The Allies have already recaptured parts of Holland, but there are still about 200,000 Germans holding out in the north of the country, including in the cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam. General Eisenhower has a dilemma the manpower needed to defeat the German army in Holland will delay the Allied victory. "[The] most rapid means of ensuring liberation and restoration of Holland may well be the rapid completion of our main operations," he wrote. This is no comfort to the thousands of Dutch who are starving. British intelligence has learned that there has not been a live birth in occupied Holland for nine months due to the malnutrition of the mothers. In a desperate search for firewood, the citizens of Amsterdam have cut down all the city"s trees, removed the sleepers from under the tramlines and stolen floorboards and bookshelves from the empty houses of deported Jews and labourers.

General Eisenhower has made sure the Allies are prepared for an airdrop of food stores are ready to feed a million people every 24 hours, and the RAF and USAAF are well rehea.r.s.ed. What is needed is a safeguard from the Germans that their planes won"t be attacked as they carry out the food drop. Yesterday, in a small school called St Josef"s in the village of Achterveld just inside Allied lines, the Allied representatives, led by Major-General Sir Francis de Guingand, met with the German delegation, led by Ernst Schwebel "one of the most revolting men I have ever seen," de Guingand wrote later. At the meeting the Germans agreed to the creation of safe air zones where Allied planes could fly without being attacked.

What has been dubbed Operation Manna is under way. Two RAF Lancasters are now lifting off from their base in Lincolnshire with eight specially built panniers in their bomb bays, containing tea, sugar, dried eggs, tinned meat and chocolate. The crews in the air and those getting ready to fly are apprehensive because the Germans have so far only given a verbal agreement to safe air zones. Flight Sergeant Bill Porter of 115 Squadron recalled, "As we crossed the Dutch coast on 29th April we could see the German gunners standing by their guns, but the barrels were horizontal."

Lancaster pilot Robert Wannop kept a war journal and recalled his first flight, just 500 feet off the ground. "Children ran out of school waving excitedly one old man stopped at a crossroads and shook his umbrella... n.o.body spoke in the aircraft. It wasn"t the time for words. My vision grew a little misty. Perhaps it was the rain on the Perspex, perhaps it wasn"t. One building was painted with huge white letters "THANK YOU RAF". Those brave people who had so often risked their lives to save an RAF aircrew and return him safely to England. Who had spied for us and done countless other deeds that may never be revealed. They were thanking us for a little food. I felt very humble."

Two days after the Yalta Conference, on 13th February, Robert Wannop had been part of a ma.s.sive RAF and USAAF bombing raid on the historic city of Dresden. The orders given to him and other RAF pilots were to "hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front... and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do". Wannop wrote a few days later, "Above it all we sat sombre and impa.s.sive, each man concentrating on the job in hand. The whole city was ablaze from end to end. It was like looking at a sea of liquid flames, inspiring in its intensity. It was so bright at bombing height that we could easily have read a newspaper." The firestorm killed at least 25,000 people. It melted the road surfaces and burned people to cinders.

At RAF Witchford the Lancaster crews of 115 Squadron are being briefed about their mission. It is a relief for them to be dropping food rather than bombs.

Eighteen-year-old Dutch girl Arie de Jong wrote later, "There are no words to describe the emotions experienced on that Sunday afternoon. More than 300 four-engined Lancasters, flying exceptionally low, suddenly filled the horizon. I saw [one] aircraft tacking between church steeples..."

At the end of April and the beginning of May, hundreds of tonnes of food will be dropped over Holland. Some crews tie home made parachutes to the food parcels sent from their families at home and drop them to the starving people below. In among one consignment containing bags of flour and chocolate an airman left a note: "To the Dutch people.

"Don"t worry about the war with Germany. It is nearly over. These trips for us are a change from bombing. We will often be bringing new food supplies. Keep your chins up. All the best.

"An RAF man."

A few Dutch civilians wear what the USAAF have nicknamed "happiness hats" brightly coloured headgear made from the parachute silk from downed Allied airmen; they are so bright they can be seen by the low-flying aircraft. The parachutes had been hidden but now are being worn proudly as a sign that they had helped the Allied cause. The crew of one USAAF bomber were flashed by a woman wearing a "happiness skirt" and no underwear.

