Books offered by JF Ptak Science Books

Philippine Announcement of one of the Last Japanese Surrenders, 15 September 1945

JF Ptak Science Books 

This announcement comes from the U.S. Army public relations office in Manila ("General Relsease  - 40") and dated 18 September 1945.  It states that "what remains of the Japanese 10th Imperial Division was surrendered September 15th by Lt. Gen. Okamoto to Brig. Gen. Leo M. Kreber", this coming weeks after the formal signing of the Instrument of Surrender aboard the U.S.S. Missouri on 2 September 1945.

The 10th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army (formed 1898) was transferred to the Japanese 14th Area Army in the Philippines from China. There it was involved in the Battle of Luzon (9 January to 15 August 1945), where the "what remains" of it statement comes from.  In that battle, more than 250,000 Japanese troops were engaged, with more than 205,000 killed (with only 9,000 captured). On the Allied side, 175,000 troops were engaged, with 8,000 killed and 29,000 wounded. 

The surrender of the Japanese forces in Manila was one of the last of the major surrenders of armies and army groups would surrender: the Japanese army would surrender at Singapore on 12 September, Saigon on 13th September, and Hong Kong on 14th September. There were pockets of resistance that would hold out for years afterwards, but so far as large organized forces were concerned, this was pretty much the end of the fighting. 

Single sheet, rare. $450

A Managerial Directive on How to Present War News: PM Newspaper, 10 Dec 1941

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1694

PM (short for "Picture Magazine, evidently) newspaper¹--begun 18 June 1940 and ended 1948--was a very strong, left-wing newspaper in NYC, a short-lived newspaper  with a long pedigree of contributors².  The "Memorandum" reproduced here, sent by the Managing Editor John P. Lewis "to the writing staff", was a powerful and interesting directive on how to present the news, and addressed the speech of President Roosevelt of the night before. 

Lewis felt that here, at the beginning of the American end of the fighting war, was the appropriate place to set out a war strategy for reporting and publishing regarding information received from overseas, or unverified sources, or from dispatches from the countries against which we were fighting.  He was clear and very concise--the whole of the memorandum fitting on one side of a single sheet of paper. 

ITEM:  1 sheet of paper, 13x8 inches, printed 10 Dec 1941.  Good condition.  $125

The Roosevelt speech of  9 December 1941 can be found  here.  Some interesting extras as follows:

"Your Government knows that for weeks Germany has been telling  Japan that if Japan did not attack the United States, Japan  would not share in dividing the spoils with Germany when peace  came. She was promised by Germany that if she came in she would  receive the complete and perpetual control of the whole of the Pacific area...This alone if true could be a justification for war with Germany."
//
"Our policy rested on the fundamental truth that the defense of any country resisting Hitler or Japan was in the long run the defense of our own country."

But the main thrust that Lewis was addressing was this:

"I cite as another example a statement made on Sunday night that a Japanese carrier had been located and sunk off the Canal Zone. And when you hear statements that are attributed to what they call "an authoritative source," you can be reasonably sure from now on that under these war circumstances the "authoritative source" is not any person in authority."

"Many rumors and reports which we now hear originate, of course, with enemy sources. For instance, today the Japanese are claiming that as a result of their one action against Hawaii they hare gained naval supremacy in the Pacific. This is an old trick of propaganda which has been used innumerable times by the Nazis. The purposes of such fantastic claims are, of course, to spread fear and confusion among us, and to goad us into revealing military information which our enemies are desperately anxious to obtain."

Lewis was quick to the point:  "President Roosevelt's address Tuesday night gave the American people a quick lesson in phony reporting.  After that address all any newspaper has to do to convict itself of falsifying is to say that it learned something from authoritative sources."

He continued: "The president laid down a very clear line on what people can believe and what they can disbelieve..." and then outlined four major points for his writers to follow:

"1. We will not pass on as news any communique about the conduct of the war from any hostile government without warning the reader that these are claims of an enemy government which wants to confuse us...

