Remembering the Great War with Operation War Diary

By Bryan J. Dickerson*

In the summer of 1914, the Great Powers of Europe plunged into the first of two calamitous world wars.   This year, as part of the efforts to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the Great War, the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the Imperial War Museum and Zooniverse have teamed up for Operation War Diary.  The goal of this online archival project is to open up greater access to records of the Great War for historians and the general public.

Launched earlier this year, Operation War Diary provides a unique opportunity for historians, archivists and interested members of the public to assist in making military history records available for online research.  For this project, war diaries of British Army units were digitized and entered into an online database.  Volunteer “Citizen Historians” then review the individual digitized pages of the war diaries and index them, capturing a wide range of historical data.  In the future, such indexing will enable people to search those thousands of pages of digitized war records to do research on battles, military units and individual soldiers and officers.

Zooniverse has made the indexing process remarkably user-friendly.   Drop down menus enable the “Citizen Historian” to quickly identify and capture important information contained on each war diary page.  Such data being collected includes dates, unit locations, unit activities, persons mentioned, casualties, battles, and the weather.

To become a “Citizen Historian” one only needs to register for a free online account with Zooniverse.  A ten minute tutorial explains how to index the records.   The Citizen Historian is then free to choose from one of the dozens of digitized war diaries contained on the website.  The units included in Operation War Diary include some of the most distinguished ones in the British Army, including the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, the Coldstream Guards, and the Irish Guards. The recently added a number of Indian units including the 1/1 Battalion Gurkha Rifles and 27 Punjabis Battalion.  In addition to infantry units, there are cavalry, field ambulance, field artillery, and service units. 

I volunteered to become a Citizen Historian in June 2014.  In selecting a unit to review, I sought out one that had been involved in the Great War from the very beginning.  I chose to work with the 1st Battalion of the Royal Highlanders, more commonly known as “the Black Watch.”  Founded in the 1730s, this regiment’s long history includes distinguished service in the Seven Years War, the American War for Independence and the Napoleonic Wars. 

In August 1914, 1st Battalion/Black Watch deployed from its home in Scotland to serve as part of Field Marshall Sir John French’s British Expeditionary Force.  1st Battalion participated in the retreat from Mons, the battles on the Marne River, the advance to the Aisne River and the First Battle of Ypres.  Later in the war, 1st Battalion fought in the 1916 Somme Offensive, the 1917 Second Battle of Passchendaele, the German offensive of spring 1918 and the Allied offensives of 1918 which forced the Germans to seek an Armistice in November of that year.  After the Armistice, the battalion served on occupation duties in Germany through 1919.  The battalion’s participation in these battles and the post-war occupation is recorded in its Unit Diary.

One’s experience at the front could be astoundingly short and violent as evidenced by the experience of 2nd Lieutenant W. R. Bucknall.  The Unit Diary records that he joined the 1st Battalion as a replacement on 17 May 1915 while the battalion was serving in the support trenches.  The following day, the battalion moved to the front line trenches.  Soon after, 2nd Lieutenant Bucknall was wounded and evacuated.  He never returned to the battalion.

Warfare is confusingly chaotic as demonstrated by the tragic experience of Major Lord George Stewart-Murray.  On 14 September 1914, Major Stewart-Murray was reported as Missing in Action during the First Battle of the Aisne in northern France – the same battle that claimed the life of LtCol Grant-Duff.  On 3 March 1915, the 1st Battalion’s Unit Diary recorded that Major Stewart-Murray was reported as being held as a prisoner of war in Hanover, Germany.  Unfortunately, this report later proved to be erroneous.  Eventually it was determined that he had been killed on 14 September 1914 and his body was never recovered.  He is remembered on the La Ferté-sous-Jouarre Memorial in France along with 3,739 other British soldiers and officers whose bodies were never recovered from the battlefields of France.  He was 41-years-old at the time of his death.

Besides the accounts of battles and casualty figures, the Unit Diary also records many other aspects of the soldiers’ lives.  This includes religious worship services, weather conditions, billeting (housing) when not at the front, unit movements, training, hygiene, inspections and visits by superior officers (see the picture accompanying this post for a look at the men relaxing as best they could while at the front).

In reviewing the 1st Battalion/Black Watch’s Unit Diary, I had found it very helpful to have several references available.  To aid me in indexing the diary, I used several maps which detail their operations, British Army Orders of Battle, and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website.

I was one of several Citizen Historians working on the 1/Black Watch Unit Diary.  Altogether I reviewed 130 pages and assigned indexing 1,589 tags identifying dates, places, people and activities.  These tags will help future researchers locate information contained in the Unit Diary.

Operation War Diary provides a unique opportunity for historians and archivists alike.  As a historian, one reviews digital images of the war diaries to record important historical information.  As an archivist, one indexes the documents and helps to make these documents more accessible to researchers and the general public.  It is both a fascinating intellectual exercise and a fitting tribute to the soldiers who fought in the Great War.

*The author served as a Religious Program Specialist in the U.S. Navy Reserve for eight years, mobilizing and deploying twice to Iraq for Operation Iraqi Freedom.  He served with the U.S. Marines MWSS-472 from January 2008 until June 2011 and served as Assistant Squadron Historian in 2009 and Squadron Historian in 2010/2011 as a collateral duty.  He was honorably discharged in June 2011 as a Religious Program Specialist First Class (Fleet Marine Force).