War diaries - Gallipoli

[Bryn]

Bob, in answer to your question, I don't know anyone in Japan who can translate Ottoman Turkish Arabic script. I have a friend in Turkey who has a friend who apparently can, though.

I'll assume Ed Erickson has either not seen the Turkish service records he alluded to, or does not know what information they contain. I'll assume nobody on the forum has or does, since nobody's responded saying they have seen them or know what's contained within them.

Which brings me back to my original point. Let me be clear that the records I'm talking about are individual service records. Only.

Of course there are records from WW1, and there may even be service records on individuals. But the fact that nobody seems to know anything about their contents - for whatever reason - leads me to question - again - how people can make sweeping, generalised comments about them, such as that they were 'meticulously' kept. There seems to me me to be no evidence whatsoever that service records of individual soldiers exist at all, let alone that they fall into the category of well-kept records.

Merely saying that the Ottomans were great record-keepers is a subjective opinion, and I would ask - compared to who? Filling in endless forms is not in itself 'good record-keeping'. It's just as likely to be mere bureaucracy for its own sake. In itself this opinion (which is disputed by some other sources) that the Turks were great record-keepers is no proof at all that they kept these records, that what was recorded was useful information, or that they exist now.

Once again I say, when the record of a private soldier of the 77th Regiment who died at Gallipoli is made available for examination (in Turkish Arabic script is fine), then I'll believe these records exist. When I know what's contained within the record, then I'll be able to judge, on my own subjective terms, whether I believe it's a comprehensive, well-kept record. After all, I don't see why my opinion on what constitutes good record-keeping is worth less than people whose opinions on these records are based on never having seen or read them.

[Bryn]

The following is from the record of an Australian POW captured at Gallipoli. It shows French with the Turkish Arabic script translation:

[Guest Bill Woerlee]

Mates

What Bryn says.

I am not asking for the records to be translated. Nor do I care for any prognostications on the complexity of the script. I want to see a serviceman's record. Let me decide how to deal with it.

As for the Arabic script - there is nothing complex about it - it is Arabic script for goodness sake. Its use by the Turks is no more complex than the use of Roman script today. It was learned by the general literate population, it was used by that population and so it cannot be too complex or else it would not have survived. Transcription from one system to another is not rocket science. The number of people who can read it today is not a criteria for not releasing the records nor is it a viable consideration.

So let's get back to what we demand - let us see the quality of a serviceman's record. Simple.

Cheers

Bill

[Ozzie]

If it is not too complex, then why is there no one that can read it now?

If you don't want it translated, why would you want a serviceman's record if you can not read it?

Just to prove a point that they do or don't exist?

Bryn, I do see your point on finding out the truth of the words meticously kept etc, but you will still have to translate them. Do you have more documents like the one you have scanned?

There may be more in the archives, as there were people on Anzac that could translate Turkish into English during the war. I have such a piece. It is 4 days of a diary found on a dead Turkish officer, translated into English. I posted it on this forum a couple of years ago. It is in a very fragile condition.

I think some people may have skimmed instead of reading this thread.

Some points have been lost.

Kim

[Guest Bill Woerlee]

Kim

G'day matess

I'm not quite sure what you are driving at. By your comment it appears as though you don't think there is anyone around who can read old Ottoman writing. I recollect Bryn has mentioned that he has a friend who has a friend who can read it. There will be many people who can read the Ottoman script. If the archives become available you will see the number increase exponentially as scholarship explodes.

In terms of myself, if necessary, I will master it too. At the moment it is pointless as there is no ability to utilise it. I have little trouble translating Gothic German script into English, French, Japanese and a few other languages. Years ago I began to learn Arabic with the idea of joining Foreign Affairs but got a better job instead and so ended my studies. Mastering the orthography for both the printed and cursive style is the important part - learning the language to read the documents will follow. Like our records, the actual number of words required to translate a document is pretty limited. These are quickly learned. I am puzzled as to why you feel that this is not able to be accomplished. I would like to have access to the documents so that I can access them. The rest all falls into place.

Hope that helps clarify my situation.

