Lost Bomber

This is a write-up of the hacking I did at the excellent history hackday, organised by the mighty @fidothe.

This story is about my great-uncle, David William Griffiths. He died returning from a bombing raid over Bremen in 1941. He was 21 years old.

I wanted to put his death in context, and in doing so I discovered it was an ordinary, almost average death, and all the more important for it.

His death is commemorated in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s online register. I also found some information about his last mission on the Lost Bombers site.

The diary entry says: “Airborne 2213 18Jun41 from Leeming. Last heard on W/T at 0250 19Jun41 and it is believed the Whitley crashed seven minutes later into the sea off Ameland. Cause unknown.”

My Uncle David’s death is historically insignificant, not part of a defined battle or definite campaign. But his death, I understand, affected his brother, my grandfather, enormously – a terrible grief.

So much so that our family history might be very different if it hadn’t happened.

I wanted to see if I could use the data out there to put David’s death in context.

I wrote scripts to scrape the Commonwealth War Graves Commission site. I created my own database containing all the records for Airmen and -women that died in 1941 – records of some 12,396 deaths and as many individual stories as David’s.

At 21 years old, David was of the modal age. The median age is somewhere around 23. Some 2,700 people younger than David also died that year.

As a Sergeant, he was also of the modal rank.

He was around the 4,400th airforce casualty that year, on a day that saw 40 people die. Not the heaviest of days, not the easiest. Some 8,000 more would die by the end of the year.

There’s more to tell you and more to find: the Whitley bomber that he was in was but two months old, and soon to be phased out for more reliable models. They were used to drop leaflets during the Phoney War before the outbreak of direct hostilities. But it looks like this mission was probably a bombing raid. It would be great to get hold of some of these leaflets and mission logs.

His crew was, as I think is typical, from various parts of the country and of the commonwealth. A Scot, a Canadian, two Englishmen and David, Welsh, of course taking off from Yorkshire and lost to the North of then Holland. In a time of less travel and more local variety, the variety in these thrown-together crews is fascinating. I’d love to get into the data and understand it better.

In 1941, looking at airforce personnel alone there are 12,395 other stories to be told. And these stories are on the very edge of living memory. I remember David’s portrait – a coloured photograph in his RAF uniform – hanging pride-of-place in my grandparents’ front room, so it’s always been a part of the family history I was dimly aware of. But, since my grandmother died recently, there’s no first-hand link to his person.

I’m left, after all this, thinking of just how young these bomber boys were. Looking at this data has been a much more moving exercise than I was expecting.

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The data exported to a Google Fusion Table: data
The PDF of the presentation I gave at the hackday: pdf