BY RIGHTS, the men of 5th Battalion The Kings Regiment should have put their weapons down and waited for the formal end of the Second World War in Europe.

Hitler was dead, Berlin had fallen and a ceasefire had been called pending the formal act of surrender. There were just hours to go.

But 5th Kings were ordinary soldiers on an extraordinary mission. The regiment, which recruited mainly in Liverpool, was part of the Target Force, T-Force, devised back in London to seize as many German war secrets, and the men behind them, as they could.

And with an eye on the likely shape of post-war Europe, they had also been told to keep one step ahead of the Russians. Even before the twitching corpse of the Third Reich had breathed its last, the first manoeuvres of the Cold War were under way.

For 5th Kings and T-Force, it meant they had to go on. Thirty or so miles ahead lay the strategic German port of Kiel.

If the Russians got to Kiel first, they could have taken the all-important Kiel Canal linking the Baltic to the North Sea and also “liberated” Denmark.

The Baltic would have become Russia’s private water, and they would have had direct access to the North Sea. It could not be allowed to happen: the Kingsmen moved on.

What followed was one of the greatest acts of bluff in the whole war. There were about 350 men in T-Force, drawn from two companies of Kingsmen and the Royal Marines of 30 Assault Unit, one of the precursor units of T-Force.

In Kiel there were around 12,000 armed German soldiers. They had been told to stop fighting – but that was a far cry in their eyes from being told to surrender.

Bob Brighouse remembers it well. The former butcher from Ormskirk had gone in with the Kings on the D-Day landings, fought his way across France, been transferred from one regiment to another and eventually found himself back with the Kings.

“We passed straight through our front line, and then their front line,” he recalls. “They were amazed. We just carried straight on and the first thing we noticed was the refugees coming out of the camps. Their legs were only as thick as our wrists. We couldn’t stop, but we threw them chocolate. Maybe we shouldn’t have done that.”

With only token fire from the Germans, they drove right up the naval base at Kiel.