‘Remember Me Darling’: Memory, Masculinity and Morality in the Last Letters of RAF Bomber Command, 1939-1945

Across military service, fighting personnel have continually made efforts to provide comfort to loved ones beyond the grave. The ‘last letter’, a practice in which servicemen would write a letter to be given to parents or loved ones in the event of their death, makes a rich site to explore intimate and profound expressions of selfhood, morality, and society. Across temporal, geographical, and cultural spaces, these letters capture a moment when someone is forced to confront their mortality. As a distinct genre of writing, last letters provide an insight into how airmen conceptualised and interacted with national discourses around their service, identity, experiences, and memorialisation, during the war itself. Unlike letters, diaries, and memoirs, the last letter in particular speaks to how airmen sought to be remembered whilst still serving. Through an intimate analysis of last letters, this article explores how aircrew faced their own mortality, negotiating their masculine, national, and spiritual identities and communicated this to their loved ones.