JF Ptak Science Books

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

JF Ptak Science Books   An earlier post (#1308) expanded

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.  

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:

 

Who Invented Walking? The Indoor Air Show, Empire Air Day, 1938

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1307

I wonder who invented walking? 

It was certainly one of the first inventions made by our deepest, oldest human cousins, walking,.  And it was probably invented in Africa. 

This thought comes to mind looking at this great photo of the Empire Air Day, being celebrated in England in May 1938.  All of these folks walking around this enormous dirigible hangar (a form of flight that had left the RAF field of interest just a few years before, mostly forever) looking at the best of what was in the air.  The crowd actually looks a little thin to me--were people already getting a little used to having such magnificent things flying overhead, even just 30 years or so into the history of heavier-than-air flight?  It makes me wonder what will be remembered of the earliest days of flying 10,000 years from now.  The answer to that question may be as meaningless as the question I just asked above. 

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

It is interesting to note the barrage balloons (three of which are shown here). The Nazis had only recently admitted that they had an air force, and of course by the middle of 1938 it was a considerable thing.  Hitler had shown his fangs of course and there was war in the air.  Wr doesn't smell like a desert bloom.  But the Balloons were there, as were the rest of the aircraft, to show the hearts and minds at home that the RAF was a strong arm of the military establishment, and that the balloons were ready to be sent aloft to help protect London (at least) from the possibility of German/Nazi attack. 

Here are some of the aircraft that were supposed to have been displayed: Armstrong Whitworth Whitley; Armsrong Whitworth Ensign -transport; Bristol Blenheim -  medium bomber; De Havilland Albatross; Fairey Battle - medium bombe; Gloster Gladiator - torpedo bomber; Handley Page Harrow -  bomber; Hawker Hurricane -; Shorts Empire Flying Boat; Vickers Wellesley - bomber; Vickers Wellesley - bomber; Vickers Supermarine Spitfire -  fighter Westland Lysander.

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. 

Blank, Missing & Empty Things: German Soldiers, November 1918

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1305

This remarkable photograph is part of an archive of World War I Underwood & Underwood News Photo Service photographs I purchased many years ago.  It shows a pile of German soldiers' uniforms--thousands of them--taken from German prisoners, the clothing headed for "cleaning and repair". 

[This photo, along with mnay others, is available for purchase from our blog bookstore.]

I didn't know before this that the uniforms were repaired--I can imagine the cleaning part, since the prisoners must wear something, and deep into the fifth year of the war it seems hardly the case that they would be given anything at all to wear except for what they were captured in. the cleaning part sounds logical too, especially as the cleaning was being done by the prisoners themselves (pictured here).  Clean clothing makes for more sanitary conditions in mass compounds for thousands of prisoners, and lowers cost for the health maintenance for the prisoners in the short and long run.  And so far as repairing goes:  attached buttons make for closed coats; closed coats allow prisoners to have a better chance at staying healthy in the coming cold months. Just ask Napoleon about the cost of thread on the buttons of his army's overcoats in the march towards Moscow.  (The thread that wasn't used cost very little; the cheaper thread that was used cost everything.)

And the detail:

And closer still:

And the text that was provided by the photo service company to be used along with the photo wen (or if) it was published. 

The cleaning and repairing went on, the prisoners kept coming in--even for those involved, the scent of the end of the war was in the air, though I doubt that the majority felt that it was only a week away. 

Reverse Autopsies of Stick Women--Blank and Empty Art Anatomy, 1941

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1304

Part of our Blank, Missing and Empty series.

Coming on the heels of my posts of autopsies of snowmen and donuts comes this semi-remarkable pamphlet (available for purchase here), published by  American Home Studies (of 1700 Eye Street, NW, Washington D.C.¹), displaying very restricted instructions on anatomy for art students.  The drawings really work better in reverse, I think, because you really can't get to the final product from the illustrated series in its how-to sequencing unless you already were finished.

What happens throughout this pamphlet is what we see below--draw a circle, then divide it by drawing lines over imaginary bones, pop in some eyes and lips, and then fill in the rest.  Not too very helpful.  This is especially so when we look at the image above, which the student was supposed to simply cover with clothing after having added the head.  If this was an animated figure, I think I  would find it disturbingly creepy.

