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As a firm believer in 'cock up'over 'conspiracy', I find it difficult to believe that the BBC has an agenda of any sort to over-egg the casualty figures anywhere. I tend to agree with Mike and Mr Raker in that 'experts' cock up and shabby research repeats the cock up ad infinitum.

 

As Abraham Lincoln so memorably said "Don't believe everything you read on Wikipedia".

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From the BBC website Click

 

still regurgitating the stat... And this time informing us that life expectancy for a pilot in 1915 was just 11 days.......

 

QED

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For anyone wanting to explore the BBCs standards of accuracy, it is worth trawling its iWonder part of the BBC website. Just a random sampling of the air war section exposes the expert Great War historian Dan Snow telling us that 

 

" It is significant that the only battle fought in Britian in the last 250 years was not fought on the ground, but in the air. "

 

Which would be be news to the Pembrokeshire Yeomanry who fought Revolutionary France at the battle of Fishguard in 1797...... incidentally 219 years ago and the only battle honour of the British Army on British soil. 

 

iWonder......iWonder if there is any quality control or does the BBC simply allow its presenters to make things up? Who checks this nonsense?  MG

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Winter was of course been judged by academics to have been less than honest about  claims he made in a book about Douglas Haig. He certainly was an author with an agenda - although I suspect his figures of aviators killed were an error  rather than an attempt to big up the figures.

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More nonsense from the BBC website, this time on the Pals Battalions....

 

In Accrington, Lancashire, of the hundreds of men that joined the fight only 100 returned home. Such examples saw communities unite in mourning and in many cases incorporate the loss into local lore. This event undoubtedly contributed to the tragic view of the conflict which many have to this day.

 

What is the driving force behind these gross exaggerations of casualties?. The idea that only 100 men from Accrington who enlisted managed to return is yet another example of how the BBC is distorting history. MG

 

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44 minutes ago, QGE said:

More nonsense from the BBC website, this time on the Pals Battalions....

 

In Accrington, Lancashire, of the hundreds of men that joined the fight only 100 returned home. Such examples saw communities unite in mourning and in many cases incorporate the loss into local lore. This event undoubtedly contributed to the tragic view of the conflict which many have to this day.

 

What is the driving force behind these gross exaggerations of casualties?. The idea that only 100 men from Accrington who enlisted managed to return is yet another example of how the BBC is distorting history. MG

 

 
 

The Accrington Pals consisted of A.coy 250 men from Accrington, B.Coy 250 men from the surrounding towns and villages, C.Coy 230 men from Chorley, made  up to a Company by men from Blackburn, D.Coy 259 men from Burnley &  District, E.Coy 250 men mostly from Greater Accrington, July 1st 1916 720 men of the battalion went over the top several of these men were posted from the A.C.C. and other battalions, during May & June, many of them were born in Yorkshire, of these 720, 638 became casualties, killed or wounded. Accrington itself suffered the most casualties. The  casualty figures in  the War Diaries for the 11th E.L. are miles out, which can be understood when all the had were cursory roll calls. Several so called Pals Ex Spurts, still quote the War Diary figures  for July 1st.

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9 hours ago, David Filsell said:

Winter was of course been judged by academics to have been less than honest about  claims he made in a book about Douglas Haig. He certainly was an author with an agenda - although I suspect his figures of aviators killed were an error  rather than an attempt to big up the figures.

Hi

I would like to think it was just an 'error', sadly he states:

"...official figures at the end of the war listed 14,166 dead pilots, of whom 8,000 had died while training in the UK."

The 'Official Figures' published in the Official History do not say this at all.  Quoting that 14,166 were dead pilots, and the 8,000 died in training, for which there is no basis, were very specific.  But the problem is not just with Winter but those that have quoted him since despite all the information available, such as the Official History, 'Airmen Died' and TSTB 1 and  2 and CWGC information.

