Ptak Science Books

Bad Grandeur: Predicting Post-Nuke USA (1966) and the Loss of 76% of all Authors

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 932

[Part of the Atomic and Nuclear Weapons series.]

I think no plumb line was ever so worked with pulleys and wheels, strings and catclaws and other Rube Goldberg devices as were the demographic studies of nuclear warfare.  It is as though their compass rose had no compass, with everything centered on the center, no way out, no way in. just there.  A faceless clock face describing “G-2 o’clock” whenever it pleased.  These studies seem to me the nuclear warfare equivalent of the Bellman’s map (described earlier in this blog as the most perfect map ever constructed): a pretty polygon describing a totally blank surface.

I have a number of these things here, some of which are restricted-distribution publications, works of statistical fancy/fantasy meant for other eyes in the same community dedicated to the fancies described, a tautological audience for self-referential.

One such bit, plucked from this pile is William W. Pendleton’s A Study of the Demography of Nuclear War produced by “Human Sciences Research, Inc.” Outside of its statistical foray in survivability and the procreative prospects of the left-overs of vast nuclear exchanges, the work is a solemn attempt at institutionalizing the death requirements of nuclear combat.  The necessity of overwhelming carnage is presented in ironic and underwhelming language, the first bits of which are seen in the conclusion of pamphlet’s abstract¹:

“Cities differ in the kinds and magnitudes of change to which they might be subjected. Considerable variation in the demography of surviving populations can be expected; that variation would be related to policy decisions; and those decisions should therefore be examined for their demographic implications.” [Emphasis mine.]

Put another way, the city is the main focus of the survivability equations, and the chances of the humans being bombed in those cities would change with—god help us—the amount of bombing.

Cities differ in the kinds and magnitudes of change to which they might be subjected.

This is the key I think to understanding documents like this, making a simple foundation statement so convoluted and tortured that it and most of what follows make any sense outside of restating themselves. Which I guess is a strength.

Back to the pamphlet and the interesting table that attracted my attention.  According to one study [and for the sake of brevity I’m not going to describe the scenarios or data estimation methods and so on] the U.S. would suffer 46% casualties [meaning immediate deaths and not as a result of radiation or illness or starvation or the encyclopedia of whatever that would lead to death somewhere down the road].  The resulting demographic of the “perished” by job description postulates that the most-killed category of worker would be: (#1) aeronautical engineers, 86% dead; (#2) transportation equipment salaried manager, with 79% killed; (#3), social scientists, with 78% of them going down with their clients; (#4), authors, with 76% gone.

Authors?  Of what, I wonder?  The good ones with the bad?  Are authors different from writers?  And what do you call folks who produce tv shows?  Since the stats here are for 70 cities there’s no wonder that there aren’t any farmers in this table, as the majority target areas (some 450 cities cited elsewhere as targetable, including my own little burgh of Asheville, N.C.) would naturally have city folk in them.  And so I’m guessing that three-quarters of all “authors” in 1960/6 were living in these target cities and were going to go up in smoke.  The aeronautical engineers category is more understandable as every one of those industries employing 50 or more people would be a target; frankly I’m surprised that given the possible firepower of the Soviet Union in 1966 that 14% would survive; I’d guess offhand that the number would be 2%. 

Even though this stuff is spread out in only 98 pages or so it would keep a person busy segregating the Orwellian gems from those not; it would be a tricky business as most of the “text” in the “not” category would be largely limited to prepositions. 

Here’s another bit:  a parenthetic poke at the post-attack composition of Congress. It is stated that the “postattack” (hyphenated no longer) Congress would be “quite different”.It would also be (“in their eyes”) “more Conservative than the pre-attack (hyphenated!)  Congress.  It isn’t a cause for great prognosticational (?) liberty to assume that the Congress might be more Conservative, but why on Earth did the author qualify the assumption by saying “their eyes”?  Pish and posh.

The paper goes on its merry way, connecting the necessaries of Goldbergian delight, and somehow nothing ever happened, which to me is a secret miracle.  Especially given the weight of papers like this one, which seems to medicate the effects of war, assuming that there will be a Congress and that people will report back to work once the factories are rebuilt and that there will be more segregation in the colossal world of post-attack America, and on and on into the red dawn. 