Things become clear by the time you reach the end of the pamphlet, when you are told that you can detach any page from the work and send it to the D.C. address for correction and advice, for a dollar a page.  That's when the real education occurs. (Many others have done this--the two guys responsible for creating Superman started out selling their services in just this how-to way.)

 

 

But I guess as a sort-of artist one would need to have something else going on for themselves so far as business goes, because its painfully clear that the maker of this pamphlet had special but very limited talent. I think that the faces given to these women are drawn by someone who does not like them, given their emotional range and all:  peevish, dull, bored, haughty, disinterested and, well, dead. 

Notes

1.  The building at 1700 I is gone now, replaced by another building of the many nameless buildings that create the corridors of I and K streets.  1700 I is basically right across the street from Farragut Square, and only a few blocks from Lafayette, which is across the street from the White House. Nice location.

The Lost Memories of Things in the Way of the Horizon–Ugly Roads, 1922

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1303

“There’s nothing so perfect as imperfection.”–Somebody.

“The great unconquerables in the geography of human thoughts and ideas are the bad ones.”–Nobody.

Bad ideas don’t so much go away as they get recycled. They can be replaced by good ideas or bad, but the ”original” bad ideas seem to linger on and on.  They are perhaps the indomitable inheritance of society, real and imagined.   

Bad human-produced landscapes are an outgrowth of bad ideas, calamities large and small that come and go, the old replaced by something new that is good or bad or indifferent. With the landscape, the original landscape itself--apart from the idea that brought it about--is generally lost forever once it has been replaced.  There is no Bad Idea Spirit that brings it back whole again, unlike the generic Bad Idea, which can live on and on, unencumbered by history, like a Greek play or some deeper mythology.

Theoretically society is supposed to learn from recognized bad ideas, so as to not repeat them etc., which is one reason why we keep track of them, in the vain hope that someday someone somewhere in the history of our future will kill particular bad ideas off one by one. 

In the meantime we can dwell on what we have, though with the removed bad idea landscape, it is more difficult.  That’s why it is important every now and then to familiarize ourselves with them when the opportunity arises, which is just what happened with this innocuous-sounding pamphlet, The Roadsides of California, a Survey¹ (1922, and available for purchase at our blog bookstore)  Its not like it’s Pandora’s box–we can open this one and just a few, limited baddies come out, and fall limply to the floor.  But what we see is interesting, a slice of our memory of the horizon–a part of our “progress” that we’ve tried to excise–and what we can see now are the removed and forgotten things. 



Notes

1. This is actually an interesting pamphlet, an early attempt at removing the quickly generated ugliness that was cluttering new roads for the explosion of automobile travelers.  As quickly as cars were made in the new decade of the automobile, billboards and roadside attractions followed.  This pamphlet identified this phenomenon as a problem.

An Unexpected "Discovery" in Correspondence to Santa, 1871

JF Ptak Science Books

 I do love Santa. 

And I know a little about him; but when I looked closely at this wood engraving of the man hard at work something struck me as very unusual to my Santa experience.

The image is from 31 December 1871--coming after Christmas for some reason--and it is one of the very earliest depictions of the most universally recognized form of Santa. It was created (his image that is,  of course) by the incredibly prolific and almost-entirely socially responsible (except for Catholics and the Irish) Thomas Nast.  Nast created this standard, iconic image of Santa--plus the Republican elephant, the Democratic donkey, the Tammany tiger, and many more iconic public images. 

In fairly famous and often used images I had never noticed that the letters that Santa is reading are being taken from the piles on his desk--but the letters are not written by children, but rather were sent by the parents.

Is this end-of-the-year grading? Were the “naughty” children being ratted out by their parents?  Does Santa really need to be told all of this?  And who on earth really is deserving of a lump of coal, anyway?  I'm guessing though that this was simply a warning cartoon to children, saying to them that they'd better well be good or a letter will be going out from Mom and Dad to Santa in the afternoon mail

This might make more make more sense if the cartoon wasn't published five days after Christmas but appeared before the holiday. Perhaps it is perfectly placed--tis would've been the first issue of the weekly magazine after the holiday, so reminding children to be good after a Christmas in which they might not have received what they wanted may have been caused by their behavior.  And since part of Nast's social power came from depicting events that were of interest to the working class and the poor and making them intelligible to the illiterate, where the cartoon/caricature could speak without words and make themselves understood, it might've been the case where parents would show the image of Santa to the kids and then tell them about the letter part to try and codify a different behavior in the new-coming-Christmas season. 

