As so often happens, I was prepping a post on one topic when I spotted something completely different. In this case, a short but poignant article from the October 18th, 1945 issue of Flight magazine…

Missing Airmen

One of the biggest jobs now facing the Royal Air Force is the effort to trace missing airmen.

Since the beginning of the war in Europe there have been some 30,000 cases of officers and airmen who disappeared while on operations, and so an RAF and Dominions Missing Research and Enquiry Service was set up. It has been at work since 1941, but its activities increased enormously after D-Day.

Once the liberation of Europe had begun, it became possible to establish Missing Research and Enquiry Sections on the Continent. Naturally, new opportunities for enquiry were opened up as the Allies occupied Germany and the fighting ceased. At first the service operated only in France, then their activities were extended to Belgium and Holland. They have now begun making their enquiries in Norway and Denmark, and in Germany itself. There is also a section in Italy, which intends to extend its activities to the Balkans as soon as possible.

Much sorrow and anxiety

The service is busy with cases dating from the beginning to the end of the war. Problems dating from May, 1940 are still being solved.

As everyone knows, there is no form of loss which causes more acute distress than a report that a near relative is missing. One remembers the great work done by the War Graves Commission at the end of the first world war, and what consolation thousands of bereaved relatives found in being able to visit the grave of a lost loved one.

It is still to soon to perform similar services for all the dead who gave their lives in this recent war. No doubt that work will be undertaken shortly. In the meantime much sorrow and anxiety can be relieved if definite information can be found about where and when a missing man fell, and where his remains were buried. So the Missing Research and Enquiry Service spares no pains in its efforts to trace out each case, and enquiries are sometimes pursued for two years or more.

Schoolboy French is not good enough

The methods used are like those of a detective agency. In the first place it is necessary for the enquiry parties on the spot to have a fluent knowledge of the local vernacular. Mere schoolboy French is not good enough. There are many language in the parts of Europe to be covered and men with an intimate knowledge of some of them are not easy to find.

The enquirers also need to have a good deal of the acumen and mental equipment of a Sherlock Holmes. They must be able to distinguish between a promising clue and a useless one, and have a flair for recognising and rejecting misleading (though often well-meant) stories from locals.

The oddest scraps can sometimes lead to an identification. Experience helps the parties grow expert at their work, while the organisation in London fits all the little bits of information together to arrive at its own conclusions.

A Stirling crew

On one occasion the service was trying to find out the fate of the seven members of a Stirling crew, who had not returned from a raid in the Spring of 1943. It was known that there were three graves in a Belgian village 20 miles from Louvain, two marked with the names of sergeants and the third marked ‘Three Unknowns’. It was also rumoured that two crewmen had baled out.

The enquiry party arrived at the village on a Sunday afternoon, when few people were about. The graves were not found in the churchyard and, while the enquirers could speak French very well, they did not speak Flemish, which was the local language. Then two passing cyclists – a brother and sister who could talk some French– told the party of another graveyard.

The girl said she knew the name of one of the missing men. She and her brother had also picked up a shirt cuff with a gold link in it and a piece of shirt collar with a name on it. She took the party to the cemetery and showed them the graves. She said that all the aircrew had perished in the explosion, and it was not true that anyone had escaped by parachute.

The girl then took the party to her mother’s cottage, where the latter produced the gold sleeve-link from a secret recess. Her sister had the shirt collar with the name on it. This was also recovered and proved to be a piece of an officer’s shirt, with a laundry mark, an outfitter’s label, and the embroidered name that the girl had mentioned. The scrap of cuff (which was tiny and had not been kept) was said to be made of the same material.

There had only been one officer in the crew of the Stirling in question, and so the chain of evidence was complete.

Overlap of services

A more puzzling case was that of a fighter which had been shot down over Calais in 1940. The only useful clue was the name of an English county. The Casualty Branch of the Air Ministry ascertained that no one with a home address in that county had been lost on that date. So the Missing Research Service then applied to the Chief Constable of the county. He did splendid work and took no end of trouble. As a result of his enquiries it turned out that the fighter in question had belonged to the Fleet Air Arm, which explains why the Air Ministry had no knowledge of it.

