But for how much longer will we remember those ghosts? This week marks the 80th anniversary of VE Day — the moment the war ended in Europe. The youngest surviving veterans are now at least 98. And of the millions of British people who served in the war, only tens of thousands remain: perhaps 0.01% of Britain’s total population.

But perhaps the question should rather be: what will we remember? In theory, an event doesn’t need to be within living memory to be memorialized. In practice, though, as the generations change, the meaning of even the most notable historic moments will waver and mutate. We still mark the foiled attempt by Guy Fawkes to blow up the Houses of Parliament, for example, but few remember the details of what Fawkes was trying to achieve.

Similarly, when I was a child, there were still First World War veterans alive: I remember interviewing Bill, a local veteran of both wars, for a school homework assignment. He had lied about his age to volunteer in 1914 when just 14, and was in his nineties when I spoke to him. He would spend all day sitting on a pavement bench, in full uniform including medals, nodding and smiling at passers-by. He talked vividly about his war memories for my project, but seemed largely oblivious to the modern world. That long-ago war was, for him, still all of meaning and reality, along with most of his personality.

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What did that war mean, though? My school history lessons presented its origins as murky, and largely driven by longstanding European rivalries. More recently, though, now that the last of its veterans has died, I’ve noticed this war increasingly repurposed as a Goodies Versus Baddies fable about “freedom and democracy”. And so it may soon be with the Second World War, however many of its ghosts still haunt Britain’s woodlands.

This week, ceremonial officialdom creaked into gear for the four-day celebration of “VE 80”, complete with military parades, fly-bys and appearances by the Royal Family. But as I watched BBC coverage of dress-uniformed soldiers marching down the Mall past the King, two things struck me. Firstly: each group was neatly formed, beautifully trained — and teeny weeny, mere pocket-sized mini-units dwarfed by the scale of a thoroughfare designed for huge parading battalions. It felt like a vivid metaphor for a Britain that rattles around in architecture built for an entirely grander state. And second: that as living memory of the Second World War fades, much more is about to pass from us than the last of the Greatest Generation.

Who were they, that generation? And how do we remember them? Two days before the military mini-units marched down Pall Mall, the ghostly airmen of my local woodland seemed briefly as though they might see another modern-day echo, when a Spitfire crash-landed in a field in Kent. All on board were, mercifully, safe — but it felt like an omen. For there is something especially emblematic about these twin-engined fighter planes.

The excitement and admiration that has always clung to folk memory of Britain’s role in the Second World War also flew on twin engines: technical inventiveness, and manic bravery. While my step-grandfather was a POW in Colditz, for example, he hand-built a glider with which he planned to escape over the battlements — a staggeringly risky engineering project only interrupted by rescue when the war ended.

Perhaps more than any other symbol of the Second World War, the Spitfire stands as an emblem for this mix of can-do engineering and wild risk-taking that enabled Allied airmen, some still teenagers, to take to the skies in the legendary 1940 “Battle of Britain”. But though we won the Battle of Britain, and eventually VE Day too, all of Europe lost the war. It was civilization-destroying. With it ended industrial, imperial Europe, and in its aftermath arose a new civilization centered on America: one only superficially in continuity with what it succeeded, and whose explicit foreign policy it has been ever since to ensure the Old World never regained its pre-1945 bellicosity.

This policy was, of course, not simply imposed on Europe. For the most part it happened with the active support of at least the leadership class, among European peoples shattered and traumatized by the bloodshed. But its effects have been far-reaching. Under the new order, nationalism was decried, and the universal fraternity of all peoples extolled. A new aspiration to global peace and cooperation based on institutions and rules took shape, even as national borders and peoples were encouraged to become ever more porous, fluid, and intermingled.

We have lived within the resulting consensus ever since. These days we often refer casually to “the West”, as a collective; implicitly we mean by this the alliance within which the post-war consensus holds, underwritten by American hard power. The center of the world is now Washington. All that remains of imperial Europe is museums, architecture, and some carefully-preserved examples of the machines that enabled both that era’s manic bravery, and also the horrific war it produced. And those surviving machines which are not in museums or private collections have been repurposed for the central cultural activity of the successor civilization, “the West”: individual consumer experience. An hour-long “Battle of Britain” flight with Fly a Spitfire, the company whose plane crash-landed over the weekend, costs £6,750.

1945 was thus a rupture in more ways than one. Fully 95% of Britain’s population today comprises those who grew up in “the West” that succeeded it. Like shepherds grazing their flocks among the ruins of the Colosseum, this much-reduced successor Britain trots its dinky military along vast avenues, or turns its palaces and vintage machines into tourist spectacle, or simply builds over the traces of a bygone culture and worldview largely opaque to us.

