Ptak Science Books

The Weight of War--Bombing and Shelling During World War I and a Lesson in Orders of Magnitude

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1389

This indelible image was made by an anonymous photographer for the Central News Service of New York City in 1918.  The Central News Service was a photographic supply house that would send requested photos to newspapers throughout the United States for publication as illustrations for  a story.  They would've been sent rolled in a tube  with a description of the image and with the stern warning to "Watch Your Credit Line", making sure that once the newspaper had paid for the use of the photo that it also told its readers the source of the (agency) photographic.

The image is insatiable--it demands that you look at it and look at it long and hard, as it tries to give some sort of idea of the tremendous number of shells that were shot from canons by the just British against the Germans during the First World War..  There were something like one million tons of these fired against Germany; this picture represents about .001% ( of that total).  We see approximately 800 shells at two hundred pounds apiece, surrounded by a group of about 150 soldiers. 

I looked very closely at this photograph.
Of this single line of soldiers along the perimeter of the bomb cache, of the 150 of them, there are, it looks like, only five of them who have placed their hands on one of the bombs, and four of them are touching the fuse with just their middle finger.  It is an odd picture of restraint, these soldiers paying the weapons of mass destruction the respect of room.

I think that this is an extraordinary photograph of the testament of understatement and small, small percentages--even with this photo being so enormously graphic it still gives you absolutely no idea of how much explosive material was hurled back and forth, even knowing in your mind's eye that this image represents something like FOUR ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE less than the total tonnage of bombs used.  By the British.

This difference in orders of magnitude is roughly equivalent to the difference in size between an ant and a human being, or between an amoeba and an ant, or between a human and one of the pyramids, or between the earth and the sun.  Basically, the shells in this photo meant nothing whatsoever to the total of shells used during the war.

World War I Photographs--Full Metal Jacket, 1917

JF Ptak Science Books       Quick Post

I do believe that this is a Lewis Machine Gun, one of the most popularly-used automatic weapons by the BEF (and of American design). It was a gas-operated weapon firing a .30-06 Springfield at 500/600 rpm with an effective range of about a half-mile.  The drum magazine (not present here so far as I can see) held 47 and 97 rounds.  These soldiers were all business.

The original is available here.

World War I Photographs: Panorama, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books

I recall, I think, that this was the largest photograph of war printed during World War I, looking to be something on the order of 8x16 feet or so.  This photo of the photo was printed by Underwood & Underwood, and stamped "British Official Photograph", printed sometime in 1918.  It seems that this is an actual battle scene, which was a very uncommon thing among war photographs for the Great War--more so for this group of photographs(News Photo Service)  produced by pool photographers for equal distribution among subscribing newspapers and periodicals. Actual combat photos distributed by the News Photo Service agencies were not a high priority, unless they depicted routed or retreating or being-defeated Germans--it was not a popularly-disributed subject, mainly for propagandist purposes. (The original photo is available for purchase here.)

I expect that this photo would've given the view a you-are-there effect, as the main characters in the composition were about life-sized--an attempt of slice-of-life experience.  There is a surprising amount of foreground in this picture, though.

World War I Photos--Fifth Avenue and Not FIfth Avenue, July, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books  Quck Post

This news photo service image (available from our blog bookstore) shows the action in "one of the busiest military centers on the British Western Front in France", with a British soldier using a traffic semaphore to take care of the hustle and bustle.  The caption--almost always supplied with these photos as they were made by a pool of uncredited photographers covering the war for a consortium of newspapers and paid subscribers providing images and content for paying media--reads that the picture "might well be taken for an everyday scene on Fifth Avenue, New York, if it weren't for the landscaping and the costumes". 

Indeed.  Actually, if you removed the landscaping, the vehicles, the background and the uniforms (clearly whoever wrote this copy had no feel for the fact that actors wear "costumes" and soldiers wear "uniforms"), and replaced it with paved roads, buildings on all sides, crowds of people and packed it all with automobiles and placed the scene on Fifth Avenue, then the scene would have looked like Fifth Avenue. 

On the other hand, even if it were never to look at all like Fifth Avenue this intersection would have been exceptionally busy from time to time; I'm sure it could have seen thousands of troops per day, particularly since the Brits fielded probably a million troops in this region alone, and those troops needed to be fed and cared for, which means there would've been a constant flow of people, and machines, and materiel. 

