soc.history.war.world-war-ii

On Feb 25, 5:15 pm, Louis C wrote:
> Unit histories prepared for someone else's consumption usually don't
> include such mundane data as the daily figures for tanks returned to
> service. Given that this is what Rich was quoting, I think we can
> trust that they were not being manipulated. They're not stirring stuff
> at all, just a bunch of daily reports, very repetitive (all in the
> same format, obviously) and dry.


Hi Louis, it's not quite that cut and dried either.

Originally the Germans required that every major item of equipment -
such as tanks - have a complete loss report completed for it giving a
narrative accounting for cause of loss. That in fact was also the
practice by the US Army and the British Army, and I suspect the Soviet
Army as well. But most of those were discarded over the years as not
being "worthy" of archiving (regulations are actually rather lax on
what paperwork must be retained, often they only indicate that their
should be enough paperwork retained to constitute a historical
record). Unfortunately documents take up a **lot** of space, so they
are usually kept or disposed of on a case by case basis. Sor for
virtually all the major players we generally have some idea as to what
was "written off" as well as a day-to-day record of what was in repair
and what was issued to units. So we can usually reconstruct a
numerical accounting that is failry accurate and where the books
balance, but we are also usually unable to account for vehciles by
serial number....except in the case of Totenkopf at Kursk, which
retained and filed their "write off" reports, which detail which,
where, when, and why their write-offs occurred. Which match to the
daily numerical reports and so on.

But in this case since we spent about a year going over the extant
reports that were left, from the Generalinspektur der Panzertruppen
down to division, and found that in general they matched, aside from
the usual and minor discrepancies related to differing reporting
periods, sloppy record keeping (German staff officers could **not**
add correctly to save their lives), differing terms and changing
document coding schemes (the letter coding for vehicles in reports
changed on 1 September 1943), I simply don't see how in this case
changes could be made or how we wouldn't have detected them if they
had been made?

Personnel casualty returns are a different kettle of fish though, but
again such problems cross national boundaries. And there I would
question why they wouldn't try to downplay the casualties suffered,
which were intense by any measure, even if less intense than the
Soviet?

Personnel strength returns are also odd, mostly because those authors
writing about them seem to have little clue what was being reported
(f.e., Max Hastings - and many others - apparent inability to
comprehend the strength return of 22/23 August 1944 given for the
Panzer formations in France).

So could a narrative be doctored? Sure, but the problem is that the
underpinning documentation is difficult to doctor.