Now, as the remaining Second World War veterans approach their own centuries, and even the lovingly maintained museum-piece Spitfires are struggling, it won’t be long before even those who remember how it ended will be gone. What will VE Day mean then? I don’t think it’s a coincidence, in this context, that we are once again witnessing land war at the edges of Europe itself. Nor do I think it’s a coincidence that Second World War and even Holocaust revisionism is on the rise, in the bowels of the internet. Such revisionism often involves a worryingly sketchy or actively malign twisting of historical fact; and its bedrock enabler is less ignorance as such, which is surely a human constant, than the events themselves passing from living memory.

As this proceeds, long-settled narratives are showing signs of increasingly volatile contestation — and not just in the more lurid corners of the online Right. The meaning of the Second World War, and its memorials, is a target for progressives as well: a fact signalled by the orange crash barriers surrounding the flag-draped Cenotaph, in a photo posted on Monday by the Ministry of Defense. This casual mix of pre-war grandeur and ugly, plastic safetyism epitomizes the dispiriting contrast between pre- and post-war British sensibilities. But it also points to the increasing politicization of war memorials in general. The Cenotaph in particular has become a popular target for protest, and sometimes vandalism, by (usually) far-Left protesters with grievances from Gaza to climate change. So frequent and provocative a focus for publicity-seeking political actions have war memorials become that there have even been nativist counter-protests. In 2024, the Government criminalized climbing on such structures during political actions.

By the time the Bank Holiday Monday VE Day ceremonies reached the Cenotaph, the crash barriers had been removed and serene solemnity reigned. But there was a time when no barriers would have been necessary.

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Some disgruntled Brits attribute this, and other purported signs of indifference to VE Day, to demographic change. Given that only 37% of London residents are white British, perhaps rather fewer of the city’s contemporary majority feel an emotional connection to sacrifices made almost a century ago, for a country to which their own ancestors sometimes had very different relationships. As a byproduct of the utopian softening of borders, this demographic change is, itself, an effect of the post-war internationalism that characterized “the West” as it has existed since 1945. And, as underlined by recent Gaza protests, the cultural pluralism that results is undoubtedly accelerating the loss of shared reverence for British war memorials.

But the fading of VE Day is not, or not only, a matter of multiculturalism. Were this the case, we might expect celebrations to be as enthusiastic as ever, in those parts of Britain where most inhabitants have ancestors who served. My Shires town is one such area. And yet there were, to my knowledge, no local events to coincide with the grand parades in London. To the extent that it accelerates the loss of shared reverence for the lessons of the Second World War, then, the post-war internationalism embraced by “the West” is indisputably hard at work dissolving its own legitimizing consensus. But demographic change is more an effect of this dissolution than its principal cause. This is, in the last count, simply a matter of time.

The Second World War itself was a cataclysm so immense that it obliterated almost everything Britain had previously been. Poor shattered Bill dressed in full military uniform every day into his nineties; and it’s as though Britain somehow did the same, at the scale of a whole country. So as we salute the last of the Greatest Generation, perhaps we can also feel a sense of relief at the prospect of letting those memories fade a little, in time. We should not forget the effort, the sacrifices, or the courage. But letting that era pass beyond living memory may also, in time, grant us more room to take stock of the kind of place Britain is now.

What will we conclude? It need not be defeatist. I dare say some of those ghostly airmen long to rest; if we could only grant this, perhaps those of us alive now might feel more able to do away with the figurative crash barriers and take up their legacy of inventiveness and daring. Then, perhaps, in holding our past just a little more lightly, Britain might one day be free to have a future again.

This is Project Propeller, today. Every year, since 1999, it has spirited Royal Air Force vets up in the sky again. Younger pilots come for the war stories, and to say thank you. The vets meet their old comrades.

But we are close to the end. This year is the final meeting of Project Propeller. The number of Second World War pilots is dwindling. The last veterans of the last good war are now in their farcically late nineties. Their trademark taciturnity is becoming tombstone silence. The few keep getting fewer.

This was the last time these pilots would be in the same room together. They would be thanked and saluted and coddled to the very end. Their story, the myth — the good war — is where modern Britain was founded. Now, their hair is mercury and silver. Their hands are curled and cubed. Their skin is translucent, tattooed with melodramatic blotches. A whole century laden on their faces. Some are negligibly less ancient than others. All of them wear uniform blazers, and rustle with medals.

