OGHAP: The Epic Great War Timeline

While studying for my MSc in Strategic Studies at the University of Aberdeen, I wrote my in-class essay for my course in Strategic Theory on the following prompt: "Explain why and how the conduct of war was transformed between 1815 and 1914." My preparations included developing a timeline of armament, geopolitical, military, sociocultural, technical, and diplomatic (treaty) developments from Waterloo to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. When I came to the realization that I'd be writing a book about the First World War, I dug that note sheet out and used it to begin developing a timeline of dates relevant to the Great War.

Initially, I was only tracking the dates, events, and which of the aforementioned categories they fell into. As I began researching the early battles on the Western Front, I tried to categorize engagements that were subsets of the Battle of the Frontiers, the Great Retreat, the Race to the Sea. As the list began to balloon in scope, the data quickly became prohibitively unruly, so I decided to organize it - and if I was going to reorganize it, I might as well expand it, right? I re-coded the dates into a "YYYY//MM//DD" format for easier chronological sorting. I also added some additional categories: theater; campaign; whether the military events are ground, naval, or amphibious in nature; and whether the British Expeditionary Force, British Imperial Forces, or neither took place in the engagement. Where relevant, I also track the Wikipedia entry for a given event or topic - I know, boo, hiss, Wikipedia, but it can be useful if you know what you're doing.

Having initially kept the timeline in my .txt manuscript, the expansion made it too unruly for that format. Porting it over into Excel has made the it much easier to manage the data, and Excel allows me to manipulate that data so that I can clump it together for easier use. It ended up being a massive undertaking, and it's still not complete, but I consider it an investment of time that will ultimately make my effort to document the war more efficient in the long run. I can also take pride in the fact that I've amalgamated a variety of sources to create a fairly authoritative timeline of the conflict. Maybe it will have some use beyond OGHAP? Only time will tell.

OGHAP: Primary Sources

When I was studying history as an undergrad, one of my professors was a borderline deranged lunatic on the topic of primary sources. For the uninitiated, primary sources are pieces of historical evidence that constitute eyewitness or participant accounts. If you submitted a paper to him (I think I submitted a total of four) that didn't rest largely on the testimony of primary sources, you were going to have a bad time. As I've researched the service of the Great War Orcadian Gordon Highlanders, I've found myself making use of multiple primary sources.

Medal index cards are often the only remaining official record of a particular soldier's service. (Most First World War personnel service records were destroyed in the Blitz.) My contact in Orkney has diligently assisted me in identifying and procuring the medal cards for the soldiers in question. A few months ago, the BBC published this guide, which includes a guide to reading a medal card. These documents have been extremely valuable in establishing or confirming some basic facts about the various Orcadian Gordon Highlanders.

Earlier this year, I discussed my efforts to procure soldiers' wills for seven Great War Orcadian Gordon Highlanders from the National Archives of Scotland. Since I wrote that post, my contact back in Orkney discovered several additional Orcadian Gordon Highlanders, and one has a will. My good buddy, CN Constable, has agreed to get it for me since the last effort took about a month and cost far more than it needed to.

The United Kingdom's National Archives (known colloquially as "Kew") are releasing and/or digitizing many documents for the Great War's centenary. One such effort is Operation War Diary, about which I learned a couple of months ago from one of War on the Rocks' (W)archives posts. (Here's more information about Operation War Diary.) Since information about many of the Orcadian Gordons is so sparse, I thought that this might be a good way to find information about the various battalions of the Gordon Highlanders, and possibly even about individual Orcadian Gordon Highlanders from my own roster. I put off participating in OWD until I had some time, at which point I discovered that none of the diaries available for tagging pertain to the Gordon Highlanders. However, Kew has a total of thirty-eight individual war diaries, ranging in length from about twelve pages to nearly six hundred. I expect to procure these records in the near future. The National Archives has a good webinar (also available, albeit less illustrative, as a podcast) about how to search for and correlate the various documents available in the archives for the purposes of historical research. I'm not sure I'll have need for more than medal cards and war diaries, but it might be interesting to see what additional resources might be available to allow me to continue researching this and related topics in the future.