Cheers

Bill

[Ozzie]

No, I am confused .Are you all talking about translating the same Turkish, cause one person says it's very difficult and you say it is quickly learned.

As to lots of people being able to read it , how come one guy in Turkey took months to track down someone who could read it?

Confused

Kim

[erickson]

Hello - I was reluctant to add my name to your forum because of the kinds of disparaging commentary that I have seen on some of your threads. Here's an example from Bryn about me!

Quote from Bryn: "I'll assume Ed Erickson has either not seen the Turkish service records he alluded to, or does not know what information they contain."[ b]A bad assumption - I have a substantial body of work based on years of research at ATASE in Ankara. I don't work at the level of individuals and so I don't work in that particular area of the archives..... but, like electricity, I don't have to see it to know that it exists.[/b]

Quote from Bryn: "Of course there are records from WW1, and there may even be service records on individuals. But the fact that nobody seems to know anything about their contents - for whatever reason - leads me to question - again - how people can make sweeping, generalised comments about them, such as that they were 'meticulously' kept. There seems to me me to be no evidence whatsoever that service records of individual soldiers exist at all, let alone that they fall into the category of well-kept records." Many scholars know about the contents of the archives - the fact that nobody on this forum knows about the contents is unsurprising. Are the Ottoman records as complete as the British or the Germans --- as a general statement, no -- however, some parts of the Ottoman archives are more thorough that some parts of their British counterparts. To clarify, ATASE allows no reproduction nor do they allow digital cameras -- it is a "stubby pencil" archive. It is impossible to copy documents.

Quote from Bryn: "Merely saying that the Ottomans were great record-keepers is a subjective opinion, and I would ask - compared to who? Filling in endless forms is not in itself 'good record-keeping'. It's just as likely to be mere bureaucracy for its own sake. In itself this opinion (which is disputed by some other sources) that the Turks were great record-keepers is no proof at all that they kept these records, that what was recorded was useful information, or that they exist now." 1) I don't know of anyone who has worked in the Ottoman archives who suggests that they were not good records keepers. There are some Armenian authors who suggest this --- but none of them have worked in the archives themselves and, therefore, could not possibly have an informed opinion. 2) Since the literacy rate of the Ottoman Empire in 1914 was about 3%, anyone who could read and write became an officer or an NCO in WW1. The Turks simply didn't have "company clerks" or "adjutant's clerks" or soldiers in headquarters who could write or copy orders. Almost everything written had to be done by officers -- and they spent hours and hours in the evenings catching up on paper work (which was hardly meaningless -- as their entire administrative system was a copy of the German Army's system).

Quote from Bryn: "Once again I say, when the record of a private soldier of the 77th Regiment who died at Gallipoli is made available for examination (in Turkish Arabic script is fine), then I'll believe these records exist. When I know what's contained within the record, then I'll be able to judge, on my own subjective terms, whether I believe it's a comprehensive, well-kept record. After all, I don't see why my opinion on what constitutes good record-keeping is worth less than people whose opinions on these records are based on never having seen or read them." The world isn't obligated to do this for you. If you are not willing to accept informed opinions about the Ottoman archives.... then you might consider 1) learning Turkish and Ottoman 2) earning a PhD 3) building a body of historical work that earns you access 4) spending a substantial amount of money to get there and back again. Just a thought.

[bob lembke]

Bill Woerlee, Jan 25 2007, 06:33 PM

Mates

What Bryn says.

I am not asking for the records to be translated. Nor do I care for any prognostications on the complexity of the script. I want to see a serviceman's record. Let me decide how to deal with it.

As for the Arabic script - there is nothing complex about it - it is Arabic script for goodness sake. Its use by the Turks is no more complex than the use of Roman script today. It was learned by the general literate population, it was used by that population and so it cannot be too complex or else it would not have survived. Transcription from one system to another is not rocket science. The number of people who can read it today is not a criteria for not releasing the records nor is it a viable consideration.

So let's get back to what we demand - let us see the quality of a serviceman's record. Simple.

