The discovery occurred at Oisy-le-Verger in the Pas de Calais, where French engineers found Fidler's Hurricane aircraft with the pilot sitting upright in the cockpit. He was shot down by a German Messerschmitt on May 19, 1940, while protecting British troops retreating to Dunkirk, and his Hurricane was one of 12 downed that day. Fidler had been posted to France the previous year as part of the British Expeditionary Force after serving in Egypt.
Previously, he was misidentified for decades after soldiers in 1940 found a Hurricane wreckage and assumed it was his, giving the body a hurried grave that was later re-interred in a cemetery in Bachy. In 2006, amateur historians excavated that crash site and proved the aircraft belonged not to Fidler but to James Strickland of 67 Squadron, who had baled out and returned home before dying in a 1941 Spitfire crash in Cornwall. The misidentification likely occurred because the downed pilot was wearing kit or had a parachute belonging to Fidler, leading soldiers to mark the grave with his name.
Identification of Fidler's remains was achieved without DNA testing, as he had no children and his siblings did not either; instead, samples from three other pilots shot down that day were used to rule them out. Fidler, who worked for his father's building business in Great Ayton, North Yorkshire, and joined the RAF in 1934, will be laid to rest next month on the 86th anniversary of his crash. The body in the misidentified grave now bears the inscription 'unknown airman' and may belong to one of two flight sergeants shot down that day, but the Ministry of Defence does not allow exhumations for identification.