RAF Driffield – ROLL OF HONOUR

Thank you for the info – very much appreciated indeed :O)

Phillip

There’s good news and bad, but compiling an authoritative Roll of Honour or Book of Rememberance for a station – particularly one with such a long and varied history – is a major task and there’s little available online that will help.

The CWGC Debt of Honour Database will not be much help, initially at least, since although it does give units you cannot search on them. It also is of course no help with fatalities during peacetime years or with many fatalities of non Commonwealth personnel.

Fortunately during the wartime years Driffield was largely a bomber base. Fortunately because it means you can use Bill Chorley’s superb series Bomber Command Losses of WW2 as a starting point. There are 6 volumes covering losses for each year between 39 and 45 plus Vol 7 covering OTUs and Vol 8 covering HCUs and other miscellaneous Bomber Command Units. I’d normally hesitate to suggest using secondary sources for a project like this, but this series (along with Ross McNeill’s similar work on Coastal Command) is as good as it gets and will allow you to build a fairly authoritative list for the period in which I’d guess at least 75% of all Driffield related fatalities occurred. You may well wish to double check the resulting list at the CWGC site just in case an error might have slipped in. You can also double check individual Australian personnel losses (for say 462 and 466 Sqns) at the Australian Archives site and Canadian ones (425 et al) at the Canadian Virtual War Memorial.

If you don’t want to stump up the £100 or so needed to purchase all 7 volumes, you should be able to order them through your local library.

You will still need to track down:
1. Peacetime losses
2. Non Bomber Command wartime losses and
3. Losses on the ground through bombing or accident.

For these your only real course is to start with the Station Operations Record Book and its Appendices (if any) held at The National Archives at Kew. For Driffield the ORB for July 36 through Dec 41 is piece ref AIR 28/221 with the other wartime ones following on in chronological order. The Postwar ORB starts at AIR 28/1350. This will mention many, but almost certainly not all fatalities from the station, but will also allow you to build up a list of units operating from the station and appropriate date ranges (which I’d imagine you probably already have). You should be aware that Station ORBs are a mixed bunch. Some are excellent, but I know of one that describes in detail the content of an ENSA show on the station while not even mentioning a fatal accident that happened the same day.

Once you have the initial list of casualties and a list of units you then have to consult the ORBs for all those units for the periods in question. These again are at Kew with Squadrons being in AIR 27 and “Miscellaneous Units” (i.e AACUs , 10 ANS etc) in AIR 29. Unit ORBs will usually record fatal accidents, but you should be aware that they frequently spell aircrew names incorrectly. On occasion for multi seat aircraft they will simply record the aircraft identity or the name of the pilot and you will have to trawl through the “Detail of Work Carried Out” (in the ORB) to establish the names of the complete crew.

AIR 29 is not complete (i.e there are some “Miscellaneous Units” for which no ORB has survived) and is catalogued in a willfully perverse way. For example you might find in the catalogue an ORB titled just “No 57” and only when you scroll back through the catalogue to find a subhead will you discover that it is within a sub category called OTUs. You need to persevere with AIR29:-)

As a starting point I’d just do a search using the National Archives online catalogue on “Driffield” (limited to the AIR class) and also do searches on the specific units you already know of. That should give you a picture of what is available. You can either trek down to Kew to inspect the records themselves or ask them to provide copies in exchange for the national debt of a small African nation.

Pre war fatal accidents were also regularly reported in Flight, The Aeroplane and the Times (usually within a few weeks of the event).

Lastly, one other approach that I’ve found useful in filling gaps is this. Most RAF stations adopted one or more local cemetaries as their local cemetary. Next of Kin could request that remains be returned to them for local burial, but often did not and the option was not available for next of kin of non-UK airmen. They would then often be buried in the local cemetary. You may already know which cemetaries were used by Driffield. If not, searching on a few known Driffield casualties on the CWGC site should identify it/them. You can then get a cemetary report on the website which shows all burials in that cemetary which are under CWGC care. This can be useful in throwing up a few “mystery men” who may have died on or from the station. It will give you a name, date and, most times, a unit and service number from which you can then try and track down the circumstances.

As a practical matter you should bank on not getting this 100% right first time and, therefore, however you decide to present it (Book, display board, online etc) plan on doing it in such a way that you can easily add new names as new info comes your way.

Hope this helps and good luck.

NiallC