January 2024 – Something Very Big

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.

My sister Jennifer, when visiting Uncle Jack’s grave in Lille, once described the man as the ‘Shadow in the Corner’: someone we were always aware of while growing up. We were told stories about him, we leafed through his little blue felt-covered logbook, we looked at fading black and white photographs of a young man in uniform and on Anzac Day, we pinned medals on the right-hand side of our chest and we marched in our village’s parade. During the minute of silence, Jack was the person we thought about.

We felt, and I think still feel, a personal connection to this man, despite never having met him and despite being, really, only distant relatives of his. Through this blog, I’ve been contacted by people who are more closely related to Jack than I am; he was one of nine children and there are many branches of the family tree. I’ve learned that there are many other people who think of him during their minute of silence, too.

That is no bad thing, and it’s partly why almost thirty years ago I dove into finding out more about Jack: so I can help to tell his story. But I’m not a direct descendent of his – to our knowledge, he never had any – and he was my grandfather’s uncle, not my grandfather. I didn’t grow up with him around, like the sons and daughters of the veterans I once knew. I didn’t see the effect that war had on him; I didn’t have to live with the person he might have become as a result. And I was far enough removed, in time and in family connection, that I didn’t experience how news of his death affected those he did live with. For those people, the shadow isn’t just in the corner on Anzac Day, the ‘one day of the year’, but it’s always there.

In my case, though, the extra level of removal from the story helps, I think. It allows me to look at things a bit dispassionately, and so perhaps more honestly. 2024 will see the 80^th anniversary of the Lille operation from which Jack and his crew failed to return. That makes it a very very long time ago: it’s now almost (but not quite) outside of living memory. For me, that helps the thrill of the hunt for more information to outweigh the sheer horror of what might be found next. The official records, for example, contain some quite gruesome details of what happened to the bodies of the crew, for example. The distance in time makes it a lot easier to be pragmatic about that: this really happened, this is what war does to people.

That makes me lucky in a way. I’m a close-enough relation to a member of Bomber Command – to the point that I share a surname – to feel a personal connection to that person and his story. But at the same time I’m far enough away that any emotional response to it can be tempered somewhat. And perhaps that allows me to get a little closer to the real story.

Month: January 2024

Ordinary Letters

Just far enough removed