Another curious case concerned a crashed Typhoon. The enquiry partly recovered its cannons, and noted the numbers on them. As it turned out, those cannon had been taken off another crashed Typhoon and installed in the machine in question, so the numbers hampered the enquiry more than they helped it.

However a scrap of coloured scarf worn by the pilot was also found, and a firm of tailors identified it as being the Old Boys’ colours of a certain school. The date of the casualty was known, and so an enquiry from the headmaster of the school ultimately led to the pilot being identified.

A tragic story

One one occasion, the body of an unknown airman was discovered near the Pyrenees, in Southern France. That caused a lot of confusion and conjecture.

The Service first imagined (and this shows how ingenious they have become) that the man must have belonged to a formation which was once flying back from Italy, but encountered a gale and tried to avoid it by flying off to the southwest. However it was impossible to link those circumstances to any known losses in that area.

The mystery was not solved for a long time, and remained open for two years. At last, a tragic story came to light. This airman had baled out over northern France, where the Maquis found him and tried to get him away. They smuggled him all the way through France and almost to the Spanish frontier, but there the Germans caught and shot him as he was about to reach safety.

From the point of view of the Service, the moral of the story is that even the strangest case may be explained in time, as long as they never give up hope.

Hopeless clues

The numbers on airmen’s watches can often give a clue to the identity of the wearer, as can rings at times. But sometimes rings have monograms inscribed on them, and it is hard to guess which order to read the three letters in. Then there are almost hopeless clues such as a cigarette case with an inscription like ‘To Dick from Vera’. They are moving, but do not provide much help towards identification.

One Mother Superior in France kept careful records of all the cases that passed through her hospital—at her own peril, she added. But, as many of the names were misspelled, it was some time before her record could be of of much use to the Missing Service. In the end, her notes would prove very useful, not only to the RAF, but to the British and American Armies as well.

Laundry marks have often proved helpful, and two trade journals currently print enquiries from the Missing Service for laundries to check. Corroboration by more than one clue often leads to a definite conclusion.

When a case has been completed and the knowledge of what happened to the missing man or men is complete, a personal letter is written to the next of kin. Official jargon is studiously avoided, and these letters are much appreciated. The Service has received numerous cordial and grateful acknowledgments from the families of once-missing men.

 

Into thin air

While this article focused on individual stories, the overall numbers of missing were simply horrific. As stated, Royal Air Force and Commonwealth squadrons lost over 30,000 airmen missing, on European operations alone. More went missing over Africa, the Far East and the world’s oceans.

Similarly, the US Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency cites 20,349 Army Air Forces personnel as ‘not recovered’ (globally) after WW2. That’s the current statistic, not the 1945 number. The Luftwaffe, too, must have as many missing again. The Russians and Japanese, even more.

To put it in perspective, we’re talking about the entire populations of several sizeable towns – like Goulburn in New South Wales or Monterey, California – disappearing into thin air.

And just to stress, those are just the missing, not the (many more) identified dead.

Gone but not forgotten

As the article mentions in its reference to World War 1, whatever cold comfort knowing the fate and final resting place of a loved one may bring, it must still be preferable to the cavernous lack of solace given by the epitaph ‘MIA’.

There were wars before and since. Some, notably WW1, resulted in huge numbers of MIAs. Statistically, later wars may have been ‘better’, but there’s no such thing as ‘good’.

And the missing of World War Two’s tumultuous, far-reaching air war will continue to re-emerge for the rest of time. Some cases, like the evading airman shot on the Spanish border, are resolved within years of the war’s end. Others turn up after 50, 60 or 70 years – like the P-40 found last year in the Libyan desert.

Who knows how many more are interred in the shifting sands of North Africa, in glaciers from Greenland to the Alps, on remote jungle specks across the Pacific or, beyond counting, at the bottom of a sea somewhere.

So now, we’ll always live with the ghosts of the missing. And for all those families, the words ‘gone but not forgotten’ couldn’t ring more true.