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So much for the Great War being " quite in the shade." We might also cite the 630,192 casualties that the Germans sustained on the Western Front in the last six months of 1916, and the 688,341 casualties that they recorded in the four months between March and June 1918, to demonstrate how German casualty rates rivalled or surpassed those of Operation Barbarossa. The record actually shows that German casualties on the Western Front in the first six months of the Great War were 847,465, a significantly higher total than that for the Russian Front in 1941. He's comparing casualties from a single battle in 1916, fought along a 15 mile front, with German casualties suffered in 1941 along an entire front of more than a thousand miles. But I find that passage a bit of a travesty. John Terraine is one of my heroes : he rescued me from the clutches of Alan Clarke, Liddle Hart and Joan Littlewood. In 1916, for example, in ten months of agonizing attrition at Verdun, the French and Germans between them suffered about 750,000 casualties Germany alone sustained that number in the first six months of Operation BARBAROSSA in 1941. The great clashes of armour supported by air power, the Blitzkrieg in its most powerful form, produced casualty bills which put the "blood baths" of the First World War quite in the shade. This is from the same book by John Terraine. Here's another example of the historiographical spin that has been put on the statistics. My uncle, too, served in Bomber Command, as a navigator. I dont beleive that my GF or Uncle would have regarded themselves as being from the same stock as the ssubalterns who volunteered in 1914/14 He was not actually in Bomber Command when he died, he was serving with 138 Special Duties Sqn and was caught up in the "Englanderspiel" of the Abwher in Holland' one of their despatch points was over a recently deployed AAA unit, the theory being that it had been moved there to meet the agent Drop.

My uncle was killled im 1943 on his third tour of ops, he had been over Berlin in 1940. If my uncle was typical he was what you would probably categorise as respectable working class, he worked in a cotton mill and his father (My GF, WW1 CSM) was skilled worker in the cotton industry. I beleive that if not the majority a significant minority of the RAF aircrew casualties in WW2 were SNCO/WO'sĪnd some of the commissioned casualties would have been commissioned Ex NCO's'

But I do take exception to flawed statistics being deployed in order to make exaggerated claims, especially if they result in a rather complacent view of the slaughter of 1914-18. Now, I am sure that it was every bit as dangerous to carry a rifle and bayonet into battle and close with the enemy in 1944 as it had been in 1916. And, to make the cup run over, Gordon Corrigan has argued that the experience of the British Infantry in Normandy in 1944 was more deadly than that of their counterparts on the Somme in 1916. Then there is, of course, RAF Bomber Command. There have been claims that the German submariners suffered a uniquely high mortality 1939-45 this has been countered by similar claims made on behalf of their victims, the British merchant seamen. There has been a kind of historiographical spin on the fatality satistics, in which the intention has been to downplay the Great War by emphasising the extreme loss of some sectors in the Second World War. What do you make of his take on them being " exactly the same type of men" ? The total of aircrew of Bomber Command, exactly the same type of men, killed during the Second World War was 55,573."

"The total number of British officers killed during the First World War.was 38,834. From John Terraine's The Smoke and the Fire, page 208 :