Missing in action

sir – Timothy Martin’s account of the chance discovery of his grandfather’s identity disc (Letters, November 5) and the tenacity of a lone civil servant rang many bells with me.

In 1977, as the head of the special investigations branch of the RAF Police in Germany – the equivalent of the criminal investigation department of a British police force – I led an investigation into the wreck of a Lancaster bomber found during building work in Hanover. The wreck contained human remains, and we were able to establish that the aircraft had been shot down during one of four raids in 1943.

We had two or three unidentifiable skeletons – this was before DNA analysis – and we discovered that two of the eight men lost had been recovered by the Luftwaffe after the plane went down. However, Ministry of Defence civil servants refused all requests for access to the relevant records, effectively preventing a full investigation from being carried out.

Today, in a less respectful age, I would subpoena those concerned to provide the information I needed.

As it was, I had to wait until my retirement to trace the identities of the dead airmen. I learnt that their families had also met the equivalent of a brick wall when they had tried over several decades to discover what had happened to their sons.

At least I was at last able to tell them what they had been longing to know. Bryan Clark

Ludlow, Shropshire