 8th Army laying temporary airfields, driving east in the race for the river Rhine and later Berlin.

The airfields were used by British ground attack aircraft – rocket-firing Typhoons – which flew sorties to smash knots of German resistance.

Advancing through northern France, he camped in one of Paris’s parks while on leave, before continuing into Belgium.

“I didn’t think much of the French or the Belgians. We’d had to save them you see, when they’d run from the Germans like rats,” he said. In September 1944 while trying to capture a Rhine crossing his older brother Charles Knight, serving with the Worcestershire Regiment, was killed by a 3in mortar bomb.

Cyril, whose unit was only three miles away in Holland, only found out from a letter his mother wrote to him later that month.

“And that was that. I never had much time to think about it, we were moving, always on the move,” he said.

While in Holland he saw the flat horror of war up close when one of the squadrons anti-aircraft guns plucked a Luftwaffe Messerschmitt from the sky.

The plane crashed into a nearby field.

“We all rushed over, and the pilot had burned to a cinder, there was nothing left of him,” said Cyril.

“We never really thought it. It’s them or you.”

The closest Cyril came to action himself was while in Belgium when he was waved down on his motorbike by a civilian.

“He said ‘no, no, no’ and waved me down,” he said. “He pointed to a wood about two miles away and told me there were ‘SS’ in there.

“I turned the bike round, went like hell, and reported to headquarters. The SS were bombed out.”

As Christmas 1944 came and went, he remembered guard duty one evening listening to the “buzz bombs” of the V2 rockets overhead.

“You’d hear them go ‘pop, pop, pop’ then they would go silent and that’s when you dived for cover,” he said.

He’s tight-lipped about the holocaust but remembers looking at ovens where they “burned the bodies” and later traded a German prisoner of war some cigarettes for a Hitler Youth knife.

“My wife Thelma told me I couldn’t keep it and she sold it after the war,” he said.

“We went into a German family’s house and saw a record of one of Hitler’s speeches so we smashed it up – they gave us some eggs so we’d leave. I got the impression the Germans didn’t want the war, we got on all right with them.”

His squadron finally ended the war at the German port of Lubeck, skimming stones across the river.

On the opposite bank were erstwhile allies of the Red Army. They were less than hospitable. “They would shoot at us,” said Cyril.

“We didn’t see much of them really but they’d take potshots.”

It was while there news of the German surrender came.

Cyril said: “For me my victory day was the day I got home in September 1946.”

He married his sweetheart Thelma back home and they had a daughter together, before he went into the agricultural sales trade.

Cyril is now 87 and when asked what he thought he got from the war he replies with a wry smile: “Well, I toured Europe at the Queen’s expense. That’s about it.”