Cheers

Bill

I wrote the below, one of my typically too long posts, while Col. Erickson wrote his most useful post. I didn't mention it, but there is some extreme expressions and verbage. I don't know where this "demand" stuff comes from, for example. "Pencils only" archives are common in major libraries for rare or old materials, and in one, in New York, I was also locked in a wire cage!

If we are looking for a fit subject for "archive outrage", consider the following: The bulk of the Holocaust materials in the world have been collected in Aronson in Germany, controlled by the Swiss, but paid for by the Germans, and I don't believe that they are available for research. The collection seems to be mis-managed, and I believe that they are 11 years behind in researching their files to authenticate claims for Holocaust benefits, so presumed survivors have to wait 11 years for their claims to be approved, while they die off, like "native-speakers" in Ottoman Turkish.

I think that Col. Erickson has answered some of our mysteries.

Guys;

I have not been able to get to William, the Penn Middle East Studies bibliographer, who has both Arabic and Turkish, and is in effect the curator of Arabic and Turkic materials in one of the world's great libraries. He will have good answers to some of our questions.

However, re-interviewed the spouse, who has worked with a book on the Arabic alphabet and just went thru a book on Ottoman Turkish for me. The more I learn, the worse the situation seems.

It does not seem like the Arabic alphabet used in Ottoman Turkish is the same as in Modern Arabic; like with many other languages, it has seemingly simplified over time, even when the associated language may have grown in size (i.e., #s of words). This is the scale of the Ottoman Turkish alphabet. I think that Modern Arabic has about 55 basic letters, at least that is what my favorite Lebanese grocer tells me. (Let's assume that In Ottoman Turkish there were no more, but it may have had more, as in other old alphabets, like Serbian Cyrillic.) Each letter is written in four ways, depending on if it is at the front of a word, in the middle of the word, at the end of the word, or if it stands alone. So then we have an estimated 220 letter forms.

Additionally, these letters, or some of them, are further plagued by these dots, as previously mentioned. A given letter may have no, one, or two, or three dots, delineating different meanings. So, potentially, at least in Ottoman Turkish, there are about 800 "letter-forms" to identify, although they only beling to about 200 "letters", when identified.

Unfortunately, this complex alphabet then feeds into Ottoman Turkish, which seems to be a more complex version of Modern Turkish, which itself seems to be the most complex major language in use anywhere in the world (Anyone have another candidate?)

I can chatter a very small but usable bit of Mandrin Chinese ("national speak") and even, as mentioned before. less Cantonese ("Canton tongue"). However, I can only, offhand, identify three of the say 16,000 Chinese characters common to all Chinese dialects. However (partually due to the rediculous and very ancient "alphabet" of 16,000 characters, Chinese has almost no grammar, and the spoken language, especially Mandrin (less tones), is extraordinarily simple and easy.

We have not even considered the potential complications of the use of the Armenian, Greek, and Pharsi alphabets, which may or may not be found in the military records.

However, Bil has identified a very important factor running in the other direction; the fact that much of the military records may be expressed in a small subset of the language, if not of the alphabet. But we still have a monster problem here. The last of the "native speakers", so to speak, are passing away, and the only people having a grasp of this language will be the odd academic, and an occasional nut.

Just looked up my notes on the diary I mentioned: (Fasih, Lt. Mehmed; Lone Pine (Bloody Ridge) Diary of Lt. Mehmed Fasih ; Beyoglu, Istanbul; Denizler Kitabevi, 2001); remember, the manuscript diaries were first translated into Modern Turkish, later to English as per this edition, so the original translation must have been done at least ten years ago, and it took the owner of the diary, a Turk, months to find someone to read the Ottoman script. What is the chance that this translator is still alive? Not much.

We will know more when I run down the bibliographer.

As per the archives, I assume that they exist, but I would think that all bets are off as far as to the degree of organization that they possess. I would expect that they are a great jumble. It is possible or probably even likely that few or none of their custodians can read them, which means that they probably can't lay their hands on anything, even if they were wonderfully organized and preserved. (Note; this question may be answered in a recent post, I may be too pessamistic here.

One wonders what portion of the 500 year old archive that we seem to have destroyed in Iraq were military; were military records shipped to Istanbul for storage, or left in the provincial archives for destruction by Coalition Forces?