"2. We will never report anything from "Authoritative" sources or anonymous synonyms. 

"3. On the actual conduct of the war, the only material which we will pass on as absolute fact is material from the American communiques."

"4. In covering war stories as well as other news, we will carefully segregate fact reporting from opinion reporting and editorial conclusions."

Lewis was also particularly demanding in his policy regarding personal opinion in news stories: "Where we want to express an editorial opinion, we will label it "Editorial."

And Lewis meant it, too. Unlike almost all newspapers, PM editorials  were signed.  The newspaper also took no advertising, hoping to keep the paper running on sales and subscriptions.  And so it did, for eight years--not long by long-running standards of  newspapers, but fairly long for the times, and for the type of business plan practiced. 

In any event I enjoyed the crispness and clarity of Lewis' directive.

Notes:

1. The publisher was Ralph Ingersoll (1980-1985), who before coming to PM was the managing editor of Time-Life, and who was also the business plan designer and then managing editor of Fortune magazine; and the silent partner in the whole thing was MArshal Fields III, who pretty much bankrolled the newspaper from a distance.

2.  It was a very considerable staf.  From Wiki:  "Journalist I. F. Stone was the paper's Washington correspondent. His award-winning series on European Jewish refugees attempting to run the British blockade to reach the Jewish homeland in Mandatory Palestine became the book, Underground to Palestine. Staffers included theater critic Louis Kronenberger and film critic Cecelia Ager. Weegee, Margaret Bourke-White and Arthur Leipzig were the photographers. The sports writers were Tom Meany, Tom O’Reilly and George F. T. Ryall (who covered horse racing). Elizabeth Hawes wrote about fashions, and her sister Charlotte Adams covered food. Other distinguished writers who contributed articles included Erskine Caldwell, [Myril Axlerod], McGeorge Bundy, Saul K. Padover, James Wechsler (eventually the paper's editorialist); Penn Kimball, later dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism; Heywood Hale Broun; James Thurber; Dorothy Parker; Ernest Hemingway; Eugene Lyons; Ben Stolberg; Malcolm Cowley; future Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill and Ben Hecht.

Rare Report on the 413th Fighter Squadron, WWII (1945)

Tyler, Parker R.: From Seattle to Ie Shima with the 413th Fighter Group, a Narrative.  Self-published, 1945. 30pp,  11x8 inches. Good condition.  Personal recollection of Capt Parker Tyler, jr.:  mimeographed, typewritten, and gathered by staples. $350

Internal German Survey on Bombing Damage by the R.A.F.

Allied Bombing and a Report on Damage to German Industry

Fliegerangriff in der Nachct vom 17./18.8.40 auf die Hydrierwerk Scholven A.G.

1940.  Fine condition.  Size: 11.5 x 8.5 inches. 20 leaves with 27 original photographic images of damage caused by the bombing. Each leave is quite thick—much more stiff and heavy than a 110-lb cover stock sheet. The photos are all 3 x 4.5 inches, and are clear and bright. Condition: fine condition. Provenance: ex-library, U.S. Library of Congress. This book was part of a very large collection of 90,000 pamphlets that we bought of the U.S. Library of Congress. Known simply as the “Pamphlet Collection” it is identified by a distinctive and tiny 3mm perforated stamp, plus a bookplate at the front pastedown. Binding: bound in thick cloth boards.

**NOTE: Hdydrierwerk Scholven A.G. was a synthetic petroleum plant and was one of the earliest targets of the British in the Ruhr Valley. It was owned by the Hibernia Mining Company, as a hydrogenation plant in 1935. Gelsenkirchen is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia,  and is located in the northern part of the Ruhr area.

Publication Data: no indication of author/printer or which agency/department was responsible, but this looks like (to me) to be the beginning of a standard protocol on reporting damage from British bombing raids. It seems as though the typing under the captions is first generation. This may be a unique copy or perhaps (at worst) one of several. I would say it was of extremely highly limited distribution. 

