Ptak Science Books

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.

How FDR Made Women (1) Nervous and thus (2) Older. An Appeal to Vote Republican, 1936

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 921

{This continues "The Coming Sex War of 1919")

Theodore J. Goe, the author of “Let’s Protect our Women”, must have been a synesthete, with the ability to smell the future.  My copy of this pamphlet used to be the Copyright Deposit copy, and is dated January 18, 1936, and what Mr. Goe was smelling were the winds of the November presidential election; and since he was a Republican—or at least an anti-Rooseveltian—what he smelled was outrageous defeat for his cause. 

And so he wrote this elegantly-produced little oddness, trying to dip into the wellspring of the enfranchised female vote (just sixteen years old at this point), trying with fatherly will to scoop women out of the harmful ways of Roosevelt’s policies.

The “protection” that women needed was for uncertainty which led to nervousness and which attacked their youth to send them into a slavery. The thinking here went sort of like this:  women were being attacked by FDR, who was “cruelly prolonging the depression” by not helping people with jobs, thus depriving their men of a fair wage which is what made women happy; without the “happiness” of a husband with a good job, “life becomes more serious than it should be”; this fights against “national influence which tends to rob [women] of their youth”, making women older sooner. And it was this premature aging that the women are to vote against in 1936.

Mr. Goe may well have been a crank, but to him and his readers this thinking might’ve made some sort of contemporary sense, after a fashion.  He did forget that women made up more than 30% of the workforce at this point, and had more sources of happiness and youth than a man with a decently-paying job, plus having a life and opinion outside of serving home/hearth/husband, but no matter. (This, by the way, is where Mr. Goe thought American women lived:)

Women didn’t rush to aid FDR’s competition in the ’36 race, when Roosevelt redefined “landslide” by crushing his Republican challenger, Kansan Alf Landon.  There wasn’t any election like it since the two-party system became nationalized 80 years earlier, Landon loosing to Roosevelt by an electoral balance of 523-8. Landon swept Vermont and Maine, with FDR taking everything else.  (No one would quite clear the plate like this ‘till Reagan turned Walter Mondale inside-out in 1984, 525-13.)

Landon was a decent man who had an interesting post-political career—even so, it’s a good thing that he lost.

Boullee, Lequeu and Ledoux: Reposts of Two Musical Slideshows

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  &   Blog Bookstore

[For another bit on Boullee see also my post  Imago Frammeni: Boulle, the Dogon, Jouffret, the Simple and the Complex]

(1) The Fantastic Self-Portraits of the Visionary Architect, Jean-Francois Lequeu

I guess it is easy to want to call M. Lequeu (1757-1825 (?)) an outsider, though he was hardly that.

He was an exceptional talent who was exceptionally well-trained (and who won the highest awards offered by his school), and started out in a staid and brilliant way, a successful draftsman in his own right, and student of Scoufflot, helping to design ancient-inspiration buildings for the super rich. He was at the pinnacle of the drafting trade, though not so on the designing end.  Along came the Revolution and away went his architectural career—he wound up a surveyor and a cartographer until his retirement in 1815, after which he enters social and historical oblivion, until he finally dies in total obscurity ten years later (or so, the date is unclear).  His post-revolutionary vision was as phenomenal as his success in selling his ideas were dismal.  Well, this is really a cheap shot—his imagination was shockingly large, enormous, his designs fantastic and beautiful, and completely unexpected, and they seemed to grow larger/loftier and more interesting as time wore away at him. But he was far in front of the curve so far as popular (public) opinion was concerned.  Even among the other visionaries of the time (like Ledoux and Boullee) it was Lequeu who staked out the furthest reaches of architecture, and also with great depth and virtuosity.

I think that as Lequeu was cleaved away, cell by cell falling through the floorboards of his single rented room, he reached further into time and deeper into space than almost any architect of that hundred-year period.   I also think that he was very well aware of his genius being seen as pure eccentricity—his half-dozen or so self portraits are among the most reaching that I’ve seen (in the pre-modern era). 

If Lequeu’s visions existed at all in the world of French architecture it was in the Deep Underground—a place that he may have founded.  He was certainly, at the very least, its geologist.

His self portraits are striking, but perhaps not so much more so than those by Rembrandt--he was certainly exploring modes of expression (Raphael's series of engravings on the emotion of the human face is a good example of this study)--Lequeu though seems to always manage to suggest that he is an observed inmate somewhere.  There is a great undercurrent of "otherness" and great remove to them--something that makes places the self portraits into a different--empty, lonely--class.