This is a fantastic photograph,though, though the captioning folks did it little justice. 

I can't quite make out the BEF-made sign in the background, placed for the use of the troops. 

Exploring Faces at a U.S. Relief Station in Italy, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1340

This is a photograph of an American aid distribution center established in Venice, an action as a direct result of the recent invasion by Autro-German forces.  The Venetians look remarkably composed. [This photo is available for purchase at our blog bookstore, here.]

And the aid workers:

Elsewhere in this blog I've written a short paragraph on the casualties of WWI--Italy suffered 3.48% of its total population being wounded or killed, including over 650,000 civilian casualties.   1

Note

The U.S. lost .13%  of its population to casualties (125,000 killed and 205,000 wounded) during the war--a war which by the time America got here had already been visciously fought for three years, costing dozens of millions of lives.  The figures for everyone else weren't nearly so "fortunate" as the U.S.:  New Zealand's 18,000/41,312 killed/wounded amounted to 1.6% of its population.  The U.K. lost 2.19% (964,000/1,663,000), Italy was 3.48% (650,000/953,000 plus 650,000 civilian casualties), while France suffered a 4.29% (1.4 million/4.27 mil) blow of its total population to war.  Things were worse on the other side:  Germany 3.82% (2 mil/2.4 mil plus 426,000 civilian deaths, and the Ottoman Empire 12% (400,000/771,000 plus 2.1 million civilian deaths.   Worst of all was the Ally  Serbia, suffering a catastrophic 16% loss of its population to war, including 275,000/725,000 plus 426,000 civilian casualties.  As gruesome as the numbers were, the Americans felt only a small percentage of the total sting of war--by 11 November, more than 21 million soldiers would have been wounded, with 9.7 million soldiers and 6.8 million civilians killed.  It was an enormous price

Inverted Iwo--Sappers and Blowing Up Trees, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1331

Most of the stuff that was blown up in WWI was an end  result of explosive shells being fired from canons--only a miniscule amount of the percentage of all bombing done during WWI  was from airplanes, and another very slight percentage from tanks.  On the other hand sappers played a much larger role in WWI than in just about any other war, placing explosives by hand and then detonating them.  (I wrote earlier in this blog about the extensive underground trench fighting that went on with sappers tunneling under No Man's Land and placing explosives underneath an enemy's trenches.  And I guess you could tunnel under the tunnel, and so on. 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.) 

This photograph reminds me in some odd way of Arthur Rothstein's iconic photograph of Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, but only a little. (This photo is available for purchase from our blog bookstore, here.)

The caption of this news photo service image identified these soldiers for blowing up trees to obstruct the canal in the background.  If you land enough trees in a canal like this you are definitely going to cause corruption and heart attacks for anyone trying to move men or ordnance down the canal. 

And this detail:

I thought for a bit that these men might actually be threading barbed wire through the trees to make the job of removing that even more heinous.  But there's no way that you could lay hundreds of yards of barbed wire without gloves and without slicing your hands up--maybe you could do it carefully for  a little bit, but not for long. 

But I've got to say that this really doesn't look like demolition materiel....

Survivors on the Little Train to Hot Showers--WWI Photographs, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1329

I suppose there there was little to lift morale more than to have troops return to divisional from the front line to enjoy a hot shower--outside of course than to be brought home away form the fighting, entirely.  These soldiers were about to enjoy what I am sure was a well worn break from the action. (The original photo is available for purchase at our blog bookstore.)

The soldiers were riding a narrow gauge railroad, brought to France from Canada, headed back to safety and "the baths". 

[Also, in keeping with my previous post, to represent all of the casualties of WWI you would need this trainload of men to extend from NYC to L.A. and almost all the way back again, about 6,000 miles of people.]

And this, below--I see the soldier at the far right is reading a letter, I'm guessing a letter from home, as he has his knees tucked up maybe trying to protect its contents from prying eyes.  The soldier to his right is engaging in the age-old custom of reading someone else's mail over their shoulder, desperate for any news from anywhere.  Who knows--maybe the guy was sharing. 

And then--as we are told in the caption for the photograph--they were given as much time in hot water as they wanted. And then:

I think the return trip would've looked much different.

 

Ghost March--Doughboys in London and Four Years of Mist, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1328

.003%  That's what I reckon this column of soldiers would represent of the total casualties of WWI.

