Countless soldiers wrote diaries even under the difficult circumstances of war. In addition to descriptions of everyday routine, they recorded the horror of war in their subjective portrayal of events.  The diaries that have come to light cover every conflict since the middle 19th century when the spread of literacy made it possible for the ordinary soldier to keep a personal record or to write home.

Besides the wish to record these formative events for oneself and others, it appears that the authors had to reprocess what they had experienced. The plenitude of blogs during  the current Iraq war shows clearly how important it is for soldiers to speak out about what they are experiencing.  After a war is concluded some diaries are revised and published as memoirs (i.e. Ernst Jünger: "Storm of Steel", George Coppard " With A Machine Gun To Cambrai") while others remain forgotten for decades.  Today such diaries are found and published with great success (i.e. Willy Reese "A Stranger to Myself").  Diaries from WW2, like Roscoe E. Blunt´s "Foot Soldier" can be found in the list of recommended books of the US Army.

Many diaries still remain to be discovered in chests and cupboard drawers. The internet is now giving us the chance to open these sources to a worldwide public. Many private websites have published war diaries. The blog of the WW1 British soldier William Henry Bonser Lamin gained large publicity with millions of readers.

The Author
Understanding the nature of the document's writer tells us how much we should value his word.  If the author is a person of great authority, then s/he has a reputation to protect, and therefore is less likely to accentuate faults or mistaken decisions.  An author who by nature is known to be truthful is going to be believed over one who is reputed to be a braggart. 

The Audience
Not only do we need to understand the author, but the purpose of the document (its audience) affects how we evaluate the document's value.  

The diary
is personal with no intended audience.  When provided in its pure form - as written with no editing or polishing in later years - it is as close as we can get to hearing the author speak to us without reservation.  Even though no audience is intended, there may be cases where an audience is implied.  Soldiers in particular do not have the luxury of privacy and their diaries could be read by bunk-mates, superiors, or in the case of capture, by enemies.  In those cases, the author will be self-editing as s/he writes and this must be taken into consideration when reading the diary.

A memoir  is usually intended for distribution, either throughout the author's family or for general publication.  The latter case is the more usual and therefore suggests that the memoir has a market, either because of the author's reputation or the events chronicled.

Other documents, such as newspaper articles and official reports, are combinations of the above.  Even with the immediacy of a diary, these have the audience, circulation and marketing issues of memoirs.  The official report in particular may appear to be a letter to a superior, but the author's career may hinged on what he says.  Therefore you will never read an official report in which the author writes, "Yes, sir, it was totally my fault that we lost the battle costing us 15,000 men captured, wounded and killed."

In addition to studying the character of the author and the nature of the document itself, those reading online have to keep in mind that what is presented is almost always a transcript  and perhaps even a translation.  With each pass the document becomes more removed from the original.  A good translator will attempt to put the flavor of the language into the work and a good transcriptionist will present every single character as it appears, without correction or editing.

Dieter Finzen