A seven-year, multimillion-dollar effort by the Library of Congress to gather American veterans’ personal war stories is peppered with inaccurate information and fraudulent claims of heroism, critics say, casting doubt on its value as a historical record.
Staffers at the Veterans History Project on Tuesday were hastily removing from the project’s Web site a number of references that bestowed the nation’s highest military honor on soldiers who never won it, confirmed Matt Raymond, the library’s director of communications.
The incorrect Medal of Honor listings are just the tip of the iceberg in a collection of 50,000 oral and written histories that also includes numerous other errors regarding everything from lesser medals to rank attained and whether or not the soldier was ever a prisoner of war, according to outside experts on the database.