Generally images like this are a virtual image-host for me, a bucket of ice cold water thrown onto a sizzling summer sidewalk, all sorts of ideas steaming from it.  But for photographs of Doughboys¹ marching, especially assembling for parade, this one struck me a little more oddly than most, giving instant pause, making me concentrate on the haze, or dust, that allowed the columns of soldiers to blend into one another and fade, losing their boundaries with their mass receding into a dull blur. 

The Western Newspaper Union was selling this image for insertion in newspaper or journal stories about the war, for a small use fee.  There were a few American organizations like Western Newspaper that were created to photographically cover the war, using pools of photographers who would distribute their work anonymously and which was available for common, general use for a small charge.  The photographs allowed out were certainly restricted and censored, though in my stash of these of objects (numbering about a thousand) I'd say that 10% of them look pretty edgy to my eyes.  Most of the action of war was not covered, but then again this aspect was still fairly technically difficult in 1918.  Images of pain were almost never allowed, and certainly not pain of Allied troops.  Aid stations were almost never covered as well, as were dead bodies, or at least those again of Americans or Brits or French or Canadian.  The imaging of the war was certainly under a fair amount of supervision and control. (The original is available for purchase through our blog bookstore. here.)

The image shows American troops assembling for a parade through the streets of London before being deployed.  The mistiness of the composition looks like a statistic to me, these men standing for those who had come before and fallen.

 The U.S. lost .13%  of its population to casualties (125,000 killed and 205,000 wounded) during the war--a war which by the time America got here had already been visciously fought for three years, costing dozens of millions of lives.  The figures for everyone else weren't nearly so "fortunate" as the U.S.:  New Zealand's 18,000/41,312 killed/wounded amounted to 1.6% of its population.  The U.K. lost 2.19% (964,000/1,663,000), Italy was 3.48% (650,000/953,000 plus 650,000 civilian casualties), while France suffered a 4.29% (1.4 million/4.27 mil) blow of its total population to war.  Things were worse on the other side:  Germany 3.82% (2 mil/2.4 mil plus 426,000 civilian deaths, and the Ottoman Empire 12% (400,000/771,000 plus 2.1 million civilian deaths.   Worst of all was the Ally  Serbia, suffering a catastrophic 16% loss of its population to war, including 275,000/725,000 plus 426,000 civilian casualties.  As gruesome as the numbers were, the Americans felt only a small percentage of the total sting of war--by 11 November, more than 21 million soldiers would have been wounded, with 9.7 million soldiers and 6.8 million civilians killed.  It was an enormous price.

And that's what I see in the mist of what may be something like 10,000 soldiers on display n this photograph.  .003%  That's two of these columns every day, twice a day, for the entire 1550 or so days of the war.   

Notes

1.  The origin of the term "Doughboy" is unclear, or varied, or rich, but it is at least pretty oldm beginning around the time of the Mexican American War in 1846-1848--evidently when the soldiers marched through dry, tough terrain they wound up being covered by earth with the color of dough.  Doughboy.

World War I Photography--Heavy and Stuck

JF Ptak Science Books 

What is this man smiling about?

He's satisfied with his place there in the tractor, rather than his soldier brothers whop were trying (impossibly) to leverage the beast out of a shell-made muck hole. At least the guys on foot had a comic sense of what their task was supposed to be. [This original photograph is available for purchase at our blog bookstore.]

 

World War I Photographs--German Prisoners, the Somme, 1916

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1322

This news service photograph (a Canadian Official Photograph from the Western Newspaper Union) shows a line of German prisoners of war in the Canadian lines at the battle of Courcelette, France. [The original is available at our blog bookstore.]

It was a battle that took place within a battle,  in the last third of the enormous 18-week series of battles and actions known as the Somme Offensive. The photograph was made between early September and mid-November 1918, which is when the Canadians joined the British offensive.

The landscape is bleak, the soldiers worn.  I rarely see expressions of pain in this series of 1500 photographs from a collection of war images that I purchased.  This is one of a very slim minority.

