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Ed's theory boils down to this - either there was no corroboration and the VC was awarded anyway (in violation of the rules) OR sometime after 30 June they did find corroborative evidence - now lost - and went ahead with it.
In short - a 50/50 chance that there was corroboration.
While much importance is laid in these discussions upon the VC files destroyed after the war, I have noted over the years that important documents very often turn up in several different groups of files - the private papers of General Jones (subsequently donated to some university or archives), diplomatic correspondence between one government and another, the intelligence summaries of one or another Army Corps. *At this moment, Spink is offering at auction (on 5 December) a variety of Combat Reports, formerly the property of an unnamed RAF Station Commander, which are probably hand-written first-drafts of typed CRs in the PRO - just one example of what might be called "documentary slippage".
Given that important documents were often copied into other files, it is peculiar that nothing has been found in less travelled territory to corroborate the Bishop VC account. *The debate that goes forward is a familiar one as the same small pool of information is endlessly debated - a continuing autopsy on an 85-year old corpse, *to which nobody has been able to present a fresh piece of *evidence in all that time.
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