Homage to Nerds

This week I want to pay tribute to all the nerds and boffins who make my work possible. I’m not only talking about archivists and librarians, who really are heroes in my eyes, I’m also talking about amateurs who compile lists and tables, often without recompense, simply for the love of it.

Years ago I worked for a publisher that put out books of militaria. We had volumes on bayonets, on uniforms and insignia, on air force bombing timetables, and so on. Some of these books were little more than elaborate spreadsheets. Others were detailed descriptions of individual tanks or aeroplanes, listing every gear, screw and rivet.

For most readers, such manuals and spreadsheets are insufferably boring, and I have to admit that editing them was a real chore. But the detail was incredible! And the deep knowledge of the authors absolutely indisputable.

This is not the kind of book I write. I do big picture stuff about the human condition in times of war, politics arising from conflict, social movements, philosophical problems, personal tragedies. But my books would be nothing without the work of the nerds, because you cannot bring any book to life without details. It is the specific that gives a story its depth. And while I myself can sometimes be incredibly nerdy, I can’t do it all on my own. I rely on the boffins – the true experts – to lead me to the details I’m looking for.

When I was writing Inferno, I had to describe in detail the bombing of Hamburg from the point of view of both those on the ground and those in the air. But I have never flown in a Lancaster or B-17 bomber. I didn’t know how where the fuel valves were, or the escape hatches, or which dials the pilot and navigator rely on most. The airmen I was writing about knew all of these things, so to get inside their heads I needed to learn them too.

Much information can be gained from the memoirs of people who flew in these aircraft, but there are always details that you can’t find or don’t understand until you confront the manuals. Roger A Freeman’s The B-17 Flying Fortress, and his books on The Mighty Eighth and The Mighty Eighth War Diary saved me from spending weeks and weeks sifting through documents in archives. Without them I might - eventually - have been able to have written the same book, but it would have taken me much longer, and probably would have been full of mistakes.

One of the many stories that appeared in my book was that of an American B-17 in 384^th Bomber Group. It was hit by German fighters as it was returning home to Britain. Three of the engines were knocked out, the left wing-tip was shattered, and a gaping hole was blown into the nose of the plane. As it limped along, yet another attack came in, and the pilot was forced to throw it into a steep dive towards the sea. As it hurtled downwards, one of the crew, David Davis, was thrown through a hatch and had to cling on to the fuselage while his crewmates desperately tried to haul him back into the plane. Miraculously, he survived.

It’s a great story, but when I read it in the official report I couldn’t understand how on earth it had taken place. And as any writer will tell you, if you don’t understand something fully, there is no way you’re going to make it convincing to your readers. It was only by studying the details of where each crew member sat, and gazing at the diagrams of this particular type of plane, that I was able to get a handle on what exactly had happened.

The thing that I’m most personally nerdy about is statistics. I want them to be historically accurate – or at least as much as they can be – because statistics are regularly used as weapons by those with political or economic agendas.

For example, as I outlined in Savage Continent, statistics were often used to determine the reparations that various nations were expecting to get from Germany after the Second World War. The Yugoslavian government of the time estimated that 1.7 million Yugoslavs had been killed, and this became the standard figure that was used for decades. But the figure had been deliberately inflated, because Tito’s government was hoping it would generate greater reparations. In reality, the death toll was probably closer to a million – still a horrific number, but not nearly as bad.

How do we know that the real figure was around a million? Because the nerds have done the maths for us. Demographers take census information from before and after the war, correlate them with birth and death rates and make complex graphs to demonstrate where population levels would have been were it not for the war. They also account for other reasons why populations might rise or fall, such as emigration and immigration. This is not a precise method, but it is much better than the numbers that are plucked from the air by politically motivated government officials.

The real nerds in this field are the Holocaust historians and institutions. They do not stop at estimating the number of victims – they have gone one step further and named almost all of them individually. This is not just for the sake of accuracy (although they are obliged to be precise because of the inexplicable existence of Holocaust deniers even today); it is also a labour of love, and of humanity. By naming each victim, and gathering other details like their dates of birth and death, their occupations, their addresses and so on, they are rescuing them from being mere statistics. They are giving these people back their dignity.

Detailed work like this takes time, patience and a meticulous eye. It cannot be replaced by AI, and often involves extensive detective work in obscure archives that have never been digitised. It is a human endeavour, for human motives and human ends.

So I would like to salute all who involve themselves in this detailed work. Let’s hear it for the nerds! Thank you, one and all. The world would be a much poorer place without you.