World War I Photography--Soldiers at the War's End, Germany, November 1918

 JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1321

I'm not sure what this photo depicts specifically but in general it sends an image of exhaustion and wear.  The caption for the image says that it shows "the condition of the Hun troops" and that the subject "Herr Professor" is learning "a good many things not hitheroto found in books".  Maybe he was a teacher, maybe not.  Machts nichts. His pants looks velour-like and his boots (if that's what his footware was) look very thin.  He is ragged, his double-fold glasses look like they're at their limit, his face looks swollen behind his beard, and he just looks "done", in general. 

[The original of this photograph is available at our blog bookstore.]

I'm not sure what he is doing, or where he is.  He may be trying to figure out local currency to purchase whatever it is the vendor-woman has on the tray at her hip--she os holding out her hand, and looking at his.  The soldier definitely has something there, and he looks basically too weary to comprehend it.  the hand language is ambiguous to me.  He may have received something already, some sort of food, and he is staring at it now, thinking perhaps how little of it there was.  He's eating, and already has taken a bite of whatever bread-like thing is in his left hand.  I'm not sure what attracted the attention  of the boy in the center--perhaps it is simply the camera, and he wanted to be in the shot. 

There's a shadow in the foreground-left of what looks like someone making a photograph of teh scene--probably not our photographer, but another, with a brownie or some such smaller camera.

At the end of years of fighting every general soldier deserves respect and, at least, some free food--I hope this guy got his.

And the accompanying text to the news photo service image, to be used if published:

Cold, Cramped, in a Ditch and Under Fire: France, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1308

If I was in a time machine, stepping back through a wormhole and into another segment of another reality, one of the places I'd least want to step into would be a cramped, cold, wet, dirty and dangerous place.  Like this American soldier, waiting for a German attack to begin so that he could launch a warning flare to the rest of the soldiers, hunkered down in a cold wet place in the front line along the Lorraine section in France, mid-way through 1918 and almost all-the-way-through WWI.  (Both images below are available for purchase from our blog bookstore.)

And even though this soldier looks far too clean, and his uniform far too spotless and pressed-ish, and his calf-skin gloves too calf-skinny, and his duffle too unmarred, and his helmet chinstrap too perfect for this man to actually have been fighting, the sensation of cold/bad/dangerous still gets through the whitewash.

There are of course much worse places to be, but I think if I limited my time travel to include what I would be on the other end--a U.S. soldier--one of the places at te top of te list would be a generic trench in the front line of a battle late in the fighting in WWI.  Sitting there, watchful, waiting for the advance of thousands of German troops, charging over a ruined and sulfurous landscape, waiting for the ruination to begin as it churned its way through  No Man's Land.  Of course it could be worse--one could be going "over the top", charging across the Desolate Place towards a line of thousands of entrenched soldiers all of whom were trying to kill. you. 

Or of course you could be in a blue coat marching in a straight line towards a series of long lines of men in red coats, everyone getting ready to get close enough to discharge an 69-calibre (or thereabouts) ball across an open plane of hundreds of feet into the ranks of the opponent.  Or being in a Marine uniform in Tarawa, in the Gilberts, in November 1943. Or being in Butternut, crossing the Emmitsburg Road on the way up Cemetery Ridge on 3 July, or being in any uniform whatsoever at Antietam.

The places and times get worse I think once you allow yourself to be any other solider in any other uniform.  A French soldier, for example, sitting in a similar spot in the same battle along a front line as our American Doughboy, above, would've been worse.  A Belgian soldier virtually anywhere also would have fared worse, statistically, than just about anyone else in WWI.  Being a newly-minted soldier wearing the uniform of the Soviet Socialist Republics in the Summer of 1941 would probably have been half-a-death-sentence.  Of course the list goes on, and on. 

Perhaps one of the worst inventions in the history of warfare was The Trench. Millions of men were wounded or met their ends while defending one, or attacking one, or being in-between two of them.  Hundreds of thousands of troops spent months charging back and forth between opposing lines, the ground over which they fought made uninhabitable for almost any form of life. Cold, wet, bad.

