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Published oral records and recollections


pmaasz

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I would like to canvass the opinions of members on the value and validity of the many oral recollections and reminiscences of soldiers of the Great War, as collected and published by several authors. Most if not all of these oral records were collected 60, 70 or 80 years after the events they purport to describe. I use the word purport deliberately.

Several years ago during my personal researches I was dismayed to discover that some of the facts and events described in a particular oral record on which I had relied were wrong or false. I put the errors down to the mistaken recollections by a very old man of the events of so very long ago. But later, having mentioned this to someone who was personally involved in the collection of some of these stories, I was told that there was no doubt that events were sometimes embellished by the givers because ‘that was what they thought I wanted to hear’.

What has brought this back into my mind is a section of David Kenyon’s excellent book ‘Horsemen in No Man’s Land’. On page 69ff he mentions the record of a man who ’allegedly observed the cavalry attack on High Wood.’ This record is very much at odds with the known facts and it has been widely published. Kenyon goes on to quote another record from a supposed eye-witness, describing an action where ‘not a man escaped’. In fact, in this action there were three fatal casualties.

The existence of a few challengeable records does not destroy the validity of the huge numbers of personal recollections that exist, but in my view it does underscore the need to be very suspicious of these long-after-the-event reminiscences.

What do others think? What errors, deliberate or otherwise, have they found?

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Treat ALL records and reminiscences with caution, however old the people involved may be and however long after the event they may have been made. Very few of us could give an accurate account of events that happened, say, 30 or more years ago. Indeed I would have problems with describing some that occurred this year.

I've got many examples of wrong statistics being given by soldiers writing from Salisbury Plain - about distances marched (easily done), the numbers of men based there and the number of Canadians who died from meningitis in 1914-1915 (including a nine-fold exaggeration). Then there are the unsubstantiated reports in diaries and letters home of three WAACs at Bulford being murdered and of Australians sandbagging their comrades in the Fovant area west of Salisbury. On several occasions I've looked at the service records of soldiers whose memoirs and diaries have been published and noticed some apparent anomalies (and omissions).

Ask six people to describe a road accident and you'll get at least four differing accounts.

Moonraker

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I think you have to take them for what they are - recollections.

They may be accurate. They may not be accurate. They may have been, ahem, embellished to put the teller in a good light. The recollection may be conditioned by the passage of time.

I think all you can do is test the recollection against the known facts. And, even here, official records, such as war diaries, can also be taken with a pinch of salt - for example, you never read a entry which says the battalion was the first to retreat; the withdrawal is always the consequence of a neighbouring unit retirng first.

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They may be accurate. They may not be accurate. They may have been, ahem, embellished to put the teller in a good light. The recollection may be conditioned by the passage of time.

That is a very fair summary of oral records.

I have been through hundreds of what are called Witness Statements of IRA men who took part in the War of Independence 1919-1921. You certainly need to put their recollections together with newspaper reports and research on the same incident to get anywhere near the truth. British soldiers always believed that they were being ambushed by at least 5 times as many IRA men, and the IRA always believed that they had killed 5 times as many soldiers as they actually did.

But I do not knock these sorts of statements, as they invariably add to ones knowledge of an action

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Should this type of concern not be applied to most if not all history? While I am in no position to do other than muse; I have noted while reading of events leading to the outbreak of war that authors commonly refer to letters that politicians have written to their wives and others, and it is certainly possible that, although written soon after the events recorded, the information, like that in diaries, risks being influnced by whatever the author thought was appropriate rather than what actually occured. A few years ago a senior civil servant was 'ecconomical with the truth'. I also recall reading in a magazine - title long forgotten - it may have been in verse - of the secretray of a high level meeting sitting long into the night trying to recall what his masters would think they ought to have said. Howver to go back to the starting point recollections do serve to illustrate and give a feeling for events, a valuable aspect for the reader/listener even if not entirely accurate.

