I recently visited the International Bomber Command Centre in Lincoln. The site is spectacular, being on a hill with a clear view across to Lincoln Cathedral.
Surrounding the Memorial Spire, there are 271 panels containing the names of all the Bomber Command casualties from the Second World War (pictured below).
That is nearly 58,000 names. I duly located the panels containing the names of Patrick’s son (William) and son-in-law (Les Dunn).
The sheer scale of the monument is impressive. Of course, it is not the only such memorial. The Runnymede Memorial (commemorating RAF personnel with no known grave) has over 20,000 names. These names also appear in Lincoln. The Thiepval Memorial (for those with no known grave from the Somme battlefield in WW1) has over 58,000 names. Tyne Cot cemetery has 35,000 names from the Ypres campaigns of WW1. The Armed Forces Memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum has over 16,000 names of those who died on active service since the end of WW2. The sheer scale of the losses that these and many, many other memorials represent becomes difficult to comprehend. There is a story behind every name. The difficulty, as I see it, is to blend the personal with the overall narrative. I hope that the articles that I have posted here provide a small insight into the impact of the losses of just two of those servicemen. It is humbling to think that there are tens of thousands of stories such as these.
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