People are exquisitely careful with them. Utterly decorous and graceful. They are so valuable, and there are so few of them left. It is as if we are in a room with Henry’s longbowmen, or Nelson’s sailors. Our scope for reverence, usually so limited, is much larger here. There are many quiet grandsons, and great-grandsons, wheeling around their relatives.

Most of the veterans served with Bomber Command. There are pilots and engineers and navigators and gunners and bomb aimers. They had to be bloodhounds; they dropped a boiling furnace down on Germany for years, and 55,000 of them were killed doing it. All of them volunteered.

Bomber Command’s role in the war is ambiguous. Watching footage of German cities obliterated by the RAF in 1943, Winston Churchill asked: “Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?” He preferred the underdog, classical heroism of 1940. But the campaign never relented. There was no memorial for Bomber Command until 2012.

I speak to Andy Andrews who was wireless operator in a Halifax, and John Bell, who was a bomb aimer in a Wellington. Andrews is 98, still standing, still driving. Bell is 100, in a wheelchair, but terrifyingly unsenile. He chews a ham sandwich, viciously, like it insulted his mother. Another vet toddles shakily over to Bell and asks him how he is getting on.

“About as well as you can be for a hundred not out”, says Bell. “Well, I am completely… buggered” says the other, with a spluttery laugh.

Bell and Andrews start telling me two quite insane stories about their bomber days.

Bell was 20 before he got in a plane. His legs were too long and prevented him from being a fighter pilot. The bombers were crewed by mostly teenage boys who all wanted to fly Spitfires.

“We lost an engine on the way to Hamburg”, he recalls. It was the end of July, 1943. They could not maintain their normal height of 20,000ft; the night air around them swam with flak. Turning back would look like cowardice, so they flew the raid at 10,000ft, underneath the other British bombers. German guns on the ground, and thick gusts of their friends’ bombs blowing above them.

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I don’t understand how he wasn’t scared, but Bell simply says he was “indifferent about his feelings”. He would not worry about what he could not control. “Courage comes over a city at night.”

Beneath his plane, Hamburg was being incinerated during Operation Gomorrah. They set the air alight. 37,000 civilians died. It sounded, said one survivor, “like an old church organ where someone is playing all the notes”. Bell was a vengeful God then, raining fire and brimstone down from the heavens.

He is a more peaceful deity now, a bit more New Testament. “All I did was bomb the targets I was given… I’m quite happy with what I did.” He returns to his sandwich. Andrews bombed Dresden. He does not feel guilty, but he is not comfortable about it either. “I think it was a mistake. It never should have happened.”

Andrews was flying over Denmark in 1945 when his plane was hit by a Junkers Ju 88. Everything was on fire; three of the crew bailed out, two were quickly dead. He woke up after the plane had exploded. “I came to, pulled a rip cord, and my life was saved.” When he tells the story he looks like he might burst into laughter at any moment.

“I ended up in a POW camp in Denmark.” The war would be over in weeks and they all knew it. No need to do any Great Escape stuff. “We were liberated by General Patton. It’s the happiest I’ve ever been to see an American.”

Andrews misses his friends. “I’m the only one left now.” All his close peers were dead, his enemies were dead, much of his family was dead. The world he grew up in had more in common with the Victorian era than the Britain he lived to see. Barely a generation back from Darwin and Dickens. But he flew in the stratosphere.

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These pilots and their machines figured in the stories we’ve been told all our lives. Velvety stories that roll between the spoken memories of relatives and old snapshots of uniformed men, between Where Eagles Dare and The Longest Day; stories that fold into the pewetery weight of a toy Spitfire in your hand. After the war Britain required myths. We were bankrupt, exhausted, confused. The myth we built around the RAF — that it was alone, that it muddled through, that it was uniquely courageous — was a form of compensation. It was the best we could do.

But these are men, not statues. Calling someone a hero is like comparing them to Casanova, or saying they’re a great dancer. From then on they are a greyhound chasing a mechanical hare. Always trying to catch up. If Bell and Andrews are heroes, then their whole existence after the war has been posthumous. Their unsurpassable status makes them less than human. All that mattered happened to them in the war.

Bell says that when the crew were trying to decide whether to turn their queasy bomber around 79 years ago, they thought: “Why not keep going to Hamburg.”

Why not? It was not about heroism — these men were fatalists. It was about fear and survival. To go on without stopping, never looking back, as the world below them cracked and collapsed. They were not destroying an enemy or defending their homes: they were fighting their own terrors. To overcome them was the only way to navigate a course towards life after the war.

When I ask them whether it was all worth it, Bell looks at me like I’ve asked him to describe the bottom of the ocean. An impossible question. “I don’t really want to go down that road.”

I cannot tell whether he means it was worth it, or it was not.

