May 14th 1940 and few little things

[Rob Philips]

Thanks, Brian & all others. We differ in style, but I believe that Franek and I are mature enough to keep matters civilised. I also believe that these methodological considerations are part and parcel of studying aviation history, even if such matters are not discussed very frequently. I would agree that matters were drifting into spheres of theory, even if I was not prepared to let the matter expand to political theory too. Therefore I offer the following, to bring it all back to earth, and to clarify my request for clarifications rather than vague generalizations.

Facts:

1. A total of X Polish military aviators participated in the French campaign.
Source:
2. We have found accounts of Y of these aviators, in which dissatisfaction is expressed with the French military aviators.
Sources:
3. The dissatisfaction that was expressed can be summarized as follows:
A. About the men
B. About the machines
C. About the organisation(s)
4. Y/X is a significant percentage. We cut short the definition of "significant" in statistics, and declare =>10% to be significant.

Opinions:

1. As the matter is significant, it requires closer examination.
2.A. Dissatisfaction A has the following connotations (discussion of differences in culture and historical experience of Polish and French military aviators)
Sources:
2.B. Dissatisfaction B has the following connotations (discussion of technicalities involved)
Sources:
2.C. Dissatisfaction C has the following connotations (discussion of differences in high command strategies and, perhaps, commander personalities)
Sources:
3. Conclusions

All opinions offered pending more and better data and insight.

I believe that in this way the matter can be lifted from generalizing phraseology, that easily leads to polarisation, to something in which many can participate, with contributions from their specific fields of knowledge, with all cards open on the table, leading to an increasingly developed view of a complicated matter. As a working method or style I would prefer the "yes, but" as the more productive one over the "nope".

Regards,

Rob

[Franek Grabowski]

About 190 Polish fighter pilots took part in the French Campaign. About 45 are known to file reports to Polish authorities, and describing activities of them, their units and subordinated airmen. About 8 airmen had their memories published post-war. Substantial number of airmen described their experiences in their unpublished diaries, diaries of friendly airmen, correspondence with researchers, press articles and interviews, etc. In my opinion, roughly at least half of the airmen left some memories.
Is this satisfactory to you?

[Rob Philips]

Thanks, Franek. I'm not looking for satisfaction, but for knowledge. Your reply tells me that many Polish aviators produced accounts about the French campaign. That's a start. Now the rest, please.

Regards,

Rob

[Juha]

Rob
IMHO you made a fundamental error here.
IMHO your list should be like:

1. A total of X Polish military aviators participated in the French campaign.
Source:
2. We have found accounts of Y of these aviators.
Sources:
3. of these accounts in Z dissatisfaction is expressed with the French military aviators.
Sources:

4. The dissatisfaction that was expressed can be summarized as follows:
A. About the men
B. About the machines
C. About the organisation(s)
5. Z/Y is a significant percentage. We cut short the definition of "significant" in statistics, and declare =>20% to be significant.

Juha

[Rob Philips]

Thanks, Juha. I consider this as consent with my proposed strategy to deal with the matter. You propose increased clarity, which is exactly what I'm after.

You raise three issues, to which I would like to respond as follows:

1. The paragraph 3. you propose is in fact present in my paragraph 2, after the comma. I am not interested in the total number of accounts produced by the Polish aviators who participated in the French campaign, but in the total number of Polish aviators who produced accounts expressing dissatisfaction with the French. The wording was selected so as to avoid counting multiple accounts by the same aviator. However, your suggestion shall work just as fine.

2. You suggest that relevance be established by looking at the dissatisfaction accounts divided by the total number of accounts. This could work, but I suggested the other way, as Franek is looking for ways to generalize. My proposed way looks at all Polish aviators involved. Your proposed way looks at those of the Poles who produced accounts. That would mean a limitation of the group called "The" Poles, hence a limitation of the scope of the generalization. Consider the situation that the group size would be 200, and that there were 10 notorious rebels, who were always venting dissatisfaction. If a generalization would be made on that basis, then this would not do justice to the 190 others, and therefore not to the group.

3. Perhaps therefore you suggest to raise the significance level from 10 to 20%. That's fine with me. It has always surprised me that in medicine doctors produced theses on the basis of less than 10 cases of a certain type of disease, whilst the group described runs into the millions. A level between 5 and 10% is usually accepted as sufficient to declare significance, but surely a higher percentage shall deliver a clearer case. We are free to make these choices, as long as we explain what we are doing, if we wish to make sense.

An improvement of the proposed strategy would be to shift the significance declaration to the chapter "opinions". In fact this is a nice example of Franek's statement, that much of what we call fact is in fact opinion. Again, the fact here is the agreement about the content of the statement, not the content itself.

Regards,

Rob

[Juha]

Hello Rob
my point is that if we are interested in how common the negative attitude to French performance during the BoF was amongst Polish pilots we must study the group of whose attitude we has knowledge. Then there are those whose attitudes are unknown to us now. And the attitudes of those we cannot study now.

An extreme example would be:
3 million soldiers from country A fought in WWI, nowadays we can find written description on how they felt during the war from 50 000 of those soldiers, of which 45 000 describes mostly negative feelings. Now 45 000 out of 50 000 gives impression that negative attitude to WWI style warfare was very common amongst participants, 45 000 out of 3 000 000 on the other hand means that negative feelings were not common. Of course in the first case we must make clear that we have know ledge of attitudes of only 1/60 of participiants and there might have been tendency of those who were critical to be more likely to vent their feelings.

Juha

[Rob Philips]

Thanks, Juha, good point. The difference with "les poilus de la Grande Guerre" is that ALL pilots were debriefed, which gave them a first opportunity to express whatever they wanted, including dissatisfaction with others. Certainly any knowledge we may gain is limited to the data we can find, and needs to be updated if we find more data. The way out here would be to follow both paths, the ones suggested by you and by me. That would make clear the limitations of any conclusions to which we might come.

Furthermore, studying the complaints can shed light on the foundation of these complaints. If an objectifiable and marked difference in aircraft and/or armament performance would be at the basis of this, then this would tell us something, whether reported by few or by many.

If we want to generalize AND make sense, we need to dive deep into the matter, and we need to make clear what we are doing and how we are doing that. Your point is a good illustration of that.

Regards,

Rob

[Ruy Horta]

Thought 5% was significant in a normal distribution.

But we can go too far in the mathematical approach, imho.

[Rob Philips]

Thanks, Ruy. I hope that I did not give the impression that I believe that these matters can be transformed into and resolved as mathematical equasions. It is just that mathematics, and I include the rules of logical inference, are tools to make clear what we want to say, in ways that can be checked by the other guy. I believe that a lot of the confusion, and even emotion, and even anger, that arose in this thread came about as a result of unclear language. Statements such as "many aviators", certainly when given in forceful ways, do not lead to a lot of clarity. Statements such as "20% of the aviators involved", and in as far as these statements can be demonstrated to be accurate, give the other guy a better chance to agree, or a better handle to disagree in a bizlike way. I could demonstrate that the extreme opinions vented in this thread are less opposing than believed by their proponents, who fell victim to their own lack of clarity, in other words to their own "method" or style. And that's a pity, leading to a lot of energy lost in the wrong directions.

Regards,

Rob

[Juha]

Hello Ruy
I highed the percentage because a) it isn't uncommon that surviving historical records are somewhat biased.
b) because war was/is unnatural enviroment to man of 20th and 21st century and in at least almost all armies and wars SNAFU is a common phenomenon there always has been certain amount of critisism towards how the war was conducted. More so because errors cost lives not only money and IMHO there are no error free organizations.

Juha