Information Management Part II: The Database

July 25, 2013June 9, 2013 ~ Adam Purcell

Though I’ve been looking at the story of my great uncle Jack and the crew of B for Baker since about 1996, my work has really become serious over the last five or so years. In that time I’ve amassed and created a great deal of information: facts, documents, books, photographs, sound recordings, emails, letters and yes, even blog posts. Keeping track of all of that data is a significant task. In my last post I explained how I catalogue my sources. How to easily access the information contained within those sources forms the second part of my information management system.

The files from the first research I completed on my great uncle, which was for a competition called the National History Challenge when I was still in primary school, all fitted into a single A4 display folder. The second phase of work I did, in the year I took off between high school and university, filled a small portable filing box. I graduated to a two-drawer filing cabinet for paper notes and documents when I decided to start my current (and somewhat obsessive) work about five years ago, but by then digital storage was becoming predominant. While it’s still important to have access to the paper files in that cabinet (and I’ve filled another box with them too), most of my work (including this blog post as I write it) is now saved onto a portable hard drive on my computer and catalogued as I explained in my last post. And having stored and catalogued all of this information, the next step is the ability to easily search the whole lot to find the parts I’m looking for at any particular time. That is where a solid digital database comes in handy.

The one I eventually settled on is a self-contained piece of software called Personal Knowbase. It’s a simple, easy-to-use program that allows me to save my information in text-based articles and attach any number of relevant keywords to each article. Each article has a date stamp which can be set to any date – like the date of the letter or document under study, for example. I can then easily pull up any articles tagged with a particular keyword, or combination of keywords. Some examples of tags I’ve used might be general themes (‘training’, ‘flying’, ‘operations’, ‘England’ etc), individuals’ names, book titles, aircraft types, targets, airfields and so on and so on. I’ve also used my catalogue numbers as keywords which makes it easy to locate the source of any specific quote. I can easily run a more customised search using a combination of keywords, basic text searches and date ranges, across the entire database or a selected subset of it. Searches can then be exported in various formats for printing or review.

The point is it is very easy to access information when it is needed, and to be able to tell where that particular piece of information came from. And if I’ve used my keywords effectively, I can also pull up related articles – very helpful when looking for everything I have on a particular raid that happened on 10 May 1944, for example…

It’s not a perfect system. Simple things like typographical errors can make word searches difficult, and care needs to be taken to use appropriate keywords to avoid burying an important fact under a pile of other stuff. And like anything computer-related, the file is susceptible to a hardware failure or a file corruption, for example – the latter of which happened to me late last year. Happily, a solid backup regime provides a certain degree of redundancy and I was able to recover my file without losing too much work (the cause was eventually traced to a dodgy portable hard drive). My database is now automatically backed up in two separate locations, one of which is ‘off-site’, and I make an occasional manual copy too ‘just in case’.

Overall, it’s a useful bit of gear. I have the database window open on one side of my screen whenever I’m working on my research. Together with the catalogue spreadsheet, the database makes it easy to store, search and find virtually anything in my collection of sources.

Information Management Part I: The Catalogue

July 13, 2013June 9, 2013 ~ Adam Purcell

I have something in the order of 13,000 individual pages in the sources listed in my catalogue for this project. Dealing with the sheer volume of stuff that I’ve gathered remains one of the big challenges of the work. Making interesting discoveries won’t do much good if I then forget where the discoveries came from, how I made them and where they fit into the story when it eventually comes time to write my planned book. There are two keys to my information management system: the catalogue, for knowing which source information comes from, and the database, for knowing what information is in those sources. This post will look at how I catalogue my sources.

If you’ve been reading this blog closely over the last few years, you may have noticed the occasional strange group of letters and numbers popping up in the posts themselves. The codes are in fact references to my catalogue of sources, and are the way I keep track of where my information comes from. The codes look like this, for example, from my ‘Accidents’ post of September 2010:

The second engine faltered shortly after crossing into England so they sought out an emergency aerodrome and, in Phil’s memorable understatement… (B03-001-016)

“…we crash landed rather unsuccessfully…”

Or these two, in ‘Motivations’ (November 2012):

Bill Brill was ‘getting a little accustomed to being scared’ (C07-036-159). And there is no doubt that airmen knew very well exactly how low their chances of surviving a tour were. Gil Pate wrote to his mother in November 1943 (A01-409-001): “It seems an age since I last saw you all + I guess I’ll need a lot of luck to do so again, the way things happen.”

