Flying With The Moon: The Search For a Lost Airman, written and published by Jean Stevens, £5 Just before 8pm on September 3, 1943, the fourth anniversary of Britain’s declaration of war on Nazi Germany, 316 Lancaster bombers from various squadrons took off for a raid on Berlin.

Six-and-a-half hours later, one of the Lancasters, with four Australians and four Englishmen on board, was confronted over Nazi-occupied Denmark by a two-engine Junkers JU88C-6 fighter-bomber, an all-purpose aircraft the Luftwaffe used for nightfighting.

Danish farmer Ingemann Halkjaer saw the burning bomber fall out of the sky and hit the ground with an enormous crash, “like a thing hitting water… “There was a crater-like hole, maybe 30 metres in length, and all over thousands of pieces of wreckage were spread over several acres of land. The hole had run full of water.”

The bomber had smashed into reed-covered wetlands west of Stadil. All eight on board were killed. The decapitated remains of one crew member were buried. The bodies of the others seven remain in the fuselage of the bomber, buried in the soft soil of the crash site.

Among them are the remains of 20-year-old RAF Sergeant Herbert Jowett, cousin of Jean Stevens, who now lives in Settle. Flying With the Moon, a 50-page booklet of prose, poems, photographs and illustrations, is Mrs Stevens’s account of what happened on that night in 1943 and how she only found out 66 years later.

It begins with what she calls “a premonition”, on a warm, sunny day in Burnley in August 1943.

Jean, seven at the time, was with her father and her cousin. They had just returned from a moorland walk and were standing in the garden.

She writes: “Everything was still. The rosy scents and warmth of summer were in the air. Time seemed frozen. Bert held out his hand to my father, shook his hand and said quietly: ‘Goodbye, Uncle Clifford. Next time it’s curtains for me.’ “Straightaway I knew intuitively that what Bert said was true and my father, too, didn’t try to sweep it away…He stood motionless and, without a word, something profound passed between him and Bert: all the emotion they felt but were unable to express, all the underlying thoughts that flooded their minds.”

This short book covers a lot of ground, including a brief account of the discovery of Tollund Man outside the Danish town of Silkeborg in 1950; the amazingly-preserved body of a man from 400BC who had been ritually killed and buried in a peat bog – a metaphor for Bert Jowett and his comrades, under the peat at Stadil.

For copies of the book, Jean Stevens can be contacted on (01729) 823918.