Ptak Science Books

Flying Tanks, 1930's-Style

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There wasn't much pretty in the physical outcome of this thinking--to construct "flying" tanks for quick maneuvers into battle situations--but I think that I like the thinking in it, especially as it seems that the aircraft-end of the tank was re-usable. Still, there was the whole "landing" part of the operation, which meant that (at this time, anyway) the tanks had to be placed and not parachuted to the ground, which also means that the armor would be relatively removed from the field of battle.  But this would be better than driving the things there, or hauling them all on a train  for quick transport.

[Source:  Popular Mechanics, vol 65, 1936.]

Also I guess I'm partial to the design of the tank--which I'm guessing was a fixed-position mobile canon--because it seems so strikingly modern. (Except for the tread and wheels part, which is the place where battles are won and lost, at least according to Heinz Guderian.)  But I like the design, which at first glance reminded me of the great T-34, the Russian workhorse of WWII, sort of, at least for its low-profile sensibility, but really more like the contemporary   The Russian Chyorny Oryol ("Black Eagle").  It really looks a lot more like the STUG assault gun, here:

[Source: combatreform.org, here; a truly excellent site.]

 

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

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 daily 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. 

[This piece of ephemera may be purchased through our blog bookstore, here.]

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.

Map of Nazi Invasion from Uruguay

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I've post a number of thing son this blog relating to Nazi invasion routes to America and the potential threat of Poland to Nazi Germany, all stories more vividly enhanced (whether true or not) by maps--as a matter of fact, maps seem to be validity enhancers to just about any story, for it seems that maps represent a will of some sort, and where there's a will, there's a way, and so there must've been a good Nazi plan for attacking South America via Uruguay.  Except that there wasn't.  But the map looked good, and certainly it made people think.

For example, see the posts Invasion Routes to America:  Nazi Invasion Scenarios of the U.S. and Germany Surrounded (map below).

[Source:  Why We Fight, the Battle of Britain.]

WWI--Post-War Photographs, November/December 1918

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I have made numerous posts on this blog using images from my archive of American news service WWI photographs, though there are few depicting scenes just after the end of the war's end on 11:00 a.m. on 11/11/11. These photographs below do so, and all come from the National Library of Scotland (which can be accessed here). They are all "British Official War Photographs", which was a service similar to its American cousin--various news and photo agencies were given access to images produced by a pool of photographers, all of which passed by the eyes of a military censor. They were for the most part aimed at the "correct" version of the news, though given the subject matter there were plenty of images that were extremely powerful.  In a war that claimed 100,000,000 casualties, the photographic image was a powerful war-time propaganda tool. 

[Original reads: 'SCENES ON THE WESTERN FRONT. WAR TROPHIES SECTION. German trophies from Vimy Ridge and Messines. In centre is Prussian Guards drum.']

On the Cost-Effectiveness of Killing: Poison Gas (1921) and Atomic Bombs (1945)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1678

Herbert Quick did a fair amount of thinking about the military use of poison gas, and it winds up, in the final analysis, thinking that it was tolerable.  What About Chemical Warfare? (published by the Newspaper Enterprises Association in 1921) is certainly a possible title for a Duck-and-Cover A-Bomb or You and Your Hormones kind-of-film--it has that certain stripe to it, bearing the certainty of wrongness that becomes more visible with each passing month.  (The pamphlet is available for purchase from our blog bookstore, here.)  But Mr. Quick took the slow boat around his issue, thinking about it a little long and out loud, before coming to his final conclusion in the chapter titled "Gas Warfare Cheapest and Most Effective Arm of Defense".

{See here for my post on Willis R. Whitney's letter/proposal for establishing the American chemical warfare capacity, 1917.]

He points out the enormous impact in the war effort that relatively small chemical corps played in WWI--something on the order of hundreths of one percent of all serving soldiers were employed in the combined chemical corps, saying "how small a body to produce such great results!" Which is true, assuming that by "great" he meant 'widespread', though it is unclear exactly what he was talking about.

Mr. Quick (born in the first year of the American Civil War and dead four years after the publication of this pamphlet, writing evidently from the cushion of old age) does make a case for poison gas being not so inhuman as presented by most civilized people, pointing out both its high quick-death rate and survivability/recovery rates, which seems to be giving/taking at the same time. No matter:  "But woe to the army or nation that does not keep up with the times.  The Angel of Death will breathe in their faces" he writes. 