Here's another original photograph made by the Western Newspaper Union Photo Service, as a "British Official Photograph"  (with the "British" part penciled out and replaced by an unknown hand, "Italian"),  The photo agency supplied a caption for the image (that was supposed to have been used by the newspaper or magazine that published the picture) as follows:

And the detail:

 

Needles and Threads; Sewing in Battle, 1918.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1307

This fantastic photograph (available for purchase from our blog blookstore) calls to mind the importance of the little things of battle--dry socks, headgear, water, food, scissors.  And of course a good coat in the winter--a good coat that can be kept closed to allow the body to stay warm, or dry.  I mentioned in a post here just yesterday that it was a small thing that may have led to the demise of Napoleon's army in Russia in 1812--the buttons on the overcoats of the soldiers were made of tin, and as tin becomes brittle in severe cold, it is conceivable that the buttons failed and therefore allowed the jackets to blow open much more easily than normal.  Little change that has an enormous impact.  

This photograph--an official French photo published by the Western Newspaper Union in November 1918--shows a group of French telegraphic soldiers, taking a break, and mending their clothes.  The original text for the photograph (below) points out that their uniforms were torn and made shabby by continuously running themselves up an down telegraph poles.  It is important to keep yourself fit and fed and your uniform in good order, so they calmly awaited the repair of their uniforms y the one man with a needle and thread. 

 

Art & Artists as Wartime Magi--Making Things Disappear, 1918.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1306

Its a little difficult to think of Ellsworth Kelly, Jacques Villon, Grant Wood, Laslo Moholy-Nagy and Thomas Hart Benton as painters-for-war.  But its true, and true for many of hundreds of other artists in the 1915-1918 era. Its not as though they were in the trenches gunning down the enemy or lobbing hand grenades into the swirling gunsmoke. They were camofleurs, camouflage¹ experts, artists employed as magicians, Wartime Magi, employed/drafted to make ships and such disappear. 

Ever since it was (sort of) first noticed in 1915 that designs odd to the environment, stark geometric patterns and such, were capable of fooling the eye, people with  design capacity were pressed into service, rendering offensive and defensive instruments of war optically semi-impervious with variations of the then-five-year-old modern nonrepresentational art. That must've been a very odd position to wake up to every morning. 

Of course the idea of camouflage in the animal world is probably 250 million years old--animals and insects have been blending into their environment for eons, and I'm sure too that early hominids did their fair share of walking behind brush.  But the idea of hiding great amalgamations of very heavy metal with paint is really quite modern.

In this photograph (available at our blog bookstore), the camouflage is more a more futuristic conception of art than the abstract and cubist approaches that were taken during the war, this looking more like assemblages of found material more than anything else.  And, according to the text that accompanied the photograph (which comes from 1918, from the Underwood & Underwood news photo service agency), the camouflage--empty sandbags thrown on a barbed wire fence) successfully concealed a gunnery emplacement for months on end. 

Notes

1. A fine bibliography on camouflage appears here, at Leonardo Online.

The definition of "camouflage" from the Oxford English Dictionary shows that it is a young word, in English:

(n) The disguising of any objects used in war, such as camps, guns, ships, by means of paint, smoke-screens, shrubbery, etc., in such a way as to conceal it from the enemy; also, the disguise used in this way; freq. attrib.

1917    Daily Mail 25 May 4/4   The act of hiding anything from your enemy is termed ‘camouflage’.

1917    Daily Mail 16 July 5/3   The King paid a visit to what is called a camouflage factory.

1922    C. E. Montague Disenchantment viii. 108   A French aerodrome across which the French camouflage painters had simply painted a great white high-road.

Forests in the Trenches: Axe Men Soldiers, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1305

One thing that I haven't thought about--among many--is how the lumber for lining WWI trenches was provided.  This issue came about while looking at this World War I news photo service image (by Underwood & Underwood), an image showing a group of journalists accompanying a troop of Canadian soldier lumbermen, all riding on top of felled trees loaded onto railroad cars, the lumber headed towards the Front.  When you think about battles along the many fronts during the war, you don't think about all of the missing trees, some large percentage of which wound up being utterly splintered during the first stages of battle.  So the lumber needed to keep the sides of the trenches intact must've come from somewhere, somewhere else. 

 [The original photo is available from our blog bookstore, here.]

Given that there were something on the order of 12,000-25,000 miles of trenches for the war (a figure taken from the PBS site on the Great War)--that would mean that there were many miles of trees needed to shore up the ditches.  This is just another one of those infrequently considered indicators of how massive the supporting efforts to the supporting efforts ( and etc.) of the war effort was on each side--that there was a corps necessary as a provider for the construction of the walls of trenches is staggering, especially when you consider the amount of lumber that was necesary to do the job.