Mr. Mencken’s view of Warren Harding comes to mind when I read this stuff and wonder about how it was that we didn’t blow the whole place up:

“I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and a half dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

Notes

1. The abstract from the above paper: “The basic problem with which this report is concerned is that of determining the kinds of demographic change that might result from a range of nuclear attacks, ascertaining the effects of those changes on the future of the surviving populations, and indicating possible areas for Civil Defense action and planning. Earlier studies of the demography of nuclear war were examined and their relevant conclusions and methodology incorporated in the report. A different methodology--expected to be more sensitive to compositional effects--was then designed. The new methodology was tested and found to be more effective than the old. Surviving populations representing a wide range of variation in attack conditions were created on the basis of both old and new methodologies, and the demographic significance of these populations was examined. Assuming a range of post-attack demographic conditions, a series of projections was made on the surviving populations. The demographic significance of the recovering populations was then examined. On the basis of the analysis a series of recommendations relevant to Civil Defense planning was made: Within the framework of this analysis the crucial variable is the demographic pattern of the city. Changes in composition, as well as size, could be of substantial magnitude and would last for generations in some cases. Cities differ in the kinds and magnitudes of change to which they might be subjected. Considerable variation in the demography of surviving populations can be expected; that variation would be related to policy decisions; and those decisions should therefore be examined for their demographic implications.”

Unexpected Sense Impressions from Antique Prints: Sound

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 631

[A continuation of the blog series "A History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things"]

The sweetest pleasures come from unexpected sources. Mozart--who loved the game of billiards and was an exceptional aficionado¹ of the game while playing it with little skill-- enjoyed composing on the table as well,  rolling balls in geometric patterns across it while working. To observers it might have seemed as though he was interested in the patterns themselves; it delightfully turns out that what he was really looking at were the changing reflections in the surface of the balls. 

Years ago my wife (Patti Digh) and I visited an artist in his studio at the lovely high-road-to-Taos town of Truchas, New Mexico.  We watched the artist at work for quite some time—well, actually, we listened to him work.  Although he was a lovely painter, the visual impact was overwhelmed by the sounds that he made padding back and forth (he was working on a big canvas) across an old and musical wooden floor --it deeply interesting, and the sound stays with us to this day. 

I enjoy these quasi-synesthesic experiences a great deal, though they are very hard to “find”. Sometime though they slip into the print world, and I include three examples below. 

(1) Putting the Pulp in Fiction, and Fact: the Sharp First Step in Paper-Making

Just about the first step in making paper is collecting and preparing the raw materials from which the paper is made.  Linens, cottons, wood and straw (among other things) would be reduced to a pasty pulp through vigorous pounding, tearing, wetting stabbing and rending, all of which would be reduced to a pasty, fibrous pulp which would wind up after a bit spread over a wire mesh until dried and then, through a great non-miracle, becoming paper.  This is a process that was little changed in the Western world for many centuries.

The most lovely of these early pulp-rendering, “stamping” machines, to me is the fabulous two-person human-powered stamper/shredder, published in 1579. (I don’t know the original source for the wood engraving; this image appears in Charles Singer’s monumental History of Technology, from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution, vol III.

The men turn crank, crank turns wheels and rod, rod turns arms, arms forced to move vertical poles up and down, stampers on the end of poles pound the rags.  Actually the stampers had changeable stamps so that the man-machine could start with a spiked stamper for rendering and then move to a roundish stamp for pounding into decomposition in a wooden bowl with mushy water. 

I just really like the machine and its representation, and of course the round stampers and bowls of mush.  It all seems so innocent in a creaking antiquarian way—but the great surprise for me is that I can just about hear this machine at work.  The all-wooden structure with slowing-turning wheels grinding against its constituent parts, worn smooth from use; the slow pounding of the stampers into the thick paste; the creaking motions of the too-slender superstructure.  I can hear it about as clearly as I can hear the soft/high clinking of the bottles in the milkman’s tray.