The catalogue was one of the first things I set up when I got seriously stuck into this work in about mid 2008 and though it’s not an incredibly sophisticated system it is quite effective in keeping track of all the sources I’ve gathered over the last few years. It lives on a (well backed-up) multiple-tabbed Excel spreadsheet that I continually add to whenever I obtain a new source. Broadly, the code is split into four groups:

Designator-Series-Item Number-Page Number

The Designator tells me what type of source I’m looking at. It is the first letter in the group, and translates as follows:

A: Original (ie Primary) Documents, Scans or Copies – a document that originated during the war or the immediate period thereafter

B: Transcripts of original documents (used when I have not seen the original – ie someone else has transcribed it)

C: Post-war (ie Secondary) material

The types are broadly defined and can sometimes be a little ambiguous – at this stage it is not critical to define each type precisely. A general idea is sufficient.

The Series indicator defines the broad category under which the source fits. It decodes like this:

01: Letters and Telegrams (including letters I’ve personally sent and received)

02: Flying Logbooks

03: Diaries and Operational Record Books

04: Official Documents and Service Records – typically these documents come from archival collections such as the National Archives of Australia [www.naa.gov.au]

05: Photographs

06: Articles, Newspaper Clippings and Media Reports – including magazines

07: Books, Memoirs and Video

08: Databases

09: [Currently spare]

The Item Number is simply an increasing three-digit number for each individual document in each series (disregarding the designator), allocated in order of cataloguing. I haven’t yet reached greater than 999 items in any category, but if I do I’ll simply transition to a four-digit number for subsequent items.

The three-digit Page Number is the page of the document on which the actual quote or information can be found. Obviously for single-page documents or photos this would remain 001. If it’s a really long book with more than 999 pages, there is nothing stopping me using a four-digit page number.

So putting it all together, using as the first example the reference from my ‘Accidents’ post quoted above:

B03-001-006

This refers to a transcript (B) of a diary (03), which was the first diary I catalogued (001). The quote can be found on page 6 (006).

I then take those details over to my Excel spread sheet, where I find…

Which tells me that it’s a quote from Phil Smith’s diary. I originally got the document from Mollie Smith, and my copy of it resides in my filing cabinet in the folder ‘Smith, Phil’.

The quote from Bill Brill, in my second example above, has the catalogue number C07-063-159. So it comes from page 159 of the 36th book I catalogued, and the book was written post-war. Referring to my handy spreadsheet, I can see its source is Hank Nelson’s book Chased by the Sun, and that there’s a copy of it on my shelf should I feel the need to check the quote.

I’ve used this cataloguing system throughout this blog mainly for my own benefit, so that when I start writing the book I keep telling myself I want to write I can easily find where I found all of my information when I was writing the blog. Obviously the final book will be properly referenced rather than being interrupted by my own strange system of code groups of letters and numbers – but behind the scenes, when I’m doing the research and the actual writing of the story, it’s a quick and easy short-hand method of accurately keeping track of exactly where my information comes from and ensuring that I can easily check my sources for accuracy where required.

I have also incorporated the referencing numbers into the second part of my information management system – the database. Conveniently, that will be the subject of my next post.

Talking

May 15, 2013May 8, 2013 ~ Adam Purcell ~ 2 Comments

I did my first research project about my great uncle Jack at the age of about 12. It was for an entry in a national history competition and my project was to write a series of letters as if Jack had been writing home from the war. This work led directly to our discovering that Phil Smith, who had been Jack’s pilot, was still alive and was living in Sydney. We first met Phil and his wife Mollie in early 1997.

