Editing Stephen E. Ambrose (section)

==Criticism==

===Plagiarism===
In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book ''[[The Wild Blue]]''.<ref>Williams, Robert Chadwell. [https://books.google.com/books?id=DD6GFORubKoC&dq=%22wild+blue+yonder%22+plagiarism+ambrose&pg=PA88 ''The Historian's Toolbox: A Student's Guide to the Theory and Craft of History''] Armonk NY: M E Sharpe Inc (2003) {{ISBN|0-7656-1093-0}} pp 88-89</ref><ref name="nyt">David D. Kirkpatrick, [https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/11/national/11AMBR.html "As Historian's Fame Grows, So Does Attention to Sources,"] ''New York Times'', January 11, 2002, accessed May 27, 2010.</ref> [[Fred Barnes (journalist)|Fred Barnes]] reported in ''[[The Weekly Standard]]'' that Ambrose had taken passages from ''Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II'', by [[Thomas Childers]], a history professor at the [[University of Pennsylvania]].<ref>[https://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/jan-june02/history_1-28.html Writing History] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140118080217/http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/jan-june02/history_1-28.html |date=January 18, 2014 }} [[PBS NewsHour]] discussion of plagiarism by historians, January 28, 2002.</ref> Ambrose had footnoted sources, but had not enclosed in quotation marks numerous passages from Childers's book.<ref name="nyt" /><ref name="hnn">[http://hnn.us/articles/504.html "How the Ambrose Story Developed,"] History News Network, June 2002.</ref>

Ambrose asserted that only a few sentences in all his numerous books were the work of other authors. He offered this defense:
{{blockquote|I tell stories. I don't discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation.

I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't. I am not out there stealing other people's writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I want to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people's writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from.<ref name="nyt"/>}}

A ''[[Forbes]]'' investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going back to his doctoral dissertation.<ref>Mark Lewis, [https://www.forbes.com/2002/05/10/0510ambrose.html "Ambrose Problems Date Back To Ph.D. Thesis,"] ''Forbes'', May 10, 2002.</ref> The [[History News Network]] lists seven of Ambrose's more than 69 works—''The Wild Blue'', ''Undaunted Courage'', ''Nothing Like It In the World'', ''Nixon: Ruin and Recovery'', ''Citizen Soldiers'', ''The Supreme Commander'', and ''Crazy Horse and Custer''—contained content from twelve authors without appropriate attribution from Ambrose.<ref name="hnn"/>

===Factual errors and disputed characterizations===

====Pacific Railroad====
A front-page article published in ''[[The Sacramento Bee]]'' on January 1, 2001, entitled "Area Historians Rail Against Inaccuracies in Book",<ref>Barrows, Matthew ''"Area Historians Rail Against Inaccuracies in Book"''. The ''Sacramento Bee'', January 1, 2001</ref> listed more than sixty instances identified as "significant errors, misstatements, and made-up quotes" in ''[[Nothing Like It in the World]]: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869,'' Ambrose's [[Scholarly peer review|non-academic]] popular history about the construction of the [[First transcontinental railroad|Pacific Railroad]] between [[Council Bluffs, Iowa]]/[[Omaha, Nebraska]], and the [[San Francisco Bay]] at [[Alameda, California|Alameda]]/[[Oakland, California|Oakland]] via [[Sacramento, California]], which was published in August 2000. The discrepancies were documented in a detailed [[Fact checker|"fact-checking"]] paper compiled in December 2000 by three Western US railroad historians who are also experienced researchers, consultants, and collectors specializing in the Pacific Railroad and related topics.<ref name="hnn" /><ref name="sosea">Graves, G.J., Strobridge, E.T., & Sweet, C.N.[http://cprr.org/Museum/Books/Comments-Ambrose.html ''The Sins of Stephen E. Ambrose''] The Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum (CPRR.org), December 19, 2000</ref><ref>Stobridge E. (2002). [http://hnn.us/articles/541.html Stephen Ambrose: Off the Rails]. ''[[History News Network]]''.</ref>

