There is a great deal in Dr Mervin’s Podium (Gazette, August 27, 'War represents tragedy on a monumental scale') with which to entirely agree, but blanket praise of pacifists, once a war has started, no.

Those of a pacifist inclination who I admire enormously were those who, realising the country was in dire straits and feeling the need to help without joining the armed forces, joined the Mercantile Marine and, as one result, thereby put themselves in harm’s way.

In WW2 a greater proportion of the Merchant Navy’s strength was lost than that of either the army, navy or air force. The positive result was that they aided the arrival of raw materials, supplies and provisions, without which the country would have been unable to prosecute either WW1 or WW2 or indeed feed the population. To take one example: there would have been no successful Battle of Britain without aircraft fuel; crude oil reached the country by sea.

Incidentally it was Merchant Navy Day on September 3. That was a day for us to remember the 37,772 men and women who served at sea in wars in the last century and for whom there was no grave but the sea. No other civilian occupation suffered anything like so much.

It is also a time to acknowledge the significance of the Merchant Navy today: that some 95 per cent of volume and 75 per cent by value of the UK’s trade is carried by sea.

There is no triumphalism in such remembrance, Dr Mervin, nor indeed in much of the commemoration of the World Wars that has been staged. The quest locally in my experience has been to inform and remind.

John Lean

Chairman, Lancaster Military Heritage Group Staveley