{"id":2067,"date":"2024-08-29T14:55:01","date_gmt":"2024-08-29T14:55:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/kingscollections\/?p=2067"},"modified":"2024-08-29T16:09:42","modified_gmt":"2024-08-29T16:09:42","slug":"war-memoirs-of-a-nonentity-creating-archives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/kingscollections\/2024\/08\/29\/war-memoirs-of-a-nonentity-creating-archives\/","title":{"rendered":"War Memoirs of a Nonentity: Creating Archives"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Cathy Williams, Head of Archives & Research Collections, King\u2019s College London Archives <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vlieland, Charles Archibald, 1890-1974, colonial administrator<\/a> presented the \u2018much abridged and expurgated edition\u2019 of his personal memoirs \u201cDISASTER IN THE FAR EAST 1941-2\u201d<\/em> to the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives (LHCMA) in 1965 – only a year after the Centre opened and having received no objection from The Colonial Office as to its publication. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Twenty years after Vlieland\u2019s death, in 1994 the Centre received the unabridged version.  Entitled \u201cWAR MEMOIRS OF A NONENTITY\u201d<\/em> and written in May 1964, this original version begins with a FOREWORD and INTRODUCTORY chapter in which Vlieland explains his motivation for writing: \u2018to debunk the mythology of Singapore\u2019 and rebut the \u2018falsification of history\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The cover and title page of Vlieland’s memoirs, including handwritten correction. Vlieland collection.<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As an archivist, I\u2019m most interested in the latter but it was Vlieland\u2019s experience as Secretary of State for Defence, Malaya from 1938 to 1941 which inspired his \u2018unorthodox statements\u2019; his view from \u2018behind the scenes\u2019; and his consequent anger towards those \u2018scapegoat-hunting journalists and Army apologists\u2019 who – more than twenty years later – were publishing \u2018masterpiece(s) of invention, misrepresentation and ill-informed and ill-natured calumny\u2019.  He states that his \u2018object\u2019 is not \u2018historical truth\u2019 but to shift blame for \u2018disaster in the Far East\u2019 away from \u2018any individual, military or civilian\u2019 in Malaya when Singapore fell and on to the \u2018Powers-that-were\u2019 in London.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s an obvious question over Vlieland\u2019s being a self-styled NONENTITY<\/em> and his assertion that compared with \u2018famous men\u2019, \u2018less exalted persons\u2019 are \u2018often better informed and less biassed\u2019.  It’s true that the \u2018writings of (those) famous men\u2019 are available in \u2018vast volume\u2019 and that \u2018records produced by (those) less exalted persons\u2019 are \u2018unfortunately rare\u2019 by comparison – but there\u2019s something contradictory in Vlieland\u2019s description of the lack of omniscience among \u2018men who get to the top in politics and Services\u2019 and his belief that in 1964 when he wrote these MEMOIRS<\/em>, he was the \u2018only man … both disposed and sufficiently informed to set the record straight\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I ought to have known.  My advisers ought to have known and I ought to have been told.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vlieland quotes \u2018Mr. Churchill\u2019s famous apologia\u2019 – from the fourth volume of The Second World War:<\/em> The Hinge of Fate<\/em> published in 1950 – as confirmation that not only did the then Prime Minister not know about the \u2018lack of landward defences of Singapore\u2019, but he was \u2018completely misled as to Japanese intentions\u2019 – and most significantly for Vlieland, by his own advisers.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that is why he condemns the \u2018inadequacy\u2019 of \u2018official documents\u2019.  For Vlieland, they record the policies and strategies of \u2018men at the summit of affairs\u2019 based on \u2018ideas in which they have been led to believe by other men\u2019; and those \u2018other men\u2019 are \u2018motivated by devotion to pet policies … by lesser loyalties … by inter-Service jealousy … by purely personal considerations\u2019.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s difficult to argue with Vlieland\u2019s \u2018feeling that the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is rarely to be extracted from archives.\u2019  He reminds the \u2018professional historian\u2019 that neither \u2018scraps\u2019 nor \u2018mounds\u2019 of paper can \u2018tell the whole story\u2019; that documents will have been \u2018subjected … to a process of selection\u2019 whether \u2018blind chance\u2019, negligence, \u2018honest error\u2019, or \u2018calculated deception\u2019; and that this was \u2018very much the case with the archives of war periods\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

MEMOIRS OF A NONENTITY <\/em>is one of those items which is consciously archival<\/em>: written with a clear intention to be part of the historical record, to redress what the author perceives as historical imbalance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vlieland\u2019s INTRODUCTORY chapter should be compulsory reading, not only for the military historian but for any researcher, as warning against archival \u2018booby-traps\u2019.  And whatever you think about Vlieland\u2019s motivation for writing his MEMOIRS<\/em>, he was certainly no NONENTITY<\/em> – which was very much his point. <\/p>\n\n\n

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Vlieland photographed in 1911 as a member of Balliol College’s tennis team (front left). Vlieland collection.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

View the catalogue record here<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In 1962, the War Studies Department of King\u2019s College London was founded by Sir Michael Howard, lecturer in Military Studies and one of England\u2019s foremost military historians. Two years later, Howard established a Centre for Military Archives at King\u2019s to complement the new department. The Centre\u2019s remit was simple: it would collect the papers of senior defence personnel of the twentieth century. The official launch of this archive was timed for 1964, to commemorate the 50th<\/sup> anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. In 1973, the archive was renamed the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives in honour of Sir Basil Liddell Hart, whose own extraordinary collection of over 1000 boxes of papers is still the single largest, and one of the most often used, in the LHCMA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2024 thus marks the LHCMA\u2019s 60th<\/sup> anniversary. In those intervening years we have gathered the personal papers of over 800 senior defence personnel, and we thought this birthday year was a great opportunity to showcase just some of the items from the collection. Every month this year we will be publishing a blog post spotlighting one item or collection chosen by a member of staff. We hope you enjoy celebrating with us!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can read last month\u2019s post about a British Officer in Ghana\u00a0by clicking here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Cathy Williams, Head of Archives & Research Collections, King\u2019s College London Archives  Vlieland, Charles Archibald, 1890-1974, colonial administrator presented the \u2018much abridged and expurgated edition\u2019 of his personal memoirs \u201cDISASTER IN THE FAR EAST 1941-2\u201d to the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives (LHCMA) in 1965 – only a year after the Centre opened … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “War Memoirs of a Nonentity: Creating Archives”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1317,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[251,237,247],"tags":[7,369,383,118,382,150,196,346,349,362,381,240],"class_list":["post-2067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-empirecommonwealth","category-lhcma","category-military-history","tag-archives","tag-british-empire","tag-british-malaya","tag-explorearchives","tag-fall-of-singapore","tag-kcl","tag-liddell-hart-centre-for-military-archives","tag-military-archives","tag-military-history","tag-second-world-war","tag-singapore","tag-ww2-2","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/kingscollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/kingscollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/kingscollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/kingscollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1317"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/kingscollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2067"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/kingscollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2067\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2073,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/kingscollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2067\/revisions\/2073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/kingscollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/kingscollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/kingscollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}