The author also warns that though Germany was "stripped" of her war-making capacities, he thought it was not so of the industries necessary to produce poison gas. He points out that Germany can produce these munitions in secret, and that if any "militaristic nation conquers the world in the future", it will be through the use of the poison gas it developed in secret. 

Defense was also important:  "in the absence of efficient defense worked out beforehand, our great cities might be wiped out with gas bombs dropped from aircraft".  Mr. Quick believes that protecting cities is possible, writing simply "preparation will prevent such a crisis".  Indeed.  Unfortunately no ideas about this defensive posture were forthcoming, though he did bring himself around to writing about gas as a defensive tool.  Against looters. And rioters. And snipers.  "Gas puts the sniper in the power of his enemy" Quick writes, using the Marine action in Vera Cruz, Mexico, as a good example of where gas ("gas grenades") would have come in handy.

The bottom line is of course the bottom line, practically stating that poison gas as a weapon was indisputably more cost-conscious than anything else, by far, each dollar spent on chemical warfare being worth "from three to five hundred for the army".  Poison gas services Quick says should be pursued, because "gas warfare cannot be stopped until all war is stopped".

Gas warfare "gives the educated, intelligent nations the advantages over the people of lower civilizations".

"When both sides are prepared it is much less inhumane than war with bullets and high explosives; but it means horrible annihilation to the army which is unprepared."

It is an interesting exercise to replace "poison gas" with other types of weapons, just to see how it reads.

Mr. Quick was up and down in his treatment of poison gas and war, though almost entirely down.  One thing he didn't see, that no one saw, really, was the use of a particular gas that was used to destroy millions of people, and which was developed quite in the open in Germany for many years, used for killing rats.  The Nazis simply used it instead on people.  No one saw Zyklon-B coming, and no one could have, even when they did.

See also my post here on Hermann Goering and Zyklon-B.

William Shockley--a future Nobelist and probable weak member of a Nobel-team that invented the transistor and which included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, or I should say rather a team of Walter Brattain and John Bardeen including William Shockley--sent forth a memo on the mathematics of destruction and the use of the atomic bomb.  He was part of a largish team working on what to do with the new technology once the bomb had been used and the war won.  (I've written more on this paper here.)

This paper was written towards the end of 1945 and is on five pages and runs about 1500 words, and is an extension of work he had already been doing for Henry Stimson with Quincy Wright on evaluating the combinations of casualties that would lead the Japanese to surrender.  He begins this paper with a logical statement of the issue of the economics of conventional and atomic bombing, ending with the sentence “For atomic bombing destruction is still more cheap”.  What Shockley is getting to is the overall cost of the amount of destruction caused per square mile, and the conclusion that he draws over these five pages is the destruction caused by the atomic bomb is 1/100th the cost of conventional bombing per square mile destroyed (“atomic bombing is probably 10 to 100 times cheaper than ordinary bombing”).

Shockley also recognizes that the problem in the near future will be the increasing cheapness of producing atomic (and greater) weapons, and their developing accessibility to small nations.  “This cheapness is a new factor and indicates that an unparalleled loss of human resources will accompany future wars.  The ability of small nations to do great damage is also a consequence of the cheapness.”  He writes further that taking this thinking to its “logical conclusion”, that at some point in the future a single individual will be able to use this new technology to destroy the world.  The main point though that he was making in this line of thinking was the dispersion and proliferation of the new technology--that an arms race would occur, and that it would be dangerous, and that it could be very very bad.  Shockley has of course nothing to say about any of that or the implications of his finds as that was not his charge. 

After figuring that the cost of destruction by the atomic bomb was about $600,000 per square mile (compared to $6,500,000 per square mile for conventional bombing), Shockley concludes that “since the atomic bomb art is in its infancy, we may well expect future economies of a factor of 10 in cost per square mile destroyed…”

The Children's Battalion--Santa and Guns, 1916

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I don't know the Illustrated History of Santa and Gun Gifts, but I guess that a book could be written if one already doesn't exist.  Well, that or something associating Santa with unusual, or questionable, gifts in his bags of joy could be made into something, something disappointing.  I'm not that person to collect those sorts of images because I have always held Santa in very high esteem, and I don't care to have too many of those images floating in my mind, exploiting some dark corners of unknown memories, disturbing the happy bits with unneeded and unwanted visual info.  But, well, these pictures below, found in the December 1916 issue of the uncommonly-seen journal, Illustrated World, provides a little glimpse into the manufactured desires of kid-wishes for toys during wartime, and so I'll pass them along.  These things do tell us something about the period--like the famous multiple images of Santa hanging cigarette carton Christmas ornaments (seen here in the post on Gift Porn, 1954), or a smoking Santa stuff a stocking with a box of Lucky Strikes--so it makes sense to make sense of them.

