Rants and Death Traps

The_Chieftain:   Nope, I'm far to young for that, obviously :)  

The_Chieftain:   No, mainly because I've not really had access to one with a video team. Plus, I haven't found an operator's manual. I'm sure I'll get around to one eventually, but it's fairly low on the 'near future' list.  

The_Chieftain:   I prefer to say he's unreliable. To call him a liar would be to ascribe malice, and I have no reason to believe he was intentionally setting out to deceive anyone. Intent, however, need not correlate with accuracy. The bottom line is that not everything he says is true, and the further from his own sphere of observation anything was, the less likely, it seems, his statement about it was going to be true. In either case, it will certainly be less reliable.  

The_Chieftain:   I'm slapping his book, not him. For the purposes of studying history, I don't care how many battle stars or unit citations he's earned (I only have four campaign awards, a Valorous Unit Award, Meritorious Unit Citation and two Bronze Star Medals, incidentally), his awards don't make his statements such as "Patton attended a conference and decided to prevent Pershing from being the tank for the job" true. A statement is true or false on the face of it, regardless of the intent or the valor of the person making it.   Unfortunately, though we commonly say "Perception is reality", in the field of research, this is not the true. Preception is perception, and reality doesn't care what people perceived. If Sherman crews perceived that putting sandbags on their tank was going to increase their survivability, even if was a commonly accepted practice to increase morale, it doesn't stop the engineers who knew what they were talking about with empirical evidence from saying "Guys, this actually makes matters worse." Who would be correct? The crewmen, or the engineers?   Cooper's book can be divided into what he saw, what he interpreted, and what he heard. What he saw is pretty much to be taken at face value, absent evidence that he was absolutely wrong. What he interpreted is to be given some weight, but with the understanding that he is looking at a problem from only one perspective. What he heard is to be given the least weight of all. It does not devalue his book as a memoir, but it should not be confused with a reliable source of objective information.