 

Mike

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8 hours ago, Retlaw said:

The Accrington Pals consisted of A.coy 250 men from Accrington, B.Coy 250 men from the surrounding towns and villages, C.Coy 230 men from Chorley, made  up to a Company by men from Blackburn, D.Coy 259 men from Burnley &  District, E.Coy 250 men mostly from Greater Accrington, July 1st 1916 720 men of the battalion went over the top several of these men were posted from the A.C.C. and other battalions, during May & June, many of them were born in Yorkshire, of these 720, 638 became casualties, killed or wounded. Accrington itself suffered the most casualties. The  casualty figures in  the War Diaries for the 11th E.L. are miles out, which can be understood when all the had were cursory roll calls. Several so called Pals Ex Spurts, still quote the War Diary figures  for July 1st.

 

 

When someone states that only 100 men from Accrington returned from the war, it is not a comment on 1st July or even the Pals Battalion. It simply states that of all the men from Accrington who volunteered or were conscripted, only 100 returned. At best it is misleading and at worst it is a falsification aimed at exaggerating Accrington's fatalities. Either way it is poor history.

 

Men from Accrington would have served in many regiments other than the Accrington Pals. The context of the article was Thankful Villages which attempted to explain how some villages suffered no fatalities during the war whereas other Towns and villages suffered greatly. Accrington was given as one of the extreme examples with its 100 survivors. MG

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I'm no apologist for Winter, but  his book on Great War aviation remains a sound piece of work - regardless of the casualty error  - which I do not I believe a deliberate falsification. Indeed it would be interesting to know if the statistic had been used before by anyone)The book is certainly far better than two or three more recent works (more than one of which quotes from his work but does not credit having done so).

I will put my hand up to errors  - and I have used the figure of casualties given by Winter in an article - as yet unpublished and now to be corrected - if the correction is correct. Despite one's best efforts mistakes are all to easy to make - and can even have 'second poofs' - create poor history.  

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2 hours ago, David Filsell said:

I'm no apologist for Winter, but  his book on Great War aviation remains a sound piece of work - regardless of the casualty error  - which I do not I believe a deliberate falsification. Indeed it would be interesting to know if the statistic had been used before by anyone)The book is certainly far better than two or three more recent works (more than one of which quotes from his work but does not credit having done so).

I will put my hand up to errors  - and I have used the figure of casualties given by Winter in an article - as yet unpublished and now to be corrected - if the correction is correct. Despite one's best efforts mistakes are all to easy to make - and can even have 'second poofs' - create poor history.  

Hi

 

All books can be useful, sadly all sorts of things tend to creep in, for example page 44 in Winter which states:

 

"The other Canadian invention was the camera gun, which looked like a Lewis with a large box for a breech."

 

Strangely this appears to be a description of the 'Hythe' Camera gun, as its name suggests was designed at the RFC Machine-Gun School at Hythe in Kent during 1916.  This in turn puts in doubt the mention of the 'one-eighth deflection trainer' being a 'Canadian design' or 'pioneered in Canada'.  The latter may or may not have been but there were various training aids produced, the 1/8th scale Deflection Trainer, 1/50th scale Deflection trainer (for indoor work) and the 1/8th Scale Deflection Target, indeed a whole series of training aids were produced during the war.  The 'Hythe' camera is a very well known device though so why did he think that it was pioneered, presumably in the training system, when it was in use at Hythe before the Canadian training system was fully set up (based on the British Training system and the transfer of some training units to Canada)?

Personally I have grown to accept 'errors' in books although some are worse than others.  Sadly Phil Carradice's book 'First World War in the Air' even has a photo of a Martinsyde F.4 stating that this was the type of machine flown by Louis Strange when he had his famous escape from death (when the aircraft went upside down when he was changing the Lewis gun magazine), it was of course the Martinsyde S.1, the F.4 Buzzard being introduced too late for the war while the incident happened in 1915 (page 114-115 of the book).  Carradice also repeats the incorrect deaths  on page 51, the book was published in 2012.

I may not be error free in my own writing but I do try to be but some that turn up in books are rather obvious to anyone who has studied the WW1 air war (or rather the air/ground war as the two cannot really be separated as most air actions relate to what was going on below). 