These questions aside, the lesson yet again for me is to look very closely when looking at complex images like this—especially when you think that you already know what you’re looking at...

 

Yes, Franklin, There IS a Santa Claus. The Franklin D. Roosevelt/Santa Claus Connection

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1302
 
FDR may well have been among our greatest presidents--but a reader, well, he was not.  Doesn't matter, not really. (Harry Hopkins, long an adviser to Roosevelt and who held numerous high-level positions in the Roosevelt administration, once said that he never saw FDR with a book, let alone reading one.)

There is a presidential library for him, of course, but that doesn't prove that the Great Man read very much.  Maybe he just didn't need to for the job. (That has been proved true in recent times though with a different outcome at the end of the presidency.)

And frankly I don't care if Roosevelt read anything more than L'Il Abner.  But I do know for a fact that he did come into contact with a great piece of American social history in this famous story of a  girl named Virginia O'Hanlon (1889-1971) who wrote to the editor of the New York Evening Sun in 1897, asking "Is There a Santa Claus?" (Her father prompted her to write, stating that if one saw a positive response in the pages of The Sun, then it absolutely must be so.)

And of course there is a Santa Claus, and so wrote the editor. (See here for the full text of the response, and also about the man who wrote it--a nice story of a man who rose to the occasion after the assignment got batted around a bit.)

The telling of the story in the book that I have here, an almost-fancy and semi-sumptuous little affair, was once owned by FDR.  It was no doubt sent to the new president from the publisher in December 1933.  Satisfied with the story and needing no further help with his own belief on the matter, Roosevelt sent his copy on to the good folks at the Library of Congress, and after six decades there, came to me. 

For what is it worth, I think that FDR knew there was a Santa, and that was that.

 

 

 

Examples of Colossally Bad Ideas--Sterilization, Eugenics and Soviet Racial/Genetic Domination Theory

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1301

Sometimes I need to make a post about a book simply to get it out of my system--once I've said something about a numbingly bad book, it usually just goes away, falling off the edge of the flat Earth rather than having its mast sink peacefully below the horizon. Such is the case with these pamphlets, one of which is so bad that its badness could not be contained in just one "volume" that it needed another. I almost wrote " 'little' pamphlets" because they are, well, little--but little in size only, their badness easily transcending their size, and the idea of "size" in general. 

[Note:  all pamphlets pictured here are available at our blog bookstore.]

I never really liked the word "colossal" in the title of any book other than say a joke or magic book for children--outside that, I think the author is asking for trouble.  And trouble is the seat of reason in this work, which was published in 1939.  It is too painful to quote much from the text, but, right from the outset the reader gets a taste for what is ahead, being told that the New Russia (the Russians being "the most elemental of all white peoples") is one way of saving the Nordic race, quoting The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception as a part-source, saying that "this race will collectively make up the sixth of the seven sub-races tat will constitute the present Aryan or Fifth Root Race" and it will "be expected to develop certain attributes that will contribute toward humanity's ultimate perfection".

 The author is enamored of the free voting system in the Soviet Union.  "No one visiting the Soviet's pictorial Exhibit at the World's Fair om New York could fail to be impressed by the dignity and attractiveness of the pictured polling places and the freshness and eagerness animating the faces of those figures who entered t perform their civic duty..." An incredible statement, validating the democratic freedom of the Soviet Union at a particular time in it history when millions of people had recently been starved to death, among other things.  The photographs of the coming genetic masters was proof enough of freedom than anything else. 