8.15am.

Lieutenant Claus Sellier is standing in the lobby of the Hotel Gasthaus Zum Brau, which until yesterday was the temporary German army headquarters for the region. He is now dressed in the full uniform of a member of the 79th Mountain Artillery Regiment. On his chest are medals that he won fighting the Russians in Hungary. Claus looks over the receptionist"s desk and sees that the package he brought yesterday is still lying on the floor, unopened. Claus wonders if he should go round and open the package and check whether it contains what he a.s.sumes a request for urgent supplies from his commanding officer. Instead he gives it a kick, then makes the sign of the cross over it. He"s done all he can to complete the first part of the mission although Claus can see that no one here is interested. In his room is the second package that must be delivered soon.

About 8.30am/9.30am UK time.

In a large detached house named Burleigh, in a village outside Coventry, the telephone is ringing. Mrs Clara Milburn answers; it"s her friend Mrs Greenslade.

"Aren"t you excited?" she begins and explains that she"s seen a story in yesterday"s Daily Telegraph that POWs from Oflag VII-B have been liberated. Clara Milburn"s son Alan has been a prisoner in Germany since Dunkirk. Mrs Greenslade means well, but Alan is in Stalag VII-B not Oflag VII-B.

Alan has written regularly over the years; the last letter Clara and her husband Jack received was on 23rd March it had taken over two months to reach them. Alan wrote about his working party doing gardening in the local town and how cold the weather"s been "the old ears and fingers get nipped first thing". Seven other men from the 7th Battalion Royal Warwickshire Regiment were captured with him; three have been moved to other camps.

Last Wednesday a young man named Jack Mercer came to see the Milburns. He had been in Stalag VII-B with Alan up until 18 months ago, but then had been moved to another camp by the Germans. Jack"s camp was liberated by the Americans and he"d got home five days ago. Clara and her husband appreciated the young man"s visit, especially as he"d cycled 60 miles from Stoke to see them.

Later today Clara will get out an old exercise book on the first page of which she has written "Burleigh in Wartime", and she will write up the latest war news: "... Berlin is being hammered street by street and house by house. Thousands of Germans are killed each day and their sufferings must be ghastly, but how unnecessarily they have made others suffer and are not sorry." Clara has kept this diary since the day Alan was called up in 1939.

Clara is not alone in keeping a diary; hundreds of others around the country are doing the same thing, feeling that they want a record of these momentous days. Many, like Clara, are taking cuttings from newspapers to stick alongside their diary entries.

At Stalag VII-A at Moosburg, British Major Elliott Viney has finished his breakfast and is watching two USAAF P-51 Mustangs fly low over the camp. They perform a victory roll and the men clap and cheer like mad. They can hear the sound of gunfire nearby. They know that liberation is close at hand.

Also watching and cheering the planes is a former P-51 pilot 24-year-old Flight Lieutenant Alexander Jefferson is enjoying his first evening of freedom for eight months. In August 1944 Jefferson was shot down just outside Toulon while attacking a radar installation, and he was captured and taken first to a POW camp in Poland, and then, as the Russians advanced, moved with thousands of others to Moosburg.

Alexander Jefferson is one of the USAAF"s first black pilots. When the US entered the war in December 1941, black people were not allowed to fly planes. In 1943 Jefferson became part of the Tuskegee Inst.i.tute Experiment, which was set up to determine if black people could, in fact, be pilots. Shortly after, he was a.s.signed to the 332nd "Red Tail" Fighter group; the Germans soon came to respect these "Schwarze Vogelmenschen" or "Black Birdmen" as skilled bomber escorts.

Jefferson will eventually sail home on the liner Queen Mary two months after being liberated. Years later he recalled the welcome he received: "Having been treated in n.a.z.i capture like every other Allied officer, I walked down the gangplank towards a white US army sergeant on the dock, who informed us "Whites to the right, n.i.g.g.e.rs to the left.""