(2)  A Scene of Western Quiet

The image comes from William Wright's The History of the Big Bonanza and was published in 1877.  It is a very simple scene (“Office of the Consolidated Virginia Mine”), nicely and proportionally arranged, though somewhat challenged by its understanding of linear perspective. For reasons I don’t quite understand it might as well have been a picture of the high desert with no settlement whatsoever.  It simply seems still, and very quiet.

(3) Electrical Hum (and Ozone) Fishing Nets

This image, from the quarto edition of the great Diderot and d'Alembert Encyclopedie (published over a number of years in the late 18^th century), shows (I think) the ways to mend broken fishing nets. I have a definite sense of a high electrical hum from this, along with the added whiff of ozone.  Its hardly something that was intended by the artist, but it was the first thing that registered with me when I bought this print 25 years ago. 

Things like this are available to us all of the time, simply waiting to be heard while being seen. 

Notes

1. After his death Mozart's estate was reckoned, and the contents of his house and belongings were catalogued.  It was recorded that he had a very nice billiard table, and that he also had 12 cues.  Now 12 cues might've been there because he liked the feel of the wood, or that he liked their artistic merit on the wall or in the corner.  That, or he had a lot of people coming over to play.  I like the later interpretation.  Also, I cannot remember the reference for the ball/reflection story; please don't tell me that it is wrong.  

How to Look Pretty or Smart, but Not Both: Ladies' Home Journal Make-up Advice, 1933

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 930

[Continuing the posts What Makes Human Robot Girls, 1941, How to Get a Boy-Date, 1941, and The Missing Pieces of Women, Pope Joan and the Proper Girl]

Following on the tall heals of several posts on mid-1940's social engineering for young women comes this rougey sprite by Dorothy Cocks, Tricks with Make-up.  It is one of a long series of quickly-produced pamphlets flung from the presses of the Ladies' Home Journal under the stewardship of Elizabeth Woodward. 

There's much to learn about what was expected of the social shell of women in this pamphlet, but what I've focused on is this jewel on page 7:  "Which is Your Type: Pretty or Smart?" And that's it: no ground in-between, no space for something else, and evidently no room for being smart AND pretty.  Here it is:

 

The advice to "touch perfume behind your ears and  above your upper lip" is a new one to me. 

Small Wars: Flowers vs. Coffins in the American Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 929

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a  high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.--Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley Butler, from his 1935 book War is a Racket^.1

This small pamphlet (reprinted below in continued reading)--printed in 1929 and once owned by H.L. Mencken, and with his annotations--is a gonzo screed against  American imperialism in Haiti produced by "The People's Lobby" and headed by Prof. John Dewey.²

This “intervention”, an extension of American hegemony in the Americas known as “The Banana Wars” and a direct relation to Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1904), was a movement taken to protect business interests, infrastructure and investment. And the Haitian debt repayment structure.

After a series of six failed Haitian governments in five years, President Woodrow Wilson felt the stinging itch of capital protection and ordered the occupation of Haiti by the Navy and the Marines, all in the guise of preserving peace and order and stability (of the Haitian state.  "The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it." as Mr.Mencken wrote). But this itch had been felt by a number of presidents over time, what with the many imperialist interventions and occasional occupations of Panama, Nicaragua, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Honduras and Mexico.

The pamphlet is effective as an anti-Imperialist proto-gonzo work, though it does leave some gaping holes in fact and some narrow ones in fiction.  Be that as it may the anonymous author incites indignation with the outrages of the American occupation, not the least of which is the usurpation of Haitian sovereignty. 

The only annotations of the former owner--Baltimore’s other great writer, H.L. Mencken-- are his characteristic hashmarks in the margins highlighting the death rate of Haitians killed during the occupation.  According to the pamphlet, which quotes the report of the Secretary of the Navy (Joseph Daniels) , there were 1,861 Haitians “killed by American forces in 1919 alone”.  The writer makes the acidic point that this figure represented one percent of the total population of the nation.  And that is, perhaps, all that Mr. Mencken³ needed to see. 

