The Unwise Archivist

I'm just slipping this up before the midnight Blip curfew. And a pretty desperate Blip it is, too. But I've been ploughing through the documents I so blithely photographed at the National Archives a while back. Now I am trying to make sense of them.

I'd no idea how trying archival research can be. It's like the driest raw material of 'history' in the making. Incomplete records, scatterd across different files, acres of irrelevance but also a huge amount of detail to be noted and coaxed towards some kind of narrative (that will probably use a tenth - if that - of the information gleaned). And that is just the UK side of the story with all the baffling lines of Army command - the War Office, the British Army of the Rhine, ALFNOR (Allied Land Forces Norway). Then there is the changing War Crimes intsitutional context - the local War Crime Investigation branches and their teams, links back to the Adjutant General's department, CROWCRASS, the United Nations Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes and on and on.



But still every now and then a gem - someone uses SNAFU in 1941 (I thought it was a Vietnam acronym but apparently used much earlier)> It means Situation Normal: All Fxxxxx Up.


But still it's pretty dry. Down in the boilerhouse of history.


John is not doing well. Another UTI. Another set of acronyms.