AS Britain celebrates the 60th anniversary of victory over Germany on VE Day, the government is finally preparing to pay the last of the war debt owed to the United States.

The American forces who helped Winston Churchill to defeat the Nazis may have been “overpaid, oversexed and over here” but the money that Britain borrowed from the US government is overdue.

Gordon Brown’s Treasury officials will write cheques totalling £43.5m — equivalent to 94p for every adult — over the next few months in final settlement of a £1 billion loan taken out in 1945 and worth more than £50 billion today.

It should have been repaid by 1999 but governments deferred annual payments six times, mostly in the hard-up 1970s. Brown is committed to pay it off by 2006.

Meanwhile, surviving American warplanes such as the Mustang and Thunderbolt, will join flypasts today as hundreds of thousands of people commemorate VE Day by attending drumhead services, dining on wartime “rations” at street parties or dancing to “hits from the blitz”.

The Prince of Wales, accompanied by the Duchess of Cornwall, will lay a wreath at the Cenotaph this morning to launch the official celebrations.

The Queen is travelling to Guernsey tomorrow to join in the Channel Islands’ 60th anniversary of liberation from German occupation.

This weekend an RAF Hurricane that lay as a “pile of junk” in a compound in India for more than 50 years is taking to the air again. It is the only Hurricane that fought in the battle of Britain which is now airborne.

Its cockpit was spotted by Peter Vacher, a printer and publisher, on a visit to a Hindu university at Benares, in the northeast of India, in 1982. The plane had been there since 1947 after being given to the university for use by its engineering students.

Vacher eventually bought the plane for £25,000 in 2001 and shipped it to Britain. Four years and 32,000 hours of restoration work later, it is ready for its public debut.

Vacher, 62, from Abingdon, Oxfordshire, who has written a book, Hurricane R4118, about the plane’s history, to be published tomorrow by Grub Street, said: “It’s been a labour of love; 60% of the original plane is still there.”

Wing Commander Bob Foster, 84, from Hastings, East Sussex, who was responsible for three of the plane’s five “kills” of Nazi aircraft in the battle of Britain, will be at the Imperial War Museum’s aerodrome at Duxford, Cambridgeshire, today to see the plane fly. “It is great to see it back in the air for VE Day,” he said. “It is such a special occasion.”

Other veterans believe there should be no more commemorations. Brigadier James Hill, 94, from Chichester, West Sussex, the highest ranking survivor from the war, said: “I think the time has come to call it a day.”

Major-General Peter Martin, 85, from Lymington, Hampshire, who finished the war as a major and is president of the Normandy Veterans’ Association, said: “Our members will still want to visit the beaches and cemeteries of Normandy, but if I never hear of VE Day again I shall not worry.”

Safety regulations and political correctness are also taking their toll. Sally B, an American Flying Fortress bomber due to fly over Southampton today, has been grounded because a European Union directive makes it too expensive to insure; and veterans have been barred from marching on the road in Stourbridge, West Midlands, because it is deemed too dangerous. They have been told to “walk smartly” on the pavement.

The Imperial War Museum is setting up an “adopt a veteran” scheme in which old soldiers go into schools to talk to pupils.George Batts, 79, a D-Day veteran from Maidstone, Kent, said: “It is a good idea to do this before it is too late.

“As for VE Day, I spent the original one on embarkation leave ready to go to the Far East for what was to have been the invasion of Japanese-occupied Malaya. There was not much to celebrate.”

BLAIR BACKS PLANS FOR SLAVERY MEMORIAL DAY

TONY BLAIR has given his personal backing to a memorial day acknowledging Britain’s role in the slave trade, writes Dipesh Gadher.

The prime minister believes the “suffering of so many people” from Africa — at least 10m and possibly many more — ought to be recognised in 2007, the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Britain.

“Faith groups and other organisations are already looking to mark this bicentenary, to explain its legacy and to highlight campaigns against injustice and poverty in our world today,” he told the New Nation newspaper in a pre-election interview last week. “I want the government to support this.”

Blair’s comments follow a sustained campaign by the black newspaper for a national Slavery Memorial Day similar to Holocaust Memorial Day which, this year, marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. It was unclear whether the prime minister backs an annual or a one-off event.

Between 1450 and the early 19th century, Britain was a leading slave trader, shipping more than 300,000 Africans a year to the Americas at one stage. Blair has ruled out financial reparation.

The trade was abolished in 1807 and slavery was banned throughout the British empire in 1834.

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