There then came a break of a few years. We stayed in contact with Phil and Mollie and occasionally travelled to Sydney to visit them and while I was aware of ‘Uncle Jack’ the bug had not yet bitten in earnest to find out more about him myself. In 2003 I took a year off between school and university, and that’s when I had some time to once again delve into the subject. Sadly the catalyst for this work was news of Phil’s death in March of that year. The starting point this time was all the original documents that we had about Jack, which I scanned and wrote explanatory notes about to put on a CD-ROM and share around my family. Then university and moving out of home got in the way and it was some years before I felt the urge again and started the work that has evolved into SomethingVeryBig.

The slightly frustrating thing is that I never had the opportunity to speak to Phil in detail about his experiences. I was quite young when I first started researching the story of B for Baker. This phase of work was what led us to him in the first place – and the second phase started after he passed away. I remember one discussion, over the lunch table at Phil and Mollie’s home in Sydney, when my father was asked to read out Phil’s wartime letter about the time his troop ship hit an iceberg in mid-Atlantic (a story in itself) while Phil added comments here and there, but that’s the only occasion that I can recall where we spoke directly about his experiences. I’m lucky that since his death I’ve had access to the superb archive of letters and photos and other documents that his father carefully collated while Phil was in the Air Force, but there’s nothing like actually talking to the people who were there for a ‘feel’ of what it was like.

Which is why I’m slowly collecting veterans, so to speak – contacting as many as I can, writing letters (yes, real letters, with stamps and envelopes and everything), phoning up and generally picking their brains. Each has a story to tell and each little insight adds to what I understand of what it was like to fly for Bomber Command. I can’t ask my great uncle or any members of his crew what their war was like – but I can still talk to other veterans. While it’s not quite the same story, they would have shared many similar experiences with each other so I reckon it’s enough to build a picture of the ‘feel’ of the times they lived in and the tasks they carried out.

Finding the Missing

April 21, 2013April 21, 2013 ~ Adam Purcell ~ 3 Comments

At the end of the Second World War, the Royal Air Force (and associated dominion forces) had some 41,881 personnel listed as missing, worldwide (C07-049-007). A large proportion of these were scattered throughout the European Continent from which, while the battles were still raging, reliable information was difficult to obtain. The unit set up to deal with the problem of searching for and identifying as many of the missing as possible went through a number of guises but is probably best known as the Missing Research and Enquiry Service (MRES). Their task was to investigate the fates of missing aircrew through records and by putting people ‘on the ground’ in Germany and the former occupied territories to interview local officials and civilians and, if necessary, open graves to find clues on the bodies themselves.

Author Stuart Hadaway, writing in a book called Missing Believed Killed: Casualty Policy and the Missing Research and Enquiry Service 1939-1952 (Pen & Sword Books Ltd 2012), notes that by the end of 1950, just 8,719 aircrew were still officially listed as missing, with 23,881 now having known graves and 9,281 formally recorded as lost at sea (p.7). This, having been achieved without the use of modern technologies such as DNA profiling, is an astonishing success rate.

Once a crashed aircraft had been located, authorities could trace the identity of that aircraft through serial numbers on any number of parts. Knowing which aircraft and squadron it came from, they could then determine which crew was flying in it when it went missing. Identification then often came down to a process of elimination: the body with the pilot’s brevet must be the pilot, for example… identity discs might have survived revealing the wireless operator… one air gunner might have had remnants of his Flight Sergeant’s stripes, which meant that the other body with an air gunner’s brevet must be the other gunner… and so on.

The MRES report of losses from the Lille raid of 10MAY44 (A04-071-017) records how the unit identified the body of F/O J.F. Tucker, who was from Doug Hislop’s 467 Squadron crew, flying in EE143. Post war, six graves in the commune of Hellemes, near Lille, were exhumed. In one was found the remains of an RAAF battle dress with an Air Gunner’s brevet, along with an officer-type shirt on the body. Tucker was at the time the only Australian officer air gunner missing from this operation who remained unaccounted for, and the investigating MRES officer was happy to accept identification on this basis.

It wasn’t always so straightforward however. Often German information was somewhat muddled by events. Hadaway cites the case of a man initially buried by the Germans as ‘Haidee Silver, 40851’, being traced by the service number to a Pilot Officer Michael Rawlinson, who had been wearing a silver bracelet that his father told the MRES had been given to him by a female relative, inscribed ‘From Haidee’ (p.39). Other men were identified through serial numbers on their standard-issue watches, for example, or through laundry labels on their clothing.

