Books offered by JF Ptak Science Books

Women Camouflage Corps, New York City, 1918

Item:  7x5-inch original photograph, "The Women's Camouflage Corps, New York City, dated 7/13/18, and issued by the Western Newspaper Union Photo Service.  Good condition with the following faults:  1.5-inch tear in top-middle, another quarter-inch tear nearby; old fold in later third of image.  Rare.  Includes the caption suggestion from the distributor, attached to the bottom of the image.  $250

I found this photograph of the "Womens Camouflage Corps of New York City", the photo lingering away in a collection of News Photo Service WWI images.  After a bit of looking, I've found nothing about the WCCNYC, though women were employed to this work in America and Britain in 1917 and 1918--it just seems as though there aren't images available online showing these workers working.

But: were their painting the entirety of large ocean-going transport ships in sharp geometric shapes and in dazzling colors to make the ship disappear, like, well, it was "camouflaged"?  No.  It wasn't like biological camouflage where all sorts of bits come into play to make an animal blend into its surrounding environment to protect it from predators, or conversely to make it a better predator by allowing the animal to stay completely hidden until their prey could do nothing but become their prize.  Nor was it really like thermoregulation, or sexual or warning signals (again drawing from the bio world)--it was simpler than that, though are there many relational examples in the biological world as well.

[The full image from which the detail was taken.]

The effect of using the geometrical shapes on the whole of a 600'-long vessel was to make it's speed and direction  more difficult for submarines to figure out and calculate so that the point-to-target launch of their torpedo would be far more complicated.  When the prolific maritime painter Norman Wilkinson figured out this approach for disguising the intentions of ships (around 1917) he instantly recognized its applicability in anti-submarine warfare:  not only would it be difficult to distinguish bow/stern properties of a ship, but also how long it was, and whether it was coming or going, and how big it was--all major factors in determining the launch of a torpedo.  Basically, dazzle camo made it difficult to produce a trajectory for the ship.

[The text accompanying the photo above, intended for use for whatever magazine or newspaper reprinted the work.]

An image of work completed:

And, it must be admitted, the coloring scheme is confusing--more so if you can image looking at it from periscope depth.

[Sir Norman Wilkinson, for all intents and purposes the discoverer of the dazzle effect in naval  warfare.]

In a Letter to the Editor ("Camouflage of Ships at War") in Nature (19 June 1919), Wilkinson explains his dazzle approach, saying that the whole point of this sort of camouflage was not necessarily "obliterative" as in biological camouflage, but rather was intended to "upset a submariner commander's estimate of a vessel's course, when carrying out an attack with torpedo", and stating further that it was not intended for "ships of the line" or to help deceive topside gunnery from another ship, especially at greater distances where the paint would simply not come into play.   [An often-used but never-cited quote from a Wilkinson "lecture"  runs as follows:  "The primary object of this scheme was not so much to cause the enemy to miss his shot when actually in firing position, but to mislead him, when the ship was first sighted, as to the correct position to take up. [Dazzle was a] method to produce an effect by paint in such a way that all accepted forms of a ship are broken up by masses of strongly contrasted colour, consequently making it a matter of difficulty for a submarine to decide on the exact course of the vessel to be attacked.... The colours mostly in use were black, white, blue and green.... When making a design for a vessel, vertical lines were largely avoided. Sloping lines, curves and stripes are by far the best and give greater distortion."]

 

[ RMS Empress of Russia]

The technology is still used, with more advanced applications, and appears on one of the world's stealthiest ships, Sweden's Visby Corvette.  Apart from having an exceptionally low magnetic signature, it also has geometric low-radar reflective gray dazzle paint. (It also has applications for land warfare use in the camouflage of armored vehicles against RPGs; see INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS; Steps towards warship invisibility
Obesity, Fitness & Wellness Week, March 15, 2008 and also the Economist, 6/11/2011, Vol. 399 Issue 8737, p83-83, ".) 2/3p "The Old Razzle Dazzle".)

