For the majority of World War II, Geoffrey Rothwell dropped Allied troops behind enemy lines on missions for which the career pilot survival rate was well below 50 per cent.
His death in Auckland in November last year, aged 97, represented the passing of one of the last remaining British WWII special duties pilots.
While his military career was highly decorated, including France's highest order of merit - the Legion of Honour - his life is marked by a continual series of dangerous environments, including two decades managing a rubber plantation in Malaya amid rebel insurgencies, before immigrating to New Zealand in 1968.
But what distinguished Rothwell's life was the duration and number of his Royal Air Force Special Duties WWII missions.
Squadron Commander Rothwell flew 71 missions over France, Germany, Netherlands, and Scandinavia as part of the covert Special Duties 138 Squadron.
Operational airmen of RAF Bomber Command had a 60 per cent rate of being killed, wounded or taken prisoner in service - and within that special duties flights was higher.
Their job was to drop Allied secret agents, by cover of night, behind enemy lines.
The most traumatic ordeal of Rothewell's risk-filled service came on September 8, 1944, when on the return leg of a mission dropping two agents in the Alkmaar region of northern Netherlands, his Stirling plane hit an unknown object, thought to possibly be a weather balloon cable.
One of four engines on the plane was ripped off in the collision as Rothwell and his crew crossed the Dutch coast, and, with the plane at too low altitude to bail out, they crash landed on Texel Island.
Three of Rothwell's crew were killed in the crash, and Rothwell was launched through the cockpit canopy, lying unconscious and badly injured.
While the surviving but injured crew regrouped on Texel Island, German soldiers who had witnessed the crash from the Dutch mainland eventually arrived, apprehended them and Rothwell spent the last few months of the war in the Stalag Luft I German prisoner of war camp on the Baltic coast.
Yet, on May 2, 1945 Rothwell and his crew were liberated from the camp by the Russians and repatriated to England by the US Air Force.
In April 2016, Rothwell was awarded the Legion of Honour, France's highest military order for his efforts opposing the occupying Germans in that country.
He was also twice awarded the UK Royal Air Force Distinguished Flying Cross.
His wife Gabrielle Rothwell said Geoff's mindset during his flights had to be guided by optimism and focus - it would have been hard to operate otherwise.
"There was no such thing as 'are we going to succeed? Will we won't we?' He was just positive, we are going to get to our target, we are going to drop our agents and then we are going to high-tail it off home," Gabrielle said.
"Some of the most dangerous countries were Norway, which of course was extremely mountainous. He had several near misses on operations like that.
"Postwar they became a romantic part of the war, because there was something, glorious isn't the word, but there was something romantic about flying off in moonlight, leaving a highly secret airfield in England.
"Obviously they had agents on-board. There was the feeling of 'will we be able to get there without being shot down?'"
Born in Manchester in 1920, Rothwell entered the Royal Air Force as an 18-year-old in 1939, and begun his Royal Air Force service as a bomber in Wellington aeroplanes.
He continued to serve in the RAF following the war, flying transports in the Middle East, and sat as a member on a War Crimes Tribunal.
Leaving the RAF in October 1950, Rothwell managed a rubber plantation in Malaya from 1951 to during the entirety of the Malayan Emergency - a period in which he was shot at by communist rebels.
In 1968 he immigrated to New Zealand where he bought land in the Bay of Islands, running a bookshop and had a part share in motel. He moved to Auckland in 2009.
Geoffrey Rothwell was first married in 1945, but it ended three years later in divorce.
He then married Judy Walters in 1959, and after her death in 2000 married Gabrielle Rothwell in 2002 who wrote a book on his life, The Man with Nine Lives.
He is survived by a daughter from his first marriage, an adopted son and four stepchildren. He died November 5, 2017.
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