While many leaders compare the wildfire crisis to the second world war, governments fail to adopt the real lessons of pre-emptive wartime action

As France and Spain battle historic wildfires, comparisons to the second world war abound. “One of the continent’s biggest evacuation efforts since World War II,” reports the Associated Press. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has called the wildfires his country’s “most difficult situation since the second world war”.

The images crossing all our screens certainly feel war-like – emergency aircraft and black smoke fill the skies, frantic civilians seeking shelter, historic towns lying in ruins, charred forests and burned-out vehicles, exhausted and sweat-soaked emergency responders.

Lockheed P-38 Lightning nicknamed ‘Marge’ and flown by Bong crashed in 1944 over what is now Papua New Guinea

A wingtip of a downed fighter jet once flown by second world war ace pilot Richard Bong has been taken to his home state of Wisconsin from Papua New Guinea, where it crashed more than 80 years earlier.

The piece of the plane named after the pilot’s girlfriend, Marge Vattendahl, underwent a remarkable journey by air, land and sea before its procurement by the Richard I Bong Veterans Historical Center in Superior, Wisconsin.