Is it all a grand conspiracy to protect the good name and reputation of McAuliffe?
I'll say no more.
> Is it all a grand conspiracy to protect the good name and reputation of McAuliffe?
A small conspiracy is not at all far-fetched. First off, it's an inconsequential thing. Secondly, if one of the three told the truth, then he'd be called a liar by the other two. Who needs that? If you're in the military, you don't get ahead by contradicting the narrative. (My dad found that out the hard way - he was punished more than once for not writing reports that fit the narrative.)
For a grand conspiracy, consider how long Biden's staff held out insisting that Biden was sharp as a tack and writing off contrary reports as disinformation.
The most compelling bit about my evidence is the frankly laughable idea that a GI would use the word "nuts".
If there is any takeaway here, it would be that historical accounts are always suspect. History is written by the victors, as they say.
> including by the US Army official historian
An official US Army historian's job is to make the US Army look good.
As we are all painfully aware these days, the accounts of newspapers are rarely accurate, and often outright fabrications. Why would WW2 accounts be any different?
I doubt McAuliffe would want to besmirch his record after the war, had nothing to gain by contraindicating it, and would be content to let it stand.
My father was a carefully honest man, and was never known by me to lie. He held his tongue until after McAuliffe passed away. He also told me some family secrets after all involved had passed, and asked me to keep them to myself until after he died, which I did.
It never occurred to me to ask him to write down that story, and now it's too late.
I know my evidence is hearsay and inadmissible in court. You're free to draw your own conclusions.
P.S. I was once personally involved in an incident that made the local TV news. There was nothing political about it, but each of the three local news channels got essentially all the basic facts about it wrong. But that is the "record" of the event. It pretty much soured me on the veracity of news reports.