.... and sometimes the names they were known by had little in common with their true initials!
This is true. A couple of years ago I wanted to look up the details of an uncle who was killed in the run up to Operation Torch. I put his name into the CWGC search engine and got no results. It was only when I put his surname only into the system and spent ages sifting through all of the names, and those of the next of kin, that I found him. I had not realised that, like me, everyone used his middle name when referring to him. He was listed under his true first name.