On January 11, 2001, ''[[The Washington Post|Washington Post]]'' columnist [[Lloyd Grove]] reported in his column ''The Reliable Source'' that a co-worker had found a "serious historical error" in the same book that "a chastened Ambrose" promised to correct in future editions.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Grove |first1=Lloyd |title=The Reliable Source |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2001/01/11/the-reliable-source/b6454d5a-63f0-413f-85f1-4c8439f29c25/ |newspaper=The Washington Post |date=January 11, 2001 }}</ref> A number of journal reviews also sharply criticized the research and fact checking in the book. Reviewer Walter Nugent observed that it contained "annoying slips" such as mislabeled maps, inaccurate dates, geographical errors, and misidentified [[etymology|word origins]],<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Nugent |first1=Walter |last2=Ambrose |first2=Stephen E. |title=Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869 |journal=The Journal of American History |date=September 2001 |volume=88 |issue=2 |pages=657 |doi=10.2307/2675159 |jstor=2675159 }}</ref> while railroad historian Don L. Hofsommer agreed that the book "confuses facts" and that "The research might best be characterized as 'once over lightly'."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Hofsommer |first1=Donovan L. |title=Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869, and: Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (review) |journal=Technology and Culture |date=2002 |volume=43 |issue=1 |pages=169–170 |doi=10.1353/tech.2002.0018 |s2cid=110233622 }}</ref>

====The Eisenhower controversy====
In the introduction to Ambrose's biography of Eisenhower, he claims that the former president approached him after having read his previous biography of the American general [[Henry Halleck]],
but Tim Rives, Deputy Director of the [[Eisenhower Presidential Center]], says it was Ambrose who contacted Eisenhower and suggested the project,<ref name="ny">{{Cite magazine|url=https://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/04/26/100426ta_talk_rayner |author=Rayner, Richard |title=Channelling Ike|magazine= The New Yorker |access-date=May 11, 2010|date=April 26, 2010 }}</ref><ref name=abc>{{Cite news|url=https://abcnews.go.com/US/historian-stephen-ambrose-lie-interviews-president-dwight-eisenhower/story?id=10489472 |title=Did Historian Stephen Ambrose Lie About Interviews with President Dwight D. Eisenhower?|publisher= ABC News|author=Goldman, Russell|date= April 27, 2010 |access-date=May 11, 2010 }}</ref> as shown by a letter from Ambrose found in the [[Eisenhower Presidential Center|Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum]].<ref>{{cite magazine|last=Rayner |first=Richard |url=https://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/04/26/100426ta_talk_rayner |title=Uncovering Stephen Ambrose's fake Eisenhower interviews |magazine=The New Yorker |access-date=July 30, 2012}}</ref> In his response, Eisenhower stated that "the confidence I have derived from your work by reading your two books—especially the one on Halleck—give reasons why I should be ready to help out so far as I can."<ref name=hnn126705/><ref>{{cite web |title=Eisenhower and My Father, Stephen Ambrose |url=http://www.hnn.us/article/126907 |website=History News Network |access-date=March 24, 2014 |archive-date=March 24, 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140324155208/http://www.hnn.us/article/126907 |url-status=dead }}</ref> The Halleck biography "still sits on a shelf" at the [[Eisenhower National Historic Site]] in Gettysburg.<ref name=hnn126705/>

