War Diaries Talk

Diaries of allies

  • erik.schaubroeckscarlet.be by erik.schaubroeckscarlet.be

    What happened with the diaries of the allies: Canada, New Zealand, Australia, ... Are they a part of this War Diary Operation?

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  • cyngast by cyngast moderator

    No, they are not a part of our project. Each of those countries would have the diaries from their individual armies.

    Here are links to the archives for each of those nations: Canadian http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/military-heritage/first-world-war/Pages/war-diaries.aspx

    New Zealand http://archives.govt.nz/world-war-one

    Australia https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/awm4/

    Not even all of the British diaries are part of our project. We are working only with diaries from the Western Front. Other areas include Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, Italy, and Salonika, that I know of. Oh, and maybe in Africa?

    I know that nothing like this project has been done with the American Army diaries, either.

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  • ral104 by ral104 moderator, scientist

    I did get in touch with the National Archives in the US a few years ago, with a vague idea that we might be able to look at some of their records at some point, but as far as I could tell the American Expeditionary Force didn't keep war diaries in quite the same way.

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  • David_Underdown by David_Underdown moderator

    The subseries on the right of this page http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/C14303 show the various British theatres of war. For the First World War Canada, New Zealand and Australia (Dominions in technical terms at the time) can't really be described as Allies, they were an integral part of the British Empire, and it was a case of "one in, all in", the British declaration of war bound all of them to enter the war (by the Second World War the legal situation had changed slightly so each declared war individually). Where Dominion forces were fighting under a unified British Empire command (as on the Western Front, Gallipoli, Middle East) diaries are included in the WO 95 record series, but for the most part haven't been digitised by The National Archives (UK) - TNA - as in most cases each individual national archives has already digitised the copies held by them, so it wouldn't have been a good use of money. In some areas eg the early capture of German Samoa by Australian and New Zealand forces, and the fighting in what's now Namibia and other areas bordering on South Africa, were less under direct British control, so TNA does not have copies.

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