Tracing serial numbers through the many layers of RAF bureaucracy could be a tedious job. What fascinates me about the work they did is the detective effort involved, and how unorthodox methods sometimes yielded the key that unravelled the case. I suppose I can draw certain parallels with the historical research I have been carrying out as part of this project. Throughout the war, files were maintained in the MRES offices in London where any little snippet of information relating to cases was kept. The files would regularly be reviewed and cross-referenced with any new information that might have come in later to see if anything jumped out. One little snippet could lead to another, which lead to another, which might have led up the garden path a bit until something else made sense of everything. And on so many of the cases, they were able to find a match.

Theirs was a gruesome and difficult task, and it was one that continued well after the war had ended and everyone else had ‘gone home’. But each case solved meant one more airman could be taken off the list of the missing. And one more family could have closure. For that, the investigators of the MRES deserve to be remembered.

This post was scheduled for some time in May but I brought it forward after tonight’s 60 Minutes program on Australian TV. Further post on that program is in the works!

Who did what, when and in which aircraft?

April 20, 2013April 26, 2013 ~ Adam Purcell ~ 2 Comments

At the Canberra Bomber Command weekend a few years ago, Don Southwell made an off-hand comment about how he wanted to re-do the Squadron histories. I’m beginning to see why!

I’m currently having a fairly close look at the activities of 463 and 467 Squadrons for the time that the crew of B for Baker were at Waddington. I’ve pulled a variety of sources that I’m going through and cross-referencing to try and build a picture of what happened for each day in the period – and, not surprisingly, I’ve found a number of inconsistencies. Take the latest one, for example. Here is an entry from Nobby Blundell’s squadron history, They Flew From Waddington!, written in 1975 and privately published, concerning 29 January 1944:

Berlin again. 467 Sqn F/Lt Simpson’s a/c was attacked by an ME110 – F/Sgt Campbell, the rear gunner, shot it down. We lost 6 a/c from Waddington, 3 from each Squadron, our worse [sic] night to date, 467: ED772, DV378 and ME575. 463: HK537, JA973 and ED949. 43 aircrew in one op. lost.

On the face of it, this seems straightforward. From a single operation to Berlin in late January 1944, Waddington lost six crews. It is true that this was right in the thick of the period that later became known as the Battle of Berlin, and as such there were many raids to that city around that time. The only problem is, this particular Berlin trip appears in none of the other records I’ve looked at. The 463 Squadron Operational Record Book for example, says this:

A dull day. No Ops. Routine work.

And 467 Squadron said this:

Much sleeping today, and a stand down in the afternoon. The usual Saturday night dance was held.

No sign of any operations there, then. Indeed, the Night Raid Report for this date shows that only small forces of Mosquitos were operating on this night.

But I always like to think cock-up before I think conspiracy. It’s unlikely that Blundell would have made the entry up entirely. Far more likely, I think, is that he’s mixed up a few raids and put them into one entry. So I thought I’d have a look around that date and see what went on elsewhere. From the Bomber Command Night Raid Reports and Operational Record Books for 463 and 467 Squadrons, here are the main operations for a few days:

27 January: 530 heavies to BERLIN; 32 lost. 32 aircraft from Waddington; 463 lost one and 467 lost two.
28 January: 683 heavies to BERLIN; 43 lost. 26 from Waddington, one lost from each Squadron.
29 January: No Main Force operations. Squadrons stood down.
30 January: 540 heavies to BERLIN. 33 lost. Waddington sent 24 aircraft. 463 Squadron lost four and 467 Squadron lost one.
31 January: No Night Raid Report, so no ops.

The most likely suspect, looking at this run of operations, is the trip on the 30^th. But Blundell claims six losses on that night, not the five in the ORBs. I needed to look deeper.

