The last 50 years have seen an incredible interest in the excavation of crashed aircraft. Schoolboys of the war period eagerly sought and swapped souvenirs, purloined from crashes under the eyes of the police or RAF guards but, after the surface wreckage was cleared away by Maintenance Units, no one realised that even greater treasures remained underground. Whereas on the Continent the Missing Research and Enquiry Unit left no stone unturned to try to trace the thousands of airmen who still remained missing, strangely enough no similar operation was carried out by the RAF on crash sites in the United Kingdom. Many of these still contained the mortal remains of pilots whose names had been added to the Memorial to the Missing unveiled at Runnymede in 1953. Perhaps, because the war in the air that followed the Battle of Britain had shifted its focus to Europe, it appeared to fade from people's memory that a hard-fought battle had taken place over the United Kingdom in 1940. It is difficult to understand today how it took so long for the realisation to sink in that aircraft wreckage still remained buried.