RMW Mauretanis:

HMS Argus:

Edward Wadsworth, Painting of Dazzle-ships in Drydock, 1919.  There are well-known stories of great artists--like Villard and the questionable Picasso--who made contributions in this effort, from making designs to doing the actual painting.  But it was the estimable Wilkinson who made the major contribution and invention of dazzle-at-sea.

 

Tree Rings of Soldiers' Clothes, 1918

ITEM:  Original news serivce photograph, 1918.  8x6 inches.  Good condition.  $250.00

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

 

Aside from the strong impact that this 1918 image makes, the enormous mounds of clothing of captured German solders that were routinely handled as part of their processing, it struck a deeper chord to an older image still (that we'll see below).  The photograph seems threatening to me, even though the action taking place in it wasn't, it was mundane--the men, who I believe are German POW's, are processing the clothing for disinfection and cleaning.  But the size of the mound reminds us of the magnitude of the numbers of the dozens of millions who were killed during WWI, as well as the millions who were taken prisoner.  What remains to be said about this image is how often that pile of clothing was replaced:  is it a monthly, or weekly, or daily pile?  My guess is that it was more daily than anything else, if for no other reason than there is an enormous oil lamp in the background of the photo, suggesting that the process went on all day and into the night.  My initial reaction is that this pile was replicated often during any given month....

 

And the image it reminds me of are those made of the enormous mounds of buffalo hides, piles readied for shipment away from the Plains by rail. 

I am in no way suggesting that the prisoner were skinned like the buffalo, not in any way.  But they do bear a resemblance in the way that thousands of men or buffalo could be represented in such a compact space, flattened husks of the living thing, gross representations of big numbers. 

A Million Miles of Barbed Wire? (1918)

ITEMS:  three photographs, all 1918, as shown.  Each 9x7 inches, in very good conidtion.  Each $125.   Ref:  JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

 The following photos were found in my small collection of World War I news photo service images, all of which were made in 1918.  They show the preparation of barbed wire entanglements--these were devilish things, made to grab a soldier and suck them in into a deeper hold when resisted, like a sort of sharp, metallic quicksand.  Since there were something like 12-25,000 miles of trenches dug during WWI, I think that it might be a safe bet to say that there were a million miles of barbed wire fencing laid down--that would be equal to about 75 feet of wiring for every soldier who served, or about 200 feet for every person killed. Given the tactics, the trenches, the barbed wire, the machine guns, the gas, and so on, it is no wonder that there was very little advancement over battlefields that stretched for miles and involved hundreds of thousands of troops, costing (sometimes) hundreds of thousands of casualties.  It would have been just insane-nasty to have to charge through fields of this stuff while being bombed and shot at by people in holes. 

No gloves, here, not for the soldier weaving the wire or for the spinner in the background:

I notice that in this photograph the only person wearing gloves is the lead model, front-and-center:

Here's the support staff assembling the

Making THings Disappear: German POWs, 1918

ITEM:  Original News Photo Service photograph, 1918.  8x9 inches.  Very good condition.  $275.00

In continuing series of posts on Blank and Empty Things is this image on fading, disappearing German prisoners of war.  The French had been pounding them in western France in the summer of 1918, and Germans were surrendering and being captured by the thousands.  This news service photograph shows one of the assembly camps with about 10,000 POWs--I made a heavy scan of the group of soldiers in the distance and was  a little taken aback to see that the men had lost their human forms,  looking like bacteria, fading into their future.  

The full image is impressive, and shows just a small fraction of the men taken prisoner during 1918; and it shows even a lesser percentage of those killed.

This detail of the foreground shows the familiarity necessitated by the men being pressed so closely together--there was little free ground.

Also, I thought that the French soldiers in the midst of the prisoner might've been feeding them, but it seems as though they were just walking in their midst.