I've worked with primary sources before, but this has been my first opportunity to do much archival history. I have to say, I'm really enjoying it, and once I get the book published I may see if my undergraduate alma mater might be interested in having me out to lecture about my experiences doing historical research outside of academia.

Reading in 2015: Mid-Year Update

I recently posted about my progress on my 2015 reading goals. Since I'm doing so well in this endeavour, to the tune of probably exceeding my goals, I'm taking the next logical step by formulating insanely ambitious reading goals for subsequent years that I have no chance whatsoever of actually completing.

One author whose work I enjoyed in high school and college was the late Michael Crichton. Like many young people, I started with Jurassic Park, and continued with (in no particular order): Eaters of the Dead/The 13th Warrior, Congo, Sphere, Rising Sun, Disclosure, The Lost World, and Airframe. There are a number of Crichton's novels that I have yet to read, and I'd like to remedy that. I expect to forego the thrillers that the young Crichton wrote under the pseudonym "John Lange". That leaves some of his older works, and some of his later works: The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man, The Great Train Robbery, Timeline, Prey, State of Fear, Next, Pirate Latitudes, and Micro.

That's nine books, and while it might be fun to follow the nine books I'm likely to read this year with nine books by a single author, I suspect that it would get monotonous, and I have other priorities to satisfy as well. So, what other categories am I considering?

Still in the leisure category, I also read a number of Ian Fleming's classic James Bond novels during and after my undergraduate years. I still have yet to read For Your Eyes Only, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The Man With the Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me, Thunderball, and You Only Live Twice. One of these, For Your Eyes Only, is a collection of short stories that was combined with Octopussy and The Living Daylights into Quantum of Solace in 2008, to coincide with the release of what may have been the worst Bond film ever made. I already read the latter collection around 2006, and I have the Quantum of Solace volume, so I'll just read those stories from that particular volume. Otherwise, I'll try to salt these into the mix along with the Crichton novels.

Aside from these two authors, I hope to read a few other books. One of these is Armor by John Steakley, which has been highly recommended to me for years, and which I attempted to read in 2014. Another is Animal Farm by George Orwell, which I also started reading years ago and only ever got a few pages into - maybe on a plane? I don't remember.

While I was in Scotland, I may have gotten about a quarter of the way into The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, and I'd love to finish it at some point. I've also spent years trying to get through the audiobook of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, and attempted to listen to Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island while on a road trip to the East Coast in 2014. Those may be good bedtime reading/listening projects for the winter months of 2015/'16.

As I continue to identify categories and books within those categories, I'll continue posting about it.

Reading in 2015 Update

We're nearly halfway through 2015, and I'm more than halfway through my goal of reading eight books in 2015. Thus far, I've finished five books: Cyber War Will Not Take Place by Thomas Rid, Warlords of Oman by P.S. Allfree, Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force by Robert M. Farley, and The Martian by Andy Weir, Churchill's First War: Young Winston at War with the Afghans by Con Coughlin. I started the first couple of books in 2014, so I should probably read a ninth book just for good measure.

The remaining books on my 2015 list are Bleeding Talent: How the US Military Mismanages Great Leaders and Why It's Time for a Revolution by Tim Kane, Bomb: The Race to Build--and Steal--the World's Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin, and Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa by Michael Totten. That would put me up to eight. However, there may be a couple of changes. The original plan was to read Sheinkin's book with Lady Jaye as part of a program at her school, but we never got around to reading it during the school year, so it may get shelved for the time being. I also began reading The Devil's Sandbox: With the 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry at War in Iraq by John Bruning during a recent trip. I've intended to read this for about a decade, I've had it on my Kindle for two years, and I'm finally getting around to reading it. I retain the hope of finishing On War by Carl von Clausewitz and The Design and Evaluation of Physical Protection Systems by Mary Lynn Garcia this year. Other potential supplements include The Story of the Malakand Field Force by Winston Churchill (as a follow-up to Coughlin's book), and Where the West Ends by Michael Totten (as a supplement to Tower of the Sun).

