RAF and Commonwealth Air Forces Roll of Honour - Cause of Death Database

[JaganP]

While several attempts have been made to put "Cause of Deaths" on the CWGC Database , there hasn't been a single source over the past two decades that CWGC has started hosting this data (other than paid books/CDs)

Towards this the RAFCommands.com CWGC War Dead Database attempts to fill the gap, Where the cause of death of airmen can be looked up. It is nearly 94% complete.

http://www.rafcommands.com/database/wardead/

122434 casualty records in this database.
114891 records (93.84%) are "Accounted for". with a known cause of death

Which leaves about
7543 records (6.16%) are still "Unaccounted" without a known cause of death.
http://www.rafcommands.com/database/...erialno=&qt=UN


Credits:
The ground work has been already been laid by the members over there - Ross with starting the forum, late Henk Welting for starting the late Unaccounted airmen thread and several others including authors like Bill Chorley, Colin Cummings, James Halley for publishing various books on attrition and losses, and other websites (aircrewremembered, naa.gov.au, international bomber command etc) who have published similar data. My role has been coding the pages, and then bringing all the data together under one working framework (lots of midnight oil burned in manually transferring links serial numbers etc to the names).

This is the first time that all that is coming under one umbrella - and the results are there to see.

• The ability to have the database cross linked with RAF Serial numbers and aircraft types have allowed me to generate informative charts on geographical and aircraft type information.
• The ability for researchers to filter results by aircraft type is another feature that has not been done on the net before.. eg... Gladiator fatalities or Hawker Audax fatalities
• There is still a long way to go - and we could really do with some help in speeding up the process. If there are members here, for whom this kind of work is a passion, i invite them to volunteer to help - please email admin AT rafcommands.com

The data does not intend to store circumstances of the aircraft losses - but merely aircraft serial numbers and provides links directly to the sources should anyone want to find out more. (That way copyright is respected in almost all the cases).