Make an on-line slideshow at www.OneTrueMedia.com

(2) Etienne Boullee, Images with Music

I've been collecting images by some of  the great, visionary architects of 18th century France:  Etienne Boullee (1728-1799), Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) and the semi-impossible Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1737-1825).  It was a tough time for these architects to see far into the future at the time of the Revolution, as people who were even less deserving than these men lost their heads.  In any event I've compiled a short three minute video exhibiting some of their works, using the music of Wim Mertens for Peter Greenaway's love poem to M. Boullee called The Belly of an Architect.  I couldn't but help using this music in this context, sorry to say--it just goes perfectly with these images.  (Also, I've written about M. Ledoux here.)

The Coming Sex War of 1919

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 920

This slight, four-page pamphlet was a flare to the newly enfranchised women of Great Britain¹,  a very-shakily congratulatory bit with wide, sniffy overtones of vast male superiority.  The author takes the intended (female) reader at a very slow, almost-stopped pace about what voting is all about, turning down the rhetoric to explain what a vote “is”.  Not only that, but the following as well:
“It seems, therefore, important to give as simply as possible a brief sketch of:
(1)    What Politics are. [Politics is the Science of Government.] (2) The Duties of Citizenship. (3) Coalition Government”.

Just because women got the vote (or partial vote:  they had top be over thirty years of age and have property or be
married to a man with property; full voting rights devoid of property requirements didn’t come in until 1928) didn’t
mean that they enjoyed a relaxation of their inferior social caste. The social consciousness of the status of women may have been slightly fragmented in 1918/19, but only enough to introduce them to the world of politics as you would a child—at least as far as this pamphlet is concerned².

But this work comes around a bit, retracting its insulting narrative somewhat by the end of the pamphlet, as what the writer really wanted was to snag a bunch of these women to vote for the Coalition Candidate, Mr. Lloyd George, in the General Election of December 1918.  Their votes were definitely wanted, and the need was addressed, if not without a little fear that women would retract themselves and form their won party. The pamphlet states:

"If the Voters are mean and corrupt, they will get what they deserve...There is a movement among women at the present time, especially among those who were most active in working for the Vote, to refuse to join any of the old political Associations, but to form a Women's Party or Federation of Women. Such a step is to be very much regretted, for it will certainly lead to a sort of sex war, men and women being divided into opposite camps, each fighting for their selfish ends." 

Assuring women of what a "vote" and "politics" are, and demanding that the priorities of "women's political parties" would lead to a "sex war", the author blandly asks his (!) readers to vote for Lloyd George.

Notes

1. The countries granting partial or full voting rights to women prior to the U.S (1920) include:  New Zealand (full voting privileges), 1893; Australia, 1902 (partial); Finland, 1906; Norway (able to stand for election); Denmark (1915); Iceland (1915); Canada (1917); Austria, Estonia, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russian Federation, United Kingdom (partial) (1918);  Belarus, Belgium , Luxembourg, Netherlands, Ukraine (1919); Albania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, United States of America (1920).
2.  As beautiful a thinker as Darwin was his mind regarding women of the mid-Victorian age was pretty modest, treating his own wife as a sort of advanced child.  She never did get a key to the key cabinet at Downs…

(I should point out an earlier post that I made about the coming equality of women in voting and lung cancer, "Deathly Equality: Liberty, Lung Cancer and Women's Rights".)

Killing London with the Future: City Planning with the Bressey Report, 1937

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 920

Sir Charles Bressey didn’t really try to “kill” London, of course, though parts of his Greater London plan for redirecting and accommodating increasing vehicular traffic certainly would’ve destroyed some great beauty had some of his suggestions been implemented.

I have no doubt that Sir Charles was on the right path to something, here and there, but all I have access to regarding his work appears as an article in The Illustrated London News (28 May 1938), and much of it looks like a absurdo-horror/sci-fi setting for a film by Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton.  I can hear the noise of this city, and it ain’t pretty:  a road through Hyde Park, floating pontoon car parks in the Thames, , elevated highways sitting on top of apartment buildings, removing Piccadilly “Circus”, removing the “park” part of Hyde Park, and so on.

(Very slightly related is this post from 2008 featuring a self-defence plan that would semi-encapsulate London (1938))

And so I’ll pass along these images of “traffic improvements” without too much comment, letting them speak for themselves.

Trafalgar Square as a triple-decker parking deck. (What can one say?)

