Errata: The Greatest Escape

History changes over time, as more information and new perspectives emerge. Any historian worth their salt will find mistakes, both clerical and factual, as they learn new information and re-examine their own work. A good historian will also be upfront about that. In an attempt to also be a good historian, I present to you dear reader, my own errata (so far):

P25. The unnamed Captain Ralph accompanies as a survey assistance was Alan Fenton Kurrle VX 24378 (with thanks to David Horner).

P.55 “The New Zealanders had launched a savage counter-attack with a few Australians.”
It would have been more accurate to say the Kiwis comprised the bulk of the attackers, as there were several hundred Brits and a few dozen Aussies also under arms.

P.65 Regarding Dulag 183, though Ralph Churches spent time there he also appears to have spent time in another camp, the Pavlos Melas camp, but he did not distinguish between the two in his own recollections. It’s possible I made the same mistake in Anzac Guerrillas…  

P. 137: “Hitler pulled the formidable II SS Panzer-Corps off the Eastern Front to take what Italy had lost.”
This is a bit misleading, though II SS was withdrawn to help shore up defences in Italy, it was dispatched well before Italy changed sides, and it’s role in repelling Partisans in Yugoslavia was on a very ad-hoc basis.

P. 259 “The detached tail had spun away with such ferocity that it had begun to act like a rotor, thereby slowing its descent. The tail had crashed into a pine forest, which had cushioned the fall. An astonished Partisans had come to check the wreckage, only to find the (American airman) dazed but unharmed.”
This comes from the 1989 recollections of Donald Luckett, and I think he got mixed up. An almost identical anecdote appears in the New Zealander Special Operations Executive doctor Lindsay Roger’s 1957 memoir Guerrilla Surgeon. Forgive me, I have misplaced the page number, but he recounts the same incident only occurring in Bosnia.  
Though not impossible that two tail gunners crash-landed in Yugoslavia in near identical circumstances, my strong suspicion is that Luckett read Guerrilla Surgeon, and by the time he wrote his own recollections, telescoped that in as a replacement memory for the American airmen who joined at Gornji Grad. Having worked with many later-in-life memoirs and oral histories, absorbing other people’s accounts is a fairly common and verifiable phenomenon.

P. 281 “(the) Slovenian Partisans were betrayed: in early 1945 the Slovenian Partisans were absorbed by their Yugoslav counterparts, and Slovenian was abolished as a language of command.”
This is me falling for a more modern Slovenian-centric narrative. There is no contemporaneous evidence that I’ve read to suggest that there was widespread discontent over this move, or that Slovenia’s Partisans felt it was a ‘national betrayal’. Jaka Avšič, a senior Partisan is the source, but these narratives appear to have emerged later, in the 1970s when more Slovenians began to feel a desire for greater independence from Yugoslavia.

P. 283 “The 14th Division was even transferred to Serbia. It’s members left the army in droves and simply went home.”
Again, this is a bit much. It’s members certainly were not happy to be transferred to Serbia, but like the other Allied armies the Partisans were simply in the process of demobilising.