1/7 Battalion Middlesex Regiment Routine Orders, Roman Way Camp, Colchester, 27 November 1940
…407. Discipline.
It has been reported by the Police Authorities that in certain areas, soldiers who are desirous of catching a lift from passing motorists are adopting the practice of hailing vehicles after ‘black-out’ by standing in the middle of the road. It is obvious that under present lighting conditions this practice is one which lead [sic] to accidents and gives the motorist little chance to avoid a collision. All ranks will be informed of the need for discretion in this matter.
(1/7 Middlesex War Diary Sept-Dec 1939, June-Sept 1940, National Archives, WO 166/4461).
One of the problems in calculating casualty figures is working out who should be defined as a ‘casualty of war’. Read the rest of this entry »
One way that’s been suggested to me by a couple of people to get hold of casualty statistics is to look at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database. This won’t provide information by month – and in a phone call today the CWGC told me that their computer can’t cope with trying to drag that information out of their database. You can, however, enter a search for a death where you don’t put in any details but year and service. This way, you can get annual figures for deaths for the armed services, civilians and for the merchant navy (the system will also let you search for the Australian, New Zealand, South African and Indian dead, which I think is probably essential).
I’ve got several posts coming up on the issue of casualties and the difficulties I’ve encountered in this research so far. But before I get onto the problems, I want to suggest some reasons for trying to draw up a month-by-month table and graph of British service and civilian casualties.
1. This information isn’t easily available in a published form (1). Compiling it and making it available is therefore a service to the historical community.
2. In the absence of that information, it’s possible to make unexamined and unchallenged statements about British casualty figures. For example, I’ve read in different sources that it wasn’t until after D-Day that more British servicemen were killed than civilians, or alternatively that it wasn’t until mid-1942 that the rate of attrition in the army rose above that for civilians. I’m going to reserve judgement on both of these – because whatever their statistical accuracy, as I’ll argue later I think they both reflect aspects of wartime experience. But these statements have both achieved the status of ‘historical fact’ – in the sense that they are now often cited without a footnote (2). And both leave unanswered a number of questions: Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve spent the last week or so working on tabulating British armed service and civilian casualties over time during the Second World War, as a means of getting to grips with telling the story of the war as a whole. Quite aside from the depressing nature of the topic – I do feel a bit like Brian in the clip above – it’s not easy: getting hold of good consistent data is hard, not least because the different services defined casualties in different ways, and the files at the PRO are often frustratingly incomplete. But I still think it’s a worthwhile project, and one that I’ll keep posting on as I work at it. When I’ve got the tables sorted out, I’ll get the QM History Dept to put them up on its research webspace.
Here’s the easy bit of it – there is a Home Office file that details civilian casualties by month. So here, to compare to Brett’s First World War equivalent, are those figures as a graph.
Here, killed is those killed outright or died of wounds, and seriously injured entails admission to hospital. Whilst this doesn’t give a day by day account, which even if I had the information would probably be too complex graphically, it does show the concentration of British civilian casualties in the winter of 1940-41, with a second bulge when the V weapons started to hit in 1944. In between those, it could be argued that more civilians were killed each year in traffic accidents than by enemy bombs (the document in which I found the Vice Chief of the General Staff making that just that argument is worth a post in itself). Looking at it quickly now, I wonder whether we can draw any conclusions from the small number of children relative to adults?
What working on all these figures – but particularly the service ones – has made me realise is just how politicised the issue of casualties was, internally and externally. I’m toying with the argument that this itself explains some of the differences between published sources for the two wars. What I want to do when I’ve got good national figures up is to compare these to the experience of individual civil and military communities.
Posted by trenchfever 