Old Tom

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There is a private journal about my pet battalion, which was written in the late 60's by a veteran. His family are very proud of it and have circulated photocopies quite widely. It is sadly full of factual errors. It contradicts the war diary, claims a rank for the writer that he did not achieve until two years later, and contradicts what he wrote at the time and was published in the local news paper. Memory is a very fickle thing. I do not believe the writer set out to mislead, but had just grown old, and in rebuilding his memories, as we all do everytime we remember some past incident had slowly rebuilt fact into new fact recalled with equal conviction because that was how he/we remember anything.

T8

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I must admit that I tend to regard the accounts of combatants years (and it does not have to be many) after the event as 'flavouring' to a piece of writing on the Great War. It is very easy to lose the emotional element during an account, an assault becoming seemingly an exercise in which some casualties occurred but the line was taken. Slotting eye-witness accounts into the text punctuates the action with emotional descriptions helping the reader empathize, at least as much as is possible, with the actual fear, horror, excitement etc. etc. of the actual event. They should never; however, be taken as the accurate description of what occurred but part of a picture, to be built up by a careful historian, to come as near as possible to what actually happened.

Jim

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I recall a thread from a couple of years ago when we discussed some of Harry Patch's recollections, where they didnt seem to conform to known history.

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Should we believe all we read I am a firm believer in first hand accounts the fact that these people were THERE you have to give some credit.ok it might not conform sometimes with the official line of what was suppose to have happened, if you want to know what is going on ask the people at the coal face as the saying goes.Are we always to believe the units' dairy as the gospel?. that is what makes history so interesting all great plans go out the window as soon as the first shot is fired.As some of the guys have already said the unit will never admit it was the first to retreat it was because someone else did something first.

"if it's a mouse coming in over the bridge it will be an elephant by the time it gets to the square"

regards Martin

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I am appreciating this discussion of my topic very much, and thank all the contributors. But just to pick-up a point from the theme of MGB's post: a major difference between War Diaries and the oral recollections I am referring to is: the Diary is written immediately or soon after the events described, whereas the oral recollections are taken from very old men many many years after. Of course, the Diaries are written for a specific purpose. Some are dry as dust and others are interesting narratives. That is not an issue. I am enquiring of people's opinions as to how much imagination/invention/mistaken memory one should expect to exist in the oral reminiscences. I am beginning to think that all authors of books that are comprised of or include these oral records should be published with a very prominent disclaimer to the effect that they should not be taken as literal truth.

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I am beginning to think that all authors of books that are comprised of or include these oral records should be published with a very prominent disclaimer to the effect that they should not be taken as literal truth.

That will not stop the believers believing. Unfortunately much of history is written by people picking out the bits that agree with the author's view of what (should have) happened. Oral records are ideal for this, as there is always one or more protagonists who can be used to support a point of view, while conveniently ignoring those who don't.

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I I am enquiring of people's opinions as to how much imagination/invention/mistaken memory one should expect to exist in the oral reminiscences.

It will depend.

If I give you an account of what I did last week, it will be pretty accurate. I might emphasise my "good deeds" and perhaps skim over or not mention the occasions when I was less than a model citizen. But it will be relatively accurate.

On the other hand, if I now try to give you an account of my life in, say August 1972, which is a significant month in my life, it will not be as accurate a reflection as last week. I'd be relying on the memory and of perception of how I now feel things were at the time.To assess how accurate my account was, you'd also need to ask other folk for their recollections and so on.

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Shakespeare said it all, in Henry V (I am quoting from memory):

"Old men forget, yea, all shall be forgot;

But he'll remember with advantages

The acts he did that day."

and

"To England will I steal, and there I'll steal:

And patches get unto these cudgelled scars

And swear I got them in the Gallia wars."

By "advantages" he means "embellishments."

The thing to remember about eye-witness accounts, whether contemporary or in later recollection, is that they record what the person saw (or thought they saw). In events like the Great War this is necessarily only a very small part of a very large picture, which is why I tend to regard all such accounts (especially the poems!) with a good deal of reservation.

A historian needs to collect several such accounts, try to reconcile the discrepancies and eliminate the bias, in order to arrive at a clearer picture of the whole. Even then, authors are often influenced by their own personal agendas, plus of course the need to sell their books.