 

Mike

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Don't want to get too involved in a discussion about the ethics behind the programming of the BBC, but my impression is that they always pick the wrong people - so called  'experts' - in making the progs. These are either professional journalists, or an academic. The first are usually people  who have previously been commissioned to write books on the  subject, of with they are almost completely ignorant. The resultant book is not a  work of original research, but a mish-mash of quotes from other books, unchecked for accuracy, most of which are either well out of date in their conclusions, or just plain wrong. The mistakes which are then passed on from book to book are consequently set in stone, purely because they are in published works. (Only a minor point, but the incorrect spelling of Rhys Davids, with a hyphen, which I corrected over thirty years ago in Brief Glory, is still used time and time again) In a recent such book the author commented that McCudden was horrified when he brought down a machine in flames. He commented that given that Mac had not expressed such feeling after his other victims, then he must have been a man of limited imagination. A quick look through his sources and bibliography, revealed that he had not even read Five Years in the Royal Flying, Corps,surely a perquisite  for making such a judgement.  

Such major mistakes in books, even by people who should know better, are too numerous and time consuming to set out here. As for the academics. God save and preserve us. I'm sure that like myself  most members of C&C spend too much time in front of the TV shouting at them and the ridiculous nonsense they talk : 'That's wrong. Completely wrong. Where did you get that from, you old idiot.'   But then what do we know?  To them we are only 'amateur historians.' They even use the  word amateur incorrectly, in a derogatory sense.

 I was amused by the recent programmes on the Somme and the presenter's contention that he is the first to consult the German records on the subject. He also used the old trick of leaving out any contrary evidence which did not support his case. I liked his statement at one point that the German machine guns had an accurate range of 3 miles, which enabled them to fire on British troops while themselves being out of range of British artillery. I'm no expert on guns, but I couldn't find any reference which gave the effective range of machine guns being at that long range. That's apart from the fact that  the gunners would still have been in range of  the British artillery.

As for Alexandra. I once unwisely pointed out to her some of her obvious errors and got soundly told off as a result. :-)

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When all is said and done there is no substitute for checking primary sources, wherever that is possible, and an author of a book or an article who does not do so is guilty of shoddy 'scholarship'. As some of you will know, my frequent moan on another thread is how people will report 'facts' without providing references, and without being able to see the source of the information it is impossible to check its validity - apart from which primary sources are (on the face of it at least!) more reliable than somebody's summary of these, necessarily subject to their own interpretation, or misreading, or simple misunderstanding.   

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I think we've been here before. What is a primary source? One has to be careful with original sources - unit and personal diaries, newspaper accounts,memoirs and so on for various reasons, not least lack of objectivity. Perhaps unit histories, written some years after the events, are as reliable a source as most, but how likely to admit that there was a cock-up by the CO or that some men refused to advance?

 

I've just Googled "primary sources" - and there are several definitions, including this by Yale University: " They are usually created by witnesses or recorders who experienced the events or conditions being documented. Often these sources are created at the time when the events or conditions are occurring, but primary sources can also include autobiographies, memoirs, and oral histories recorded later." (Another definition reckons that after-the-event records are in fact secondary sources ... )

 

So how does one know that the primary (or secondary) source is correct? Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That may be a good read, but he is regarded as having embellished some accounts. What about T E Lawrence and Seven Pillars of Wisdom?

 

An author or researcher could spend for ever and a day checking back on primary (and secondary) sources and finding contradictions, then checking on more recent books and finding contradictions, then appealing here on GWF - and getting contradictory information ...

 

Moonraker

(who not so long ago published the wrong WWI casualty figure for his old school, which sent his publisher a terse email)

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Moonraker, You write.

'An author or researcher could spend for ever and a day checking back on primary (and secondary) sources and finding contradictions, then checking on more recent books and finding contradictions, then appealing here on GWF - and getting contradictory information ...

That's why attempting to write history is so difficult. :-)

 

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I suspect many (most - even all) of us on this Forum have been guilty of supplying misleading information, mostly inadvertently I am sure, but are happy to stand corrected when we're unmasked  The problem with the printed word is that it is - well ... printed and becomes the truth and is then referenced again and again. The more high-profile the author, and the more outrageous his or her claims, so much the better 9or worse).