Hyde Park, with a semi-submerged road cutting through the heart of the place.

 

 

 

 

Flying Wing Aircraft, 1930

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 919

What can I say?  I just like the flying wing. Also I should point out that the Illustrated London News is an excellent resource for schematic cut-aways like this--I think that I have 125 or so of them here for the 1910-1945 period.

Junkers built this fabulous flying (“inhabited”) “wing only” aircraft, sending it up for commercial service in 1929 as the largest airplane in the world. Only two were built (though a Japanese military knock-off ran to a production quantity of six), and I imagine that it was quite expensive making the Berlin-London flight, cruising in around at 109 mph.

I would like to know what the artist was thinking about when he decided to draw a standing man in the sleeping compartments. Not only that, the fellow is looking straight at the artist...perhaps it is a sly, tiny self-portrait?

 

Notes

 

1.  Plane specifications:

Crew: Seven (including a full-time engineer who could service the plane’s four engines from inside the plane).

Capacity: between 30 and 34 passengers, depending upon variation of the aircraft.

Length:  75 ft

Wingspan: 144 ft

Height: 23 ft

Wing area: 3,122 sq ft

Empty weight: 32,893 lbs

Loaded weight: 52,900 lb

Max takeoff weight: 46,826 lb

Maximum speed: 140 mph

Cruising speed: 109 mp

Range: 2,150 miles

Service ceiling: 12,100 ft

Missing "Dots" and Not Seeing the Discovery of Platelets, 1842

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 918

{This post continues some new and unusual cross-categories in this blog, like Missing Things Making Holes; Bombs as Breads.  Today's bit combines the "Blank, Empty and Missing Things" with "The History of Dots" categories.]

Alfred Donne (1801-1878), physician, experimenter, microscopist and photographer, is best known for things other than what he should probably be best known for:  his discovery of the third element of the blood, platelets.  Donne had a wonderful vision, and was among the very first on the scene to write about and employ the spectacular invention of the daguerreotype in chemistry and microscopy.  As a matter of fact, Donne, along with his collaborator Leon Foucault,  produced the very first engraved images of photomicrographs for his cytology paper of 1840. (He was also the first to use electricity in producing a medical illustration, and was among the first modern physicians to write on the great efficacy of mothers using their own milk in breast feeding their children.)  The discovery of platelets paper of 1842¹--preceding two other works published in the same year--does indeed identify the new object, but actually fails to make a methodological examination of the new body, calling the new units "globulins du chyle" (or small globules, derived from plasma).  He also fails to make a drawing of what he saw; so, the combination of these two important elements asked the reader to accept his findings on faith, the tools of reproduction of his observations not being present. 

And so we remember Donne for some other significant things, and less so for his lightly-interpreted and un-illustrated, and missing, "dots".

Notes
1.Donne, Alfred. De l'origine des globules du sang, de leur mode de formation et de leur fin. Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Sciences, Paris, 1842, 14: 366-168. 

(Overall the history of the discovery of platelets is complicated:  Leewenhoek (1675) and Henson (1782)  were the first to fully describe the “undefined” particles of the blood; Donne’s work was then more fully described by Beale in 1850, and then again (identified as “small corpuscles” by Zimmerman in 1860 and then again by Schultze in 1874 and Laptschinski (also in 1874). William Osler then enters the scene in 1880, followed by Giulio Bizzozzero who was the first, in the years 1881 -1882, to establish central role of platelets not only in physiological haemostasis, but also in thrombosis.  Anyway it is a longish and not-clear-to-me history.)

Missing Things Making Holes: Soviet Bread-not-Bombs in Finland, 1940

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 917

[This post is a hybrid category bridging “Blank and Empty Things” and “A History of Holes”—it is really an entry for blank and missing things making holes]

1.  The Soviet Union’s foreign minister Molotov¹ wanted to make it very clear to the rest of the world that his country was not bombing civilian targets in Finland during the winter war of 1939/1940.

2.  Molotov insisted that targets that were being bombed near Finnish cities were actually airbases.

2.1   Also, since the complaining FDR was over 4000 miles away there was no way that he could “see” what was being bombed.

3.  If there were civilian targets that looked as though they were being bombed, then

    3.1   they weren’t being bombed; and

    3.2   if anything at all was going on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was  dropping bread on the town’s/city’s starving inhabitants.

4.   So far as undefended, non-military targets were concerned, the Soviet Union redefined “bomb” as “bread”.

5.   Therefore, what we’re seeing in this image above are not bombs, but bread; that, or the houses were airbases, which would turn the bread back into bombs.