Ron

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The army of 14-18 - like any group of British citizenry - contained saints and sinners, heroes and cowards, teetotalers and drunkards . There will be some who embellish their accounts, some who will underplay their part, some downright liars (I remember one WW1 writer who records an NCO who lied to his officer during the retreats of 1918 and earned himself a gallantry award - some of you may be able to remind me of the reference)

All we can do is study all the information and draw our own conclusions. We still can't make up our minds about Haig!

Edwin

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I remember (oddly enough, given the topic) some years ago talking to Lyn McDonald. She was discussing the battalion of the Rifle Brigade (11th, I think), to which she was very attached. Two veterans were discussing an action, and were disagreeing over whether or not it rained.

Their answer was simple - "Ask Lyn - she'll know"!

My own (very limited) military service recollections are, I know well, heavily embellished, and as for the stories my old dad told, I'm absolutely certain some of them were at least part true.

And was it Harold MacMillan whose memoirs were entitled "Old Men Forget" (someone tell me - I forget)?

Seriously - I can't remember what I did last Thursday, let alone 40 years ago.

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My thoughts about recalling the past match what many have said. Although events are vague and lost in time I recall vividly two near death experiences when I was 11 and 12 years old. The recollections of old soldiers are, I suggest, more likely to be accurate when danger and near death events happened to them personally rather than to their units.

Kevin

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It's great in civvy Street eating your digestive biscuits and drinking cups of tea, or even sat down at your desk talking to schoolkids about history.

Being in the Armed Forces of any country whether in barracks or on the battlefield, whether they're quiet or the bombs & bullets are flying around,in my opinion is always going to be different than the average life a civilian has lead.

I was corresponding with one of the lads who I had served with back in the early 90s, and I told him I didn't remember much about the time I had served with him, he then sent me this correspondence

I remember in 92 you were my section commander and we did a beach landing and then a tab inland but I got food poisoning and couldn't keep my guts in so they cas evac'd me back to camp, I was there for 3 days then re joined you lot in the field, I remember, as punishment for being ill you sent me on a water run and it was a Bloody nightmare, we had to put a jerry can in our bergans and scramble down a very steep hill, fill the jerry cans up then try and climb the hill again on all fours and I was all weak from the food poisoning and struggled like hell! I also remember you and Lou found a massive spider and put it in one of those White pack lunch boxes then got me to open my it, I freaked out because I did not like spiders and you bloody chased me with it! I remember I threw a chair at you to keep you away, I always thought you were a ******* for chasing me but a top man for laughing when I threw the chair at you and not pulling rank.

After reading the correspondent bits of that time came back to me, however I did send him this,It's surprising what people remember and what others don't, I can honestly say I don't remember any of that, however I'm sure you remember how crazy it was sometimes.

It also comes down to your own personal integrity, whether you big up the incident you were involved in or don't.Once servicemen steps out of his normal environment onto a battlefield,anything and everything happens and it happens that fast sometimes it's hard to recall what has just gone on, I can recall quite clearly the first time I saw someone shot dead, I can't remember the rest of the day, there's a good chance I could tell you everything about the incident, but I couldn't recall what I had for breakfast that morning or what I was doing that same evening.

All of these things our Kept in our long or shortterm memory sometimes we can recall it. other times it is just forgotten.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Interesting to observe the speculation about the circumstances surrounding the fates of Colonel Gaddafi and a couple of his sons and the various versions that are in circulation, despite(or perhaps partly because of) video footage and "instant" news coverage. This does underline how difficult it is to determine how accurate were reports of wartime incidents a century ago, especially when those reports were made available to the public, often some time afterwards, by people who were miles away and who relied on accounts that were second-hand several times over.

(I very much trust that now we do NOT embark on a discussion of this week's incidents in Libya.)

Moonraker

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Hi I wrote this as the preface of a book to be published in a year or so. It is so relevant I offer it now.