 

I guess kids have fairly well always wanted toys (or not) guns for Christmas,  gifts from Santa, or at least so long as Santa has been around or identified as so, and to see Santa with a rifle would not be so unusual, especially given that this was deep into the second year of the bloody Great War.  (I have another interesting image here, somewhere, showing Santa distributing presents to British troops in trenches, riding a tank, but presently I can't find its stack in a stack of stacks.)

Perhaps the issue of playing with guns and cannons and so on was a way of easing fear and distress during wartime; perhaps it meant something soothing for the developing mind of a child.  I don't know.

An Episode in the History of Bread Photography: Monumental Bread and Infographics, 1914

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1662

In the history of pictures of bread, this loaf seems to be about the biggest.  The 60-million-pound loaf is meant to represent a week's ration for teh newly-fighting German army.  The war, the Great War, WWI, was just beginning when this article hit the newsstands on 22 August 1914.  There wasn't much yet printed in the Scientific American regarding the war, and it seems as though this was the first cover of the magazine to deal with the new world-ender.  But in the blazes of the guns of August (B Tuchman) the end of the conflict might've looked a little close at hand.  I doubt that many would've seen the 100,000,000 dead and wounded that would come as a result of the war, at this point just finishing its first month.

I am not sure why, but the editors of SA chose to think about supply for their first stab at making a cover-comment about the war.  It does give some idea of the sheer numbers of people involved, at least on the German side.  Hoiw this is iterated by a 400-foot-tall loaf of bread, I can't exactly say.

(Are potatoes one tenth the density of :"meat"?  The potato sack and the meat chunk look to be about the same size, though the meat bit is less than a tenth of the weight of the potatoes.) 

Two issues later--5 September 1914--we see the following artistic display of quantitative data, a much more effective way of generating understanding on the differences in troop strengths among the waring countries:

 

The United States would not get involved in WWI until 1917, and so American statistics were not included in this image.  But if they were, the U.S. Army's size would be somewhat larger than little Montenegro there at the far right.  Given the American population of 92,000,000, the army was quite small, with barely 98,000 soldiers under arms (half of whom served overseas). (Montenegro's force of 50,000 was somehow pulled out of a population of 350,000 people--Belgium, with a population of 7 million, had an army more than double the size of that of the U.S.)  Of course this was a peacetime, hands-off army for the United States, and by the end of 1914 President Wilson expanded the standing army to 140,000; by 1918, when the newly-instituted draft¹ really kicked in, more than 4,000,000 people would be in the armed services, half of whom would serve overseas. 

Notes

1. Beginning in 1917 all males between the ages of 21 and 30 were required to register for the draft/military service, and by September 1918 more than 23,000,000 men had done so.  This was an extraordinary leap from the Army totals for 1914.   

Kolberg and Sachsenhausen, 1945--Visions of Fantasy and Reality

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1661

At the end of WWII there was a tale of two battles, both by the name of Kolberg.  One was a propaganda tool filmed in Agfacolor at the request of Josef Goebbels, a movie begun in 1944 about the mythically-endowed victory of Germany over Napoleon at Kolberg.  It was an epic, costly movie made at a time when the 180,000 "extras" composed of Wehrmacht troops could not be spared, but it was seen by Hitler and whoever was around to agree with him that a movie selling selflessness and sacrifice (blood sacrifice) was more valuable than a military victory¹. When it was finally put to bed, the movie "opened" virtually nowhere in Berlin in January 1945, as  the city was becoming a bombed-away shambles--much more so in the next three month.  The visions of resistance-to-the-last-breath played in few places outside of Hitler's bunker, where the dictator professed the qualities of sacrifice and the fight-to-the-death messages in the movie, though not applying those necessaries to himself.  

The other Kolberg battle was the Battle of Kolberg (a Baltic seaport city in Pomeria located about halfway between Berlin and Koenigsberg), which took place in real life from 4-18 March 1945.  It was a fight between the Germans and combined forces of the Soviet and Polish armies--it ended in Polish hands on the 18th following the retreat of the Germans and he destruction of most of the city.

It is ironic that the defeat of the Nazi forces in the real city of Kolberg occurred at nearly the same time as the wasteful film of the 1807 battle extolling the virtues of heroism and sacrifice was released.

