6,200 names of Second World War airmen added to Lincolnshire’s International Bomber Command Centre’s Losses Database

Thousands of names have been added to a Second World War memorial thanks to dedicated volunteers.

The International Bomber Command Centre (IBCC) war museum in Lincoln has been building a losses database for 12 years to provide a free-to-access 67,300-name digital archive of those lost in service.

Its latest addition of 6,200 names represents the airmen lost in the Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and North African theatres - areas that were involved in major war operations.

The archive includes a large number of biographical information, photographs, references to other memorials, and other resources and it is overseen by volunteer and losses archivist Dave Gilbert, who has spent 13,000 unpaid hours on it so far.

“Together we’ve built an archive that includes almost seven million individual pieces of data and growing,” he said.

“It’s an amazing achievement of collaboration and a collective passion project for us all.

“Expanding the archive to include the additional names was a natural progression.

“The work is never complete as there’s always something more you can write about every one of them, so I’m quite sure I’ll be doing this for the rest of my life.

“It’s vitally important that we continue this work.”

See also: Interview with International Bomber Command Centre chief executive Nicky van der Drift

Although the Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and North African losses were not under the control of Bomber Command, many of its squadrons spent time in that theatre.

The IBCC gets messages from family members almost daily asking whether they can be included, which is why the organisation thought it made sense to include it.

“For those in these additional theatres, it was a very different conflict to what Bomber Command personnel experienced,” Dave added.

“There were the added perils of diseases such as malaria and dysentery and the North African theatre was particularly hostile, with some airmen having survived a crash in the desert, then perished due to dehydration.”