Hot Air

[MikeMeech]

14 minutes ago, alex revell said:

Leaving aside the esoteric and the  minutia, for the moment. For me, the problem is that having seen and heard the  numerous, quite glaring  errors in subjects of which I have some knowledge, it's hard to know the validity of those documentaries on a subject of which I have little or no knowledge.

Alex

You are definitely not alone in that worry.

 

Mike

[Moonraker]

We've wandered around a bit with this discussion, departing from  the point first made, but "primary sources" came again to mind when I read this post in another thread:

 

"I have the impression that, with Edmonds, one has to read as much between the lines as on the lines due to the amount of redaction and modification forced upon him by more influential personages. His original drafts must have been very interesting! "

 

Edmonds being the official historian of the British Army. One reviewer claims that "the official history of the British Army in World War I is a great reference source of primary material. General Edmonds served in the war and he consulted the unit diaries, personal correspondence and interviews with both major and minor participants".

 

Some researchers, including generalists, might regard the Official History as reliable. On other hand, in this day and age of cynicism and conspiracy theories, others might not.

 

Moonraker

 

 

[Chris_Baker]

Having ploughed through the correspondence between the Official Historian and officers who participated in the Battle of the Lys, I was surprised at how much of the latter's information (provided many years after the events) found its way almost verbatim into the relevant volume of the OH. On the one hand: good, it is of value to hear from men who were present and for them to correct or modify the OH draft they were sent. On the other: how much could their memory be trusted?

 

In general, I have to say that I find the OH a brilliant piece of work. Try writing up a large, complex battle from the war diaries - it's far from straightforward. That Edmonds and his staff managed to distill a readable narrative at all was quite a feat. I have rarely found an error of fact (when comparing OH to operational records): it is where the Official Historian presents a view or opinion that it becomes much more shaky.

[Guest]

Given the sheer scope of the material in the OH, and the fact that it literally took a lifetime to write, I suspect it would be extremely difficult to properly assess the accuracy of the OH in its entirety for the simple fact that all the hundreds of eyewitnesses that the Historical Section spoke to and corresponded are now dead. Andrew Green made a noble attempt at assessing a few volumes in his Writing the Great War for his PhD and concluded that Edmonds and his team did rather a good job. Dissent is nothing new: Liddell Hart in the 1930s: "It's Official but not History".

 

I can't imagine anyone trying to write about the Great War without referring to the OH. 

 

 

Edited 16 September , 2016 by Guest

[Moonraker]

There's something of a case history suggested by

 

this recent thread

 

which has shown that several battalions of the Manchester Regiment were at Codford in early 1916 when some very respected sources place them at Witley, 70 miles away.

 

I suspect that most lists of unit locations in Britain stem from E A James' British Regiments 1914–1918, "one of the most used and most useful works of reference on the Great War ever published". I understand that James trawled through unit histories to compile his work. Years ago, I abstracted the entries for Wiltshire, which from time to time I "tweak". I can't recall having to make any corrections but perhaps in a dozen cases have been able to make attributions such as "Salisbury Plain", "Tidworth" and "Ludgershall" more precise. ("At Tidworth" can meanTidworth Barracks, Tidworth Park, Tidworth Pennings or Windmill Hill.)

 

Perhaps then we can regard James as a "primary source" or an authoritative summary of primary sources?

 

John Hartley (post 3 of the recent thread) has obviously done due diligence and could not be expected to have come across a few very scattered references to Manchesters at Codford. Indeed, without the Web and the GWF discussion their presence there would not have been accepted.

 

Moonraker

[David Filsell]

The curse of Winter continues.

A new biography of Oswald Boelke (Grub Street) by an American author has just repeated the Winter statistics hooklike and sinker and quoted a number of his other factoids. Not least this makes one question the depth of the author's research - which is virtually all in secondary researches it appears.

 

Interestingly and strangely in reporting the 'Boelke Dicta, the book also seems to have edited out the sentence in his guidance  which said pilots should follow their quarrey down as  they fell -  significant factors in the Deaths  of both vonR and Mannock and no doubt others. Accident or design?

 

As well as OB's own posthumous work and an exitisting German biography (Werner translated into English by the fascinating Claud W Sykes) the book actualy and unsurprisingly seems to have  little new to say about the man, although it does place him, aviation development and tactics in an interesting perspective.

Edited 3 January , 2017 by David Filsell

[Guest]

One can see the influence of Winter's work in many places: Type Ctrl+F and enter 8,000 then enter to find the quotes. 