The pamphlets grow heavier and more dense with each paragraph, the edges of the pages bending under their own filthy weight of vast stupidity and understated racial hatreds.  God and the superiority of whiteness and the gross disabilities of Catholics and Black people come along after a bit.  Jewish people aren't even mentioned.   But the author states that it is a genetic "tick", some sort of "genetic conscience" that comes into play that has prevented the "inferior races" (like Catholics or Blacks) to have come anywhere near attaining the presidency.  It is a spiteful, hateful pamphlet that is completely myopic about the rich, savory goodness that is the highest attainment of spiritualism/intellectualism/modernism and civilization that was the Soviet Union.  There would be little left to say about this work ten years hence, when the real stuff of the Soviet Union became more publicly common knowledge, and it became more difficult--I would think--for the author to reconcile his witches' brew of Biblical nonsense, genetic debauchery and Cool-Whip history.

The next assortment--all written just after WWII--asks some questions that one probably has never heard before.  "Should married lovers fight?" and "Is sexual castration easy?" are probably a pair of interrogatories that would never be heard in conversation in a hundred years of boring parties.  The contents of the pamphlets are a genuine struggle to get through--I picked my way through each for about 20 minutes before declaring defeat, except that I know enough to not have to think about these works again.

The pamphlet Sterilization for Human Betterment, published by the Human Betterment Foundation (Pasadena, California),  states that 13,000 people in this category had been "asexualized" between 1909 and 1939 in California. (I should point out that California was the sterilization capital of the United States, with a third of all the national eugenics procedure performed in this state for this period of time) It defends this practice, saying emphatically that "eugenic sterilization is not an experiment", and that "sterilization in this form represents one of the greatest advances in modern civilization". 

 

It continues:  "(sterilization) has been continuously used by American institutions since 1899, when the first sterilizations were performed in Indians".  What?

"Patients, relatives of patients, state officials, physicians,parole and probation officers, social workers, agree on the value of this practice" which was actually the "prevention of producing defective and handicapped children".  I'm relieved that the probation officers were consulted.

The Betterment people shed more light on the role of sterilization and sex offenses by women. (My bold.)  "Of 304 feebleminded girls sterilized and paroled, 9 out of every 12 had been sex offenders before commitment.  After sterilization, only one out of every 12 became a sex delinquent on parole". 

If this wasn't such an awful story, "sex delinquent on parole", a phrase I've never seen before, might make for a great 1950's trashlit title. (It could've been a series, too:  all you need to do is take the title "Sex Delinquents on Parole" and add something to it, like "...on Parole from Outer Space" or "...on Parole:  Queenie the Slip Crown Breaks Her Knuckles" and so on.)

The sorry story that I've interrupted with this bit of frivolity is that the "sex offenses" that are being discussed here is actually "prostitution".  These young women weren't committing violent acts of sexual savagery, they were just prostitutes, which meant that in most state they were "depraved".  The "feebleminded" girls I would guess were poor or working poor, without the best education, and didn't do well on whatever test was being administered to them to determine their test-taking intelligence. It seems to me that if  the goal was to liquidate prostitution that perhaps the men "seeing" these women should've been the ones faced with the operation. But that isn't how the dominant culture viewed the situation, and that the best way to approach the problem was to remove the reproductive capacities from the weakest members of society.

(Click on this table for a larger, clearer version of the number of forced sterilizations by state.)

 This pamphlet was the co-authored spawn of Paul Popenoe (1888-1979) and E.S. Gosney (1855-1942) while both were on the board of the Human Betterment group. In addition to a strict diet of superior morality and race,  Gosney seems to have been the money behind the organization. Popenoe had a background in agricultural genetics with an overdrive taste for eugenics and race, somehow intersecting them with social hygiene and marriage relations. The “dr.” that Popenoe loved to insist attaching to his name was an honorary, unearned degree, which he must have felt he needed in order to secure the proper amount of intellectual identification necessary to write on intellectual identification. The Nazis wasted little time in translating and publishing this work, adding it to their official publications list in 1939. It was one of a significant number of intellectual imports that came into poor, besotted Germany; the imports came nowhere close to the amount of information banished, exported to the necessarily beautiful non-Aryan non-Nazi inferno. It was just the sort of thinly distributed stain that interested people like the Nazis.

I wonder what "Dr." Popenoe thought of this Nazi honor?

