JF Ptak Science Books

Early Aerial Bombing, 1916

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This issue of Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig) was published 27 April 1916 (volume 146, number 3800) and features an early-ish image of an airship bombing a city. The first time this occurred in WWI was in the autumn of 1914, at Liege, with a bombing campaign initiated against London in January 1915.  (The first aerial bombing seems to have been during the first Italian War of Independence and used by the Austrians from a  balloon against Venice in 1849; while this 1916 bombing occurred a few years after the first bomb was dropped from a heavier-than-air aircraft during the Italo-Turkish War on 1 November 1911, the Italians this time delivering the blow in Tripoli.) The scene here illustrates an airship in flight over a very industrialized section of a city, perhaps to drive home a propaganda point that bombing was accurate enough to be strategic and also that targets were industries and not general populations. 

• "Airships made about 51 bombing raids on England during the war. These killed 557 and injured another 1,358 people. More than 5,000 bombs were dropped on towns across Britain, causing £1.5 million in damage. 84 airships took part, of which 30 were either shot down or lost in accidents. Aeroplanes carried out 27 raids, dropping 246,774 lb (111,935 kg) of bombs for the loss of 62 aircraft, resulting in ground casualties of 835 dead, 1,972 injured and £1,418,272 of material damage."--Wikipedia

 

 

Money: How Much did a Sergeant's Chevrons Cost in 1870?

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2735

Here's an interesting list of prices, outfitting U.S. Army personnel stem to stern so to speak. The major thing here that I do not know is who it was paying these prices--was this the cost to the government in supplying these goods to soldiers? Or are these the prices that soldiers paid for replacement goods? Or did new recruits pay for their uniforms with the costs deducted from future pay?  My suspicion is that these are the costs to the government in outfitting the army, plus arms and munitions and food and all of the rest.  Interesting numbers, if you can use them.  

There were a number of things here that cost only a penny, like the eagle emblem for a private's uniform hat, while the most expensive items listed here for soldier accoutrement were the cavalryman's greatcoat ($6.49) and the musician's uniform (at $5.89). 

Some other interesting bits:

• Underwear, 67 cents
• Mess can, 22 cents
• Standard tent, $17.11
• Sash, $1.21
• Shovel, 59 cents
• Sergeant's trousers, $2.32 (for the corporal, $2.17, and the private, $2.10)
• Stockings, 21 cents
• Hospital tent, complete (though without medical equipment) $106
• Garrison flag, $48

What does it mean for the average person to spend 5 bucks in 1870?  How does that translate to current currency?  There's a ton of difficulty in doing that, but one simple way that gives at least some clue to understand the value of those dollars is to put it into the context of how much of a weekly salary something might absorb for a worker at that time. For example, here are some weekly salaries for a few professions:

• rag cutters at a paper mill, $7.45 (male) and $4.00 (female)
• blacksmith at iron works, %15
• "forger of nuts" in carriage works, $20
• forgers of lightning rods, $10
• coopers in lime works, $12
• sail makers $10
• laborer in a varnish works, $11
• shoemaker, $14

These are average weeklies, and would varying according to location (with high and sometimes substantially so being paid in the West and unusual destination points). So in general, a $2 expense is about a day's labor for a 6-day/10-12 hour week, which means it is not like buying a cup of coffee. This is simplistic, but useful.

[Source for the data above: the very interesting and exhaustively-titled Special report on immigration : accompanying information for immigrants relative to the prices and rentals of land, the staple products, facilities of access to market, cost of farm stock, kind of labor in demand in the western and southern states, etc., etc., to which are appended tables showing the average weekly wages paid in the several states and sections for factory, mechanical, and farm labor, the cost of provisions, groceries, dry goods, and house rent in the various manufacturing districts of the country, in the year 1869-'70, by Edward Young, chief of the Bureau of Statistics. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044024335481;view=1up;seq=248

And the army?  Here are some figures I found for Union pay during the Civil War, per month:

• Private and Corporal, $13
• 1st sergeant, $20
• 1st Lieutenant, $105.50
• Captain, $115.50
• Major $169
• Lt Colonel, $181.
• Colonel $212, Brigadier General, $315

[Source: Civil War Trust https://www.civilwar.org/learn/articles/military-pay]

 

(Click for a larger, readable image.)