The only other details that Blundell recorded are the serial numbers of the aircraft lost:

From 467 Squadron:

ED772
DV378
ME575

From 463 Squadron:

HK537
JA973
ED949

So I thought that was a good place to go next. From the Operational Record Books, we get this:

Pilot Squadron Aircraft

Messenger 463 ED772

Hanson 463 JA973

Dunn 463 ED949

Fairclough 463 ED545

Riley 467 DV372

Comparing that to Blundell’s list, we see he has accounted for the first three, so I’m now fairly confident that he’s got the wrong date and the operation he is referring to is indeed that of the 30^th. But he attributes ED772 to the other squadron, includes DV378, ME575 and HK537 in his list and completely misses ED545 and DV372. To work this one out, it’s time to find another source.

Bruce Robertson wrote a book called Lancaster: The Story of a Famous Bomber, published in 1964. In the back section are lists upon lists of Lancaster serial numbers, and what happened to each aircraft. So I checked the serial numbers from the ORB, and from Blundell’s extract. Robertson agrees that the first three were lost on 30 January and shows it as 463 – which agrees with the ORBs. ED545, says Robertson, was lost on 14 May 1943 – seven months before the night in question – so it must be an error in the ORB. DV372 survived the war and was scrapped in October 1945, so that one must also be incorrect. With those two ORB records now empty we have two outstanding aircraft (those flown by Fairclough and Riley) and three unknown serials (DV378, ME575 and HK537).

Robertson comes to the rescue again: ME575 was lost on January 27 (one of the other Berlin trips at the end of that month), and indeed the 467 Squadron ORB agrees that this aircraft went missing on that night.

DV378 is very close to DV372, so it is possible that the Orderly Room clerk who typed up the ORB made an error. And indeed, Robertson shows that DV378 went missing on 31 January. Since aircraft returned from the 30 January operation close to and in many cases beyond midnight, and there is no Night Raid Report for the 31^st, it is reasonable to suggest that this is the correct serial number for the aircraft flown by P/O Riley.

That, then, leaves HK537 which, again, Robertson records as being lost on 31 January. That is fairly solid evidence that it was indeed the aircraft flown by P/O Fairclough.

So based on this, the list from above should, I believe, actually look like this:

Pilot Squadron Aircraft

Messenger 463 ED772

Hanson 463 JA973

Dunn 463 ED949

Fairclough 463 HK537

Riley 467 DV378

All of this goes to show how important it is to cross-check your sources. The ORBs, while considered the definitive record of what happened on each squadron, vary significantly in quality, depending on the individual officer who wrote them at the time. They were compiled at a time when aircraft were being lost and new aircraft and crews were arriving on squadron virtually every day and as such errors could and did creep in. It takes a bit of patience to painstakingly sort through the records and check other relevant sources to try and find out what actually happened.

I think Don Southwell is on to something when he says he’d like to re-do the squadron histories. It would be a very long job to go through the entire Operational Record Books for both Squadrons to try and find these sorts of errors, but I think it would be a worthwhile exercise if it meant that the histories could be more accurate. What form the histories would then take needs more thought and is, perhaps, a subject for a future post.

Use the Source, Luke

April 4, 2013March 26, 2013 ~ Adam Purcell

My research catalogue for this project includes about a thousand individual items. And those are just the ones that I have catalogued; there are many more that sit in a great pile on my bookshelf waiting to be looked at. They are from a wide variety of sources and types. There are personal letters, logbooks and photographs. There are service records, casualty files and night raid reports. There are audio recordings, interview transcripts and videos. And there are books – there are many, many books; some written by people who were there, and some written by people who were not there.

No one source can tell the whole story, though – in one sense, this is why there are so many individual items in my catalogue! To build a more complete picture of ‘what really happened and why’ (which, after all, is one of the reasons for doing this work in the first place), multiple sources need to be consulted and compared as a whole.

A pilot’s logbook, for example, can offer a full record of what flights the pilot made and when they went on them. The more fastidious pilots also recorded who they flew with, in which aircraft, and even over which route they flew, which are all Really Useful Facts for a historian. But what a logbook doesn’t necessarily reveal is why each flight was made. Take, for example, this one, which appears in S/Ldr Phil Smith’s wartime logbook on 06MAY44:

Aircraft: Oxford. Pilot: Self. Crew: -. Duty: Base – Coningsby and return. 0.30hrs Day.

