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Actually for things like nomenclature and basic statistics they're usually right.
"Usually" is not the same as "always". That was my point.
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The stuff that comes out of official archives hasn't changed in 50 years. The fact that the prototype Comet is the tank in the picture and that a particular A number was a particular tank is highly unlikely to be overturned by new information.
A particular piece of stuff might not change, but there has been a lot more stuff found in the interim that conclusively contradicts earlier stuff. On top of that, much of the work at that time didn't rely on original archival materials but upon published summaries and histories and the personal notes and data of people like Icks, Jarret, and Barnes.
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They can't be beat for basic information and identification.
C&E and other works of the era have a lot of basic things wrong. Ever see a photo of a M4 composite captioned as a M4A1? How about the Sherman IIC Firefly? Welded hull Shermans are frequently misidentified as to their type, and many if not most M32s in photos are really M32B3s.
C&E is fine so long as you understand what it is and remember its limitations.
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So called "Rivet counting" detail work is something else entirely and that is constantly in flux. I just go with what I want to build. I'm not doing a thesis for a graduate degree, I'm building a model. The number of angels dancing on a pinhead is as inconsequential as the phrase implies.
I don't know anyone who has done archival research on tanks for academia. They just aren't interested in that. I know a number of people, however, who have researched and published because they were modelers or just thought tanks were neat. Yeah, we may like to know how many rivets are dancing on an M3, but we also don't want to make a model of a USMC M4A4 on Tarawa based on a photo from 1971 that had a bad caption.
KL