 

Data Visualization and Enormity--the Cost of War in Terms of Iconic Buildings (1917 and 2017)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2733

The first thing that a reader in the U.S. will probably notice in this graphic is that there is no "United States" entry--that is because the U.S. had only entered the war seven weeks before this image was made after having been steadfastly neutral for the war's first 2.5 years.  That said the daily cost of war was made accessible and understandable to the readership of the Scientific American by putting costs in terms of the construction of the then-tallest building in the world, the Woolworth Building (the world record holder for height from 1911-1930). 

Overall, for the eight major combatants, the total daily cost of the war was the equivalent of the cost for building eight Woolworth Buildings, every day.  At the end of the war that would have been a stack of Woolworth Buildings that was 30 x 30 Woolworths square and 100 Woolworths tall.  

And just for perspective, the daily cost for Great Britain was 25 million pounds in 1917, which using the B of E calculator for inflation, would be about 1.2 billion pounds today (per day).  This is roughly in league wit the cost of U.S. involvement in the 2003 Iraq war at about 700 million dollars a day (since 2003). 

It is difficult to "translate" what $61 billion in 1917 is related to in 2017 dollars. The Bureau of Labor statistics says it is something on the order of  $1.3 trillion, so it must be in there, within or so of an order of magnitude. And now it looks like the "total" cost of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will probably be $10 trillion when all is said and done. That would be equal to the cost of about 2,000 2 World Trade Centers. Given that the costs for WWI still had another year and a half to go, they may have accumulated costs doubling up on the 900+ Woolworth Buildings to 1,800 or 2,000--anyway something pretty similar to 2 World Trade Center measurements, which is pretty odd. 

There are many ways of looking at this data, though the Scientific American wanted to approach the expenditure in terms of gigantic piles of waste, given that people are pouring money from wheel barrows into a hole.

• See also an earlier post here on data visualization and the measuring of things with the Woolworth Building:  http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2016/06/data-vizualization-automobiles.html

[Source: Scientific American, May 26, 1917.]

Ghosts of the Past and the Future (1932)

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The folks over at the Illustrated London News were having a bit of a sotto voce chuckle at the expense of what was left of the German military's tank corps. No doubt its readers were momentarily surprised and probably shocked to see a line of German Reichswehr (the military organization from 1919 to 1935, after which it was the Wehrmacht) tanks--which were prohibited to Germany via Article 171 in the Treaty of Versailles--at least until they sharp-eyed what the "tanks" were or read on in the article. The vehicles were actually just cars fashioned to look like tanks for war games, and that was all. There really wasn't much to laugh about, though, because the clock was definitely running out on the new normal of world affairs.

This picture story appeared in January 1932, 13 years after the Treaty of Versailles and only a year or so before it began to unravel in earnest. Germany--reeling still from the Depression and from the economic hardships and concession placed on it by the treaty, suffering large unemployment and with a disastrous economy--by June of that year had decided to ignore the military restrictions of Versailles and sought to rearm.  By July it withdrew from the nearly half-trillion-dollar (in 2017 American dollars) concessions agreement, and started to accumulate funds for a vast new military restructuring program. Hitler lost the presidential election later in '32 but pulled in 38% of the vote and truly began to consolidate power, and a year later he was chancellor with huge Nazi gains in the Reichstag (which would be on fire in another month).  In six years came the Anschluss and Czechoslovakia, and in the next year, Poland, and WWII.  Seven and a half years from cutout tanks to the Blitzkrieg and Rommel and Guderian. This could well have been the last laugh at the German military. 

Cross Section and Cockpit of a Hawker Hurricane, 1939 and 1942

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I would say that there are perhaps 100 good, solid (mostly technical) cross sections on this blog, and to that number I'd like to add two more. the first features the Hawker Hurricane and the beautiful and winning Vickers Spitfire--two of the most important aircraft of the war and backbone of the RAF, and it appears as a short article right before the start of the European part of WWII in Popular Mechanics for January 1939.

This second image--barely a cross-section as things go but it does serve our purpose--comes via the cross-section-dependable Popular Mechanics for April 1942, and shows the cockpit controls for a British Hurricane as well as a smaller image for a German Messerschmidt. (Click and click again to greatly enlarge this image for the small print.)

 

 

 

 

 

Iconic WWII Propaganda--Great Britain, 1940 ("Careless Talk Costs Lives")

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2727

I found these images years and years ago, and evidently had forgotten them--they surface yesterday from a long slumber, and immediately put me into mind of the very real hearst and minds campaign and of keeping secrets secret in the terrible and great struggle in the U.K. in 1940.  These are four of eight posters in the very popular “Careless Talk Costs Lives” wartime propaganda series issued by the Ministry of Information and printed in 1940¹. They are the very stylized work of the illustrator "Fougasse", who was Cyril Kenneth Bird, (1887-1965), an illustrator for Punch (from 1937 to 1949) and other journals and magazines, and also a wounded vet of Gallipoli in the First War. 