"Gelsenkirchen in the time of the Third Reich.   In the time when the Nazis held sway in Germany, Gelsenkirchen, owing to its location in the heart of the Ruhr area, was a centre of wartime industry. In no other time has Gelsenkirchen's industry been so highly productive. This brought about, on the one hand, after the massive job cuts in the 1920s, a short-term boost in mining and heavy-industry jobs. On the other hand, the city naturally became the target of many heavy Allied bombing raids during the Second World War, which destroyed three fourths of Gelsenkirchen. Even today, many old above-ground air-raid shelters can be found in the city, and some of the city's official buildings such as Hans-Sachs-Haus downtown and the town hall in Buer have air-raid shelters still kept more or less in their original form. Two synagogues in Gelsenkirchen were destroyed in the anti-Jewish riots of Kristallnacht in November 1938. The one in Buer was burnt down. The one in downtown Gelsenkirchen was likewise destroyed. Exactly 66 years later, the cornerstone was laid there for a new synagogue. The Institute for City History set up a documentation site: "Gelsenkirchen in National Socialist times". Throughout the time when Hitler was in power, from 1933 to 1945, the city's mayor was Carl Engelbert Böhmer, an NSDAP member." $500.00

Japanese Propaganda for the Inhabitants of the Occupied Philippines, 1941

Propaganda Corps,  Ideals of the New Philippines--Japanese Army Propaganda on Liberating the Philippines.  1941/2.  37pp, 6x4 inches.  Printed wrappers.  Very good condition.  Binding: self wrappers. Rarity: there are 14 copies of this work found in the massive and tremendously useful librarians' aid and bibliographic tool, the OCLC/WorldCat, nearly all in superior research libraries.   $175.00

There are several essays in this work, all of them address the victory of the Japanese Army over the United States and Allies (USAFFE) and calling for Filipinos to accept their new responsibilities in rebuilding their country according to Japanese and "Asiatic" ideals. In general the approach to the newly-captive population was that of a liberator, helping the Philippines to escape from the captivity of the United States. The Japanese call for a "Marshall Petain" model of rehabilitation: "you must surmount tremendous difficulties everywhere you go". There is no escaping the very determined, strict approaches: Filipinos must follow the Japanese way or they will be deemed a traitor to the Philippines and to the Japanese Imperial Army. Those who spread rumors about the return of the US Army to the Philippines "are unpardonable criminals because they disturb the tranquility of the country". "You shall never regret your collaborations with us." Yosihide Hayasi (Director General of the Japanese Occupation) writes strongly of the anti-Imperialist efforts of Japan and their Army's liberating efforts, and the plan to bring about a great Asiatic Asia, "free of Western influences and the eradication of Anglo Saxon and Western imperialism".

"Believing in the superior blood of Asiatic people the Filipinos will wash away the defects of the Anglo Saxons." There is a further short essay by Jorge Vargas (Chairman of the Executive Committee), entitled "Philippine Islands Grateful to Japanese". There is also appended (from pp 28-37) the "Field Service Code of the Japanese Army", a heavy belief in strength, discipline, honor and obedience.

RARE Mimeographed Unit History, WWII: 193rd Glider Infantry

Dorrity,  Edward G.  Gliders in the Snow, Story of the 193rd Glider Infantry. MIMEOGRAPHED SHEETS. Rare.  New Orleans:  Piety Hill Press,  1946.  22pp  4to.  Published November 1946.

Mimeographed sheets by the Piety Hill Press of New Orleans. Binding: stapled sheets with plain cover. Size & Pages: 11 x 8 ½ inches, stapled. Our copy is the copy sent by the author to the Library of Congress in partial fulfillment of the requirements necessary to secure an American copyright. This also comes with an original carbon card of the LC card catalog card. Rarity: there are NO COPIES of this work found in the massive and tremendously useful librarians' and bibliographic tool, the OCLC/WorldCat.

