MAKE DEEDS LIVE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 86, Issue 308, 31 December 1942, Page 3

MAKE DEEDS LIVE

DOMINIONS IN WAR TASK FOR HISTORIAN Sydney, Dec. 23. Some interesting facts concerning the 1914-18 war were stated this week by Dr. C. E. W. Bean, who recently finished his official Australian history of it—a task which took him 27 years and was performed in a way that has earned him world fame. Urging the immediate appointment of an official historian of this war, Dr. Bean said it was most important that those charged with collecting the material for an official history should have the opportunity to investigate the facts on the spot 'and within a short time of their occurrence. He said: "Perhaps I, more than anyone else, realise how much truth will never be written, and how much false history will take its place, if thorough, contemporaneous investigation is not made. Had we not been on or near the spot at the time or soon after, many events that are Australian landmarks to-day might almost never have happened so far as history is concerned. "For example, the real stories of the landing at Anzac, and of Lone Pine simply do not exist outside our official history and the works based on it. The main records of them are in the historian’s notes. Vast Errors Found. "As for later years, if Gullett, Cutlack or I, on the spot, had not been led to suspect vast errors in the official records, history would have been quite different. Tanks, and not our infantry, would first have pierced the Hindenburg Line at Bullecourt in 1917, and the Americans would have finally broken that line in 1918. "The most important work of the A.I.F. in 1918—the peaceful penetration that wore down the Germans, or infiltration, as it is now called—is not described at all in the British history of that summer, not because the British history is ungenerous (it is the very reverse), but simply because the facts were unknown until we published them.

Tn this war, as in the last, the world should know not only what Australian fighting men have achieved, but what Australia has done. As time passes this task of recording will become harder because most of the records of the fighting men in Greece, Crete, Malaya and elsewhere have been lost or scattered. Extracts froni an interim history of the campaign in Greece already published in Britain, whilst generous to Australians, are partially inaccurate —and no wonder, because the survivors of the fighting and the records are in Australia and New Zealand. “I can say this with certainty, that if much more time is allowed to pass it will be beyond the power of our Government, however much they and our fighting men may wish it, to give these men and the nation the benefit of a history such as we were able to write of the last war. The chance, not merely of making those deeds and the brave actors live again, but of establishing many of the bare facts, will have passed 'beyond recall."