Found in a Foot Locker

If like me you have an interest in military history, have you ever visited a military war grave cemetery? Walking past the immaculate rows of headstones, at first I tend to look at each individual name in detail, but after a while the names just fade to a blur because there are just so many of them. Soon you are no longer looking at the name but the battalion or regiment, and in the bigger cemeteries after about fifty rows of headstones, the scale of loss is so great it is impossible to appreciate every single stone marker.

Standing back and looking at the whole scene, it's difficult to remember that each one of those headstones symbolises one lost person, a husband, a father or a brother. Each headstone is a permanent reminder that he [or she] had a face, a family, and a story to tell, a story that saw them lose their lives for the defence of others, surely worth remembering, but as you look again around the cemetery, how many people's stories buried in there are known to anyone at all?

This book is about one of those stories, Sgt Robert L. Todd. Nine men lost their lives at 6am on the morning of April 5th 1945 in a B-17 takeoff accident in Cambridgeshire, England. In the scheme of things you might say that nine men in a war that took millions is nothing, hardly worth remembering, but when we see their faces, when we hear their friends and colleagues talk about them with such reverence, suddenly for a moment they become the most important story of all. Robert Todd's story was literally 'Found in a Foot Locker' many years after his death, and this is my attempt to share his experience with you.