 

I still think it highly unlikely the BBC are at the centre of a conspiracy to defraud, though. Incompetence and researchers who can't research creates the problem, I'd say. I mean, they seem to think Danny Boy is an historian, after all!

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Show me a historian who has never made a mistake and it will be a historian who has never published or taught. Fact is most of those of us who write - fact, fiction, or whatever - just do the best we can with the material available. 

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I do not mean to suggest the BBC is deliberately or knowingly pushing out false information. It is more nuanced. I believe it has a set of values or criteria which are core to its programming and these seem to heavily influence its researchers to the point where accuracy sometimes is a secondary concern. 

 

Two years ago the BBC ran the Crimson Field and claimed that despite being a fictional series it tried to be as historically accurate as possible. I did not see the programme but the comments from many informed GWF members who did watch it seem to suggest historical accuracy was a secondary concern; subordinated to a number of core thematics that the BBC was determined to backfit in an imagined history. In some instances they went completely against expert advice. The net effect appears to have been to produce a very misleading idea of the experiences of nurses and the medical services in the Great War. The Crimson Field according to its 2013 objectives was a central piece in the Great War centenary programming.... Part of its mission to "inform, educate and entertain."

 

It is the BBC's apparent determination to view the war within a framework of modern values that creates this distortion. My perception is that this is so dominant that historical accuracy is sometimes lost, simply because no one appears to be doing a reality check. In some cases the desire to create a shock factor (usually casualties) or some stunning revelation, or recycle some authors' 'groundbreaking' research, the BBC has forgotten to do some of the basics; checking 'facts'. I fear that the BBC has created a culture where it's 'message' is more important. 

 

I may well be wrong. MG

 

.

 

 

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The BBC views everything within a framework of modern values whether it's GW history or serialising Dickens. it's what 12 year-olds do.

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Talking of accuracy. Does anyone know the rule as to when the Sam Browne belt was required to be worn. My understanding was that it was  worn only when one was on active duty - after all, it has the attachments for revolver and other parts of equipment. But in plays, it is often shown being worn by officers not on active duty, dinner at home, and various other social occasions. I've asked several ex- army people about this.but they never seem to be able to give a definite answer. I do know that an officer in 56 Sqdn was fined by Major Blomfield for arriving at the Mess for dinner wearing a Sam Browne, because the only

officer entitled to do so was  the duty officer of the day.

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Viewing the past through the lens of modern society is not the only challenge. In the introduction to Six Weeks, John Lewis Stempel touches on how other factors distort the picture;

 

"The trenches of the First World War are now almost impossible to reach. It is not just that those excavations on the plains of Flanders and the Somme are buried under the plough of the farmer and the grass of time, it is that they are surrounded by a moat deep with the pitying tears of the war poets. Across the lachrymose ditch though, some definite khaki figures loom: there is the heroic, cheerful Tommy and the sclerotic, incompetent general. Much less distinct is the junior officer, who seems to be either composing exquisite pacifist poems in the manner of Wilfred Salter Owen, or braying stupidly."

 

MG

 

 

 

 

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14 hours ago, QGE said:

 

 

When someone states that only 100 men from Accrington returned from the war, it is not a comment on 1st July or even the Pals Battalion. It simply states that of all the men from Accrington who volunteered or were conscripted, only 100 returned. At best it is misleading and at worst it is a falsification aimed at exaggerating Accrington's fatalities. Either way it is poor history.

 

Men from Accrington would have served in many regiments other than the Accrington Pals. The context of the article was Thankful Villages which attempted to explain how some villages suffered no fatalities during the war whereas other Towns and villages suffered greatly. Accrington was given as one of the extreme examples with its 100 survivors. MG

1

You are correct, 1000's of men from Accrington served in many other Regiments & Services, for Greater Accrington (now Hyndburn) the number of names & details I have collected exceeds 12600, for Accrington alone the figure is near 6000, Accrington's war memorial has 879 names on it, there are 19 spelling mistakes, 14 double entries, and 39 names missing including 9 Accrington Pals.

So you are also correct in that it is a  falsification and  exaggeration.