It’s one of those June days that cannot decide whether to be warm or cold, so we have both. There is blossom on the grass. All the vets have been brought in now, by light aircraft the same white colour as yachts. I am told that one of them hasn’t made it — he died yesterday afternoon.

A Spitfire sits outside a hangar. Men in deep middle age take selfies with it, as if they have met Kim Kardashian. It is a celebrity. The only Allied plane in service from the first day of the war until the last. So brilliant, so adaptable, so fast.

I speak to a selfie taker. There is a male glee in technical details. He knows the names of the parts. Words decorated with beads of numbers. Rolls-Royce Merlin 61 liquid-cooled 12-cylinder Vee piston engine, he says. Bellcrank hinge control. He smiles. Browning 0.303in (7.7mm) machine guns. He is talking in small prayers.

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A plane is an orchestra of parts, playing together, he says. The machine is the point for him. He tells me this Spitfire was bought privately for £3 million. He has spent many afternoons mulling the Spit. You can hold its parts, weigh them, pet them. Machines are more manageable than emotions. When I look at the fuselage of that plane, the metal rounded to a propellered nose, I see slightness and fragility. I look at the sky, fill it with Germans, and imagine the terror.

A tiny man is trundled towards the Spitfire. This is Bill Williams, he is one of the last people alive who flew them during the war. He is 101 years old, and he is my lift home. He contemplates the Spit. It is like seeing a snail come face-to-face with a past shell.

His war was not glamorous. Bill is not part of the myth. He missed the Battle of Britain by three years. After training he flew out to Cairo, then to Calcutta.

There he made reconnaissance missions over the Irrawaddy Delta, photographing Japanese railways lines and fuel depots. His real enemy was the weather in monsoon season, which made flying deadly, not the Japanese, whose planes were not fast enough to get near his Spitfire.

Bill remembers it so well that he can take a pencil and draw a map of Burma for me on a flyer. He sketches out hills, rivers, and weather patterns. (I checked it against Google’s satellites later. It is absurdly accurate.)

The only weapon Bill’s plane had was a revolver. “I realised it was for me, if the plane came down and it was a choice between that and being captured by the Japanese”.

In their memoirs, Spitfire pilots often compare the machine to a woman. They were slenderly experienced teenagers. She was a perfect lady. She had no vices. She was beautiful. Most of them only knew sisters, mothers, aunts. They were describing falling in love for the first time.

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“Oh the Spit was a lady in the air”, Bill says. “But a real bitch on the ground.” The undercarriage was narrow and weak. Landing it was never easy. “But it was very, very easy to fly. So light. You could literally fly it with this. With one finger.”

We have to get Bill back in the sky. He is cradled, with care and difficulty, into the cockpit of a Cessna 414. Graham, the pilot, does his checks. The plane begins to shudder and wobble.

Soon we are airborne, buffering and swaying, rapidly climbing over the East Midlands. Graham explains the controls to Bill. He is supposed to be flying three tonnes of metal in a minute. He has not flown anything bigger than a kite since the war. I am… somewhat concerned that Bill might accidentally kill all of us.

It is all in my head. Bill knows everything. He is taking us on a right turn, towards Nottingham, then levels the plane out. He checks the air speed. Altitude is perfectly maintained.

“It feels heavier than a Spitfire”, he mutters to himself in the headset. Suddenly he is attentive, composed, professional. Bill flew 1000 hours in the war. Suddenly a man who cannot walk has his wings back. I watch him closely, everyone in the plane does. Bill looks younger, visibly freshened. He is 20 again, avoiding purple-black monsoon clouds above a Burmese delta. He is not flying. He is travelling back in time.

The land below opens up. The yellow fields give way to rashes of red brick suburbs, ringed with motorways, and further out the south of England, and cities, and millions of people.

At this height everything is simplified and clarified. The problem with the myth around these men is that it makes them peaks. All the rest of us can do is dwell in their foothills. A beautiful, hobbling myth: Churchill as King Arthur, the RAF boys like Bill as his gleaming knights, Spitfire as Excalibur. “Nothing surpasses 1940” Churchill said. But how are you supposed to live if your greatest days are behind you?

All at once the stories seemed ridiculous and naive. Bill, Andy, John, and all the others were not myths or legends or heroes. They were survivors. They were skilled, they were dogged, and they were very lucky.

Up here there is only light, wind, and speed. Nothing else matters. England is streaming below us. I look at the list of questions, of the ‘what was it like back then’ variety, for Bill on my phone. They seem stupid now. There is only one thing it makes sense to ask him: how does it feel to be back?

“Oh.” He pauses, searching for the right word. “It is wonderful.”