War Diaries Talk

Unit Strength

  • cyngast by cyngast moderator

    I'm wondering about the numbers in the right-hand column. In the comments with this page, deehar noted them as battalion strength, but I was skeptical at first, as 54 seems like far too great a number of officers, 30 being the usual number. However, if the author is including the sergeants with the officers, this makes more sense.

    The second number does decrease by five after the enemy raid where 1 NCO and 4 OR went missing.

    Rob? Heather? Should we be tagging these numbers as Unit Strength? And if so, how do we account for the high number of officers?

    Posted

  • marie.eklidvirginmedia.com by marie.eklidvirginmedia.com

    I started tagging these numbers as unit strength when someone mentioned it in the diary but there is no distinction between the NCO's and OR's. I have tagged diaries where the Author has sometimes said that they are over-strength.

    Posted

  • ral104 by ral104 moderator, scientist

    I think it must be that there's no distinction between officers and NCOs, or possibly NCOs from a certain rank upwards. At this stage in the war I wouldn't be surprised is there were fewer officers than the ~30 they might expect at full strength. I certainly wouldn't expect them to have more than the usual number.

    The reason I'm wondering whether the second number might include the more junior NCOs is because it goes down after the raid, as Cynthia says. So possibly the first number is senior sergeants upwards.

    As far as tagging goes, I think we probably have to tag the first number as officers, but with a note in the comments to explain what we think it actually means. Not a perfect solution, I know.

    Posted

  • cyngast by cyngast moderator

    The reason I thought it might be the sergeants included with the officers is that according to The Long, Long Trail there were eight of them with each company at full strength, which would make 32. Here we have a count of 54, which makes sense if both the officer and sergeant counts are down a bit. These numbers actually appear in the previous month's diary as well, and in some notations the first number is as high as 62: 30 officers and 32 sergeants, possibly.

    Thanks for your quick answer, Rob.

    Posted

  • HeatherC by HeatherC moderator

    I wondered if it might be the number in Bn HQ and the number in the Companies, but 54 doesn't really make much sense for that either! Including the Sergeants sounds right but I can't understand why they'd do that as usually the distinction between Officers and ORs is quite clear. Maybe it will become clearer as the diary goes on!

    Posted

  • HeatherC by HeatherC moderator

    I was going to look on through the diary and see how it develops, but it looks as though the data digger isn't showing any of the most recent batch of diaries uploaded. I think you mentioned this elsewhere Rob - is someone from Zooniverse aware?

    Posted

  • ral104 by ral104 moderator, scientist

    I did raise an issue for wd3 on github, but it hasn't been picked up. I'll try again. I assume wd3 is working off an old copy of the database.

    Posted

  • cyngast by cyngast moderator

    I haven't yet come across any reason why this unit might include sergeants with officers, but as I've gone along, the numbers match up for the count of men coming and going for various reasons. So the numbers must indeed be unit strength. When they first began appearing, I didn't connect them as being a running count of some kind. I thought they were referring to orders!

    Posted