Need advice on data problem with British airmen's first names during the 1939-40 period

[Larry Hickey]

Hello,

Many of you are by now familiar with the "Eagles Over Europe" project (see the permanent EOE post at top of the Luftwaffe Board if you aren't) that is going forward to document in definitive detail on all sides the story of the air war in Europe from the beginning of the Polish Campaign 01.09.39 to the end of 1940. Presently, about 50 people from 13 countries, including many readers of this board, are cooperating and contributing their resources of time, translation skills, photo and document collections and expertise to this effort. The cooperation and support from within the aviation history community has been overwhelmingly, and the many readers of this board who have been involved have my deepest appreciation.

One of the underlying research efforts has been to establish a definitive all-source data base of all aircraft losses/damages, and all personnel injuries, deaths and MIA for all sides. Peter Cornwell, as many of you are aware, is, without doubt, the most knowledgable person on this subject in the world, and his published works in the field are well known. The results of his research has appeared many times on this board. After recently completing a definitive data base on the Luftwaffe side for the period, involving all theaters, and all incidents excepting training losses, the EOE Working Group (WG), with Peter coordinating and leading the research effort, is now going forward with the digitization of all previously published major sources for constructing a parallel data base for the British side. We have nearly completed the basic task of digitizing all major works relating to this subject for 1939-40, including all previous works by Peter on the subject, Bomber Command losses compiled by Chorley and Coastal Command losses by McNeill. We are also adding Royal Navy aviation-related losses from a variety of sources.

Now we have a basic decision to make. One of the major upgrades to Peter's previous Luftwaffe loss lists has been to add first names and crew positions to all listed personnel, which we've been able to achieve with about 99% completeness. I do not believe that crew positions are a major problem with the British data, but first names, as opposed to initials only, plus middle initials, are a very significant problem. Neither Chorley nor McNeill list first names in their published data, only first and middle initials, and Royal Navy sources, which we're just beginning to look at in detail, are expected to result in a similar problem. Peter wants to adopt a consistent standard for this, and barring a reasonable solution to this problem, is prepared to go forward with listing first and middle initials only, as he's done in his previous publications relating to the subject (including victory claims references). However, we both would prefer to add first names to all British listings, especially since we have done so on the German side, if we can consistently do so without adding hugely to our research problem in both time and expense.

Various Battle of Britain listings, all pretty much based on the original research of Holloway, contain this data for direct Battle of Britain participants and casualties, the CWGC data base has this for all those dead or missing, and various contemporary officer listings (for which Peter does not presently hold a copy) provide a great deal of this material, but to be definitive on this subject Peter is concerned that we will be reduced to having to tediously search for the missing first names by "trawling the (SQ) ORBs for names (time-comsuming & with no guarantee of success)." As many of you know, access to master British casualty files are restricted primarily to related family members.

So I'd like to appeal to the expertise and knowledge on this subject of our TOCH board readers to see what they might know that we don't, or entertain suggestions as to which way we should proceed? Does anybody really care if full first names are listed for British casualties? In my published and forthcoming histories of American air units, I've always striven to use complete full names and middle initials, but apparently this is less common in British source materials than in American.

If you do not wish to discuss this on the msg board, and have my direct email address, you can correspond about this directly. My TOCH message box it likely to fill up quickly, so please keep this a public discussion as much as possible. If you try and correspond by Private Message, you'll have to be patient while I clear off some space to accept new messages.

In case the question comes up in someone's mind, we are also doing similar Data Bases for Polish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, Belgian, French and Italian losses/casualties. Once published as a part of the EOE books series, we expect that this will be the basic reference source on this subject forever, at least that is our goal, and this is just one of the data base subjects and reference tools underlying the much bigger vision for the entire project.

Looking forward to your ideas and advice.

Regards,