Historical blinders

Jerome Preisler has been teasing people who follow him on Twitter with accounts of his work on a new World War II historical account, to be titled Codename Caesar. Everything I've heard about the book, which details nail-biting Allied operations to upend a high-tech German/Japanese program, make it sound like a must-read; it's due to be published some time next year.

Along the way, Jerome has been providing some interesting insights into the historical process, which is something that's always interested me (and is part of the focus of my own books, Rangers at Dieppe and my forthcoming biography of Omar Bradley).

The other day he tweeted this:

In researching my current book, I read lots of historians who say WW II German airmen were "dedicated" and the Japanese "fanatical". Zat so?

An excellent point. As is the fact that a single adjective can reveal a great deal.

Now I'm going to guess that not one of the accounts he's been reading is by a writer who would be considered "prejudiced." (Much less would consider him or herself the same.) But be that as it may, it would seem inevitable that the subtle shadings of their work influence readers, generally in ways reader and author don't notice. And those hidden influences, inevitably, shade the work of writers who come later, and on and on.

That's one reason people don't know much about Omar Bradley, and that what they do know is wrong. But it's also a reason that we don't learn as much from history as we might.

(Jerome's twitter feed is @YankeesInk. As you can guess from the title, a lot of it has to do with baseball and especially the Yankees - so it may be an acquired taste for some, especially you guys up in Boston.)