IN PICTURES: ‘Hero’s welcome’ for 101-year-old US wartime flyer on historic return to former airbase near Wellingborough

His Flying Fortress would be shot down over occupied Europe and he would parachute to safety, only to be incarcerated as a prisoner of war in Poland.

Later, half-starved, he would be forced on a notorious 800-mile ‘Death March’ into the heart of Germany.

His life teetering on the brink, what must the odds have been against the young flyer returning to Podington more than 80 years after that fateful flight had departed?

Yet Lester Schrenk survived those ordeals and last Saturday (October 11), as he approaches his 102nd birthday, he received a hero’s welcome back at his old airbase, long since transformed into Europe’s premier drag racing venue, Santa Pod Raceway.

As cars and motorcycles noisily enjoyed a public track day on the dragstrip, laid over the runway from which he had taken off, Mr Schrenk was greeted in the venue’s hospitality centre by an enthusiastic band of World War Two historians and experts, many arriving in a fleet of WW2-vintage Jeeps and troop carriers.

An exhibition of uniforms, equipment, artefacts, artworks and memorabilia was displayed.

Some aircraft wreckage on show had recently been unearthed, literally, from nearby woodland.

After meeting his admirers, speaking a few words and signing autographs, the agile centenarian was treated to a passenger ride down the dragstrip in one of Santa Pod’s potent resident Ford Mustangs and then convoyed at the head of the vintage fleet to visit more distant parts of the old airfield, where some original wartime buildings remain intact.

Before Mr Schrenk’s homeward flight to Minnesota, Santa Pod was the penultimate stop on a busy European tour which even included the site of his prison camp, Stalag Luft IV.

On leaving the racetrack, one poignant local journey remained, to Northampton to glimpse the house where once had lived the British girlfriend he never saw or heard from again.