In 1935 HG Wells wrote the "
shape of things to come", where the world is saved from the horrors of post-war destruction by a group of aviators calling themselves "wings over the world".
A boy, who read that book in London in 1935, saw the film version in 1937 and was enthralled.
He was very an adult, when the war came, but that didn't matter to him, nor to an increasingly desperate Britain. The war came hard, just as it did in the book. But HG Wells did not imagine nuclear bombs or death camps, and so the boy became a pilot, found that there were to be no wings over the world and that the shocked post-war world was a very cold place indeed.