Bob Lembke

[bob lembke]

Modern Turkish has, I believe, 27 Latin-style letters. That is far simpler than 800-odd "letter-forms".

Bob

[Guest Bill Woerlee]

Bob

Thanks for all of that. Makes me wonder how the Ottoman litterati ever learned the language.

In comparison to the Japanese written system, mate that is a doddle. The Japanese have three systems used simultaneously, hirogana, katakana and kanji, creating about 2,000 basic character forms that need to be learned before one can read the language. In learning the toyo kanji, it is important to get into mind the 118 radicals. Adding to this are an additional 45,000 or so kanjis that hang around although 5,000 will do the average person. You eve seen a Japanese typewriter? Typists all prefer to write in romanji. Yet Bob, millions of people read an write Japanese quite comfortabley, so much so that they can launch space satelites, build cars and ships and every other economic endeavour in that language. Plenty of Gaijin learn it without too many hassles.

No difference with Ottoman script.

Military records might require recognition of a couple thousand word forms - that is all. English has a working vocabulary of about 1500 words. Toss in a couple technical terms and you might have a required vocabulary of 2,000 words. No different for Turkish and that written with Ottoman script. Printed forms are by necessity standardised and simple. the information required on each of these forms - even if it is 150 different forms is standardised with standard information inserted.

Reality is Bob, if these items become available from the archive - I can guarantee that there will be available from some enterprising character a form reader translator created since the effort required will not be huge. If, and this is the unlikely event, the WW1 Turkish military archives, and more specifically soldier's service files, become available, if no one else has done it, I will put out an item like that and flog it to you.

Languages are difficult to learn if yuou want them to be difficult to learn. They are easy to learn if you want them to be easy to learn.

Cheers

Bill

[Bryn]

As Bill says, pontificating about the supposed insurmountable complexities of Ottoman Turkish script does not release a single record and has nothing to so whatsoever with why no such record seems ever to have been sighted. If such a record is made publicly available, it'll be up to us who are interested in its contents to have it translated - it's not someone else's problem, and it's not a good excuse for not releasing one. 'Put up or shut up.'

Ed Erickson admitted he's never seen an individual service record ("I don't work at the level of individuals and so I don't work in that particular area of the archives..."). Right. I went to some trouble to point out that it was ONLY those records I was talking about, so why am I receiving a lecture on the OTHER records? Nobody is yet any the wiser as to what information is contained within one of these records which Ed hasn't seen.

Ed Erickson stated: "The world isn't obligated to do this for you."

If you read my post more carefully you'll see that I never said it was. But I won't believe these records exist unless I see one.

I also won't believe that these records were 'meticulously' kept until I see one. I haven't read any 'informed' opinion on these individual service records because there hasn't been any.

Sorry if that upsets or offends you.

[Ozzie]

Is this the script you are talking about.

Turkish News

circa 1915-1918

[Bryn]

If it is not too complex, then why is there no one that can read it now?

If you don't want it translated, why would you want a serviceman's record if you can not read it?

Just to prove a point that they do or don't exist?

Bryn, I do see your point on finding out the truth of the words meticously kept etc, but you will still have to translate them. Do you have more documents like the one you have scanned?

There may be more in the archives, as there were people on Anzac that could translate Turkish into English during the war. I have such a piece. It is 4 days of a diary found on a dead Turkish officer, translated into English. I posted it on this forum a couple of years ago. It is in a very fragile condition.

I think some people may have skimmed instead of reading this thread.

Some points have been lost.

Kim

Hi Kim,

Who told you there is 'no one that can read it now'? Someone on this thread? That doesn't make it true, because if we think about it, Ed Erickson must be able to read the old Ottoman script, otherwise how does he do his translations? And how could he tell others they should learn the script if they want to access these records? So there's at least one person who can do this.

I have a couple of other documents in 'old' Ottoman script, but *I* won't have to translate them. They will have to be tanslated before I understand them, yes, but that's something I believe I can arrange to have done.

My problem is not even whether these records exist - my problem is that there are certain people, who have NEVER SEEN these records, claiming that the records (which they've never seen) were 'well-kept', 'meticulous', etc. And maybe they are or were indeed well-kept, but where's the evidence?

