A man has revealed how a series of chance discoveries led him to discover the truth about how his uncles died during World War Two - and brought to light a painting of one of them.

Chris Bryan-Smith from Oswestry in Shropshire grew up knowing twin brothers Anthony and Martin Bryan-Smith died while serving with RAF Bomber Command.

Improvements in online databases allowed him to look up records and trace where one of the brothers crashed. When he posted the story on Facebook this summer, he was contacted by a surprised RAF museum curator who had the portrait.

Bryan-Smith said the eyes of the man he saw in the painting looked so much like those of his own son.

When he was young, he knew the brothers had died in the war and that they had lived in Beoley, Worcestershire, but while people would often talk about the war, little else was said about them.

He said: "When I was growing up, my family didn't talk about them much as it was too painful.

"People didn't talk about the losses. Funny incidents, yes, recalled with great gusto. But not the horrors."

As a result, the 74-year-old said: "I didn't feel like I knew them, they were almost like numbers when I was growing up."

All he really knew was that Anthony Bryan-Smith died in 1940 when his Hampden aircraft crashed north of the Humber estuary on the way home from a mine laying mission and Martin's Lancaster was shot down on D-Day in 1944.

Little changed until 2005, when he said "I went on the internet one day out of idle interest and all this stuff came up.

Noting that a lot of this information would only have been found in a records office in the past, he said: "It didn't really occur to me that it had become so available."

Bryan-Smith said he found details of Martin's last mission on D-Day in the Operations Record Book.

He also found a detailed account of the mission written by the crew of another aircraft which took over as lead when Martin's plane, known as Z-Zebra, was shot down.

Reading the story, he said: "It was incredibly moving to read about the end of a life."

He was also surprised by how casual the language used had been before observing Z-Zebra going down in flames.

The account contained phrases such as "gave the target a right prang" and "Beautiful morning, us going in, the Americans going out."

There were also the words of a surprised pilot seeing the English Channel full of ships heading to the D-Day landing sites and remarking "full of ships - Army got their finger out at last".

Reflecting that a lot of these events had "passed from memory to history," he said: "Like all things in the past you lose the humanity of it."

Bryan-Smith said it was thought Martin's Lancaster had crashed into the sea, but in 2008 another discovery was made which changed that.

He said he had been on holiday in France when he was contacted by a historian living in the country who had found the wreckage of two planes, one of them a Lancaster.

It had been identified as Martin's through engine markings and a cygnet ring, which had belonged to the plane's navigator.

Visiting the site, Bryan-Smith said it felt "kind of eerie" to be where the plane had come down and once again he said he felt the brothers were "nudging" him to find out more.

He decided to write up the story of the twins online to coincide with the D-Day commemorations in 2024 and then he updated the entry with a post on Facebook this summer.

The post included photos of the two brothers and within an hour he was contacted by a man from RAF Wyton in Cambridgeshire.

Bryan-Smith said Johnny Clifford, the curator of the Bomber Command Pathfinder Collection at RAF Wyton told him he was "stunned" when he saw the photographs online.

He explained he had recently bought a painting of an unknown airman at auction, because he was wearing the Pathfinder Eagle, but he had no idea who he was.

It was clear to both men that the main in the portrait was Martin Bryan-Smith and putting a name to that face meant "another brave airman had been recognised for his sacrifice," Clifford told him.

Bryan-Smith said he was "surprised and thrilled" by the discovery, not least because he had no idea a portrait had been painted of his uncle and there had only been a few photographs.

Because the man in the photograph included a full set of medals, he assumed the painting had been created after his death and the person who painted it had been "obviously quite a good artist".

There are no plans to move the painting from the museum, though, and Bryan-Smith said it was "probably the right place for it, much though I'd love it on my wall".

The discoveries have left Bryan-Smith hungry to learn more, although he said he was interested in the brothers as people, not military statistics.

He said he did not want them to be forgotten and for people to realise when they saw the lists of the war-dead "that each one of those was somebody".

This weekend he plans to go to a remembrance service and he said it was important to "thank those regular human-beings that produced such super-human deeds and saw things that no human-being should ever see".

"Their loss has meant that we can carry on," he said.

"We must carry on because that's what they did it for."

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