The desire towards the end of the war to retrieve dead air force personnel, or to give some information on missing aircrew to their relatives, led to the creation of the MRES in 1944.

[2] The task was to trace and account for all Royal Air Force and Dominion personnel who had been lost, not declared dead or as a PoW, in any theatre of war between 1939 and 1945.

[5] Service personnel on the MREU in Italy were required to wear civilian clothes and remove all military insignia from their vehicles.

This was enforced by the Italian authorities, and was not mirrored by their North-Western Europe counterparts who were viewed either as liberators, or one of the four powers governing Germany at that time.

[5] This additional task was daunting for those working on the MREUs; one report detailed how an aircraft crash, a Blenheim shot down over a raid on Wilhelmshaven in September 1939, killed all four crew, but the state of their injuries meant that the Axis troops buried them altogether.

What did help was the collation of lists by the opposing side (Totenlisten), which was sent to Britain via the Red Cross and included deaths, injuries and place of burial (if known).

The gravesite was badly overgrown in 1947 when an officer from the MREU arrive to investigate, and all three bodies were removed to the British Military Cemetery at Caen in February 1948.

[17] The MRES was disbanded in 1949, though some RAF personnel were still employed to look into any further cases of unknown airmen until 1952 as the Missing Research and Graves Service (MRGS).