Sheldrake wrote:There are big questions about von Luck's account, prompted by the aerial photos which Ian interpreted. "Conspiracy theory is too strong a word, which on reflection I should not have used.
It is hard to be definitive about what happens on any battlefield.
I've spent a lot of time trying to de-conflict what unit Luck might have encountered and in connection with Daglish's imagery analysis I think it pretty conclusive that Luck's account simply doesn't fit. However, I also spent enough time in the research for the
Breakpoints study with combat veterans to realize that "war stories" like Luck's develop easily and aren't necessarily the result of dishonesty. For example, a couple of our Rapido River survivors described some events for that action that another survivor, from a different perspective, quickly realized had not occurred on the Rapido at all, but at Monte Camino a month earlier. We ran into similar conflations with veterans of the 106th ID and 7th AD in the Ardennes, the 28th ID in the Huertgen, and so on.
Memory isn't a video that we replay in our brain. Instead, we over time we conflate different memories, graft other accounts (for books, movies, and television) onto our "memory", and otherwise reedit events so that they become our new reality. Insofar as I know, Luck's account was first related by him at least 25 years after the event. It seems likely he could easily have melded memories of different days occurrences into one whole.
Bottom line is that the best evidence is that Luck's account is faulty, but there is actually little reason to believe he lied. As for Rosen, he had no reason to believe that Luck lied either, which allowed him to "fit" Luck's account into a logical reason for the defeat of his Tiger's. Again, no reason to believe it was deliberate conspiracy on their part, but was rather the natural consequence of two old soldiers telling "war stories" to a receptive and uncritical audience.
Cheers!