A FARMER whose distinguished military career brought him face to face with a notorious concentration camp warder has died aged 95.

Retired Wing Commander Bill Malins was 23 when he joined the air force in 1938 and in 1940 was posted to Lille as a low level reconnaissance pilot.

In 1940 he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross following a daring reconnaissance mission in Belgium.

He also trained for a defence operation to drop mustard gas on the UK’s beaches if the Germans invaded. And he was one of the first officers to set foot on Sicilian soil when the Allies invaded in 1943.

The same year, while working at London’s Air Ministry, he survived a V-1 ‘doodlebug’ bomb explosion in The Strand, which killed about 80 people.

During the closing stages of the war, Mr Malins was there when Allied troops crossed the Rhine in 1945.

His squadron was one of the first inside the gates of Belsen, Germany, when the concentration camp was liberated.

In his memoirs Coming In To Land, he wrote: “It justified every single day that I had spent fighting in the war.”

He visited the prison where SS and Gestapo guards were held, including Irma Grese, dubbed the Blonde Beast of Belsen, and asked her how long she had been in the SS.

He retired from service in 1952 and went back to the family farm, Lords Farm, off Lords Lane, Bicester, expanding it from production of 40,000 litres of milk a year to two million today.

He leaves four children, 11 grand- children and two great-grandsons. His funeral will take place on Monday at St Edburg’s Church, Bicester.