This is the first flight in an Oxford that I can find in Phil’s logbook at all (though he did significant flying in the very similar Avro Anson during his training), and it is quite an odd flight to find in the logbook of an operational bomber pilot. Indeed, later that night, Phil led his crew on a bombing operation to an ammunition dump at a place called Sable-sur-Sarthe in France. So what on earth could he have been going to Coningsby for? To find the answer, I needed some other sources.

A few years before he died, Phil wrote an unpublished 29-page typescript for the benefit of his grandson, entitled ‘Phil’s Recollections of 1939-45 War’. I’m lucky enough to have a copy of it and I had cause recently to go through it to see if I could match his (mostly undated) reminiscences with actual flights in his logbook. And, funnily enough, that odd little flight the fifteen or so miles from Waddington to Coningsby is one of those he wrote about.

“For this raid I was appointed ‘Controller’ which meant that I would maintain contact between the target marking Mosquitoes and the main force of Lancasters carrying the bombs. In the afternoon before the raid, the station commander ordered me to visit the target marking people on the nearby aerodrome, Conningsby [sic]. I duly went over there in our Oxford aircraft, a type I had not flown for more than a year.”

But why would Phil need to do that? At the time of the Sable-sur-Sarthe operation, Bomber Command was increasingly becoming engaged on operations against French targets in the lead-up to D-Day. That much is clear from a perusal of Night Raid Reports for this period, in the UK National Archives (AIR14/3411). This trip was no exception. Great care was taken to be accurate on these trips – for the sake of effectiveness of the attack itself, but also to avoid French civilian casualties – and new, far more accurate marking techniques had begun to be developed. This is touched on in a 1951 book called No. 5 Bomber Group RAF by WJ Lawrence (p.164) Indeed a week previously the crew of B for Baker were on an operation to attack a munitions factory at St Medard-en-Jalles, near Bordeaux, but were ordered to return with their bombs when smoke and haze made accurate visual marking of the target impossible. (The bombers returned the next night and blew the munitions factory out of existence.) Phil Smith, having been appointed Controller for the upcoming raid, went to Coningsby to discuss tactics with the people who would be marking the target for the force he was to control.

So that curious little trip in Phil’s logbook now has an explanation. The primary source (logbook) has been complemented by a range of other documents, both primary (night raid reports) and secondary (Phil’s typescript and the 5 Group book) to come up with a picture of what happened and why.

It’s only a minor detail in the overall scheme of things, but it adds a little bit of colour to an otherwise dry logbook entry. And it gives the history just that little bit more life.

Leader

June 17, 2012 ~ Adam Purcell ~ 1 Comment

Every Monday in my postbox I receive a copy of the local newspaper. The Moonee Valley Leader usually shrinks to less than half its thickness once the advertising flyers are removed, but every now and then it reports on interesting stories with local connections. Just after ANZAC Day this year it ran this story about a 100 Squadron airman, P/O Jack Wilson, killed in action over Holland in January 1945. He and his wife were living in Essendon when he enlisted, and the story was about how his daughter – two years old at the time of her father’s death – made contact with a British researcher after by chance finding an earlier article in the Leader seeking information about P/O Wilson.

The British man is Paul Kurn, whose father was a ground mechanic with 100 Squadron, responsible for Lancaster JB603, the aircraft on which P/O Wilson had died. Mr Kurn’s search for the story of his father’s war began in 1998 and was originally centred around the operations carried out by this aircraft, before shifting into looking for the airmen who had flown it. He contacted the newspaper using P/O Wilson’s wartime address. It took a year, but eventually the right person saw the article and made contact.

Writing to local newspapers is a tactic that can, as this story demonstrates, be very effective. People of that era tended not to move around nearly as much as we might do today and so if they are still alive there is a good chance of their being in the same area six or seven decades later, if not in the same house. Articles also being published online these days greatly strengthens the chances of finding the right person by bringing them within the reach of a simple Google search. All it takes is one curious relative to look for something as straightforward as a name. Patience – and a good deal of luck – can certainly pay off in this research caper.

Paul Kurn set out on his journey with similar intentions to my own. Finding descendants of the crew, he said, gives him “…a chance to maybe tell them of what happened to their relative and […] to shed light on something that they may have wondered about for 60 years without any idea what happened in those final moments and where it happened… The story has grown beyond anything I could have imagined”.

