Retired Wing Commander Bill Malins was 23 when he joined the RAF in 1938. In 1940 he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, following a daring reconnaissance mission in Belgium. And he was one of the first officers to set foot on Sicilian soil when the Allies invaded in 1943. At the closing stages of the war, Mr Malins was there when Allied troops crossed the Rhine in 1945. His squadron was one of the first inside the gates of Belsen, Germany, where its concentration camp was liberated. In his 2010 memoirs, Coming In To Land, he wrote: "It justified every single day that I had spent fighting in the war." He visited the prison where SS and Gestapo guards were held, and met Irma Grese, dubbed the "Blonde Beast of Belsen". He retired from service in 1952 and went back to the family farm, Lords Farm, off Lords Lane, Bicester, expanding it from production of 40,000 litres of milk a year to two million today. RIP, Bill.