The occupation of Haiti left broad scars along with the new and vastly improved infrastructure, which was probably just a colonial remnant of the necessities of governance by the occupying force. After all, we needed roads and bridges and such to secure the possession, and it isn't as though we could role them all up and take them home at the end of the day.  They were more cenotaphs to an unwanted and shameful legacy than the betterment of Haiti's social structure. To close with Mr. Mencken, the flowers that came with the American occupation make us look more for the coffins than anything else.⁴

Notes:

1. In 1935, Butler wrote in his famous book War Is a Racket: "I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

2. Just to note that this was the John Dewey, one of founders—along with the great Charles Sanders Peirce and William James-- of the philosophy of pragmatism. 

3. Mr. Mencken also made the following Modest Proposal: "It seems to me that the United States would be a great deal better off today if it had a war on its hands, somewhere or other, all the time. I do not mean, of course, such puerile buffoonery as now goes on from time to time in Nicaragua and Haiti, but real war, occupying say a quarter of a million or half a million men." "Editorials" in the The American Mercury, Nov 30, p.284

4.  As in his Bierce-like dictum "A cynic is a man who, smelling a flower, looks for the coffin".

Odd Collections: 500,000 Wishbones

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 928

"One must go into oneself armed to the teeth"--M. Teste, Paul Valery

“Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still." --H.D. Thoreau

Sometimes odd images just need to be surfaced for the pure sake of it.  Such is the case with this glorious photo by Greg Villet¹ of Delphine Binger in LIFE magazine for  24 May, 1954 .   Ms. Binger ("a Manhattan spinster") actually collected the wishbones with a business utility in mind, fashioning them into objets d'os.

She purchased the wishbones for nothing, added a few bits of half-penny decorations, perfume, a pin, and SO! a piece of jewelry is born.  She evidently was able to sell her creations for $2.10 apiece, which in 1954 translates into 25 2009 dollars; so I guess if she sold some here and there she would be able to supplement her income.  Of course there's the issue of overkill on the bones:  she seems to have probably ten times ten times more than she "needs", so there is something else going on there.  

An old friend of mine--we'll call him Mr. Tulipfields, a brilliant mathematician/physicist/compsci guy with a deep appreciation for music--started buying classical cds when cds were a relatively new phenomenon.  Rare recorded material was being placed back into "print" at such a rate that he couldn't really afford the appropriate sound system to actually listen to all of his new purchases.  HE hurried into buying many of the cds because he thought that they would drop out-of-print again, and that he needed to act quickly.  I thought that the cds would stay available basically forever—as it turned out he was right (as usual) and I was wrong (ditto). And so Mr. T amassed an enormous collection of music—in the dozens of thousands—many of which are now impossible to find. 

In some ways my friend didn’t need the cd player—he already knew the music, could play it in his head.  Somehow he was keeping all of this music on course in forming this fabulous collection  And once he had explained his reasoning behind the whole effort, it all made perfect sense, and you’d wonder why he didn’t have 100,000 more choice cds.

On the other hand I’m not sure why Ms. Binger² needed her extra 497,500 bones—its not as though there would be much of a relative variation in them, from bone to bone.  I doubt that a  centimeter here or there would make much of a difference in a corsage bone display like the one Ms. Binger is wearing in this photo.  I guess she needed them for, well, something else.

Notes:

1.  I don't know much about Greg Villet.  He took a lot of preparations for this photo, stringing 5,000 wishbones on black string on a black backdrop--that is considerable dedication to the idea of an image.  I also know that he did some very significant documentary photography with Rosa Parks and the Montgomery strikes of 1955/6, which tells you maybe all you need to know about the man.  

2.  I can't help but wonder what happened to all of those bones on Ms. Binger's passing?

The Stench of Creativity: Dante, SpongeBob & Unintentionally Bizarre Titles

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 927 [Part of the Fantastic Titles series]

Squidward: What's that horrible smell?! [sees steam coming out of SpongeBob's window] Is Patrick thinking again?

Patrick: [sticking his head out of the window] I'm making art!

Squidward: Patrick, it smells like something crawled into your brain and died!

Patrick: That's the creative process at work!