The series in general depicts people sharing a piece of possibly sensitive information that in the wrong hands and together with other pieces of info could reveal devastating secrets—and in each case there are figures lurking/loitering/disguised in the background waiting to collect the data, and generally a poorly disguised Hitler or Goering or both. Fougasse was able to make his message immediately memorable and understood because I think of his understated over-the-top visual humor. The images were funny, but the message was deadly serious. Also, you really didn't even need to read the text to understand the message. (This is in the same vein as some of Thomas Nast's finest work, conveying social content and a political message to the illiterate, making his devastating (and usually highly textual) cartoons understandable without needing to read them.) 

(1) "Strictly Between Four Walls".  In this poster (made a convenient size to be useful in virtually any small area and also abiding the wartime paper shortage) we see two men in big club chairs about to share some bit while the artwork-ensconced Hitler waits to hear the interesting parts. 

A Fine RADAR Map of NYC, 1945

JF Ptak Science Books

The history of RADAR (RAdio Deection And Ranging, and something I've always written in caps, for whatever that is worth) is absolutely not what I'm thinking about now--that is a long story with lots of twists and turns, complicated, complex--and it ranges depending upon location as for the most part RADAR (from the 1930's anyway) was developed in secret, kept as a military secret.  And that's because it was a very important development, with the victor of the Battle of the Beams being the possible victor, period.  

All I want to do presently is note the significance of this particular pamphlet in the history of RADAR. This work was printed by PHILCO Corporation, (and dated December, 1945), and has an inserted leaflet stating that this "makes public for the first time the salient facts about the Corporation's development and production of airborne radar equipment for the United States Army and Navy".  PHILCO and other companies made significant contributions to the war capacity of the Allied forces, and--for this company in particular--much of that went unknown for quite some time afterwards, and of course there are some stories that just won't get told. But for PHILCO the story gets told here.  

This is also a fabulous nighttime map of NYC--produced by RADAR.  

[RADAR on Wings, Philco, 1945.  10x8", 30pp (unpaginated) with lots of photographs and an occasional schematic.]

The history of RADAR (RAdio Deection And Ranging, and something I've always written in caps, for whatever that is worth) is absolutely not what I'm thinking about now--that is a long story with lots of twists and turns, complicated, complex--and it ranges depending upon location as for the most part RADAR (from the 1930's anyway) was developed in secret, kept as a military secret.  And that's because it was a very important development, with the victor of the Battle of the Beams being the possible victor, period.  

All I want to do presently is note the significance of this particular pamphlet in the history of RADAR. This work was printed by PHILCO Corporation, (and dated December, 1945), and has an inserted leaflet stating that this "makes public for the first time the salient facts about the Corporation's development and production of airborne radar equipment for the United States Army and Navy".  PHILCO and other companies made significant contributions to the war capacity of the Allied forces, and--for this company in particular--much of that went unknown for quite some time afterwards, and of course there are some stories that just won't get told. But for PHILCO the story gets told here.  

This is also a fabulous nighttime map of NYC--produced by RADAR.  

[RADAR on Wings, Philco, 1945.  10x8", 30pp (unpaginated) with lots of photographs and an occasional schematic.]

Maps of Nazi-Controlled Lands, Including Nazi Germany 1948 (Published in 1942)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2718

Čtyři léta války v mapách ("Four Years of War...in Maps"), published in London, ca. 1942, is a curious, Czech-exile publication telling the story of the rise and fall of Nazi Germany in maps.  The culminating interest though shows the Nazis surrounded, and put to the final test--it is the first map I list, below, even though it was about the last map in the pamphlet. The "Ein Volk, Ein Reich..." map (the last map shown below), is a Nazi propaganda piece, reproduced here no doubt to show the audacity and hubris of the Nazi state, shows them with a vast territory, including Great Britain and the Soviet Union. I can't recall having seen such a map depicting Great Britain as a captured entity.)

[The pamphlet is 9"x 6" and 35pp, with printed wrappers. It is a rare thing, this pamphlet, and it does not show up in the usual places. There are only seven copies located in the WorldCat/OCLC, all in top-notch libraries: NYPL, Yale, Harvard, Harvard Law, UC Berkeley, Oxford, and Nanterre.]

