by Thom Morris

Captured Luftwaffe pilots were secretly recorded saying how "fun" it was "splattering" Ashford in the Second World War.

Historians Soenke Neitzel and Harald Welzer used the interrogations of 13,000 German military prisoners as the basis for their new book which is released next week.

One pilot said: "I was over Ashford. Some sort of meeting was being held on the market square.

"Masses of people, speeches and all that. They didn't half get splattered. That was fun."

The pilots had no idea their rooms were bugged by Allied intelligence which recorded the conversations at the Trent Park detention centre in north London.

In another interview, the same pilot spoke about trying to machine-gun homes in the town saying it was "fabulous" to see windows rattle on the houses.

He said: "As we came around the roofs would fly off."

Another boasted to his fellow pilot: "In our squadron, I was known as the 'professional sadist'.

"I knocked off everything; buses, a civilian train in Folkestone. I gunned down every cyclist."

The Allies recorded the prisoners in the hope of obtaining information for use in the war effort.

Excerpts from the 150,000 pages of transcripts will be published in Soldiers: Diaries of Fighting, Killing and Dying which is expected to be available in the UK this autumn.