Ed Erickson accepts it as blind faith: "like electricity, I don't have to see it to know that it exists", to which I say, good on you. All that proves is that you're more easily pleased than I am. I *do* have to see it to know it exists.

Now we can be written off as flies in the ointment because we haven't spent money in getting to the Ankara Archives, or because we don't have PhDs, or because our 'work' has not been judged acceptable to the Turkish army to the extent that we would be trusted to report findings from the records, but I ask you: what good have those things done the people who *have* been in the archives? They apparently still haven't seen the files I'm asking about.

[Ozzie]

This one is one half of a page on which is a joke or a story.

[Ozzie]

Bryn, I see your point. Seeing is believing.

I wonder if they'd let little ol' me in to see them when we visit.

Probably not, eh?

No credentials.

(Sorry, being a tad hick.)

But I also do see , I forget who made the point, that Turkish military history may be a lot more sensitive to the Turkish people, than ours is to us, and therefore they are very careful who they allow to see it. We, with our freedom, and our excellent AWM, are very lucky.

Cheers

Kim

[Eceabat]

Pals,

Back to put my head over the parapet again.

I’ve been asking some questions of Turkish friends involved in the field of research on the campaign. One I spoke to was Haluk Oral, a historian, Ottoman scholar and avid collector of documents from the Gallipoli Campaign.

First off, he is unaware of there being a single detailed service file for private soldiers in the Ottoman Army. According to him, when a man was conscripted a file or notebook as he says, was opened at the town or centre where the man was inducted. This recorded his basic details such as name, father’s name, home town or village, height, etc. Haluk said that this record stayed at the place of induction, being closed when and if the man ever returned from service.

There would have been records of our sample man’s transfer after basic training to a unit, though as the war went on groups of conscripts were sent as a bloc to the front, and then assigned to units. Before the war, recruitment for most infantry units was based on a regional area, thus the 57th regiment came from the Edirne region close to what is now Turkey’s border with Greece and Bulgaria.

Haluk said that there would have been company or battalion records of men, when assigned, kit issued, when left unit through transfer, illness, wounds or death. However, these would have been brief. According to him, there was no centralised file where all this paperwork came together.

However, he reckons that if you took a name of a particular soldier, you may be able to find at least part of this paper trail. I am thinking of trying this with a couple of researchers that I know and having a go (time permitting).

For officers, it was different, and extensive files were kept on each, many of which still exist.

Col. Erikson is right is saying that the literacy rate at the time of the war was low in the Ottoman empire, the figure I have seen was about five percent, and those who could read or write were often instant officer material. This situation was aggravated by the pre-war decision of Enver Pasha, the Ottoman War Minister and one of the leaders of the Young Turk movement to cull a lot of the older officers from the Ottoman army. While many of these officers were past it, it did mean that there were large gaps in the officer corps, with instances of men being promoted who were semi-literate at best.

The massive casualties among the ranks of officers at Gallipoli and other campaigns also drained the pool of educated men.

There were very few literate men in the ranks, one of the reasons that there is so little written material such as letters and diaries from privates and NCOs. Turkish historian Sahin Aldogan once told me that he knows of only one written account from someone who was not an officer from the Gallipoli Campaign, that being from an senior NCO, though he is sure there are others out there somewhere waiting to be found.

As I have written before on this thread, there are younger people out there, meaning less than 90 years old, who can read the Ottoman script. There are a few universities that teach courses in Ottoman, and I personally know at least four people who are both keen students of the Gallipoli Campaign and who can read Ottoman.

I would contest Bill’s statement that "The number of people who can read it today is not a criteria for not releasing the records nor is it a viable consideration" on two counts. One, if given permission to conduct research in the various archives in Turkey, material is accessible and secondly I would have thought that being someone able to read them would be a fundamental requirement.

As part of Ataturk’s program of creating a new nation, he banned the use or learning of Ottoman, even for religious purposes. While this ban has long since been rescinded, the pool of Ottoman scholars is small, and the pool of those with an interest in the history of the First World War even smaller. But it is there and it is growing.