World War I in Ivory--Pianos and Recovery

ITEM 1:  original 1918 photograph, 6x8 inches, piano playing for U.S. soldiers in hospital.  $150.00

ITEM 2:  original 1918 photograph, 6x8 inches, four U.S. servicemen singing at piano.  $150.00

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1409

These images come from my collection of World War I news photo service photographs, and are among the minority that show even momentary happiness.  In both of these cases, the emotion resolves itself in song and in the piano.  The first image takes place in a U.S. overseas hospitals for wounded soldiers, and they seem genuinely relieved to have the attention and the entertainment. (Both images are available at our blog bookstore.)

The second image is dated 2 November 1918--just nine days before the armistice--and shows the "Broadway Quartet" as they rehearse "I'm Only a Buck Private" for a behind-the-lines show for U.S. servicemen, somewhere in France.  The note with the image (from the Western Newspaper Union) says that the staging used for their shows came from found wood, bits of flooring, and camouflage netting torn into pieces.  

Barbed Wire Cutting Device on the Mall, 1918.

ITEM:  original news photo service photograph, by Clinedinst studios (of Washington DC).  7x9 inches.  Very good condition.  1918.  $150

"Will Cut its Way Through Hun Entanglements" reads the header to the caption for this new photo service war photo from the Central News Photo Service, published nearly at the end of 1918, just a few months before the end of the war. The inventor, John E. Logan, was demonstrating his invention "before senators and representatives of Congress" on a "miniature tank wire entanglement".  The "entanglement" wire was much nastier than what you'd think of as the "barbed wire" of today--not concertina wire, but something small and nasty that was meant to catch soldiers, to pin them more deeply in the wire like a sharp metallic quicksand, stopping their advance and making them meat bait for machine gunners and everyone else. 

Logan attracted a fair size crowd for his demonstration in the vicinity of the Capitol.  His machine seemed to work well, too, cutting through 72 strands of wire in about a half minute.  I'm not sure how many of these machines were produced (can't find anything on them offhand)  but there would've been a need for a great number of them, given that since there was something like 12-25,000 miles of trenches dug during the war that there must've been millions of miles of barbed wire produced.  (That's an off-hand guess, but it probably isn't horribly wrong.)

The Children's Parade, the Liberation of Ostende, 1918.

ITEM:  original news photo service photograph, Underwood and Underwood, 1918.  7x9 inches.  Very good condition.  $200    Ref:  JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1393

Ostende, a port city of West Flanders on the North Sea in  northwestern  Belgium, was an important stronghold and also a  key to holding the inland port of Bruges, which is something that the Germany Army was able to do until the very end of World War I.  Under constant occupation by an invading force, the city was only liberated by the armistice signed two days before this photo was made, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. 

Some of these children might still be alive, though all but two of the soldiers of this war are all dead.  I remember talking to my grandmother ten years or so ago, asking her about what she did to celebrate the end of the war.  She laughed, and then told me that she and her sisters and brothers went out to the street (in their small town of Housatonic, Massachusetts) and danced and danced.  She then said that a few other children went to their kitchens to come out with pots to bang with wooden spoons--and then it struck me, taking away my breath, that what she was talking about was celebrating the end of WWI, not WWII, which is what I thought she was going to talk about. 

Cold and Understatement on the Western Front, 1916

JF Ptak Science Books 

ITEM:  Original news photo service photograph, a Canadian Official War Photo courtesy of the Western Newspaper Union. 1916.  8x6 inches.  Fine condition.  $125

The caption stamped on the back of the news photo service agency photograph (from the Western Newspaper Union) said that the bitter cold encountered by these Canadian soldiers ont he Western Front in the winter of 1916 "was one of many difficulties encountered by the soldiers".  "Great hardships have been caused by the frigid weather in this region" continues the caption.  Indeed.  Even for Canadians this was a cold winter, though not so cold that the Canadian trooper in the foreground stopped to put on his gloves to remove the ice from the water trough. These soldiers may have been cavalry, as there is a horse-like medallion on the front of their lids. 