This pamphlet is part of a very large collection of 90,000 pamphlets that we bought of the U.S. Library of Congress. Known simply as the Pamphlet Collection (as many of the pamphlets are identified in a distinctive and tiny 3mm rubber stamp), this pamphlet bears the Surplus 1. Library of Congress 30x50mm rubber stamp on the back wrapper. Conservative condition grade: a sold, and retrospective VERY GOOD (say, a conservative 7.5 on a 1-10 scale (ten being Mint)). The mimeo quality of this document is not very high; that, or the typed original was done with a not-so-good typewriter. In any event it is entirely legible (though occasionally with a little difficulty). This is a VERY BRIGHT, CLEAN copy.

Provenance: Formerly in the collection of the Library of Congress. There are a few scant interior (title page and front paste down) marks from the Library of Congress cataloging staff, but there are no other internal penciled or penned notes or anything else considered defacing from any previous use.  $350.00

The 193rd Glider Infantry Regiment Unit History.

This section taken entirely from http://www.ww2-airborne.us/units/193/193.html, with thanks.

"The 193rd Glider Infantry Regiment (GIR) was constituted on 16 December 1942 in the Army of the United States. It was activated 15 April 1943 at Camp Mackall, North Carolina under the command of Colonel Maurice G Stubbs (picture left). The 193rd GIR was immediately assigned to the 17th Airborne Division. Moved to the Tennessee

U.S. Wartime Production, Control, and Patriotic Propaganda, 1942

ITEM:  16 pieces of homeland propaganda from the War Production Board, printed 1942.  All 8x3 inches.  Good condition.  $200

The War Production Board (WPB)--the entity responsible for printing the leaflets below--was instituted 16 January 1942 as a federal effort to direct U.S. wartime production and allocation of essential commodities.  And time. The WPB centralized the effort to convert some peacetime industry to wartime production, as well as direct the production of existing wartime industries in the manufacture of critical goods, and rationed or prohibited the manufacture of other material that could possibly hinder the war effort.  Thus the WPB rationed things like sugar, heating oil, plastic, gasoline, paper, rubber, nylon and metals of all descriptions; it also controlled large swaths of the workforce, restricting wages and benefits as well as prices.   It was an essential element of fighting the war, and brought necessary control to an economy and industrial base that needed organization for what would become a total war.        

Instituting a war-production base for American industry allowed production to ratchet way up, producing (for example) multiples more aircraft more in 1943 than in 1941:   1940, 6k aircraft; 1941, 19k; 1942, 47k; 1943 85k; 1944, 56k; 1945, 46k.  Also there were enormous production advancements for total shipping tonnage (reaching a wartime production total of 33 million tons), across-the-board huge increases in coal and iron ore (and especially in crude oil), and on and on.  The U.S. was able to mobilize itself and take advantage of its enormous natural resources, industrial base and civilian workforce in what was essentially an unreachable island economy, forming what was actually an unbeatable combination of war goods production. (Plus of course there was the atomic bomb, which is another story, but which also only could have been produced in the U.S., given the enormous quantities of energy and material needed to begin its production.)     

The WPB also was responsible for hearts-and-minds campaigns at home, too, because so many people, such a huge proportion of the population, needed to be involved in the war effort, not only from the production standpoint but also for strategic conservation.  For example, in one massive effort to collect the very necessary scrap metal (that would be collected and reformed into war materiel) the WPB organized a nation-wide drive that in one day collected 82 pounds for every person in the country.  Singular efforts like this, or seemingly singular, needed to happen at regular and short intervals for the war economy to be successful.  And so pamphlets like the story of Joe, below, needed to be told:

The "it" that Joe needed to have was ammunition, and grenades, and anything else that would kill the enemy.  With it, Joe was successful; without it, and thereby without the "it" being produced by the folks at home to whom this flyer was being distributed, was helping to kill Joe by not giving him enough of the deadly stuff.