A problem is that while there are massive archives of material, much has still to be catalogued. The collection of the Ottoman civil archives, held in Istanbul, still has about 80 percent of material, covering a period of 600 or so years, to be sifted through and listed. The military archives are better catalogued, while those held by the Department of the Prime Minister are also fairly well sorted as I understand it.

The cause of the civil archives wasn’t helped by one of the less that bright decisions made during the early years of the Republic, that of selling the whole lot to the Bulgarian’s for scrap paper. Turkish officials then realised that written records of things like land titles, census records, etc were a handy thing to have and had to buy the archive back.

About a year ago, and with the assistance of the civil archives, a two volume set of books was published containing material from the Turkish equivalent of the London Illustrated War News. Good photos and the articles were interesting in how the Turkish press covered the war on all fronts. I include this to show that material is still coming out, despite the difficulties.

I can recall many years back being told by Australian War Memorial staff that, in the 1960s, some 10,000 photos from the collection were burned because at the time they needed the space and didn’t have information on what the pictures showed, captions etc. These included donated photos covering an area I was particularly interested in, POWs in Turkey.

In the early 1990s, I have to beg not to have some of the Australian Red Cross records dealing with POWs from the First World War destroyed due to the AWM needing the shelf space. Apparently, I had been the first person to delve into these files, dealing with buying of material for POWs in Turkey and Germany, letters, receipts, accounts and the like, since they had been donated in 1925. They were a gold mine, as I was able to show the AWM staff. I offered t take the lot but it was decided to retain the collection within the AWM (thankfully).

Whether the piecemeal records of private soldiers in the Ottoman army still exist, I do not know but I will try and find out more.

It is still less likely that the records of a private of the 77th regiment have survived, simply because the regiment was recruited in Syria, so the initial induction records, which as Haluk said were kept at the induction centre, probably never made it to Turkey. (note to Bryn, some interesting material has just come to light on the role of the Arab regiments on the first day at Anzac, from a staff officer’s lecture just after the war, refuting claims they turned tail and broke without cause, it has just been translated privately from the Ottoman and Serpil is looking to translate it into English).

I am not going to weigh in on the debate on how hard it is to learn Ottoman, being a dreadful student of languages. All I can say is that Turkish friends of mine who have learnt it, and who have the advantage of knowing Turkish already, say that they all found it hard going.

Well, I’ll close here in the hope I’ve added something to the debate.

Cheers

Bill

PS. Kim, if you really did want to try and get access to the archives, contact the Turkish embassy or consulate in Sydney or Melbourne to get a research visa. I'd advise to get cracking.

Also, would you mind if I downloaded the image you posted above and showed it to one or two of my friends who can read Ottoman text. Though the image is a bit "soft" they might be able to make something of it.

PPS. Kim, you said you were a "tad hick". Do you mean you are just a simple country girl?

[Ozzie]

Yes, Bill.

I am not an academic or a student or anything like that.

I just read and if my interest is caught then I have a bit of a deeper look.

A simple country girl does me fine.

I'll let a few friends know about applying for access, in case there is something special they wish to know.

By all means, show your friends. I would love to know what the pages say, especially the cartoon one. I can scan the other half of the page with the cartoon for you and there are two more pages of the News pages if you would like them as well. I can send them by email which would mean a bit bigger if that helps.

Cheers

Kim

[Ozzie]

If I could access the Turkish files, what I would be looking for is the Turkish soldiers reaction to the Nek. Not the officer's, but the man in the trench. But given the alluded to illiteracy of the common soldier, I expect this would be an impossible task.

Kim

[Eceabat]

Kim,

by all means send the other images to my e-mail address (wsellars@usa.net) and we'll see if we can make anything out of them.

If you or any of your companions on the Light Horse invasion do want to apply to any of the Turkish archives, it would be well to specify what you were looking for. They aren't the sort of place you can just have a generall trawl through but by including a particular topic or area of interest would increase your chances of getting access.

When I got my research visa the first time, I didn't have too many letters after my name or much of an academic record of publication to back up my request.