By the way, there are two men on Accrington's War Memorial that did not die and one on Oswaldtwistle's memorial. I told the two clever beggars who were compiling the names for the new copper plaques, about the errors in their lists back in 2007,  one of them said Ok I'll be in touch, never heard from him again.

To me 1 thou out and its scrap, 1/2 thou, tolerable. I spend as much time checking as I do finding,

My  other hatred is these dammed twiddly bits    "" ..'' ```,,, & where they go.

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15 hours ago, Retlaw said:

You are correct, 1000's of men from Accrington served in many other Regiments & Services, for Greater Accrington (now Hyndburn) the number of names & details I have collected exceeds 12600, for Accrington alone the figure is near 6000, Accrington's war memorial has 879 names on it, there are 19 spelling mistakes, 14 double entries, and 39 names missing including 9 Accrington Pals.

So you are also correct in that it is a  falsification and  exaggeration.

By the way, there are two men on Accrington's War Memorial that did not die and one on Oswaldtwistle's memorial. I told the two clever beggars who were compiling the names for the new copper plaques, about the errors in their lists back in 2007,  one of them said Ok I'll be in touch, never heard from him again.

To me 1 thou out and its scrap, 1/2 thou, tolerable. I spend as much time checking as I do finding,

My  other hatred is these dammed twiddly bits    "" ..'' ```,,, & where they go.

 

Thank you. None of this is surprising in any way. One has to wonder what happened to common sense when the author was writing that only 100 men returned to Accrington.. From your data, taking a minimum of 6,000 men served, would imply 98% of Accrington's men never returned. 

 

Again in these are not small errors, this particular datapoint is over 8 times higher than the national average for all men who served. A statistic that is so unlikely as to be nigh impossible. In its efforts to highlight the fate of working class communities from the industrial north the BBC has managed to create a new myth.... which naturally raises questions how this can happen on a state run media website, funded by licence payers, that is aiming to inform, educate and entertain. It is doing the opposite. 

 

The pilot figures were exaggerated by 300%

The Accrington figures were exaggerated by 800%

 

QED. 

 

 

 

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Martin

If the BBC is like its counterpart, the ABC, in Australia, I wouldn't worry that the BBC has just started a new myth. I never worry about what is said on the ABC as fewer than 10% of the population ever watch its news programmes or documentaries!

 

Mike

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Let^s be fair to people who make programmes. They are often just given the job, without any special knowledge of the subject, and have to turn to people who are supposedly experts on the subject. How can they contradict them?

 

It is all very well saying that researchers should go back to primary sources and check everything. I wonder just how many people realise how difficult and time consuming that is? I completed an inventory of "Luxembourgers in the First World War" - available on Kindle.

I spent FIVE years in the National Archives here going through hundreds of files on the First World War to find names and the stories. Then I spent a coupe of months going through the newspaper archives doing the same (a lot in Gothic German).

 

Then a BBC journalist who was told on Monday to prepare a script for transmission on Friday is criticised for not going back to primary sources and doing his own research. We have to be reasonable; it can't be done.

 

Documentaires are a bit different, but many programmes are done almost on the spur of the moment. A couple of years ago I was asked by Radio 4 to speak on a programme to be broadcast at 4 p.m. about a fairly technical subject (not history). It was then 2 p.m. I had to ring a couple of companies and speak to the managers to get some facts or at least opinions on the subject, get notes in order and be ready to speak. I I made some mistakes, well, hard luck. I did my best.

 

In any case, I wonder how many of the general public actually remember the numbers? I'll bet that most just heard them and thought, "horrific" and moved on. Ask them now the actual numbers and they won't have a clue, just that they were high.

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I was in Waterstones this morning. While waiting for the better half I spent some time reading a relatively new book. No names or pack  drill. Suffice it to say it was by someone who should know better. Full of factual errors and misspelled names, sometimes when mentioned more that once. One spelling on one page (correct)  wrong spelling on another. However, came across a real beauty, quite a classic example of dreadful proofreading or none at all. Estrée Blanche was motioned several times, sometimes with the correct accent, some not. Then came to real classic in the text: Entrée Blanche.

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