The second pamphlet by the same people, Human Sterilization Today,. is in a swift eight pages in which the Betterment Foundation makes it case to use sterilization to check "the misery spread through the community by the unchecked reproduction of the human unit" (italics mine)..  They are closing in on the Big Picture in this work, aiming at the 5,000,000 "who will be at some point committed to state hospital as insane" and the other 5,000,000 "who are so deficient intellectually (with less than 70% of average intelligence) as to be, in many cases, liabilities rather than assets to the race".

This is exhausting reading, but it is a story that shouldn't be forgotten, and could remind us that what we're doing or practicing today might look  like the Human Betterment stuff 25 years down the road. 

What is also deeply unsettling about Popenoe is that from this vast miasmaic idea set of misguided and forced statistics, philosophical racial extremism, "social hygiene", eugenic sterilization of the enfeebled and socially undesirable, he managed to create the very first marriage counseling service/practice in the United States.  The American Institute of Family Relations opened its doors in 1930 (in L.A.!) with this dizzying philosophical semi-brew of sterilization and marriage talk-therapy, happily correlating the whole thing with exploding axis of divorce, love, social failure, racial impurity and castration.  And somehow it all seemed to make sense to allot of people, back there in the past.

 

Discovering Something Not Discovered--or, How to Best Figure Out What You've Got Left After Being Nuked

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1300

The spoiler answer to this:  make sure to account for the nukes dropped on you  when figuring out what you've got left to work with.

This seems a tautologically  tongue-twisting, not-quite-right title for this post, and indeed it might be.  But that's the way the pamphlet I'm reporting on read, a sometimes resilient-to- inspection rubbery beastie whose basis for being written was to report on an great oversight that doesn't really want to be recognized, even if it is the title of the work.

The Bomb Damage Problem, AFAPA-4-4, published in 1954 by the Directorate of Management Analysis (DCS/Comptroller at the  Headquarters of the U.S. Air Force) is a pamphlet of discovery–or rather, the discovery of the lack of discovery.  (The pamphlet is available from our blog bookstore, here.)

The work is an introduction to some aspects of  nuclear exchange post-attack predictive capacity–particularly with the ability of American industry “to support a war plan”. 

The anonymous pamphlet gets straight away to the discovery part–that previous predictions of post-attack capacity were “probably completely unrealistic” because “[they] did not take account of the likely bomb damage to the U.S. production facilities”. 

I would think that even at this relatively early point of planning for possible Soviet nuclear attack that war game scenarios would have taken bomb damage to industry a”and accompanying manpower losses” into account of how the war machine would react after the bombs began to explode.  Though it seems not. I’ve looked to see how I could be misreading this thing because it seems like too monumental an oversight to make. But I can’t find where I’m making my interpretative mistake. 

Ultimately the authors focuses on saving the corpus of the overall works, saying that this oversight does not damage the “important thinking” that had gone on it spite of this error.

The word “error: is not used in the text of course.  This is how it is described: “In connection with this critical new obstacle to intelligent military planning, it is essential that speculation be minimized.” The error is actually redefined as a “critical new obstacle” the effect of which heightens “speculation”.   Which is all true.

I suppose what is really going on his the formation of some bedrock stuff formulating information gathering for creating a computer program for deeper analytical study of the effects of nuke warfare on post-attack industry.  1954 is about right for the time for this to happen, and the DMA–as the home for the creation of linear programming among countless other things–would’ve been the place for this work to happen. 

But I keep coming back to what seem to be enormous understatements–even giving plenty of allowance for the time–that keep cropping up in the pamphlet.  Perhaps it is just stating the obvious for the first time that makes all of these seem so potentially underwhelming, like this nugget:   “numerous measures of the importance of each target may eventually be needed....” (Page 7). 

There’s plenty of more detail though that occurs in the pamphlet, as in figuring out damage to structures by the yield of the explosion and distance from the target and the composition of the target’s structure, and so on.

And then we get back to the obvious: “the principal effect of a fire storm following an attack would be to enlarge the area of destruction and to alter the shape of the various damage zones, changing them from concentric rings to irregular patterns. “.  As I said, maybe it is just a case of a “Call me Ishmael”, or stating that lines and points in space exist for the purpose of geometry.  Still, it rubs me the wrong way, all over.