It is interesting too that the  actor depicting the leading German hero in the movie Kolberg (directed Veit Harlan and Wolfgang Liebeneiner)  Heinrich George--who acted in a number of Nazi propaganda films after finding ways to get back into favor following his pre-Nazi pro-Communist politics--found himself arrested and imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he died of "complications" in 1946.

Sachsenhausen was one of the longest-lived concentration camps, being in operation from 1936 to 1950.  From its beginning to May 1945 it was of course a Nazi concentration camp (Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen), where from 1943 until the fall of Nazi Germany it was also an extermination camp.  As many as 200,000 people were seized and sent through Sachsenhausen and its satellite/tributary camps. From the end of 1945 to 1950 it was operated by the Soviet Union, where another 15,000-30,000 people were imprisoned, Heinrich George being one of them. 

In addition to the many horrors of Sachsenhausen, there was also this--it was the center of a plot to destroy the British economy with the production and distribution of a hundred million pounds worth of counterfeit British currency.  The lead counterfeiter at Sachsenhausen, Salomon Smolianoff (a gifted artist who once said "why make art when you can make money?") was an inmate with exceptional skills and who basically headed the team of workers responsible for this effort,  For good work in his part of pulling down the economy of Great Britain, Smolianoff was rewarded with an occasional go at a ping pong table, as well as less-rancid pieces of meat. 

[One of the forged Sachsenhausen notes.]

This was operation Bernhard, named for its director, SS Major Bernhard Kruger (the leader of the VI F 4a Unit in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office) or RSHA), who was responsible for the operation from 1942, and which eventually extended from Sachsenhausen to other camps, most notably a major operation at Auschwitz.  More than 134,000,000 pounds of what the Brits considered to be the most perfect counterfeits ever were produced, but for various reasons--not the least of which was sabotage instigated by extraordinarily brave concentration camp internees--the vast part of the plan was never implemented. 

As it turns out, Smolianoff survived Sachsenhausen, survived the war, and then became a puff of smoke. He was a wanted-but-not-found fugitive, and spent his last days in Brazil, painting.  And creating toys.  He died in 1976.

Bernhard Kruger (born in 1904), also survived the war.  When the pound-forging plan was scuttled in 1944, he moved the idea over to American currency, which he worked on until the end of the wat.  Although he was kept by the British for two years, and then by teh French for one year, he was eventually released, and faced no charges until a Denazification court ordered him to trial, where he was somehow acquitted.  He died an old man, aged 85, in 1989, in his bed. 

Notes:

1.  At least this is so as reported by Sir Ian Kershaw in his biography, Hitler, 1936-1945.

11 11 11: Veterans Day

Veterans Day repost:

I want to thank all Veterans today, all of our Veterans everywhere, for all of your sacrifices. I particularly want to say to say how much I appreciate the members of our family who have served: Uncle Pete (USMC, WWII), Uncle Ray (RCAF, RAF+USAAF, WWII), Uncle Stan (Navy, WWII), Uncle Alex (Army, WWII), Uncle Joe (Army, Korea), Uncle Jerry (Army, WWII), Uncle Frank (USAAF WWII), Uncle Walter (Navy WWII) and my other Uncle Stanley (Army, WWII), Uncle Francis (Army, WWII), Uncle Vincent (Army, WWII), cousin Billy (USMC, Vietnam) and Grandpa (Army, WWI); Patti's father Melvin Lonnie (Navy, WWII) and stepfather Boyce (Army, 2nd US Cav WWII), Uncle Guy (USMC WWII), Uncle Max (Army WWII) and her four relatives in the CSA. Nearly everyone was in battle, and nearly everyone came home. [Image: Uncle Walter looking at the 5-star Blue Star flag, Housatonic, Mass, 1943.]

Big Numbers and WWII Aircraft--Artistic Displays of Quantitative Data

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This post continues an earlier series on the artistic display of quantitative data--putting a face on big numbers. In particular it extends a collection of images of Second World War airplanes, "A Big Sea of Planes:  Quantitative Display of World War II  Bombers. The images below appear in the 17 October 1942 issue of the Illustrated London News in an article about the possibility of replacing seaborne troop and materiel transport across the Atlantic from America with the big Martin JRM Mars aircraft, getting the troops there faster and safer and releasing at least part of the naval force for wartime activities.  The images are pretty compelling:

 The caption states that 5000 Mars planes could get 500,000 soldiers to Europe.

