At its heart, the story of the crew of B for Baker is one about fairly ordinary people caught up in quite extraordinary circumstances. It’s their very ordinariness, I think, that makes the story so fascinating. There are a lot of surviving primary sources about their flying careers when they were on the squadron – Operational Record Books, Night Raid Reports, logbooks and the like – but these, in the main, are official documents. Much less remains about their personal, ordinary lives: the letters and diaries and photographs that really bring the story to life.
I’m betting that when they were sitting in their rooms, pens in hand, airmen would have had no idea at all of how interesting the missives they created would be to people like me, so many decades later. Many of the wartime letters that I’ve read are fairly ordinary: enquiring about family members and favourite pets, asking for news of the local cricket team, benignly commenting about the weather. Wartime censorship necessarily limited what aircrew could say about their ‘work’ in Bomber Command, and a lot of them simply weren’t great writers in any case. But every now and then I’ll find a little nugget of information that I didn’t know: what they did on leave in London, for example, a mess song from the squadron or a description of the local pub. They might even reveal the name of their English bomb aimer’s wife or child; in at least one case like this, that little gem led directly to me tracing and contacting descendants of the family.
Nearly eight decades later, those letters have assumed an entirely new significance. Newspapers have been called the ‘first draft’ of history; there’s a good argument for giving that description to personal correspondence as well, albeit on perhaps a smaller scale. Reading wartime letters can fill in gaps in the story, revealing what aircrew were doing and thinking when they were outside the remit of official records. They were never intended to be historical sources – but now they are.
I started writing in a journal again in March 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic first began to impact life in Melbourne. And a couple of months later, I began writing regular letters to my dad, who lives interstate. Why did I feel compelled to do that? What did I want to record? Something about the pandemic made me stop and think: here was the first time that I’d lived through a big, truly global, universal event. I suppose I wanted to preserve something of my experience of it, as an otherwise very ordinary citizen in Melbourne. It started something nice, too, a correspondence that we continue to this day – I received his latest just this week.
I’ve drawn deeply, in my Bomber Command work, from personal sources from ordinary people, so I realise the value of letters and diaries for future historians. The ordinary helps to make sense of and give human scale and dimensions to otherwise unfathomably complex events. But how will those future scholars find stuff about the coronavirus pandemic, for example, when in the modern digital world there’s not many personal communications that are saved in a form that someone might find in a dusty box in the attic?
A lot, if not all, of our personal communications these days take place via digital means – text message, WhatsApp group, emails – and these are typically not archived in any physical form the way a box of letters can be. I had more or less continuous WhatsApp messaging throughout the pandemic with two friends overseas, one in Scotland and one in the Netherlands. The transcripts of those conversations and the accompanying photos would be a useful personal source for a historian comparing responses to the pandemic in different countries. But that correspondence lives on my phone; it won’t be put away in a box somewhere. That’s a potential source that won’t be available to a historian in the future.
And so there, I think, was the motivation for me to start writing things down in some sort of physical form. But that brings up problems of its own. I wrote those letters at least partly intending that it could be packed away and found someday, by persons unknown, in the future. They are contemporary sources alright, being written at the times they describe. But can they truly be considered primary sources of and about their time, if the very purpose for which they were written was to archive that story?
That might be a question for a future post.
© 2024 Adam Purcell