Evidently the role of the cavalry in the BEF along the Western Front is an under-appreciated thing, or misunderstood, at least.  I'm not sure how they influenced the outcome of this stagnant section of the war, where the line of battle remained essentially unchanged throughout the duration of the war.  Millions of troops were deeply entrenched over hundreds of miles of battlefront, wailing away at one another with massive artillery barrages, countless machine gun nests, and then eventually tanks, planes and poison gas.  Back in February 1916 there weather was so tough and frigid that the battle of Verdun was postponed a bit, waiting for less intense weather conditions.  Dozens of millions of artillery shells and  billions of bullets later, in 1918, there was little change in the positions of the armies, except of course for the millions of casualties. 

 

Ephemeral Uniqueness in Large Crowds, 1917

ITEMS:  two WWI  news photo service original photographs, as follows:

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1390

There are 1500 or so of these news service war photographs here, and one of the remarkable things that I've discovered about them--trivial things to be sure compared with their overall message, ephemeral bits of semi-nothing--is that in many of the very-large-group images that there is sometimes just a single person who is doing something that no one else is doing, and it has been captured almost forever in the photo.  There are photos of thousands of troops, all facing east, with on solitary soldier facing west; there's the solitary waver; there's the one bare-headed man in  a sea of a thousand men with hats; there's the one person raising his hat to the photographer in a sea of people looking at the camera but not raising their arms.  Then of course there's the group photo of a mass of German WWI POWs, with only one soldier without a hat or helmet, and he looks just like me. 

Here are two other examples--the first is a detail from a photo showing British children cheering their American allies in 1917, showing one man clearly reacting to the hundreds of screams by covering his ears.  And is the only one doing so.  The second detail shows a large contingent of American soldiers leaving for Europe on a steamer--there is only one man  who turns to the camera and waves.

The second detail:

PHOTOGRAPH #1:  9x6 inches, 1917.  $125

The entire first image, showing the children cheering the raising of the two flags:

And this:

 

PHOTOGRAPH #2:  10x7 inches, 1917.  Very good condition.  $150.00

And the second, showing a group of hundreds of soldiers waiting to leave Hoboken, New Jersey, for the fight in Europe, 1917.  Most are pulling themselves inside their coats as much as possible; I suspect being right there on the harbor--and seeing the floating bits of ice in the water--that it was wet and very cold.  Our one adventurous Doughboy gives the camera a spread-fingered wave....he also seems to be quite tall.  He is the lone waver.  There also seem to be a lot of smiles in the crowd. 

 

A Field of Artillery Shells--a Miniscule Sample of the 40,000,000 Shells Fired at Verdun, 1916

ITEM: World War I news photo service photograph, dated 15 April 1916, by Underwood and Underwood.  9x6  inches, with the original catpion on an attached paper.  Good condition.  $175.00

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1388 (out of order!)

I just finished posting this from yesterday on a sea of shells and what those explosives meant in terms of overall destructive firepower for WWI.  This explosives image is a little easier, in a way, just showing hints of the vastness of what might be an acre of large ammunition.  

This photo (dated 15 April 1916 by the news photo service of Underwood and Underwood) shows a French senator--H. Charles Humbert--viewing "a field literally covered with shells",  the photo really only giving some glimpse of the extent of the palleted shells, which fade into the distance behind M. Humbert and extend deeply into the field in front of him.

M. Humbert (1866-1927) would've had more of an interest in this scene than most, as he represented the Meuse district, and at this point int he war the shells were headed to a part of that area, Verdun. Verdun of course was one of the major battles of WWI, fought from  21 February to 18 December 1916, in the hills and dales of north-eastern France, at Verdun-sur-Meuse. There were 306,000 battlefield deaths at Verdun, plus another 500,000 wounded, in what may have been one of the most gruesome battles of modern times. 

Humbert was also an Army veteran and wrote on the military, and as it turns out, as the war approached he adopted a call to arms for more canons and more shells for the defense of France the inadequacy of the defenses of the French Army, and the insufficiency of officers and munitions  ("Des canons, des munitions!").  He certainly would've been relieved with what he saw here.  Of course this is photo would represent a percentage well to the right of the decimal place of all those shells used at Verdun, which numbered an inconceivable 40 million.  When this photo was made in April the battle was already wicked and had been fought for two months--there were still eight months of gore to go.