 

http://www.theaerodrome.com/forum/showthread.php?t=23225&garpg=7#content_start

( A long and detailed article by Michael Skeet on the training of RFC Pilots. No reference is provided for the 8,000 figure)

 

"Training Accidents & Casualties

Before the Gosport System, RFC training was incredibly costly, in terms of both machines and men. The RFC had an attitude toward training accidents that seems now to be shockingly casual. William Lambert’s first solo ended in a perfect three-point landing. Unfortunately, he was still 10 feet up in the air at the time, and when he relaxed the controls his machine pancaked straight down, driving the undercarriage up through the lower wings. After checking to be sure that Lambert wasn’t hurt, the instructor pointed to another machine and told him to try again. This was a very common experience, and the typical training airfield and its surroundings were constantly littered with crashed aircraft in varying degrees of ruination.

g was going on at full pace; this led to a steady hemorrhage of cadets; on average, one trainee pilot died each day in the UK before Gosport, and several others were seriously injured. In a typical day (21 October 1917), C.H. Andrews recorded 17 crashes at his training squadron. One cadet was killed and five were injured seriously enough to be sent to hospital. And this was in Canada, which had a much better safety record than did Britain; 129 cadets died in Canada compared with over 8,000 in Britain, and the fatality rate per hour flown in Canada was one percent that of Britain. (Not coincidentally, Canada had standardized on a better training machine in the Curtiss “Canuck”; the Shorthorn was never used in Canada.) Ambulances were on constant duty, motors running, at training squadron airfields; Canadian cadets referred to ambulances by the name “Hungry Lizzie.”

It could be argued that the constant death and injury helped to inure cadets to the casualties they’d encounter when they reached the front. The evidence, though, suggests that training-squadron deaths shocked cadets. Though outwardly they tried to maintain a show of light-heartedness (“Very cheerful” was Andrews’ comment after noting the carnage of 21 Oct. 1917), diary entries show that the strain was there and having an effect. When Harold Price lost two friends to an R.E.8 crash in late spring, 1917, he was shattered and closeted himself in his room. “Haven’t the heart to see anyone,” he wrote in his diary, and added that he could not write home under these circumstances because this kind of news could not be shared with family. In public, though, the attitude was more stern. Price notes with approval a colleague’s exasperation with the emotional, public response of two women friends to the deaths. “We boys do not talk about [death],” he wrote, “except very privately and quietly, in two or threes, and then in almost an impersonal manner.” "

 

 

RAF Museum claiming that the "casualties rose sharply and by the spring of 1917 the life expectancy of a new pilot could be measured in weeks."

http://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/research/online-exhibitions/taking-flight/historical-periods/first-world-war-flying-training.aspx

 

RAF Benevolent Fund.

https://www.rafbf.org/news-and-blogs/danger-flight

 

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world-war-1/472661/Death-from-the-machine-meant-to-deliver-peace-before-WWI

 

http://www.southribble.gov.uk/content/wwi-photographs-south-ribble-museum

 

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0StaCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA178&lpg=PA178&dq=8,000+pilots+WWI&source=bl&ots=-a1Q7LAPMQ&sig=7-APHG-GLMwYcv3yOAlp7EUWBMg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi1j8_xpqbRAhUMBsAKHVDCDWwQ6AEIRTAG#v=onepage&q=8%2C000 pilots WWI&f=false

 

http://www.fighterpatrol.co.uk/the-aircraft/dh-82-tiger-moth/

 

http://journals.chapman.edu/ojs/index.php/VocesNovae/article/view/15/91

 

This one appears to be quoting a pilot. I wonder if this is the source:

 

http://www.hadesign.co.uk/worthing_history/history_pages/html/wing_and_a_prayer.html

Edited 3 January , 2017 by Guest

[MikeMeech]

3 hours ago, David Filsell said:

The curse of Winter continues.

A new biography of Oswad Boelke (Grub Street) by an American author has just repeated the Winter statistics hooklike and sinker and quoted a number of his other factoids. Not least this makes one question the depth of the author's research - which is virtually all in secondary researches it appears.

 

Interestingly and strangely in reporting the 'Boelke Dicta, the book also seems to have edited out the sentence in his guidance  which said pilots should follow their quarrey down as  they fell -  significant factors in the Deaths  of both vonR and Mannock and no doubt others. Accident or design?

 

As well as OB's own posthumous work and an exitisting German biography (Werner translated into English by the fascinating Claud W Sykes) the book actualy and unsurprisingly seems to have  little new to say about the man, although it does place him, aviation development and tactics in an interesting perspective.

Hi David

 

Thanks for this, so it goes on in recent works I presume the more correct figures are not exciting enough. Of course it would make the German figures for deaths in training look rather better instead of being about the same as the British.