Like St. Paul warned by Archangel Michael, and Dante by Virgil, the visions of the Hell they were touring was also stinky, though the robes they held to the noses did not prevent them from experiencing the very lofty stench of sin.  Perhaps it was something like the crawled-in-and-died stench made by the beautiful Patrick starfish from SpongeBob Squarepants, his brain’s intellectual exuda forming a pretty but stench-ridden experience.

And so to with experiencing the found, unintentional absurd--or the naïve surreal—in printed material like some of the examples below.  Their title pages can be experienced as art in a way, at least today, so far removed from their original meaning and context that the words float like disembodied arks of meaning looking for whatever piece of land/meaning that they bump into.  Sometimes their titles are the bizarre-ity, masking a mundane, pedestrian contents; much of the time the title and contents emanate the stench of lost meaning through and through. 

  “… ‘Why us thy mind’, he said,
‘so far away, unlike its usual self,
 What are thy wits about, where have they fled?’
 —Virgil yelling at Dante for asking a dumb question outside the City of Dis,. Inferno, XI, 76-78

 

 

Medical Treatise on Horses: Illustrations, 1685

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 926

This is a simple image-only post relating the four wood engraved illustrations from the rare Spanish work by Conde (Pedro) Garcia, Verdadera Albeyteria, printed in Madrid in 1685.  They were beautiful works, if not exactly correct, or terribly useful--not in the great traditions of veterinary (& etc.) anatomists like Andres Laguna, Leonardo or Vesalius. Oddly enough, Garcia didn't seem to draw on the very accomplished work of Carlos Ruini (b. ca. 1530-1598) whose earlier work, "Anatomia del cavallo, infermit, et suoi rimedii", was a standard font of anatomical and medicinal information on the horse for 75 years.  But the illustrations are compelling, and beautiful.  Just not very helpful.

"...This most noble beast is the most beautiful, the swiftest and of the highest courage of domesticated animals. His long mane and tail adorn and beautify him. He is of a fiery temperament, but good tempered, obedient, docile and well-mannered."--Conde Garcia.

And the bleeding chart:

A Short Look at Fifths and Fives: Joltin’ Joe, Legal Sausage and the Structure of Mathematics

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 925 

I’m going to take a drive through five fifths—all of which don’t come close to making a whole—to get to my ultimate destination, a ribbon of numbers circling the earth.

In American law, “taking the fifth (Amendment)” allows you the prohibition of incriminating yourself, giving the supposed ability to look innocent whole not saying anything about anything for fear of legal repercussions, though this sausagey implosion from guilt seldom looks pretty. 

There’s the fifth column (as in Hemingway’s play by this name), the not-fourth-but-fifth force, the musical perfect fifth of highest consonance, the Keplerian nestling of the five Platonic solids,  Beethoven’s Fifth, a fifth of (good) scotch, the fifth cardinal direction (the center), the five books of the Torah, the five pillars of Islam, the worst categorization of hurricanes and tornadoes, living in the fifth Mayan world, the fifth Fibonacci number, and on and on.

And aside from being the number that Joe DiMaggio wore on his pinstripes, it is also the number of the  Euclidean postulate that called to all those who were interested in the possibilities of the postulate not being so—that there exists as perfect a non-Euclidean system as there is for the Euclidean.  The fact of the matter is that this calls into question the foundation, the very basis, of mathematics.  Or used to.

All of this was brought into mind by this 1957 ad for the RECOMP computer produced by Autonetics.  The image of a sheet of numbers circling the earth¹, the product of digital computation, suggested structure, mathematical imperative and solidification of numbers.  But the point of this was the bottom line: what was the point, and for that matter, what was the point?  They were hardly physical things floating in space, but ideas (except of course in the worlds of Flatland). 

Euclidean structure was the infallible, rigid, predictive, explanatory structure and the most accurate descriptor of physical space.  This had certainly been the case for fifteen hundred years or so, or at least until the struggling fifth postulate of Euclid’s Elements became really, well, unwieldy.  More to the point, the axiom, the parallel postulate axiom, wasn’t as self-evident as the first four, and wasn’t provable from the other nine of the first ten axioms.  And so came the unbelievable question, what if the fifth postulate wasn’t true?  What if there were other geometries—non-Euclidean geometries—that were as provable as that of the Master?  The possibility of relegating the understanding of nature and the physical surroundings to something other than the existing geometry was simply, positively, extraordinary. 

