Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Pre-1946 Military History is Best

I confess to being a military history buff.  Have been reading it almost since I became aware that there was such things as history books.  Well, perhaps a bit later than that, but certainly by the time I was in junior high school.

I also kept up with developments in military equipment, aircraft in particular.

The problem was, much about recent (at the time) military history as well as the current equipment was classified.  What information that was available -- especially for things such as capabilities of currently active aircraft -- could sometimes border on Public Relations press releases.  (My Army job happened to be Public Relations, by the way.)

After a period of time, information became declassified.  Probably the most famous case was Ultra, the British decoding of coded and enciphered German radio messages.  Histories of World War 2 written before 1974 did not include this important information: we had to wait nearly 30 years after the war ended to learn of it.

So now I tend to ignore accounts of military events that occurred, say, less than 70 years ago.  As for aircraft, information about types currently in service might not be entirely trustworthy, especially regarding any defects or limitations.

Recently I've been reading a lot about naval vessels from World War 2 and earlier, and figure I'm gettin a fairly truthful picture.

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