1943:

And the vision of the future, taken from a German design (poster? illustration?) showing the advance of the making of Greater Germany, showing countries conquered through 1940 and then countries that would be conquered, including the Soviet Union (which was to be taken in 1941) and also an occupied Great Britain, though no date is given for that.  

1938-1948:

 

On the Economic Efficiency of Poison Gas in Wartime (1921)

JF Ptak Science Books 

• Review: QUICK, Herbert. What About Chemical Warfare? The Newspaper Enterprise Association (1921) 15pp.
  7x5 inches. Fine condition. WorldCat/OCLC locates 6 copies. 

[Image: Illustrated London News, October 30, 1915, detail of photo on front cover.]

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. 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".

 

[Internet Archive offers the full text : https://archive.org/stream/whataboutchemica00quic/whataboutchemica00quic_djvu.txt]

He points out the enormous impact in the war effort that relatively small chemical corps played in
WWI--something on the order of hundredths 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.
Quick 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.

The Soviet Union's Statement on Being Attacked by Germany, July 8, 1941

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2715

It is hard to criticize the Soviets when they were at their post WWI weakest, but I needed to point out a few, well, inconsistencies in the following statement by Maxim Litvinov. The text is that of a radio address by the mega-connected and high profile Russian revolutionary and People's Commissar of the USSR, and it was delivered on July 8, 1941. At this point Litvinov (1876-1951)--who would in a few weeks become the Soviet Ambassador to the United States--was addressing the weeks-old attack and declaration of war made upon the U.S.S.R. by Nazi Germany.  

It was a terrible and nearly mortal blow to the state, and Hitler's vast overreach very nearly came to be. Still there were some bits in the address that were difficult to absorb. 

For example Litvinov states: “Hitlerite Germany's treacherous attack on the peaceful Soviet Union in face of the Non-aggression Pact...”  The Soviets did indeed sign a hands-off/so-no-evil Non-Aggression Pact (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) with the Nazis in August 1939 and enjoyed the fruits of that special relationship, the two nations dividing conquered border states according to each other's "sphere of influence". So, this pact was "peaceful" only so far the U.S.S.R. is concerned, and not so peaceful for other nations.

Then this: “The Soviet Government was almost first to realize the danger of Nazi aggressiveness...”, which seems hard to acknowledge when they shared a non-aggression pact/treaty in the early stages of WWII.

Then the “veritable miracles of heroism” of the Red Army is “bearing the whole of Hitler's powerful war machine and compelling him to transfer more and more forces from West to East”. I will not doubt heroism of fallen soldiers in a near lost cause effort, and it is true that the Germans would half- or mostly-exhaust themselves in the East, maybe more than that, probably, probably costing Hitler far more than he could ever have conceived. Stalin had already murdered his way through a large swath of the Soviet command structure, and was also unwilling to recognize that the Nazi attack was in fact the Real Thing. Stalin hesitated, and went incognito a little, and in general did not know what to do; he did come to his senses in short order, but a great amount of damage had already been done to Soviet defenses, and that would nearly cost him the country. But it didn't, and the U.S.S.R. rallied, and at the cost of millions of lives killed the Germany armies in the East, and really was responsible for contributing in large part to the defeat of Nazism. 

“Thanks to this the English people are enjoying a certain respite after twelve months of incessant bombardment...”, which was true to some degree.

“Each blow struck now is ten times as effective and entails infinitely less expenditure and sacrifice than if it is delivered when anyone [sic] of his adversaries becomes weaker”. 

And so on.  

I've reproduced the 4-page document below.  

A Fine and Seldom Seen Map from "PM" Newspaper: 1944

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Here's a fine, nearly full-page (12" tall) map that appeared in the great and now elusive newspaper, PM, showing the Allied advance into Germany , October 17, 1944. (I have written numerous times here about this newspaper--just search "PM" in the Google box at right for a number of other posts and a short history of the paper.)  The Allied forces here are nearly into Germany, nearly at the end of their victorious battle at Aachen (Oct 2-21), and pushing up against what was about the last line of defense for Germany, the Westwall (the older Siegfied Line). The Ardennes sits in the middle of this map, waiting for its own major action at the end of the year, which was the final German counter offensive, and the beginning of the end of the European war. 

We're going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line.
Have you any dirty washing, mother dear?
We're gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line
'Cause the washing day is here.
Whether the weather may be wet or fine
We'll just rub along without a care.
We're going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line
If the Siegfried Line's still there ...