About 9.00am/10.00am UK time.

Medical student Michael Hargrave is waiting on the runway at Down Ampney aerodrome by the Dakota transport plane that"s due to take him and other volunteers to Germany to help the sick at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Overnight snow has been brushed from the wings by the ground crew, the student"s luggage is on board and Hargrave is drying his wet gloves on the tail of the plane.

In central Berlin there"s a sudden lull in the sound of artillery fire. Several Hitler Youth runners arrive in Boldt and von Loringhoven"s office in the upper bunker to report that the Russians are advancing with tanks and infantry towards the Reich Chancellery buildings. For days Boldt and von Loringhoven have been trying to work out how they can get themselves sent out on a combat mission. They have decided that this is their best hope of survival. It is clear that time is running out. Boldt feels sick with tension. The silence of the guns unnerves him.

On the outskirts of Berlin, Yelena Rzhevskaya is attempting to interrogate a "tongue" as the Russians call their informants a 15-year-old Hitler Youth with "bloodshot eyes and cracked lips". Rzhevskaya is with the Russian 3rd Shock Army"s SMERSH intelligence detachment. She"s a German speaker working as an intelligence interpreter. The detachment has just received instructions to make their way to the government district and head for the Reich Chancellery. Their orders are to take Hitler alive, but Rzhevskaya is confused and frustrated as information is "scarce and self-contradictory and unreliable". They aren"t even sure that Hitler is in Berlin. The "tongue" isn"t talking and Rzhevskaya concludes that he knows nothing: "He is sitting here looking around but not understanding anything. Just a boy."

Claus Sellier and his fellow Mountain Artillery lieutenant Fritz have met for breakfast at the Hotel Gasthaus Zum Brau, the onetime regional army headquarters. They are enjoying hot coffee and fresh rolls, but their mood is sombre. Claus is thinking of his three best friends at school the group of them had been nicknamed the Four Musketeers. Now the others are dead two died in Russia, one was shot down over the Atlantic.

"What do you think we should do now?" he says to Fritz.

"We"ll go to Traunstein and deliver the last package," Fritz replies, then adds bitterly, "Do you think Hitler knows that his generals have jumped ship? What are we going to tell Hitler if he calls here? "Yes, Sir, Mein Fuhrer Hitler. No, sir, Mein Fuhrer! Everybody at your headquarters has gone. It"s over, sir! You should go too!""

The two men laugh, and then head to their rooms to pack.

"S-3 to all battalions. Upon capture of Dachau, post airtight guard and allow no one to enter or leave."

9.15am.

Corporal Bert Ruffle of the Rifle Brigade has been a POW since he was captured at Dunkirk on 26th May 1940. He"s a prisoner in Stalag IV-C, an all-British camp near Wistritz in the Sudetenland, and like hundreds of others, Ruffle is forced to work constructing the Sudentenlandische-Treibstoff-Werke an oil refinery. The refinery has taken four years to build and is almost ready to start production. Ruffle never works very hard as he doesn"t see why he should aid the German war effort.

Normally they"re woken up by a guard bursting into their hut at 4am, but today Ruffle and his friend Frank Talbot of the Queen Victoria Rifles have a more pleasant job. They have been selected to go to the nearby town of Brux to collect some building material for one of the foremen at the refinery. From the back of their lorry, they can see that the town has been bombed heavily by the Allies.

Ruffle is glad of any respite from the tough oil refinery work. Over the past few weeks their food ration has dropped a loaf of bread a day now has to feed eight men rather than six. Last weekend was his 35th birthday and to mark the occasion he made himself a cake out of flour, burned barley "coffee" grounds, potatoes and a small amount of sugar. "You never saw such a conglomeration in all your life but we ate it," Ruffle wrote in the diary he"s been keeping since January.

Like many of the other POWs, Ruffle is starting to get dizzy spells and is seeing spots in front of his eyes. Their health suffered in the numerous marches they were forced to take as the Germans moved them away from the advancing Russians; one trek in the January snow and mud lasted over six weeks. On the march Ruffle witnessed many scenes of brutality a British POW killed for trying to grab a potato from the side of the road; Russian prisoners shot one by one as they marched.

