Little trooper Alfred, 6, smashes 100 MILE challenge for hero WW2 soldiers

Little Alfred Mawson walks with giants after completing the world's largest one-day commemorative march.

The six-year-old promised to spend his summer walking, running and swimming 100-miles in honour of veterans after a "life changing" experience.

And today the little trooper will return to school a hero after finishing The Airborne Wandeltocht, an annual march in remembrance of those who fought and fell during the Battle of Arnhem.

Crossing the line alongside him in Oosterbeek, Holland, were Second World War warriors Don Turrell, 100, and Ivan Staines, who turns 99 tomorrow.

Alfred of Ruskington, Lincolnshire, whose father Danny, 38, served for 13-years in the British Army as a paratrooper, set out to raise a modest £250 for the Taxi Charity for Military Veterans which takes old soldiers to commemorative events in Britain and Europe.

He was inspired after visiting the D-Day beaches in Normandy with his family earlier this year and meeting Second World War veterans for the first time.

He promised to spend his summer holiday fundraising for them and so far his heroics have raised more than £4,000.

Wearing the famous maroon beret of his father's airborne infantry regiment, and with his arms held jubilantly aloft as he crossed the finishing line, Alfred said: "It was a very special day with my friends. I wanted to raise money to say thank you for what they did during the war. I am so glad they were with me at the finish line."

The extraordinary picture shows the significance of remembrance spanning generations, with the youngest embraced by the greatest.

Alfred was one of the youngest of 40,000 participants in the 78th annual march and completed it with his proud mum Grace, 38, who served as a Combat Medical Technician with the Royal Army Medical Corps.

She said: "Alfred is old beyond his years and even at six-years-old appreciates the sacrifices veterans made. In his mind they are all heroes and he is absolutely right."

Alfred was watched by Geoff Roberts, 100, who took part in the decisive 1944 battle and is one of the last men standing from the pivotal defining Second World War clash.

He was just 19 and a private in the 7th Battalion King's Own Scottish Borderers sent as part of a crack team sent to help to liberate Nazi-occupied Holland.

The Battle of Arnhem, which took place between September 17-26 1944, was a failure, as the Allies did not secure a bridge over the Rhine. But the Dutch have never forgotten the part the British played in ultimately securing freedom.

During the bloody battle 35,000 Allies valiantly fought the Germans for nine days in some of the fiercest fighting of the war. More than 8,000 British soldiers were killed or taken prisoner.

It resulted in the award of five Victoria Crosses, four of them posthumous, and is immortalised in the 1977 epic A Bridge Too Far directed by Richard Attenborough.

Geoff was captured by a German officer and told in perfect English: "For you the war is over". He was then held as a prisoner of war and put to work as a slave in coal mines.

Earlier this year he was made an MBE receiving his gong from Princess Anne at Buckingham Palace. The honour came after he met King Charles, then the Prince of Wales, at events to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the battle in 2019 when he asked the old soldier: "Did they take you somewhere ghastly?" to which Geoff replied: "Yes, down a bloody coal mine!"

The hero from Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, has returned to Holland every year since the end of the war and is greeted like a celebrity by the grateful Dutch.

Each May he leads the annual Liberation Day parade through Wageningen, the city where the German surrender was signed, and every September he lays a wreath at the Airborne War Cemetery in Oosterbeek where more than 1,700 British and Polish soldiers killed in the Battle of Arnhem are buried.

Dick Goodwin, Vice President of the Taxi Charity, said: "Geoff is treated like royalty by the Dutch, and rightly so. He's a hero to them. And so too is little Alfred now."