Cheers

Bill

[Ozzie]

Emails should be landing in your box now.

Cheers

Kim

[bob lembke]

I think that Bill's information, and that of Col. Erickson before him, have answered most of our questions. There do not seem to be personnel files of any substance for EM, and the most important single document was scattered about the old Turkish empire. So, for example, in the little blaze in Iraq that I referred to, a good number of these went up in smoke.

When I finally get to Penn's bibliographer for Middle East studies, who as I said has Arabic and Turkish, and is the curator, so to speak, of Penn's Ottoman material, I will pass on his estimates of the number of Ottoman-literate people at our university and in the US.

Observe that Bill said that highly literate Turks find it very hard to learn Ottoman Turkish. Please note that, of all the difficulties I have laid out, the single biggest hurdle is learning Modern Turkish itself. For someone without native Turkish, becoming reasonably literate in Turkish would take years of work itself.

It is heartening that it seems that reasonably ordinary people can get access to the Turkish archives, if they can demonstrate a sensible reason. When I conned my way into my interview with the colonel commanding the Military Library at Istanbul, I did not get the sense that I could not get permission, only that they were bureaucratic, and that I would have to apply to the General Staff at Ankara. When I exhibited despair at that prospect, it was breezily explained that I could apply on the Internet! But this explanation was received from a private, not the colonel, so it may not be authorative.

Access difficulties and destruction of materials is not confined to Turkey. Indeed, to look at a common book in the British Library, I had to be interviewed for "access-worthyness", although I think that the bar is very low there. When I went to the Imperial War Museum, I gathered that to look at their collection of photos I had to reserve a seat at a table about two weeks in advance, not useful during a one-week visit to London. I have mentioned the problems with the Holocaust archives at Aronson, where in addition the director was under investigation for sexual assault, I understand. Here in Philadelphia, there was a very large archives of negatives of Civil War photos by a major Brady-type Civil War photographer. Tens of thousands of Civil War glass plates had the image scraped off to use the little glass plates to make glass windows to be used over the dials of household natural gas meters. This was done only a few years ago.

I only hope that the intricacies of the Ottoman Turkish language(s) have been recorded, so that eventually advances, possibly in computer reading and translation, can be developed in the future.

Bob Lembke

[Bryn]

Thanks to Bill Sellars,

I've now read some informed opinion on the subject of individual service records. Seems we shouldn't have too much blind faith and just accept that these records exist in 'another area' of the archives after all, as Ed Erickson would have us believe. Because they don't.

[Guest Bill Woerlee]

Bill

G'day mate

Thanks for the run down on the meticulous records maintained. Gives me new hope in understanding that despite the 156 different forms filled in every night, the Ottomans were just as incompetent and slow as everyone else. I strongly suspected that.

As to language being a criteria for withholding - I am not sure I understand your point. Let me illustrate - the fact that a Chinese speaker from Beijing does not know English does not estop the release of records in the AWM in English. All it means is that if the fellow in Beijing wants to access the records, then he had better learn English or get a person who does know English to translate them for him. In itself, assumed lack of linquistic skills should not be employed as a reason to estop access to a record or the release of a record.

Cheers

Bill

[Guest Bill Woerlee]

Mates

Now for those who were dazzled by the explanation that Ottoman script was so difficult and tough that no one knows it.

Well here is that tough schema below:

Gasp!

No one can ever learn that.

For those who want to exercise their skills, Bryn and Kim have kindly posted samples. See if you can pick out these monsterously difficult constructions in the text. Remember, it reads right to left rather than left to right.

Enjoy the experience. Transliterate the word into roman script, then see if you can translate it into English via an online dictionary - I use langtolang:

http://langtolang.com/

Enjoy the thrill of getting your first word out. From there it only gets easier as you become more familiar with the systems.

Tough ... gidouda'ere.

Cheers

Bill

[Ozzie]

So you are not prepared to put your translation of the above here for us to see, or will you tell me that it is for me to do.

I'd rather learn French at the moment, and with everything else I've to do, I don't have time to learn Ottoman. But, others may enjoy your challenge.

Hopefully someone will get some use out of the above.

Cheers

Kim