Ruffle wrote that evening, "What would happen was a guard would s.n.a.t.c.h a prisoner"s hat and then throw it away. The prisoner was told to fetch it and, as he left the column to retrieve it, he was shot. It was nothing for a guard to give a prisoner a push and then shoot him as he staggered. All told, there must have been about hundred Russians who would not see Russia again."

9.22am.

Twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Felix L. Sparks is on an important mission. The infantry and tanks of his regiment the US 157th Infantry of the 45th Infantry Division have been given the task of taking part in the capture of Munich, the capital of Bavaria and the home of n.a.z.ism, and then to push on to destroy Hitler"s mountain residence the Berghof, outside Berchtesgaden. They have been making good progress, covering on average 50 miles a day, and they"re now only 30 miles from Munich.

Sparks" tanks are full of fuel, German opposition is light (little more than a few roadblocks), so Sparks is confident that the city will soon fall.

A message is radioed to his jeep from headquarters. "S-3 to all battalions. Upon capture of Dachau, post airtight guard and allow no one to enter or leave."

Sparks hears it with fury. Capturing and taking over a concentration camp is going to slow him down but he knows he has no choice. Yesterday he and other commanders were told that Dachau would be in their zone of action the next day, and that it was a "politically sensitive area". This morning, Sparks divided his 56 tanks into two units and told them to go either side of the concentration camp and then to proceed to the town of Dachau, and reach Munich by nightfall.

On 10th July 1943, Sparks landed with the 157th Infantry as part of the Allied invasion of Sicily. It is now day 511 of their long, hard campaign. They fought through Italy to Rome; then sailed to the South of France, fighting across the Alps and into Germany. Six days ago they were in Nuremberg, where in a battle by the opera house, Sparks was forced to abandon his jeep, which had in it letters from his wife Mary and photographs of his year-old son Kirk. Now the only pictures he has of them are stuck on the b.u.t.t of his Colt .45 revolver.

"I was looking for pictures, not prisoners..."

9.30am.

The bodies of Mussolini and his girlfriend Clara Petacci are hanging upside down from meat hooks outside a petrol station on a corner of the Milan square where they had been dumped earlier. As the square filled up, it was hard to prevent the crowd from trampling the bodies, so in an attempt to calm the onlookers, the bodies were strung up. Their names are on placards pinned to their feet.

Milton Bracker, a reporter for the New York Times, is pushed towards the bodies by the ecstatic Milanese, into what he would call later "the circle of death". The crowd think Bracker"s driver, Private Kenneth Koplin, is an American colonel on an official mission to see the bodies, and push him from his jeep to take a close look. Koplin feels sick and can"t wait to get away.

In the crowd, taking one of his last photographs of the 600-day Allied war in Italy is a young second lieutenant working for the British Army Film and Photo Unit. Twenty-four-year-old Alan Whicker has seen plenty of fighting including the Allied amphibious landings at Anzio in January 1944 and the liberation of Rome the following June (where he attended a press conference with Pope Pius XII where US photographers were shouting "Hold it, Pope!").

On 25th April he and his team of cameramen arrived in Milan, ahead of the advancing Americans, Whicker having swapped his jeep for a large Fiat limousine. They were told by Italian partisans that the SS holding out in the city would only surrender to an Allied soldier. Whicker wrote later, "I was looking for pictures, not prisoners, but allowed myself to be led towards the enemy stronghold." There, an SS general, clearly disappointed at Whicker"s low rank, nevertheless clicked his heels and handed over his revolver.

Now, four days later, Whicker is in front of the Milan petrol station taking pictures as the mob spit and scream at the bodies of Mussolini and Clara Petacci. He too is appalled at the scene. "It was not, at that moment, a very splendid victory," he wrote later.

Alan Whicker"s day is not yet over. He has a traitor to catch.

The Italy section of the British Army Film and Photo Unit took over 200,000 still pictures during the Italian campaign, and over half a million feet of film. It came at a high price. Eight of the 40 officer and sergeant cameramen were killed and 13 seriously wounded.

