So, I'm a history student and i'm currently researching an imaginary paper for if captain america was real (your timeline is my life, btw). But as part of this i've been going back through catws and noticed that Bucky's Smithsonian exhibit has his death date as 1944? ( youtu(.)be/Ut8OrXYb0yg?t=91) which makes no fucking sense to me, because that throws out most of what we know about what the howlies/steve did during the war. Anyway, I was wondering if you had any ideas on this?
Other than ‘the prop people messed up,’ which is the likeliest answer tbh, I would go with this: the reason for that incorrect Smithsonian date is because the missions the Howling Commandos ran were highly classified, and likely still would be to a degree by the time Steve resurfaces.
Governments around the world are only just now releasing classified documents from World War 2, and the movements of an SSR elite strike team like Captain America and the Commandos dealing with an entity like Hydra would certainly be highly classified. Details of the mission where Barnes was killed wouldn’t be available to the public, and since they were in constant combat with Hydra in the months leading up to it, those would all be rife with redacted information as well. It would be near impossible to track any of the Commandos through history without having access to that redacted information.
It’s possible that the Smithsonian researchers (and historians in general) were either given a false date of his death by the SSR to hide classified information, or they were forced to take his estimated date of death from the last Army/SSR report where he was mentioned as being alive, or the last date he was recorded to have been in Allied territory.
I hope one of those options helps?