 These were big planes¹ (200' wingspan, 117' long, 38' high, more below) and could haul 130+ troops.  By the time though that the powers-that-be were figuring out who the main contractor would be for production (and those production numbers in early 1942 were about 500 per year, at that point, anyway) the Battle of the Atlantic was already--in 1943--fairly well decided.  The U-Boot problem was solved enough for a continuous flow of soldiers and supplies, though not without a high cost in the first half of the Atlantic campaign.  (Overall, from 1939 to 1945, some 3,500 Allied merchant ships  and 175 Allied warships were sunk, costing the lives of 72,200 Allied sailors and merchant seamen.  The Germans lost more than 780 submarines along with fully three-quarters of all sailors in the U-Boot fleet, making some 30,000 men.)

 Below, a cutaway for the Mars:

Stats and Technical data on the Glenn-Martin(from Jane’s Fighting Aircraft of World War II, (1945):

WWII German Comic Book Propaganda

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The Bilderbogen vom Krieg--some examples of propaganda aimed at German children, efforts to convince them of the winning of the war, evidently a universal attempt....

Source:  Deutschsprachige Comics und Romanhefte vor 1945 here.

On the History of Blank, Missing and Empty Things: the Heart of Some Sort West

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post   (Part of the series on the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things.)

I've owned this photograph for a long time.  It has been in the files for many years, waiting for something to happen to it, waiting for it to be a little understood in some slight way of identification.  I've still not gotten around to it.  To me, it has always seemed like a photograph of a small post out in the American Far West, 90 men in dress uniform inside their "fort", or outpost, the commander and the camp dog addressed in front and the sergeants out on the flanks.  The enlisted men stand at ease. 

I'm really not sure though who or where they are.  The camp is very spread out, for one thing.  And for the age (I reckon this to be made around 1885, perhaps a little earlier) I would've thought that boots would've been visible under trousers.  And their hats/helmets--they really don't look to be made for the sun, and also seem too much of a bull's eye/target.  That's on first glance--nothing about their uniform seems fitted to the place:  no protection from the sun, trousers caught on low burrs and scrub, and so on.  But the uniforms--and helmets--seem to be in line with the Prussian-influenced dress of the time (or at least around 1882), including the ribbon-y materials draped around the commander's neck.  (I really don't know enough about U.S. Army uniforms to make a good qualified guess about who these men are.)

But the photo as art has always intrigued me, capturing the heart of a lonely place.  I know, though, that having spent  a little time hiking in the desert that the place is hardly empty, or blank.  But it can still be lonely if you want it to be, a state which isn't dependent on any of the conditions mentioned in the title of this post--its a created space, the loneliness.

I've wondered too about who those people are,  sitting together, (huddled?) at the far end of the soldiers' barracks, a speck visible over the shoulder of the sergeant (the last figure on the right in the top photo)? I suspect they must be Native Americans, or at least indigenous people.  They've faded into history too with the rest of the people in the photograph, a chance at a piece of tangible memory missed because, well, no one made any notes (that survived, at least) about the image. 

The photograph looks hot and cold to me at the same time...

(This image is available for purchase via our blog bookstore, here.)

A History of Changing Sides, Part 1: a Half-Fascinating, Wholly-Horrible Biography of a Forgotten Man

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1642

This is the first post in a new series on this blog on "changing sides"--that is, having a new allegiance, Adopting/acting on an something completely out of the mainstream of the personal experience, believing in the opposite of an established belief; to leave something, falling away or rejecting one thing for its opposite or something different, done with integrity or with the abandonment of honesty. 

Jacques Doriot.That was the name on the pamphlet that I pulled out of a stack of pamphlets segregated for their cover art.  Les Communistes et le chomage was written by Doriot in the year after he became mayor of St. Denis, an ancient commune just north of Paris, in 1932.  That was years, of course, after Doriot returned home from being a POW of the Germans in WWI and found himself joining the French Communist Party (PCF), a group in which he rapidly succeeded.  HE went to jail for the violent protest of teh French occupation of the Ruhr, emerging into the political arena as mayor of St. Denis.

At one point he was taken by the Communists, but a bitter debate erupted after which he was expelled from the Party (in 1934).  He abandoned thoughts of the communists and established a new ultra-nationalist Parti Populaire Français (PPF) in 1936.  From there things went downhill, but not yet downhill and on fire. 