After Eisenhower's death in 1969, Ambrose made repeated claims to have had a unique and extraordinarily close relationship with him over the final five years of the former President's life. In an extensive 1998 interview, before a group of high school students, Ambrose stated that he spent "a lot of time with Ike, really a lot, hundreds and hundreds of hours." Ambrose claimed he interviewed Eisenhower on a wide range of subjects, and that he had been with him "on a daily basis for a couple years" before his death "doing interviews and talking about his life."<ref name="ISA">[http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/printmember/amb0int-1 Interview with Stephen Ambrose] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101212023732/http://achievement.org/autodoc/printmember/amb0int-1 |date=December 12, 2010 }} May 22, 1998, Academy of Achievement, Washington, D.C.</ref> The former president's diary and telephone records show that the pair met only three times, for a total of less than five hours.<ref name=hnn126705/><ref name="ny"/> Rives has stated that interview dates Ambrose cites in his 1970 book, ''The Supreme Commander'', cannot be reconciled with Eisenhower's personal schedule, but Rives discovered, upon further investigation, a "hidden" relationship between the two men. Eisenhower enlisted Ambrose in his efforts to preserve his legacy and counteract criticisms of his presidency, particularly those charging that Eisenhower's actions at the end of World War II produced the Cold War. Ambrose wrote a review and book supporting the former general, with Eisenhower providing direction and comments during the process. Rives could not square the questionable interview dates cited by Ambrose in later works, but uncovered a relationship with Eisenhower that was "too complicated" to be described by Ambrose's critics.<ref name=hnn126705/>

In his 2015 book ''The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952–1961'', Irwin F. Gellman wrote that "while some Eisenhower scholars questioned Ambrose's research after [his] book's publication, the enormity of his falsifications was not revealed until after his death. Ambrose lied about his relationship with Eisenhower" and that "Ambrose also manufactured events that never took place".<ref name="gellman">{{cite book |last=Gellman |first=Irwin F. |date=2015 |title=The President and the Apprentice Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952–1961 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=CqcXCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA4 |publisher=[[Yale University Press]] |pages=4–5 |isbn=978-0-300-18105-0}}</ref> Historian [[David Greenberg (historian)|David Greenberg]] stated in 2015 that Ambrose's "wanton acts of plagiarism and the posthumous revelation that he fabricated interviews with Dwight Eisenhower have rendered his work unusable".<ref name="greenberg">{{cite news |last=Greenberg |first=David |author-link=David Greenberg (historian) |date=June 24, 2015 |title='Being Nixon' and 'One Man Against the World' |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/24/books/review/being-nixon-and-one-man-against-the-world.html |work=[[The New York Times]] |access-date=September 2, 2024}}</ref>

