The Persistence of Memory

During the writing of The Job To Be Done I listened to (and read) thousands of first-person anecdotes from the Second World War, as I felt strongly that if I was to understand what my Dad and his friends had gone through, I needed to hear the stories of those who were there in their own words. Second-hand sources and narratives are vital, but the personal recollections are equally important. Online archives like the BBC People’s War allow us to listen to the words of those who lived what we call history.
What I soon learned however, was that memories are funny things, and whether by accident or embellishment, sometimes it is worth questioning their accuracy. In the book I wrote about how the story of the Coffey crew’s Jamaican flight engineer, Jimmy Willoughby, and his near-fatal accident had gotten a bit muddled up over the course of 80 years, and about how I uncovered the actual facts from online records. I also related how angry I was when I watched a T.V. documentary in which a British soldier, who had served in the Normandy campaign, claimed that many of his friends (and 600 Canadians) had died from Allied bombs one day during a Bomber Command attack, an attack that the Coffey crew had taken part in and that I had researched. I knew for a fact (and I went back and confirmed) that there were zero Allied casualties reported from the attack that July day. Friendly fire incidents did happen, but not on that day – the soldier’s memory was flawed, and no one had fact-checked him.
When I was still working as a Correctional Officer I remember reading a book about how unreliable eyewitness testimony has often proven to be. One of the stories in the book was about a woman who had fond (and vivid) memories of her beloved grandfather reading her a specific English children’s book at bedtime each night. Her grandfather had died when she was quite young, but she never forgot him, or that book. Decades and decades later she herself became a grandparent, and decided to track down a copy of the obscure book to read to her new grandchild. After much online searching she found a first edition copy in a bookstore in London and ordered it. When it arrived and she opened the familiar cover she was in for a shock: the first edition of the book was published two years after her grandfather died...someone may have read her the book, but it wasn’t her grandfather!
I am currently reading historian Max Hastings’ book (Armageddon)about the downfall of Hitler’s Germany in the final year of the Second World War, and am running into the same issue. Hastings relies heavily on personal memories and anecdotes to tell the story, and while I appreciate the effort he went to to track down and interview the people who were there, from the U.S. to the Soviet Union, he relates them all at face value, even ones that are pretty obviously embellished.
The one that stands out is about a guard at an American fuel dump during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. Supposedly, upon hearing the Germans were approaching (and not wanting the fuel to fall into their hands) this fellow singlehandedly used an axe to puncture and empty 4,000 20 liter jerry cans. Math was never my strong-point, but by my reckoning this would have taken him about six straight hours of swinging an axe without stopping. Am I being too skeptical in calling “B.S.” on this story?
I will share an anecdote that I uncovered during my research into The Job To Be Done that didn’t make it into the book, as I just felt it may have been embellished, and I couldn’t find any corroborating evidence to substantiate it. Apparently in the summer of 1944, an airman at one of the airbases that the Coffey crew were stationed at sexually assaulted a local English girl. One of the members of the Coffey crew got wind of the attack before the authorities did, spoke to his crewmates, and some vigilante justice was arranged. A local farmer they were on good terms with loaned them a denutting tool, a vicious looking implement used to castrate farm animals, and the offending airman was cornered, held down and subjected to an impromptu surgical procedure that ensured he could never commit that crime again.
Now what is a researcher to make of this story? The squadron records make no mention – but was it perhaps hushed up? Perhaps the airman was just given a good scare, not actually mutilated? Who knows, but is it possible, just maybe, that a certain young airman returned home to Canada after the war with a story for his loved ones that his nethers had been tragically shot away by German flak over the target.....?