I typically underperform on this particular goal, but being more than halfway through with around half of the year yet to go is encouraging.

Another Container Home

Hey, it's another blurb about another shipping container home!

Saloons in the Gulf

A couple of weeks ago, I saw an article in the Kuwait Times entitled When a Saloon Isn't. As the author rightly notes:

The word ‘saloon’ to an American immediately conjures up images of the Old West, of John Wayne movies and gun fights at the OK Corral. Watch any of the Hollywood Westerns from the 1950s and 1960s and you will see the word ‘saloon’ flash across the screen each time Gary Cooper or Clint Eastwood walked into a bar. Saloons have a very rough, low reputation. They are the places where cowboys caroused, swilled beer and mingled with saloon girls (aka prostitutes).

So it’s ironic whenever an American arrives in Kuwait that they find saloons on almost every corner - but not a drop of legal alcohol to drink.

When I lived in the Gulf, I also frequented a local "saloon", and went in on most of my days off to get my head shaved and my beard trimmed. Most of my favorite memories of my time in the Gulf are of being in that barber's chair, while some Pakistani guy with whom I could barely communicate held a blade to my scalp or my throat. (If we're being quite honest, that took some getting used to, but it was a pretty good experience for me.) Being able to read Arabic myself, I eventually got a good enough look at the little wood carving, but didn't know what it meant. So, when I saw the article, I was naturally intrigued. When you zoom in on the wood carving, you can see that it reads:

That's "صالون الفطيم", or "Saloon al Futtaim". As far as I can tell from some casual Googling, "al Futtaim" is a family name, but Wikipedia, the undisputed source of all knowledge, confirms that "saloon" is the South Asian word for a barber shop, potentially derived from the French "salon" or "sala". Isn't it interesting what you find out several years after the fact?

UPDATE: The Kuwait Times published another article about barber shops on Friday.

Internet Research, Then and Now

A few mornings ago, on my way to work, I was thinking about just how far the Internet has come. I was one of the early users of the Internet, not when it was still brand new, but just before it started to become popular. In the United States, home Internet access started being proliferated around 1995/'96, but it was still a few years before most homes had it (I think my family got connected in early 1997). When I got to college, the Internet had become pretty mainstream, but the available resources were a tiny fraction of what we enjoy today, and you didn't have the sort of quality control that we now sort of take for granted... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFBDn5PiL00 Anyway, I did a lot of my research on the Internet, even back when most professors (particularly my history professors) were still pushing students to use books and articles from "scholarly journals", the former of which were difficult to get a hold of, and the latter of which were nearly impossible to identify and procure. I remember writing a research paper for one particular course, and being gently hounded by the good-natured but skeptical professor. Ironically, he's been one of the department members who's come to embrace the online format for his curricula, but at the time he was very reticent to accept work that relied on Internet resources. In particular, I remember him being extremely suspicious of an article I'd used as a source (Roman Ireland: What did the Romans ever do for us?, Damien DeBarra, 27th July 2002) because it was "from a site called 'Blather net'". It actually ended up being a pretty critical resource, particularly because it pointed me to other articles by distinguished scholars whom the author, having worked at the archaeology museum of the National Museum of Ireland, had been intimately acquainted with.

Fast forward to 2013, and very nearly all of my postgraduate research was conducted online. I read a few traditional textbooks, particularly before leaving the States for Aberdeen; and I got a handful of hard copy books that were out of print and unavailable online to use as sources in my dissertation; but aside from that, the vast majority of my research for my four courses and my dissertation was done online. I used some of these techniques to achieve great success. I got news and journal articles online, I raided multiple document repositories for (publicly available) official and academic sources, I incorporated tons of news stories. And, of course, my advisor didn't bat an eye.

I don't suppose I have a real point, aside from reminiscing about how revolutionary the information revolution actually is.