“THAT was an incredible moment,” says Wellington-based author Stephen Harris, of finding a “pot of gold” while researching for his book, Under a Bomber’s Moon.

It came in the form of a 60-year-old BBC recording of wartime broadcasts that by chance included an account by pilot Eric Whitney of the night he and navigator Colwyn Jones, Stephen’s great-uncle, ditched their plane in the English Channel.

The mid-air drama is one of many in Harris’s book, published this month, the result of his quest for answers about his ancestor’s World War II experiences.

As a former journalist in both newspaper and radio, who has worked for Radio Deutsche Welle in Germany and Radio New Zealand, Stephen knew the chances of finding such a recording were a million to one.

“I had absolutely no idea that a CD I had bought would contain what it did. I just bought it because it seemed interesting, and then on track eight, there was this account,” he says. “That was an incredible moment.

“I think luck plays a certain role in being able to put together a story like this so long after the events happened.

“But at the same time, you need to persevere to give luck a good chance.”

He persevered by making three visits to the town of Penzlin where Colwyn’s plane finally went down for the last time during an air raid on Berlin, and eventually found someone who remembered the event.

Under a Bomber’s Moon follows three men’s journeys – Colwyn Jones, German Luftwaffe pilot Otto Fries, and Stephen’s own journey as he sifts through history.

Also a journalist, Stephen’s great-uncle kept a detailed diary and sent letters home during his time in the Royal New Zealand Air Force before he was shot down and killed at the age of 35.

The diaries and letters proved to be an extremely valuable resource. Stephen says his great-uncle “obviously realised the value of rigorous historical research on the one hand but also a ripping yarn on the other”.

While working in Berlin in 2007, Stephen began to spend his evenings and weekends buried in the archives of the RAF museum in London, and visited all of Colwyn’s targets and the remaining RAF airbases from where he flew operations for two years.

Stephen stepped out of his job at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade for a year, and his wife, Jocelyn, stepped into it so he could work full-time on the book.

“I’m still surprised that I was able to do it within a year,” he says.

One of his most memorable research trips was to a cemetery in Hamburg which was so big, it had its own bus service.

On one side of the road lies a Commonwealth war cemetery for airmen who died bombing Hamburg, while on the other stands a memorial to 37,000 unidentified victims of one night’s bombing of Hamburg.

“You have this odd juxtaposition of the perpetrators and the victims,” Stephen says.

Having lived and worked in Germany for seven years, Stephen was no stranger to the country, and found a rich resource in the German side of the war.

The struggle to find his great-uncle’s crew members in a condition to be interviewed led him to German fighter pilot Otto Fries, who was nearing the end of his life but still vividly remembered the events of the war.

After two dozen interviews, Otto reflected on his part in the war and also gave Stephen an insight into the effect it had on Germany as a country and how its people still suffer today.

He also interviewed another German pilot, Paul Zorner, and experienced a moment of horror: “I wanted to talk to this person, but at the same time I wondered whether this was the person who might have killed one of my family members.

“So there is an amazing kind of intimacy about this process across the generations. You come across this person who has been in mortal combat with somebody that you know about.”

It turned out that Zorner wasn’t the man who had shot down Colwyn, but at the Wellington launch of the book, Stephen met somebody whose uncle had been shot down by Zorner.

Stephen says the main purpose of his book is to get people talking about the contribution New Zealanders – especially bomber command – made to the war, and about the “6000 New Zealanders who served in bomber command made to a victory over a Nazi regime that wanted to exploit all of Europe and to destroy millions of people who they thought did not deserve to live there”.

Since finishing his book, Stephen has established a website containing material not included in the book, with a message board for people to tell their own stories.

When asked what his great uncle would think about the book, Stephen says: “I hope he would be very proud that somebody had reconstructed the story of big events that he took part in… I think also that he was very solicitous of his mother, in particular, but his sisters as well, of their feelings.

“I think he would have felt that a story about his contribution to the war would have been some return on their mourning and the pride that they had in him.”