And just to make this point perfectly clear:  the "bomb damage" problem is to take into account bomb damage to U.S. war-making, bomb-producing capacity, in a sort of BIBO (bomb in, bomb out)  version of a SISO (shit in, shit out).

A Girl and Her Submarine, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1299

I could hardly resist this 1918 image:  the young girl, the hands in her pockets, the ribbons on her chest, her submarine fashioned over a tricycle, the two flags (Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack).

The sun is low, rising or setting, and it is catching the girl in the face, the home-fashioned cardboard visor of her home-grown officer's headgear doing nothing to shade her eyes.  She's in her dress whites, maybe proud of someone else's handiwork on her ten foot long submarine.  [The photo is available on our blog bookstore site, here.]

The image comes from a small archive of WWI  news service photos, this one no doubt intended to stir some home fires to help raise money or spirits.  I have no idea of the image was ever published. 

And of course the details:

And this of the stern flag, the Union Jack:

And this, with the hand-sewn eagle on the hand-made jacket, with all of the trimmings a creation of mom, or someone else as kind:

Less-than-Optimum Oblivion: Measuring the Bad Side of Advanced Nuclear Exchange, 1956

JF Ptak Science Books   [Another in a long series of post on atomic and nuclear weapons.]

Perhaps nothing is obvious unless it is established or labeled so; perhaps the obviousness must be stated at least once before it can be officially, recognizably, the case.  And perhaps the greater the obviousness is, the more the need to make it officially so.  Perhaps nothing is so incredibly obvious that it can be studied and dissected and established.

This seems to be more the case in more recent history than in time more further removed: that millions of dollars can be spent “proving” that children do not like to be separated from their mothers, or that cars will go faster downhill than up, or that people will respond to proper medication better than not, and so on, so on into the night, just seem not to need a vastly-funded proof.

And so the case with nuclear warfare, people, and cities.

In this RAND report from 1956, the great issue seems to be laid to rest, once and for all: the problem with nuclear weapons being exploded in/over cities is that since cities are filled with people, people will be killed.  And if those people in the cities are there because of professions that depend on city-settings, then more of those people will be killed than not.  [This rare pamphlet is available from our blog bookstore, here.]

But what this report was really about was the unfortunate aspect of the impact if nuclear warfare on leadership and working positions in significant and strategic industrial/business/government professions.  And what the report finds is this: since the vast majority of these positions are located in cities (defined as 100,000 population and above), and since cities will be the major targets in a nuclear “exchange”, the overwhelming majority of these people will be killed, thus leading to strategic human resource vacancies post-war. 

It seems that 95% of aeronautical engineers in the U.S. would be killed in a nuclear war, which I guess would mean that it would be difficult to design new aircraft and such in the post apocalypse world.  Of course these people would be killed because it was their industrial base that was being targeted and they were collateral damage, so there wouldn’t be any industrial base to produce the components necessary to build, say, a B-52.  That part of the equation is not addressed here, though.  Nor is there any sort of recommendation presented to fix the problem.

The RAND document just painfully points out the obvious, once and for all; no one really knew what to do with the information now that it was there, in black and white. Certain people could be evacuated, saved from the maelstrom; but saved for what?  There were other evacuation plans that were completely doomed from the beginning, sheltering plans, Dr. Strangelove arrangements, but all of that would come into their pitiful being later on.

First, though, the bitter reality of what everyone already knew--one of the greatest of all obviousnesses–had to be make its appearance in print.  And so it did.

When a Portrait is Portraits: Found Portraits in a Group Photo, WWI, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books

In my collection of WWI News Photo Service Agency photographs I would say that half or so of them show  scenes like this--semi-informal group portraits of military support groups.  500 portraits like this seem to be a lot, and I'm not sure why these images are so well represented. Except of course that there weren't that many images (overall) of active-battle scenes. [This image is available for purchase at our blog bookstore, here.]

These bakers, working at a front-line support station, from my read were probably taking a break, and the photographer took the opportunity to draw them together for the portrait.  I don't know why they're separated so, but they do look as though they have a real camaraderie--it is just a wonderful picture, full of friendship and loyalty, and I'm sure it has never been published before.