War Diaries Talk

Some questions

  • Tredegar by Tredegar

    Hello there. I have been working with Operation War Diary fro some time now and am fascinated by all the information and history that is written in them. This has led me to ponder a few items.

    1. I know you don't want to post Canadian and ANZAC diaries since they are posted on other websites. Please reconsider. By not including them you leave holes in the overall picture of the diaries and how the units worked together. Plus having them all in one internet location makes research a bit easier.

    2. Will unit diaries of other theaters ( Middle East, Gallipoli, Africa) be issued? I hope so.

    3. The gentlemen in the splash page photo, who are they?

    Thanks in advance for any help.

    Posted

  • ral104 by ral104 moderator, scientist

    Hi there, @Tredegar. Thanks for getting involved!

    The issue we have is that there is simply so much work to do to cover just the Western Front diaries alone. There are ~1.5 million diary pages from units posted there. We've completed ~77,000 of them, so there's still a mammoth task ahead. We would definitely like to include diaries from other theatres at some point, but I think that would be a quite a long way down the line.

    In part, that's why we haven't included any Canadian or ANZAC diaries - we decided to focus on pages which hadn't yet been digitised or tagged in any way, rather than duplicating work done elsewhere. I do agree that it would be excellent to include diaries from all units who served on the Western Front - there were a lot of South Africans too, amongst others - and I've been pondering the idea for a while of whether we could get hold of data produced by these other projects to set alongside our own outputs.

    The splash page photo shows the 13th Royal Fusiliers after the attack on La Boisselle on 7th July 1916. It looks like they also have some French troops with them.

    Hope that helps!

    Posted

  • David_Underdown by David_Underdown moderator

    The digitisation programme at The National Archives is continuing, though it won't be until next (financial) year that all the Western Front diaries will be completed (and they won't be available online until the following year probably). What's being fed into this system so far is going from the bottom up as it were, from individual battalions (and equivalent units), up through brigades to divisional level. This year's digitisation has started from top down, from GHQ (France and Flanders), through the Armies, and Lines of Communication. This still leaves Corps level material to be done.

    Then we'll start on other theatres. There is no point us digitising eg Australian and Canadian material that we hold as those have already been digitised by the National Archives of Australia and Library and Archives Canada, and made freely available. The statutory framework we operate under means we have to charge for downloads (which helps meet the cost of digitisation, and the storage and other system costs for keeping it online), so who would download that material from us when it's free elsewhere?

    If you browse through the hierarchy of the series via http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/C14303 you'll soon see just how much the Western Front material out weighs everything else. There are 5500 pieces in the overall series, almost 4000 of those are Western Front

    Posted

  • Tredegar by Tredegar

    Thanks for the answers. I have wondered how much work is still left to do and had not realized the scope of the diaries. I mean looking at them right now all we see are battalions and companies, but I had not thought about the brigade and higher units.Those would probably make for an interesting read.

    As a side note I have found another picture of the 13th Royal Fusiliers taken about the same time, if not a few minutes removed from your splash page photo. I can positively identify one of the men because he is wearing the same clothing as the splash page picture and also there are French troops present.

    Posted

  • ral104 by ral104 moderator, scientist

    There are a few which I think must have been taken at the same time in IWM's collections - they all look so cheery, it's easy to forget what they must have just been through!

    Posted

  • Tredegar by Tredegar

    Agreed. I took the opportunity to explore the photos from the IWMs' collection and interestingly enough there were two photos that showed the group sitting. The one is your splash page the other is the same guys not smiling. They look like a pretty grim bunch then.

    Posted

  • ral104 by ral104 moderator, scientist

    I see the one you mean. Grim indeed.

    Posted

  • Tredegar by Tredegar

    Here's something else for you. In the BBC Documentary "The Day the Guns Fell Silent, Part 1" there is a portion showing the Imperial War Museums documentary "The Battle of the Somme." The gentlemen in the first portion of the documentary are the 13th Royal Fusiliers. If you take a look at the men, you can recognize several from the stills. This must have been quite a production to bring and film this so close to the front.

    Posted

  • ral104 by ral104 moderator, scientist

    Thanks - I hadn't realised they were part of the film.

    The link to the full film is here: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060008206

    It's divided into 5 parts.

    Posted

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

    What an amazing film record of the men on the Somme. So much activity going on. The men had to put with such awful conditions in such a desolate place. You read of their activities in the diaries when tagging and on this film you can picture what they went through.

    Posted