[Pete Hill]

Hi Neil,
That would be funny if it didn't grate so much! How about this one? I once saw in a US-publication that shall remain nameless, a writer say..."Many of the highest-scoring Aces in the First World War flew for countries other than the United States. This reflected the fact that the US was a late entrant into the War..."
Hows that for an inwardly-focused view of history!! Thankfully, the majority of American historians are more aware of the rest of the planet than this guy evidently was. Was he claiming that if the US had entered the war in 1914, instead of 1917, then the top-scorers of the air war would automatically have been American? I shoudl point out that there are plenty of Australian, British, French and German writers who can be just as guilty of nationalistic conceit and self-centredness. As one writer recently pointed out, today's French school-children are taught that their nation was liberated almost solely by the French resistance, with maybe a helping hand by the United States but no mention of the British or Canadians. And for many decades, most Australians and New Zealanders were firmly convinced that their respective forces were the sole-participants in the Gallipoli campaign. Many soldiers throughout history have tended to be on the selfish side when it comes to deciding who gets the credit for a successful military action. As Napoleon said.."Victory has a thousand fathers but defeat is an orphan..."
Their claims, observations and perceptions can sometimes cause later historians to have a slanted, or even a misleading view of an event. For a long time, the popular view of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 was that most of the non-British units of Wellington's Anglo-Dutch army performed poorly and it was the English units that won the day. This has recently been proven to be false as it was created by the selfish recollections of British officers who wanted to gain glory and prestige for just themselves and their own units, leading them to dismiss the Dutch-Belgian troops as cowardly or in-ept. Recent studies of other source material has revealed that this was simply not the case. The Dutch, Belgian and Brunswicker regiments, for the most part, fought effectively and sometimes admirably. There were some desertions but no more than there were amongst the English units. Indeed, from the ranks of even the famous, elite and highly revered British 95th Rifles, there were nearly a hundred men who fled from the battlefield during the fighting, an incident that is rarely mentioned in many earlier accounts of the battle.
The recent TV documentary series 'Battlefield Detectives' revealed that at Balaclava in 1854, the Turkish infantry, allied to the British and French, played a crucial part in delaying the advance of the Russians until the English could organise themselves. But until recently, no British accounts have mentioned this.
Most British accounts of the Fall of France never really praise or even acknowledge the true efforts of the French army against the German Blitzkreig. It was largely due to the heroic rearguard actions of a small number of French units that enabled the evacuation at Dunkirk to succeed but how many English writers are willing to admit to this? Indeed, many histories of this campaign seem to halt after Dunkirk as if the later German campaign to capture the remainder of France was a walkover. It wasn't. In fact, of all the casualties suffered by the German army in the invasion of France, more than half of them were sustained AFTER Dunkirk when the bulk of the British forces had left the continent.
Many US-written histories of the Vietnam war rarely acknowledge the efforts of the Army of South Vietnam other than to dismiss them as second-rate, in-effective forces. However, as the late Australian film-maker Neil Davis pointed out, during the entire 10,000-day war, there were only three weeks in which US-Army casualties were higher than those suffered by the South Vietnamese. Hollywood's treatment of the war is no better. The lesser-known 1977 film- 'Go Tell the Spartans' which starred Burt Lancaster, remains perhaps the only post-war US film to portray South Vietnamese soldiers actually doing some of the fighting.
Hope you had a good break, Neil. Cheers, Pete.