Wartime eye-witnesses to BIG LIES & small truths

Historians can only confirm - never reveal - that the morning of October 16th 1940 in Berlin was warm and sultry.

Even Goebels himself won't bother lying about something like that -- a lie so easily refuted by four million locals.

But he might explain away the previous nights' failure to flatten Manchester as promised because of a ( non-existent) fog over the site.

He'd fool most Germans, the flight crews aside,  but not northern Brits.

We are all perpetual eye witnesses to a variety of collective - second hand - BIG LIES and personal - first hand - small truths throughout our lives - even in peacetime.

But in wartime it gets much worse as elites on all sides unite to bally ho what they want us to think we know and censor and render secret things they don't want us to know.

So all WWII eye witnesses know the weather on a certain day in our community because this is a fact impossible to lie about - at least to locals.

Similarly all eye witnesses to WWII know that the Germans flattened Coventry (except they didn't).

And they never knew that the Allies killed more innocent French civilians with our bombing than the Nazis did in their bombing of Britain.

Coventry residents knew that only their city centre was in any way flattened --- because they were local eye witnesses to this local and small truth.

But they bought into the collective BIG LIE that the rest of Britain was as hard hit as Coventry city centre because they weren't direct eye witnesses to the damage elsewhere - only to secondary accounts (lies) published by the media under the thumb of the government censors and cheerleaders.

Six years of BIG LIES so coloured the thinking of eye witnesses to the war that they still can't see the war with fact-oriented eyesalone.

This six long years of wartime BS and Bumpf even effected the thinking of postwar eye witness historians ---- despite the training of professional historians to test all assumptions with the factual evidence at hand.

But all wartime eye witnesses are still valuable to the historical record .

So -despite buying into the false claim that America was an "uniquely efficient arsenal of democracy" - a factory hand also knows that in their own plant at least, war production in fact usually lurched from crisis to crisis.

They 'know' BIG LIES yes, but they also know small truths as well.....