"Don't let Joe down" says the flyer, "its our job to give him everything he needs and wants".  It turns out that Joe had 26 notches in the comb of his rifle, "from the Japs (who would never) get back to report after they met Joe".   Joe "spread the lead around with a free and easy hand and alot of Japs wished he hadn't been so generous.  Trouble was, he never had quite enough of it..."

And so went the rest of it, and them--resonant pleas, demands, for people at home to be vigilant in whatever it was they were doing to push the war effort forward.  Slacking meant death and possible destruction, and the hosts of these flyers that I have here gave very little pre-text for this not to be the case. 

Balloons and the Defense of London, 1938

ITEM:   weekly issue of the Illustrated London News, as described below.  Cover art illustrates a pictorial two-page spread on the balloon defenses of London.  Very nice copy, removed from larger bound volume.  $75

This series of drawings, published in the Illustrated London News 22 January 1938,  by the incredibly prolific and detail-oriented G.H. Davies depicts one segment of the city defense program being formulated by the British government in the last year  or so leading up to the beginning of the European end of World War Two. (I own 150 or so of these images by Davies--he never fails to provide the detail where you need it.)   The overall plan for defending major British cities consisted of anti-aircraft guns, searchlights, R.A.F. fighter squadrons and interceptors, and the "Balloon Barrage".  London and suburbs are featured here, all to be protected by a series of ten squadrons of fifty balloons each, handled by a crew of ten.  The thinking was that it would make low-level bombing by fighter aircraft impracticable, and force any aircraft attempting such an approach to a higher altitude where they would be theoretically susceptible to the interceptor squadrons. 

I'm not terribly sure why the thinking was against low altitude attack, but my best guess is that the planners were thinking about the He-111Bs and Ju52s or other such aircraft that the Nazis checked and tested out against the Spanish Republicans during the Civil War. Perhaps freshest of all memories of the German operation Feuerzauber (Magic Fire) was the Guernica raid, just a year or so before the publication of these images, where that militarily insignificant town was attacked from the air in twenty minute intervals over three hours, destroying it in a terror blitz.  If I was sitting around a big table at 10 Downing, I’d have that picture in my head.  .

Be that as it may, the "air mine field" looks terribly inefficient and vulnerable to me, sort of like an exposed Maginot Defense Line, but without the very deep misunderstandings that went along with the highly questionable French effort. 

Explanation of the Images:

a)    The first image shows the incredible perimeter defense network, which extended ten miles around St. Paul’s; the balloons were moored at 100 yard intervals, making for 1100 or so balloons to “fence” the perimeter.
b) The second image shows  London center and immediate suburbs, with another 500 balloons in a smaller circle inscribed in the larger.
c)  The third image  is a close-up of the balloons, looking down;  seems as though they were tethered at about 2000 feet or so
d)  The last image is a close-up of London center.

 

 

Bombing Britain, 1940; a "Popular" Look from the Other Side, Part II

ITEM:  Illustrirte Zeitung, Leipzig, weekly issue for 3 October 1940.  Pp 237-256.  Illustrated.  15x11 inches.  good copy.  $75

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1337

Earlier in this blog I wrote a post on an illustrated article that appeared in the Illustriete Zeitung for 5 September 1940.  On page 165 is an extraordinary two-part map, the upper part being a vellum-like overlay, showing the German bombardment of England.  (“Bombenregen ueber England.  England muss jetzt allein um seine insel Kaempfen…” )  The template map is in stark black and white, showing locations of “war” industries, chemical plants, rubber works, textile plants, metal industries and gas works . The overlay shows the outline of the island with 150 or so bombs, imprinted with a color code to show what sort of industry it was intended for.