====Band of Brothers====
The book [[Band of Brothers (book)|Band of Brothers]] states [[E Company, 506th Infantry Regiment (United States)|Easy]] reached [[Berchtesgaden]] first amongst Allied units. Other units claim the honor, for example, on May 4 by forward elements of the [[7th Infantry Regiment (United States)|7th Infantry Regiment]] of the [[3rd Infantry Division (United States)|3rd Infantry Division]].<ref name=historynet>{{cite web |url=http://www.historynet.com/world-war-ii-race-to-seize-berchtesgaden.htm |title=World War II: Race to Seize Berchtesgaden |last=McManus |first=John C. |date=June 12, 2006 |website=HistoryNet |access-date=July 10, 2019 |archive-date=November 16, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201116173041/https://www.historynet.com/world-war-ii-race-to-seize-berchtesgaden.htm |url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{cite book |url=http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/USA-SS-Chronology/USA-SS-Chronology-5.html |editor-last=Williams |editor-first=Mary H. |date=1960 |title=Special Studies, Chronology 1941-1945 |series=[[United States Army in World War II]] |publisher=Center of Military History, United States Army |quote=In U.S. Seventh Army's XV Corps area, 7th Inf of 3d Div, crossing into Austria, advances through Salzburg to Berchtesgaden without opposition. |access-date=January 11, 2017 |archive-date=November 16, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201116173157/http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/USA-SS-Chronology/USA-SS-Chronology-5.html |url-status=live }}</ref>{{efn| According to [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]], Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe, the [[3rd Infantry Division (United States)|3rd Infantry Division]] was the first to take the town of Berchtesgaden; the "Eagle's Nest" is never mentioned.<ref>{{cite book |title=Crusade in Europe |url=https://archive.org/details/crusadeineurope00eise |url-access=registration |last=Eisenhower |first=Dwight D. |date=1948 |location=New York |publisher=[[Doubleday (publisher)|Doubleday]] |page=[https://archive.org/details/crusadeineurope00eise/page/418 418] |quote="On May 4 the 3d division of the same corps captured Berchtesgaden." (The corps mentioned was the US XV Corps. The term "Eagle's Nest" is not in the quote nor the paragraph that mentions the capture of Berchtesgaden.)}}</ref> This view is supported by General [[Maxwell D. Taylor]], former Commanding General of the [[101st Airborne Division]], then attached to the [[XXI Corps (United States)|XXI Corps]].<ref>{{cite book |title=Swords and Plowshares |url=https://archive.org/details/swordsplowshares00tayl |url-access=registration |last=Taylor |first=Maxwell D. |date=1972 |location=New York |publisher=[[W. W. Norton]] |page=[https://archive.org/details/swordsplowshares00tayl/page/106 106] |isbn=9780393074604 |quote=3d Division units got into Berchtesgaden ahead of us on the afternoon of May 4}}</ref><!-- What did Taylor have to say, if anything, about the Kehlsteinhaus, which is the point at issue on this page? --> }} Reputedly members of the 7th went as far as the elevator to the ''Kehlsteinhaus'',<ref name=historynet/> with at least one individual claiming he and a partner continued on to the top.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001001.09540/ |title=Veterans History Project: Interview with Herman Finnell |date=2001 |website=Library of Congress |access-date=July 15, 2019 |archive-date=November 16, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201116173048/http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001001.09540/ |url-status=live }} Herman Louis Finnell of the 3rd Division, 7th Regiment, Company I, states that he and his ammo carrier, Pfc. Fungerburg, were the first to enter the Eagle's Nest, as well as the secret passages below the structure. Finnell stated that the hallway below the structure had rooms on either side filled with destroyed paintings, evening gowns, destroyed medical equipment and a wine cellar.<!-- Note: Unlike Hitler's Berghof, the Kehlsteinhaus was ''not'' bombed; purportedly SS troops which survived the air raid inflicted substantial destruction on the Berghof, Kehlsteinhaus, and elsewhere before leaving the area in advance of Allied occupation. It remains unclear who inflicted the destruction the Fungerburg describes, the SS, or prior U.S. troops. --></ref> However, the [[101st Airborne Division|101st Airborne]] maintains it was first both to Berchtesgaden and the Kehlsteinhaus.<ref>[[E Company, 506th Infantry Regiment (United States)|Easy Company of the 2nd Battalion 506th Regiment]], US 101st Airborne Division: {{cite video |year=1945 |title=Video: Allies Sign Control Law For Germany, 1945/06/14 (1945) |url=https://archive.org/details/1945-06-14_Allies_Sign_Control_Law_For_Germany |publisher=[[Universal Newsreel]] |access-date=February 20, 2012 }}</ref>{{Failed verification|date=November 2017}} Elements of the [[2nd Armored Division (France)|French 2nd Armored Division]], Laurent Touyeras, Georges Buis and Paul Répiton-Préneuf, were present on the night of May 4 to 5, and took several photographs before leaving on May 10 at the request of US command,<ref>{{cite book |title=Les Fanfares perdues: Entretiens avec Jean Lacouture |last1=Buis |first1=Georges |last2=Lacouture |first2=Jean |date=1975 |location=Paris |publisher=[[Éditions du Seuil]] |language=fr}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |title=La Nueve. Los españoles que liberaron París |trans-title=The Nine. The Spaniards who liberated Paris |first=Evelyn |last=Mesquida |location=Barcelona |publisher=[[Ediciones B]] |date=April 2010 |language=es |isbn=978-8-49872-365-6}}</ref> and this is supported by testimonies of the Spanish soldiers who went along with them.