The origins for this movement away from Euclid started with Girolamo Saccheri (his book published in 1733 but not “discovered” for its non-Euclidean importance for another 150 years) Georg Kluegel (1763), Johann Lambert (Theorie der Parallellinien, 1766) and Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752-1833, who was sort of in a similar boat with Saccheri in that his work wasn’t actually published until after that of the next two mathematicians); and coming to a point of real invention in the work of Nikolai Lobachevsky (1792-1856) and Janos Bolyai³ (1802-1860). (It would be incorrect to credit these last two men [plus Gauss] with the creation of non-Euclidean geometry given the longish and complex history of its development.)

This work brought into question the way in which the world was seen, and the very foundation of recording visualized space.  This is all much messier than had been planned (so to speak) by almost all previous mathematicians, questioning the very foundations of mathematics.  The orderliness of the earth-circling numbers doesn’t seem to be quite as they were, but as Henri Poincare stated, the “new” system isn’t anything better or worse, just different,  a new and more convenient way of looking at things⁴.

Notes

1. To be honest about it, the foundations of math bit didn’t suggest itself right away.  The first thing I thought when looking at what this paper trail was supposed to represent—a string of numbers 41 billion zeroes long—didn’t look right.  Given the size of the numbers coming out of the “printer” there would need to be five times as many rings around the earth.  But when you read the text the numbers are supposed to be “hand written”.  Therefore if you assume the numbers to be less than an inch high and with no spaces in between, then this 2.5 times around the earth works out to be accurate to the number of inches in the circumference. 
2. Still earlier work is found in the work of  Omar Khayyam's Discussion of Difficulties in Euclid, John Wallis and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi... among others.
3. Bolyai’s work—published as an appendix to his father’s work on the foundations of geometry—was privately reviewed by the great and impossibly smart Carl Gauss, who gave it a backhanded series of compliments while at the same time saying “I thought so…”  Which was true, evidently, as it looks as though he was working on the problem beginning in 1799.
4. "If geometry were an experimental science, it would not be an exact science. it would be subject to continual revision ... the geometrical axioms are therefore neither synthetic a priori intuitions nor experimental facts. They are conventions. Our choice among all possible conventions is guided by experimental facts; but it remains free, and is only limited by the necessity of avoiding every contradiction, and thus it is that postulates may remain rigorously true even when the experimental laws which have determined their adoption are only approximate. In other words the axioms of geometry (I do not speak of those of arithmetic) are only definitions in disguise. What then are we to think of the question: Is Euclidean geometry true? It has no meaning. We might as well ask if the metric system is true and if the old weights and measures are false; if Cartesian coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false. One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient.” --from:  M J Greenberg, Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries: Development and history. (1980).

Things They Took To War, 1915 [Official-issue Pocket Contents]

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 923

[This post is related to an earlier one here on shipping the belongings of The Fallen during WWII.]

The 27 Feb 1915 issue of The Illustrated London News is remarkable.  Yesterday’s post was generated by an image appearing in it of sappers mining under a battlefield to create an underground attack on the enemy’s trench lines.  A few pages into the issue shows a series of pictures describing the regulation issue for an enlisted man headed into combat—simple, scary, and heartrending. And of course a true measure of the courage and fortitude of these millions of men who marched to the Front with all what today looks to be  not-adequate material.  It is hard for me to imagine going off to conquer your enemy and your own fear with these sorts of supplies, marching along with all of these slight bits jangling and clanging to each of my steps.

[All of the images are expandable.]

The images themselves are, I think, unintentionally spectacular for their design and arrangement, not the least of which is the fact that all of the materiel is suspended from rope or wire. 

There is no way for me to know what of this material was instantly discarded (if any), or what was thrown into ditches because they didn’t make sense or were too heavy or cumbersome or got in the way.  Or what of these supplies were actually carried into battle.  Given the nature of the fighting, perhaps all of it was carried in and out. 