"While oral historians usually develop warm personal feelings and a deep admiration for their informants, once an interview are recorded it becomes evidence to be assessed on its merits just as with any other historical source. Unfortunately, oral history in recent years has been attacked by people who disparage it as a knee-jerk reaction. Perhaps many of them have never had the time, the opportunity, or the inclination to sit down and listen to hundreds of detailed interviews. Many ally this sceptical approach to oral history to a near-worship of contemporary sources: letters, diaries and official documents. In essence their outlook seems to be that if it was said, thought, or best of all authoritatively stated at the time - then it must be true.

A robust defence of oral history must start with a recognition that it is invaluable in correcting mistaken beliefs gathered through the uncritical study of more traditional forms of historical evidence. Ironically this is most evident when reading unit war diaries and their subsequent enshrinement in the pages of regimental or official histories. The reverence displayed by some historians for such sources can cause amusement to those more aware of their provenance within the command structure of a battalion - where their prime function was to help absolve senior officers from any possible criticism of their performance in battle! Hence the unbelievable number of times that a 'retirement’ is ordered to ‘conform’ with the ‘retreat’ of the unit next in line to the right! Secondly, ordinary personal diaries are ludicrously partial, often placing the peripheral writer at the very centre of events. They are often inaccurate and above all reflect the transient contradictory emotions of the writer; as such the view expressed can be entirely dependent on which date you chose to select. Finally, the tone and content of letters depend to a large degree on the person destined to read them. Soldiers frequently under-exaggerate the risks and their fears for the future in letters to their mothers; while exaggerating the same to male contemporaries and making frankly nonsensical boasts to their girlfriends. Very rarely do men refer to the mundane horrors of war in any great detail – the lice, the stench and above all the deep personal humiliations inflicted upon them by diseases like dysentery. Such things, if mentioned at all, are concealed, rather than revealed, by coy euphemisms.

So what is oral history good for? Well if you want to know what life was really like for the men fighting the Great War then reading this book is surely the closest you can get a hundred years later. Oral history is excellent providing a level of detail that is unequalled by any other source! It brings the past into sharp focus – revealing and explaining all the nitty-gritty fundamentals that define the spirit of the age, the little wrinkles that allow you to feel what people were going through. Some elements are strangely familiar; other once commonplace habits or attitudes now seem alien. Oral history can also simplify a convoluted situation. An amusing anecdote can cut through the complexities to reveal what was really happening in a way that a dry narrative often cannot. But above all it is the emotions heightened by war that are revealed in interviews. Men and women open up as to what they were really thinking, as opposed to the conventional viewpoints as expressed in regimental histories and the hundreds of 'gung ho' post-war memoirs. It is very apparent from oral history interviews that once men were really aware of the reality of war, then few of them had much enthusiasm for fighting and many were just plain terrified. This makes their courage in carrying on and ‘going over the top’ all the more remarkable, but it rather undercuts the official sanctioned view that the lads were ‘dying to have another bash at the Hun’! Terrible tragedies are often exposed in heart-rending memories of much loved relatives or comrades that were killed, mangled or mentally shattered by war.

Oral history gives us much needed variety. All of human nature is here and indeed I encountered 'all sorts' as I carried out the interviews. Quiet bespectacled types, rough diamonds, stolid bible reading types, intellectuals, eccentrics, even a few who still 'liked a drink'. Brave men who could take all their enemies could throw at them and ask for more; nervous types who found it all really much too much. Many got through without a scratch, but some were dreadfully wounded, their bodies ripped apart and their lives ruined or changed forever. Few had ever written anything down or preserved their contemporary letters, so without these oral history interviews their experience would have been lost.

