War Diaries Talk

Gunner Devlin

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

    In the diary gunner Devlin T. died May 25th and his service number is 77072. When I look in CWGC I find one gunner called Devlin who died on May 25th. But his service number is 40807 and his first name is John which doesn't give an initial T as in the diary. But the CWGC gunner is burried in the same cemetery as the other 8 victims of the 124 Bty Wagon line. In lives 1st WW however I find a gunner Devlin Thomas 77072 who died on May 25th. I am inclined to consider the CWGC gunner to be the wrong one.

    Posted

  • cyngast by cyngast moderator

    I would say that the name in the diary is the one that should be tagged. The diary is from Gr. Devlin's own unit and was therefore the record closest to the scene. It's also hard to imagine that even in the confusion and destruction of shelling, that the man's own unit would not know who the eight men were who had been killed.

    I found the same records that you did and also found both Thomas and John Devlin in the medal cards on the National Archives site, but those unfortunately don't include any information about anyone's death. It does seem to confirm they are two separate people however. The CWGC must have the wrong information, or someone there has confused the two men and merged them into one person.

    Posted

  • erik.schaubroeckscarlet.be by erik.schaubroeckscarlet.be in response to cyngast's comment.

    I asked th CWGC and they say the diary is wrong ...

    The answer of the CWGC:

    Thank you for your email. Please accept our apology for the delay in our reply. This is due to the large volume of enquiries we currently receiving.
    Please find below a link to our website with details of Gunner J Devlin.
    https://www.cwgc.org/find-war-dead/casualty/454510/devlin,-john/
    The dairy appears to contain number of errors but not an unusual occurrence.
    We hope you find this information useful.
    Kind regards
    CWGC Enquiries Team

    Posted

  • ral104 by ral104 moderator, scientist

    It's not unknown for information in the diaries to be wrong - sometimes they were filled in hurriedly, or at a later date, and things got confused. However, given the medal index cards also list the same name and service number as the diary, I think I would stick with that. It's difficult to tell who is right and who is wrong, and in the absence of anything more concrete, I would always advise tagging what's on the diary page.

    Posted