Heinlein liked his illustrative ccases, and sometimes these contradicted the facts. I started a thread several years ago about his citatioon of the court martial of William Sitgreaves Cox in the War of 1812, described in Starship Troopers. The unfortunate lieutenant took a fallen comrade below to medical help, and in his absence the officers were killed, leaving him the ranking officer, who was courtmartialed for his inattention to duty to the rank he had acquired in his absence. heinlein tells it as a cautionary tale, being careful to point out that, despite the family’s efforts to have the charge reversed, it never had been, even by the date the story takes place in the future.
The problem, of course, is that the decision HAD been reversed before Heinlein even wrote the original version of his story. He apparently wrotye it in 1958 or 1959. As “Spaceshipo Soldier”, the story was serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction at the end of 1959 and published in book form in December 1959.
But Harry Truman had reversed the decision against Cox in April 1952, over seven years earlier. Like other such long-delayed decisions, it wasn’t exactly quiet, and made the national nrews, including newspapers amnd Time magazine:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,816263,00.html
When I brought this up as perhaps willful ignorance, people said that how was it possible for Heinlein to know this, years later. I sometimes get the impression that people think it was impossible or extremely difficult to look things up before the advent of computer database searching. In any event Heinlein was in contact with military folk, was an active veteran, and spoke and interacted with people at the Air Force Academy and elsewhere, where the matter was likely discussed.
It’s possible that Heinlein remained blissfully unaware of developments in the case, but you’d think he’d check it out, or that one of his editors at F&SF or at Putnam’s would have – it’s a striking incident, and Heinlein makes a big deal of it in the story, and it surely would hsave aroused interest*.
But it dramatically makes a point, so I suspect that, if he didn’t ignore contrary evidence, he simply didn’t look very hard into corroboration.
*Dammit, I get queries about curious or questionable things in my writing.