Yet it is undeniable that there are problems with the unthinking usage of oral history, normally by people who think of it as 'testimony'. In particular, veterans mostly of junior rank are inherently unlikely to understand the military strategy and higher tactics of the day. They may have been there, but in truth they did not know what was happening at the time. As such they are not authorities on what the generals were thinking, or of what should have been done. It is also true that some men, lacking confidence in their own recall of events, begin to inhabit a past that actually reflects the views peddled in post-war books or popular television programmes. These false memories can become their reality. Then again a very few sad fantasists have been lying about their exploits for years and could no longer distinguish truth from fiction. Such cases can generally be exposed by a combination of competent interviewing and diligent historical analysis; to put it bluntly, it is usually evident when veterans are unreliable informants. Yet one very real problem with oral history does remain: people in battle are under severe stress and often in a state of physical shock, with all the mental confusion and dislocation from events that this entails. The result is their recollections of actual fighting are often vague, sometimes dreamlike, or they may even have had a black-out and be reliant on what they have been subsequently told of the incident. Police officers trying to determine the exact course of a contemporary violent criminal incident will be familiar with this phenomenon. Witness statements can often differ radically just minutes after the event - never mind after a gap of several decades. Thus oral history ‘action’ stories always need to be carefully checked for internal inconsistencies and alongside other sources of evidence. In many ways interviews are best used to give a ‘sense’ of ‘what it was like’ to be in an attack rather than the fine details of what actually happened – in particular how they felt before they went over the top, the overall pattern of the fighting and the impact of the experience once it was all over. This might be described as exploring the commonality of a traumatic experience. Another avenue is to interview as many people as possible from the same unit so that the accounts criss-cross to provide a reasonably convincing overall account of what really happened. Sadly we were too late for this approach with our Great War oral history interview programme, although it has been pursued very successfully in our projects covering subsequent conflicts.

In the final analysis, oral history is not testimony - a word that provides a wholly unnecessary smokescreen of reverence combined with the sulphurous whiff of legal depositions. On the contrary as a source of evidence interviews are by no means perfect and the veterans are not plaster-saints. When using oral history you have to be sceptical. But this is surely one of the ground rules of any historical research: if something is frankly unbelievable, then don’t believe it without a great deal of solid confirmation - whatever the source. In the end historical evidence is made up of many constituent parts much in the fashion of the ‘All Arms Battle’ that eventually won the war on the Western Front in 1918. Oral history is just one part of the big picture, but it does have an important role in that it humanises the record and provides a ‘grounding’ with its strong roots in real life. Rely solely on ‘contemporary’ documents and you will eventually end up with a sanitised ‘romantic’ view of war that significantly underplays the horror and moral ambivalence that defined the experience for the majority.

Peter Hart (Copyright reserved)

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A few years ago a senior civil servant was 'ecconomical with the truth'.

Not a civil servant. It was Alan Clark (he of the diaries), sometime Minister of State in the Ministry of Defence.

On the general point, the potential unreliability of memoirs for fine detail can be demonstrated when one has the opportunity to challenge the writer in person. I have had occasion to do this with two people, one a member of the House of Lords and the the other a retired university professor. Each, when I pointed out details which did not accord with well-documented facts, readily conceded a faulty memory. There was never any reason to suppose that either had deliberately misled readers. It simply demonstrates the necessity not to rely on any detail that cannot be substantiated independently.

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Not a civil servant. It was Alan Clark (he of the diaries), sometime Minister of State in the Ministry of Defence.

Actually, I think it was also said of the then Cabinet Secretary (Sir Robert Armstrong?) when he gave evidence in Australia in the 'Spycatcher'/Peter Wright case.

IIRC Alan Clark admitted to being "economical with the actualite'."

I am also reminded of a saying attributed to the American "homespun philosopher" Josh Billings:

"The problem is not with what people don't know, it's what they do know that just ain't so!"

Ron

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Duff Cooper I think

I remember (oddly enough, given the topic) some years ago talking to Lyn McDonald. She was discussing the battalion of the Rifle Brigade (11th, I think), to which she was very attached. Two veterans were discussing an action, and were disagreeing over whether or not it rained.

Their answer was simple - "Ask Lyn - she'll know"!

My own (very limited) military service recollections are, I know well, heavily embellished, and as for the stories my old dad told, I'm absolutely certain some of them were at least part true.

And was it Harold MacMillan whose memoirs were entitled "Old Men Forget" (someone tell me - I forget)?

Seriously - I can't remember what I did last Thursday, let alone 40 years ago.

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Pete

I merely want to echo Moonraker's comment in that you have provided a brilliant summary of what oral history is all about. Hopefully others will read what you say.

Time we met up again!

Charles M

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