Doriot supported the idea of France becoming more like its Facsist neighbors Germany and Italy, and when the war rolled into existence in 1939, Doriot jumped on the foreign Fascist bandwagon.  In France.  He supported the occupation of the Nazi's French occupation of the north, but when that proved to not be fascist enough for him, he toddled off to Paris where he found a better reception for his pro-Nazi sentiments among the Nazis themselves, what with the Vichy government providing too-soft a version of governance.  His transformation was in full blossom by that time, when in 1941--after having an Ezra Pound-like experience in espousing pro-Nazi beliefs on Radio Paris--he and Marcel Deat went almost all the way into the heart of the Fuhrer, creating the Legion des Volontaires Francais (LVF), which was a French force organized to fight with the Wehrmacht^. (The French were hardly alone in this, with something like 350,000 soldiers in the Wehrmacht coming from places outside of Germany.  See the note below for troop strength numbers. ¹ )

Not surprisngly the LVF was thrown into the Barbarossa meatgrinder, and was decimated, along with millions of German soldiers as well as more millions of Russian citizens and soldiers. (According to a wiki page, the LVF started out at regiment strength of about 2,400 when they went into battle in October 1941; by the spring of 1942, there were only two batallions left, comprising about 600-800 soldiers in total^.2.) Doriot survived, and in what must have been the high point of his life, was awarded the Iron Cross in 1943. In coming back west he pursued other pro-Nazi activities, including what looks the support of German agents inside liberated France in 1944, which I think would leave an ordinary person completely vacant and a deranged one full of pride and fortitude.

Somehow he made it almost to the end of the war, though had he survived it I am sure that he would have been visited with vengeance and retribution.  (It seems that most of the officers were tried and executed while the soldiers were either sent to jail or offered to work off their debt to the nation via service in the Foreign Legion.) Doriot was killed when the car he was driving in was strafed by a fighter plane on Washington's birthday, 1945. 

It is quite a remarkable, and horrible, little life that Doriot led, a life that actually has me feeling a little hollow as I write about it--very off-putting and upsetting in a dark, struggling way. 

Crowd Series--VE Day, May 1945

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This is an addition to a developing series on images of crowds:

• Ephemeral Uniqueness in Large Crowds, here.
• Crowds and the Press of Humanity:  WWI German POWs, here.
• The Chaos of Hats, here.
• Crowd Series and Berlin Expectations, here
• Clarity and Confusion in the Display of Human Masses, here
• Large Crowds and Singular Persons Series--3 Images.  Here.
• Servicemen and B-17s at the End of WWII, here.
• Imaging Mass Casualties in WWI, here.
• Relief in Capture: Churchill in Carthage and what 230,000 POWs Looks Like, here.
• The Detail is in the Detail: What 20,000 Soldiers and 1 Mule Look Like, 1918, here.

Times Square, New York City, VE Day, May 1945:

Custer--the Limited Man of No Limits--and Exterminating Southerners

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1630

"...I would offer no compromise except that which is offered at the point of a bayonet. I...favor a war of extermination. I would hang every human being who had a drop of rebel blood in their veins whether they be men, women or children..."--G.A. Custer in Richard Slotkin Fatal Environment..., Harper, 1985, pg. 384.

Here’s a bit of Custer legend that is true and seldom heard—if left to his own devices in a Custer-filled world,  the general would have “exterminated” everyone in the South, every one (“men, women or children”) , “with an ounce of rebel blood” flowing in their veins, hanged dead.  At that point the South would be free, and would be repopulated with the “loyal and patriotic” people,l presumably from either up north or Southerners loyal to the Union.^a

This was part of  a long letter (transcript below) to U.S. Senator Jacob Howard, written on 19^th January 1864, in the field.  Custer was feeling on the ropes at the time, needing to defend his loyalty to Lincoln and his policies, and needing to distance himself from Lincoln’s election contender and inferior general, George McClellan. (Richard Slotkin, in his fabulous The Fatal Environment, the Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 notes that Custer needed “to justify himself…(and) disabled his previous affiliations and the nature of his relationship with McClellan…’)

Custer's relationship--real and imagined--with McClellan was putting him in a stench void, creating the possibility of distance between himself and the powers that be--particularly with Senators like Howard and Zachariah Chandler, "who controlled army promotions" (Slotkin, page 384), which meant distancing himself from the higher rank he thought he was destined for. Custer had been on McClellan's staff, and had aligned himself with his war policies, though not necessarily so his presidential ambitions.  Howard, a Republican from Michigan and member of the Military Affairs Committee, believed that Custer was a "McClellan Man" and set against Lincoln, and for that was set to block his promotion to brigadier general.  Custer's  salvaging letter¹ to Howard left no doubt about his supposed non-political feelings and where he stood on Lincoln, the Emancipation, and the treatment of the Confederates: