About the Bomber Command
Memorial Register

The Bomber Command Memorial Register records the memorials, crash sites, and aircrew of RAF Bomber Command during the Second World War, 1939–1945. But it is about more than locations and facts. It is about unearthing the local stories that inspired each memorial — the crash itself, the community that witnessed it, and the connection between village and crew that endures to this day.

Bomber Command suffered one of the highest casualty rates of any branch of service during the war. Of the 125,000 aircrew who served, 55,573 were killed — a loss rate of 44.4%. Many were very young men, drawn from across the Commonwealth and Allied nations, who gave their lives in the skies over occupied Europe.

When Bomber Command’s institutional commemoration arrived sixty years late, the work of remembrance had long since fallen to civic society: parishes, local historians, schoolchildren, and the families of the dead. Across the United Kingdom, communities erected memorials to remember the crews who fell near their homes. Some are grand stone monuments; others are simple plaques on a village wall. Each one carries a local story of courage, loss, and remembrance that deserves to be told.

Our Mission

This register aims to document every known memorial to Bomber Command aircrew and, for each one, to unearth the human story behind it: the crew who were lost, the circumstances of the crash, and the local people who chose to remember. We believe that every crew member deserves to be remembered by name, and every community that built a memorial deserves to have that act of remembrance recorded.

The register currently contains 406 memorials. Many entries are partial — we know a memorial exists, but the full story remains to be told. We welcome contributions from researchers, local historians, families, and anyone with information to share.

Contributors

This project was founded by Keith Binley, inspired by the memorial to Halifax MZ519 near his home in Farnsfield, Nottinghamshire. Sitting with the farmer who had campaigned for its erection — a man who, as a boy in 1944, witnessed the crew laid out in a field after the crash — Keith realised that these local stories were in danger of being lost as the eyewitness generation passes. The connection between the seven young men of 578 Squadron and the village that continues to remember and commemorate them became the inspiration for this register.

We are grateful to the many local historians, parish councils, squadron associations, aviation archaeologists, and families who have shared their knowledge and photographs. Every memorial in this register exists because someone in a community decided that these crews should not be forgotten.

How to Contribute

If you know of a memorial not listed here, or can add photographs, crew details, narratives, or corrections to an existing entry, we would be delighted to hear from you. Many entries in the register are marked as “Stub” or “Partial” — meaning we know the memorial exists but lack the full details.

Please email us at admin@bombermemorial.co.uk with any information you can share. Every memorial page also has a “Suggest a correction” link at the bottom — we actively welcome corrections from local communities who know these sites best.

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”

— Laurence Binyon, “For the Fallen” (1914)