By the time this issue of the Zeitung appeared, the Germans had almost spent themselves on their invasion of Britain (11 July-29 October 1940), and were well-past part two of a four-part invasion plane.  The third part would begin two days after the appearance of this article, the clock already almost ticked-out on the Luftwaffe's ability to pound the Island Nation into submission.  They felt out the defences in part I, while also bombing along the coast and into Liverpool and London itself, mining harbors and waterways, attacking convoys; part II continued the assault and probed and searched out the airfields, aircraft factories and radar sites (while continuing to mine the waters and bomb the cities). Part III continued the heavy assaults on Liverpool, London and other cities, and searched out the RAF--but the German losses were starting to mount up, and the RAF was beginning to win.  On September 15, 185 German aircraft were lost--a huge event--and the plans for Operation Sea Lion were called off, suspended indefinitely. 

The 3 October issue of the Zeitung presented a large, two-page illustration of the Luftwaffe bombing London, which was suffering under the attack, flaming and smoking.  But the image by this time was mostly propagandistic, the end of the campaign only weeks away, the German air force staggering under the British response.

The end result was a terrific victory for the Brits, far beyond what the numbers show, even if the numbers are strong.  The U.K. losses included 544 aircrew killed, 422 aircrew wounded, and 1,547 aircraft destroyed.  The Nazi losses were 2,698 aircrew killed, 967 captured (638 missing bodies identified by British Authorities) and 1,887 aircraft destroyed.

The  Luftschlacht um England, the plan to overtake and destroy the British capacity in the air, was defeated. As long as the English had command of the airspace there would be no way that the Nazis could force an invasion by land/sea (at least in the minds of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht  and Hitler).  And so the Nazis failed--it was their first major defeat, and, especially, with the turning of attention east, it was a pivotal point of the war.

Blank & Empty Things Series: The Militant Christian Patriots, Hitler and Saving Britain from Itself, 1938

ITEM:  broaside for the Militant Christian Patriots, as seen below.  10x8 inches. 1938.  Fine condition.  $125

Ref:  JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1323

The flag of the group Militant Christian Patriots may tell you something about them faster than even their name:  it was a large bright red field, with a white circle in the center, in the center of which was a simple black cross.  Drop the horizontal bar to the middle, elongate it, shrink the vertical just a tad, and turn the ends of each bar 90-degrees at 75% of their length,  et voila, you have the Nazi flag. 

This unsigned circular blasts the "appeasers" from inside the government of the valiant Mr. Chamberlain, who is supported by the Militant Christian Patriots in his stance to keep Britain out of the developing (and developed) trouble brewing between the Nazis and the Czechs.  The piece of paper that Chamberlain held aloft at the airport, claiming victory with his appeasement of the Nazis and happy with the firm trust in Hitler's signature, was a good document to start with for this extremist group.  Next, they would have Mr. Anthony Eden (who wound up resigning his position until recalled by Churchill when he finally and thankfully took over the office of PM from Chamberlain in May 1940) removed, what with his alliances to Fabian-Zionists and all.  The other ministers targeted by the Militant Christian Patriots were among those others who supported Eden and worked against Chamberlain--undesirables, "pacifists, Socialists, Communists and Zionists".   The other branch of their unholy alliance were "the disgruntled refugees and their powerful friends in Britain, who aim at bringing Germany to her knees", because, somehow, members of Parliament were somehow responsive to disgruntled refugees.

 

This is a photo of Chamberlain at the airport with Hitler's signature, telling the world, basically,  that "it was up to the Czechs, now", somewhat confident in the fatal Munich Agreement, trusting Hitler to end his European territorialism .  The occupation of Czechoslovakia came just months after the Austrian Anschluss of March 1938, but, well, the Prime Minister had Hitler's signature.  It would not take long for this picture, and for the newsreel, and for Mr. Chamberlain's face and even his very umbrella, to be used as iconic symbols of disastrous failure. 

The Militant Christian Patriots were faithful to none of the words they used to identify themselves--after all, calling yourself something does lead to some sort of expectation...