Molotov insisted that no civilians were direct targets of Soviet bombing campaigns in Finland.  Also, if there were people being killed in these bombing raids they would necessarily and by definition be aircraft workers or air bases support staff or other military personnel.  

This strikingly designed image is from the 17 February 1940 issue of The Illustrated London News; the design is by G.H. Davies, the phenomenal ILN draftsman, and elegantly (and forcefully) depicts the innards of the bomb and its effect on its target.

It is a spectacular and brilliant presentation of the new(ish) Soviet hybrid terror bomb that was being used in the non-existent attacks on Finnish cities.  [The 5’ bomb was made to be deployed in two sections:  the front end of the bomb inside the false nose cone contains dozens of incendiary bombs, released by a revolutions-generated cap propeller, which fall away from the main section of the bomb, which contains a high explosive.]

Since the non-existent bombs that were not being used against non-military installations and were actually bread, the Finns gave the weapons the nickname of “Molotov’s Breadbaskets”.

This was just a down-right nasty bomb, and the illustration shows it falling on and destroying a quiet town with no visible military advantage. The town not being bombed was called Sortavala, which—after numerous Soviet attacks in December 1939—was in actuality destroyed by Soviet air power on 2 February 1940.

The man ultimately responsible for this campaign and the murder of millions of his own countrymen through means of induced starvation, disappearances and ruthless killings—Joseph Stalin—was post mortem dispatched in much the same manner as the reasoning listed above.  Stalin was ignored to the point of non-existence, de-Stalinized and  left entirely out of the 50-volume second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia²  published just a few years after his 1953 death. Stalin executed his brutal and long-time political compatriot Lavrentii Beria, (1899 - 1953) right before his own death, ordering that people who owned the GSE to physically cut out the Beria entry. It is unfortunate that Stalin could not have been denied his existence 30 years earlier.

Molotov, on the other hand, in spite of his enormous sins against humanity (as principle architect of the Great Terror, the extermination of millions of Ukranians, and etc.) was finally removed from government following Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaigns (i.e. by 1962)  and managed to live out the rest of his life alive, not dying until 1986 at the age of 96.

(The "Molotov Cocktail" by the way was not named for him by Soviet soldiers or freedom fighters or whatever fighting for the USSR—it was named for the petrol bomb used by Finnish soldiers and civilians fighting against the Soviets invading their country  in 1939/11940 and again in 1943/4)

Notes

1. In 1940 Molotov was the foreign minister of the Soviet Union, and had just completed negotiating the Non-Aggression pact with Nazi Germany.  This gave the USSR free range for its relations (read “occupy/annex”) Estonia, Bessarabia, Latvia and the Ukranian/Belorussian-occupied section of Poland (to the Curzon Line), and to also conduct its war with Finland.  The fierce Finns never lost their independence, though they did lose a part of their country. 

2. The GSE had a somewhat complicated publishing history, winding up with 65 volumes over its two editions, constructed with very questionable state-controlled X-Ray communist vision spectacles. There is so much in these volumes that is wrong/sanitized/fiction that I have no idea how a non-specialist might be able to use the thing.

What 1.5 Billion Pounds Bought the Military in 1938: Finding a Gem Inside a Great Graphic

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 916

The Illustrated London News for 27 February 1937 hosted a brilliantly designed graphic illustrating the ways in  which the British War department could/should spend 1.5 billion pounds (or about $100 billion in 2009 dollars, sort of) over a five-year period as the price of keeping the peace.  Of course they wouldn't make it but a quarter of that distance as Austria fell to Czechoslovakia which fell to Poland and the end.  The full-page pictorial effort is to the right:

Nestled in the corner of this page--at about 2x1 inches--is this lovely little graphic, showing that 1.5 bil could purchase 300 Queen Marys, which this delightful little design showed to great effect, and a hidden gem inside of a gem. First is a detail of this detail,

 

Followed by the full smidgen of the overall page of comparisons and analogies:

Then there's the semi-standard presentation of what the Navy could purchase:

And then the Army:

And of course the Territorial Army:

And the Air Force (which if you look closely includes a balloon barrage  facility at upper right):

By far the most interesting to me is the hidden gemoid of Queen Marys, all produced by the fabulous G.H. Davies, who did many hundreds of such images and sectional cutaways and plans and technical drawings for the ILN over a 25-year period.  M.r Davies may well be my favorite technical artist of this period.