Telling the crews’ stories, and remembering. That’s why we do it.

Grisly

March 29, 2012May 22, 2012 ~ Adam Purcell

War is a terrible business. The violent nature of the tools used in combat – guns, bombs, explosions, fire – can do dreadful things to human bodies. In the course of this sort of research, you sometimes come across some shocking stories. A P-47 Thunderbolt pilot, for example, was killed in a crash in eastern Holland in November 1943. A young girl found a loose boot belonging to the pilot near the wreck of the aeroplane… with a foot still inside. Or the unfortunate Charlie Nash, a 467 Sqn mid-upper gunner who was killed on the 10 May 1944 Lille raid. Such was the force of the explosion that brought his Lancaster down that Nash was dismembered. He was initially buried in two distinct graves, one in Hellemmes and one in Forest sur Marque.

Many of these sorts of stories are revealed in the files of the Missing Research and Enquiry Service, a team of RAF investigators who combed what had been occupied Europe to establish the fate of as many missing airmen as possible after the liberation of each area. The reports can sometimes make for disturbing reading. So much so, in fact, that full MRES reports are not released to the public in the UK if authorities believe they will be too distressing for next-of-kin or other researchers to read.

There is no doubt that these reports can contain some very grisly details. But factual reports of this nature are just that – factual. The details contained within them are very real. The events they deal with really happened – to real people. How much should modern-day sensibilities take precedence over knowing the truth?

This is an extremely difficult question to answer, and it’s one that every researcher must give serious thought to. There are two conflicting priorities here: the natural desire of the historian to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, versus the need to protect families from some pretty disturbing feelings about what might have happened to their relative. It is sometimes easier for the researcher to deal with these sorts of unpleasant revelations if they have no direct family connection to their subject. What they need to be careful of, however, is the sensitivities of those who do have that direct connection. I’ve been guilty of this myself, once or twice blithely telling a story to a relative of one of my great uncle’s crew without first considering how they might take the news. It’s only after I’d finished, when I saw their reaction that I realised, whoops, perhaps I could have dealt with that one with a little more sensitivity.

Ultimately, it is the researchers themselves who are responsible for making this very difficult decision. I disagree with the authorities determining what will and will not be released because I think it should be the duty of the researcher to decide what they do and don’t tell their audience. Researchers must be sensitive about how they communicate these sorts of stories.

Personally, I tend to prefer the truth, warts and all. After all, this is what actually happened. But I need to be very careful about how I get the message across.

Writing

March 5, 2012May 22, 2012 ~ Adam Purcell

My ultimate aim with this research is to write a significant piece of work – a book – to tell the story of the crew of B for Baker, who they were, where they came from and what part they played in the overall context of the bomber offensive. Much of this blog has been about the actual research that I’ve completed in this project. But I haven’t looked much at that important second bit – the writing thing. And that’s probably the bit that I need most practice in. What follows, then, is a basic framework for how I approach writing a short piece. It will need to be developed when I get around to writing the book that I’d like to end up with, because that will probably end up significantly longer than anything I’ve written before, but it’s a place to start from. This is, in broad terms, the process I use.

My writing evolves through a number of distinct phases. First comes the research part, where I find sources, take notes and build up a picture in my mind of what actually happened. Only when I think I have enough information to have the bare bones of a story in my head do I actually start to write.

My first draft is usually not a particularly eloquent or efficient piece of writing. My aim initially is to simply get everything down on paper (or, more correctly, on my computer screen). Usually I’m writing a historical story so I work more or less chronologically. At this stage I’m not worried too much by structure, length or style. I’m simply using my notes and research and putting everything relevant into a document. This process will quickly reveal any gaps in my research, and it is here that I will go back to my sources to try and fill those gaps. My aim is simply to tell the story – it doesn’t yet matter how long the story is, or how easy it is to read. It just needs to have every part in it. The resulting ‘first draft’ can sometimes be very, very long – for Bomber Command: Failed to Return it was almost 50% longer than my allocated word limit. I like to reference as I go along (usually by footnotes). This means that at all subsequent stages I know exactly where all of my evidence comes from and can easily go back to the primary sources to fact-check if required later on. The references are not normally formatted correctly yet – the important thing is that I know precisely where to find what I’m looking for if needed,

The second draft is where the structure gets fixed up. This is where I shift passages around into a more logical, flowing sequence – even if the language used at this point is far from flowing. A clear introduction, body and conclusion develops (evidently Year 12 English taught me something!). I’m still not too worried about length or efficiency of phrase.