Basically though the pictures just make me uneasy, nervous; so many things look so slight and needy.  The canteen looks tiny; there’s only two pair of socks (!?) but two pipes; the “grocery ration” looks inadequate; the ammunition pouches look stingy. But the “housewife” looks useful, and its always good to have scissors, and a handkerchief.  I’m not so sure about the purse.

It just seems to me an amazing display of the stuff that the British soldier was given to haul into the future with him. 

 

Bad Places to Be Dept., #1:Fighting Underground in Sub-Trench Warfare, 1915

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 922

"Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun.
Take it on the run, on the run, on the run.
Hear them calling you and me,
Every Son of Liberty.
Hurry right away, no delay, go today.
Make your Daddy glad to have had such a lad.
Tell your sweetheart not to pine,
To be proud her boy's in line."
--Opening of George M. "Cohan's Over There"

It is difficult to think of soldiers fighting one another across hedgerows or trenches, hiding behind earth, creating a death-vacuum on the land in between--but worse yet would be fighting in these scenarios underground. 

Finding this large double-page illustration in The Illustrated London News¹gave me a physical reaction like the one I get when thinking about the discarded  Dalton Trumbo’s²  anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun.  The novel’s main character (Joe Bonham) is virtually encased in his own mind, having lost his arms, legs and face in an explosion on a WWI battlefield—the story is told from his bedridden perspective; dark, bandaged, alone, his mind and brain functioning, and with little means of communication or control over his body. .Among other obvious things, it makes me feel a peculiar stuffy coldness.  [The two sets of four images following should be viewed as two-parts of one long image, the bottom part being on the right.]

And so too when I look at these soldiers tunneling under a dead battlefield, working their way slowly—a foot an hour—towards the enemy trenches, desperately trying to blow a hole in an immovable object resistant to infantry and artillery.  The soldiers—sappers—were sent in to do a job that could no longer be accomplished above the ground.

This sort of warfare is extremely old, though the name is not, being about 150 years old. These soldiers were forward combat engineers, and had training across a number of different areas—they were responsible for many technical chores, like building (and blowing up) bridges, laying/clearing minefields, general demolition, defense construction, and, of course, fighting.  It could be a tremendously difficult job, unimaginable.

The “sapp” part of “sapper” comes from the French “sappe”, which refers to the other main part of their job during WWI, which was digging advancing trenches, a zigzag construction of a long horizontal half-hole which allowed an infantry force to slowly advance towards an enemy’s entrenched position. Another part was to tunnel under the enemy's lines, and then blow them to smithereeens so that a successful attack could be launched into the weakened position.

Here’s what I think about when I think about these men doing this job:  that two teams, British and German, start to tunnel towards each other’s lines, and somehow, in the middle of the battlefield, somehow manage to dig directly towards one another, their tunnels literally colliding.  Hand-to-hand combat through the opening connecting the two sapper tunnels, then gunfire.  Alerted, the artillery from each side zero-in on what is suspected to be the opening end of the tunnels, pummel them, destroying the access.  So now, both sets in what is now virtually one tunnel, are fighting in the dark.  Even though the topside is only two feet away, any hole would open into the killing zone, making it impossible to escape that way.  It would be a bad place to be.

 

Notes

1. The issue is 27 Feb 1915.  The illustration is entitled "They Sent us in front with a Fuse an' a Mine', Sapping and Mining Under the Enemy's Trenches". The first half of the title is from Kipling's "Sappers": They send us in front with a fuse an' a mine , To blow up the gates that are rushed by the Line...

2. Trumbo has an interesting history, to put it mildly. An old Communist, he once gave up his old associates to the FBI at the start of WWII--an act he later thought of as being stupid and wrong.  It also had the opposite effect for him--he thought he was being patriotic, but the FBI was more interested in him than his information.  He would get eaten up by McCarthyist operatives and denied HUAC any information on any of the famous "Hollywood Ten".  He got a year in jail and was blacklisted, booted out of LA. He came back--mostly under someone else's name (see the link above for his screenwriting credits, which are substantial)--and acknowledged shortly before he died.