10.00am.

A Hitler Youth runner appears in von Loringhoven and Boldt"s office in the upper bunker to report that the Russian tanks are now about 500 metres from the Reich Chancellery.

In Padua, New Zealand senior intelligence officer Geoffrey c.o.x is watching a Sherman tank roar up to his command post. On the front is John Shirley, one of the finest radio experts in the division.

John Shirley has proved to be invaluable to Geoffrey c.o.x"s intelligence team. It"s clear from the interrogations of German prisoners that they have considerable knowledge of Allied troop movements, and Shirley has helped establish that they"ve been using First World War techniques to eavesdrop. The Germans have been laying their own telephone lines alongside the Allies", and so have picked up, thanks to the physics of induction, what was being said.

In Padua, through interrogations and examining captured files, it was also discovered that during the famous battle of Monte Ca.s.sino in 1944, the Germans had employed another ingenious method to get information. At one point Allied telephone cables had been laid along a railway embankment that ran towards German positions. The rails worked as reliable conductors, so all the Germans had to do was attach listening equipment to them to discover vital intelligence.

Further back on the Sherman tank, holding white flags in one hand and holding on with the other, are four German officers. c.o.x orders the men to be put in a disused office building with other German POWs. Prisoners are becoming a real problem; that morning the Italian partisans captured 5,000, and the Allies can"t spare men to guard them.

c.o.x arrives to speak to the four officers and arrange for their transfer south. They give him the n.a.z.i salute. One of them, a general, asks if he can take with him a basket filled with bottles of cognac. But c.o.x is in no mood to be helpful, having heard the general"s aide de camp and other officers making comments about their Maori guard, calling him a "Neger".

c.o.x picks up the basket of cognac and hands it over instead to the guard.

Like many Allied soldiers, Geoffrey c.o.x"s att.i.tude to the Germans has hardened since the publication a few days ago of photographs from Bergen-Belsen in the forces" newspaper Union Jack. He has seen death both as a correspondent and as a soldier, but those pictures shocked him and his men. c.o.x wrote later, "To the troops who saw them now, as they jolted forward in the back of their three-tonners... they were one more stimulus to an aggressiveness that was already a flood tide."

Two days ago, c.o.x ripped out a picture of Belsen from Union Jack and gave it to his interrogator Mickey Heyden.

"Stick this up in your truck when you"re interrogating and see what they say about it..."

"I will but I know in advance what they will say "Grauelpropaganda" [atrocity propaganda]."

A short while later, c.o.x went to see several hundred captured German soldiers. Taken with them were four Russian women, who the Germans claimed were hospital workers, but c.o.x could see that was a lie. All the women were crying; one was staring at the Germans with total hatred. A Kiwi guard offered them some chocolate cake, but they were too frightened to take it.

As he watched them, a prisoner in his late thirties came up to c.o.x and said he was a lecturer in English from Hanover. c.o.x was too tired to fully interrogate the officer, so he decided to see where the man"s sympathies lay.

"I have always loved England," the German said. "I have made this war with a very heavy heart. Many Germans have made this war with a heavy heart."

c.o.x showed him the pictures of Belsen, saying, "Enough Germans had light enough hearts to accomplish this."

The man looked at the pictures but was clearly unconvinced. c.o.x pointed out the Russian women.

"Do you feel no shame about that sort of thing? Does it not seem evil to you to take girls like that and drag them from their homes to be used as slaves?"

"It is ugly. But it is one of those things which come from war." Then the German officer said, "May I ask you one question? What will happen to us?"

The way the captured soldiers looked at the women had enraged c.o.x, and he thought of all the atrocities he"d seen in Italy, including just this past Sunday the bodies of men who"d been dragged out of ma.s.s, put up against the church wall and shot.

"You will be handed over to the Russians to rebuild some of what you have destroyed," c.o.x lied. The man looked terrified, and as c.o.x walked away he heard the prisoners start whispering, "...den Russen ubergeben!" and he took some satisfaction that he"d scared them.