The third phase of my writing is where I start getting creative. The emphasis to this point has been in getting the story right. From here, however, I’ve got the story itself organised. How the story is told is what concerns me next. If writing to a tight word limit, this is where the culling begins. Irrelevant bits get cut and long-winded passages get shortened. Awkward passages get re-written into more efficient language. Parts get condensed or lengthened if further emphasis is required.

By this stage, the main work is just about done. Phase four – the edit – can now begin. I give the piece the once-over myself, checking spelling, grammar, formatting and references. Then I call in outside help – and it’s amazing what another pair of eyes will spot. My sister and mother provided their ‘red pen’ services for Bomber Command: Failed to Return. The revised draft gets revised again, and again, and sometimes again. At this point it’s not unusual to go back to phase three to re-jig phrases or keep culling if I’m really pushing a word limit. Spelling and grammar are given a last check and references are checked for consistency and formatted correctly.

Then, at last, the piece is ready to be submitted.

Leo

February 24, 2012May 22, 2012 ~ Adam Purcell ~ 4 Comments

There are fifteen Commonwealth War Graves in the cemetery belonging to the small village of Hellendoorn, in the east of The Netherlands. My family and I lived in Nijverdal – the next town along – throughout the year 1995 and when we discovered that there was one Australian among the graves we decided to see what we could discover about him.

Flight Lieutenant Leo McAuliffe was a fighter pilot attached to No. 222 Squadron, RAF. He was killed on 17 March 1945, a matter of weeks before that part of the Netherlands was liberated. He was 24 years old and came from Bexley, NSW. While still overseas, we wrote to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to see what they could tell us about Leo. He had been killed in a ‘flying battle’, they said, and another letter to the Air Force after we returned to Australia in 1996 revealed he crashed while leading a section of two aircraft on a patrol and weather reconnaissance mission over enemy occupied territory.

Late last year I decided to obtain copies of Leo’s service record and A705 files from the National Archives of Australia. This was not intended to be as in-depth a study as I am doing on my great uncle Jack and his Lancaster crew. It was just a side-line interest, more for general interest of our family than anything overly complicated. I had vague plans of reading through the files and writing a short ‘interpretation’ of them so I could then bind the whole lot up and give it to Dad for Christmas. Unfortunately the National Archives are experiencing ‘high demand’ for copies at the moment, and the month turnaround that I was expecting turned into two – too late for Christmas. Dad got a packet of liquorice instead.

But I now have the files, and have spent the last couple of weeks reading through them and beginning to write my little story. And guess what? It’s turned out into something far bigger than I was intending it to. I’m not under the deadline of ‘Christmas’, so I have time to delve into the story a little deeper, following leads that I would have otherwise left alone. So questions raised in the NAA files have led to posts on the RAFCommands forum, which in turn led to the discovery that Leo served in Northern France following the invasion… meaning that my friend Joss le Clercq is also interested in Leo’s story and has been in touch.

The account of Leo’s final flight, from his wingman, suggests to me that he simply became disoriented and lost control in thick cloud – more accident than ‘flying battle’. And the story of how a young Dutch woman witnessed the crash and recovered a dog tag but was later killed in an air attack on Nijverdal caused me to contact a friend who volunteers at the small World War II museum that is now in that town. This, in turn, resulted in numerous emails from her contacts at the museum, and much information about the crash and the attack on Nijverdal.

All quite amazing. I’ve spent the last few hours translating those emails from Dutch and using Google Earth to try and pinpoint a crash location. But a line needs to be drawn somewhere. There is a lot of information out there – the tough part is deciding when you have enough, when you can stop researching and start writing. Leo’s story is well on its way to becoming known now. A couple more questions to my new Dutch contacts, and the writing can begin.