 

Mike

[MikeMeech]

55 minutes ago, QGE said:

One can see the influence of Winter's work in many places: Type Ctrl+F and enter 8,000 then enter to find the quotes. 

 

http://www.theaerodrome.com/forum/showthread.php?t=23225&garpg=7#content_start

( A long and detailed article by Michael Skeet on the training of RFC Pilots. No reference is provided for the 8,000 figure)

 

"Training Accidents & Casualties

Before the Gosport System, RFC training was incredibly costly, in terms of both machines and men. The RFC had an attitude toward training accidents that seems now to be shockingly casual. William Lambert’s first solo ended in a perfect three-point landing. Unfortunately, he was still 10 feet up in the air at the time, and when he relaxed the controls his machine pancaked straight down, driving the undercarriage up through the lower wings. After checking to be sure that Lambert wasn’t hurt, the instructor pointed to another machine and told him to try again. This was a very common experience, and the typical training airfield and its surroundings were constantly littered with crashed aircraft in varying degrees of ruination.

g was going on at full pace; this led to a steady hemorrhage of cadets; on average, one trainee pilot died each day in the UK before Gosport, and several others were seriously injured. In a typical day (21 October 1917), C.H. Andrews recorded 17 crashes at his training squadron. One cadet was killed and five were injured seriously enough to be sent to hospital. And this was in Canada, which had a much better safety record than did Britain; 129 cadets died in Canada compared with over 8,000 in Britain, and the fatality rate per hour flown in Canada was one percent that of Britain. (Not coincidentally, Canada had standardized on a better training machine in the Curtiss “Canuck”; the Shorthorn was never used in Canada.) Ambulances were on constant duty, motors running, at training squadron airfields; Canadian cadets referred to ambulances by the name “Hungry Lizzie.”

It could be argued that the constant death and injury helped to inure cadets to the casualties they’d encounter when they reached the front. The evidence, though, suggests that training-squadron deaths shocked cadets. Though outwardly they tried to maintain a show of light-heartedness (“Very cheerful” was Andrews’ comment after noting the carnage of 21 Oct. 1917), diary entries show that the strain was there and having an effect. When Harold Price lost two friends to an R.E.8 crash in late spring, 1917, he was shattered and closeted himself in his room. “Haven’t the heart to see anyone,” he wrote in his diary, and added that he could not write home under these circumstances because this kind of news could not be shared with family. In public, though, the attitude was more stern. Price notes with approval a colleague’s exasperation with the emotional, public response of two women friends to the deaths. “We boys do not talk about [death],” he wrote, “except very privately and quietly, in two or threes, and then in almost an impersonal manner.” "

 

 

RAF Museum claiming that the "casualties rose sharply and by the spring of 1917 the life expectancy of a new pilot could be measured in weeks."

http://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/research/online-exhibitions/taking-flight/historical-periods/first-world-war-flying-training.aspx

 

RAF Benevolent Fund.

https://www.rafbf.org/news-and-blogs/danger-flight

 

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world-war-1/472661/Death-from-the-machine-meant-to-deliver-peace-before-WWI

 

http://www.southribble.gov.uk/content/wwi-photographs-south-ribble-museum

 

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0StaCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA178&lpg=PA178&dq=8,000+pilots+WWI&source=bl&ots=-a1Q7LAPMQ&sig=7-APHG-GLMwYcv3yOAlp7EUWBMg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi1j8_xpqbRAhUMBsAKHVDCDWwQ6AEIRTAG#v=onepage&q=8%2C000 pilots WWI&f=false

 

http://www.fighterpatrol.co.uk/the-aircraft/dh-82-tiger-moth/

 

http://journals.chapman.edu/ojs/index.php/VocesNovae/article/view/15/91

 

This one appears to be quoting a pilot. I wonder if this is the source:

 

http://www.hadesign.co.uk/worthing_history/history_pages/html/wing_and_a_prayer.html

Hi

 

I find it all rather sad, in these 100 Anniversary years, that writers still get this and other things wrong despite the correct information being available.

 

Mike

[Guest]

All the articles appear to post-date Winter's Tale

 

The RAF related websites were the most surprising. 

 

Edited 3 January , 2017 by Guest

[David Filsell]

The sad fact is that much of Winter's book is a worthwhile overview of the realities of the war in the air. I had little reason to question his statistics until this thread, as clearly did many others. It's not simply a question of gullibility (he said defensively) more of lack of of a basis upon which to question assertions - so do check the footnotes. If there is no evidence, it is merely an author's assertion/judgement think before accepting. Not least the knowledge on this forum is extremely important. Ask the question, query the factoid, and someone may know better and an reference the proof.

Edited 4 January , 2017 by David Filsell