Our modest war heroes may be forgotten by the state — but not by the Telegraph

Every morning, when I am faced by my pile of newspapers, almost the first thing I do is to turn to the obituary page of the Daily Telegraph. Obits in all the serious papers are good — generally much better than they were 20 years ago — but the Telegraph has a particular specialisation which its rivals hardly try to emulate. Three or four times a week it carries pieces about former servicemen who fought in the second world war. To be included it seems that you need to have won a military medal, or else gone on to achieve high rank after the war. These obituaries record the acts of sacrifice and bravery of young men over 60 years ago. There is nothing like them anywhere else in the British press.

Over the past year or two I have noticed that the number of these obituaries is slowly declining. This is hardly surprising, if you think about it. A generation of heroes has been dying out. If you were 18 in 1945, and fought in the final year of the war, you would be nearly 78 now, had you lived to tell the tale. Those who enlisted in 1939 as very young men would be in their middle eighties now. Surviving senior officers are long dead, as are nearly all the middling ones. We are left mainly with former junior officers, and sometimes NCOs, who were too young to play a central part in the strategic development of the war.

There are still a few exceptions, though: men who have lived into their nineties, and made their mark at a preternaturally young age. One such was Sir William Deakin, of whom the Telegraph carried a typically masterful obituary this week after his death at the age of 91.