((Kennedy/Carr) Peter Maurice Music Co Ltd 1939)

 

A Penetrating Appraisal of Hitler, 1934

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"Ernst Henri" (a probable pseudonym?) wrote Hitler Over Europe in 1934--it is a very insightful appraisal of Nazism written early in the history of the newly-presiding party of German politics and life. This book was published in 1934 by Simon and Shuster and translated by Michael Davidson, and then published in Argentina and China the following year, and then in England by Dent in 1936. (I've checked WorldCat/OCLC and find the printing history a little confusing, but I think that this is about right--also there are more than 240 copies located in libraries worldwide, which means that it is or was a popular title.) 

It is in the very first paragraph (below), where you can easily see that the author is using high octane. 

It is interesting to set this appraisal of Hitler's background and politics against the great Dorothy Thompson's insights into the man when she interviewed him in 1932...and read him right and then very wrong. (“He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones,” she wrote. “He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man. A lock of lank hair falls over an insignificant and slightly retreating forehead. . . .The nose is large, but badly shaped and without character. His movements are awkward, almost undignified and most un-martial. . . .The eyes alone are notable. Dark gray and hyperthyroid—they have the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics...There is something irritatingly refined about him. I bet he crooks his little finger when he drinks a cup of tea.”--quote from Historynet.com http://www.historynet.com/encounter-dorothy-thompson-underestimates-hitler.htm)

Henri, whoever he was, seems to have clenched his fist around the heart of Nazism. The book is at least worth a good solid browse:

• The full text, Hitler Over Europe, can be found at the Internet Archive:  https://archive.org/details/hitlerovereurope009891mbp?q=%22Ernst+henri%22+hitler

"Thyssen"

"WHO sent Hitler?"

"Many believe that it was the German middle class, that
forgotten social force, which nobody thought about and
which suddenly, in a rapid awakening, burst on to the
political scene and smashed everything around it. So it
seemed from without. This is an illusion."

Graphic Design in "PM" Newspaper, September 1944

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Here's another noteworthy, unusual, and most likely very seldom seen display of data from the excellent PM newspaper, this published September 1, 1944. (I've made numerous posts to this blog on PM--for more information, just search the name of the newspaper in the Google search box at right.)  The larger image below measures about 5"x5" in the original; the "Nazi supermen" image directly below is only about 1.5'x3", and really does make a strong graphical point about the demise of the German army in northern France. This is reporting good news to the readers, though it was hardly the true end of the story in that region--three months later, on 16 December, the Germans would begin Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein ("Operation Watch on the Rhine"), their last push against the Allied forces in the West. To the Allies this attack was known as the Ardennes Counteroffensive, and would last until 25 January, ending in disaster for the German forces. 

Bottom line here is that the design is very compelling. 

And another, larger image:

"Restricted" Reports of Allied Aircraft Performance, 1944

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This is another installment of interesting bits and pieces that have emerged from a notebook prepared (ca. 1944) by a naval student of the Naval Air Combat Information School at Quonset Point, Rhode Island. The printed text for the curriculum and classes for an intelligence officer given during the summer of 1944 are nearly all marked "RESTRICTED" in the typed original of the offset pages, and the entire document runs about 220pp.  It seems as though there is an elevated high-and-dry possibility here, but the fact of the matter is that there is a ton of great material, much of it unexpected. For example, in one section there was this three-page chart displaying major engineering factoids of British aircraft: 

Debriefing Life Raft Usage by Air Combat Intelligence (1944)

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I was so surprised to find this 1944 checklist and review for an "Air Combat Intelligence Officer" of "Life Raft and Emergency Equipment Performance Report" (!).  It was in  a notebook prepared (ca. 1944) by a naval student of the Naval Air Combat Information School at Quonset Point, Rhode Island. The printed text for the curriculum and classes for an intelligence officer given during the summer of 1944 are nearly all marked "RESTRICTED" in the typed original of the offset pages.  The entire document is about 150pp long, and if there is interest in the contents I'd probably reproduce the entire thing--it is surprising how much can be learned and how much is revealed even in the multi-page lecture descriptions. 

The document below addresses an odd internal issue of mine, something that I've sort of followed around in some fashion in reading about WWII in the air, and especially in the Pacific, and especially for the precautions and supplies aboard USAAF aircraft in the event of a ditching. I knew from incidental and second-hand reading exposure that these supplies changed quite a bit from 1942 to 1943, but I had no idea that there was such a debriefing schedule established for life raft usage. 

I would really be interested in the answers to #17.  No doubt there is a collection of those answers, but I think I'll just have to leave those to mystery.