Category: Militaria

Propaganda Maps: Potential Nazi Supporters, 1938

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 956

In
an audacious move Adolf Hitler attempted to unite German-heritage people
throughout the world to come to the aid of the Nazi Socialists; it was a
vicious piece of propaganda attempting to inflate the number of possible-Nazis
into the hundreds of millions, showing a sub rosa infiltration of Nazism
throughout the world.

This
map appeared originally in Deutsches
Volkstum in aller Welt (Berlin,
1938) and purported to document far-flung German descendants—the map alone was
perhaps statement enough to many, striking a deep fear thinking about the
20,000,000 Americans alone whose roots could be traced back to the
Vaterland. As a terror and influence
tactic that cost little money, it must have caused the anti-propaganda folks a
good deal of worry. The German/Vaterland
(German American Bund, or Deutsch-Amerikanischer Volksbund) movement never
really gained much popular ground in the U.S., though there was some
significant compliance in business and trade going on at higher levels of
industry and banking.

(I’ve
written about the Nazi-American connections in numerous posts on this blog; all
you need to do is do a site google under “Nazi” and you’ll find plenty. For the
moment I’ll just concentrate on the Henry Ford example. The man was a monstrous moral figure without
an ounce of historical understanding who blamed much of the world’s troubles on
the “Jewish Dictatorship”, which somehow, in his mind, spawned WWI. Long story short, Ford received the Grand
Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle for his friendship and services
to the Nazi state—this friendship extended in form of money and many thousands
of military vehicles, and so on. His was
a treacherous business, his Nazi interests folding very nicely in with his
astounding anti-Semitism. Ford, by the way, received his medal months after the
invasion of Austria,
when he really should’ve known better.
I’m not sure if he gave the thing back or not after the war ended.)

But
among the masses, the sentiment never grew into strength, though it wasn’t for
trying. The movement had been present in
the US
since the 1920’s in the form of the National Socialist Party and the Teutonia
Society, though the real start of the American Bund seems to have been with
Friends of New Germany (1933). Right-Wing groups such as America First were
strong sympathizers of Hitler, though they abandoned him once the war
began. (Not so true for Chase Bank, Ford
and many others.) The German American
Bund never topped 100,000 members, though it did fill up Madison Square
Garden for a meeting in
1939. (One of the main speakers was Avery Brundage, International Olympic
Committee Chair. Brundage survived in this role until Munich in ’72, when he ordered the Olympic
games to continue, unabated, after the 11 Israeli athletes were murdered by
elements of Yasser Arafat’s organizations.)

Amyway,
this map was more a propaganda tool than one of true expectation, and I’m sure
it did its fair share of damage.

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Bad Ideas — Information, Quantitative Display of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Militaria
Graphic Display of Quantitative Data: German Military Flatline in Persepctive, 1934

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 955

This terrific 1933 pictorial display of quantitative data1
showing the comparative military capacities of eleven countries—it will become progressively
and aggressively more wrong in each passing year to the start of WWII. In 1933 the military giant was, basically, France—the same country that would be quickly
and completely overrun just seven years later by the country at the bottom of
this display with the micro graphs, Germany.

The German military forces underwent staggering change after
the end of WWI. The Imperial Forces were
completely done at the end of the war, limited to 100,000 men, left with no air
force and no tanks. There were wide
changes during the Weimar
Republic, the army seeing
three iterations (not to mention the hundreds of Freikorps that were
established with some of the disbanded remnant of the standing army) that
ultimate resulted in the formation of the Reichswehr (in 1921) and which in
turn would evolve into the Wehrmacht in 1935.

Germany
barely registers, barely forms bumps in the flatlines of measurements in
1934. By 1939, six years after the
election of Hitler, and fanned by xenophobic revenge and greedily speedy full-throttled
hate, Nazi Germany rushed at record
speeds towards the rape of the future. The German Wehrmacht stood at 4.7 men.in 1939
(6.6 million in 1940; 8.1 in 1941; 9.5 in 1942; 11.2 in 1943, 12 in 1944, and 9
in 1945), while the Luftwaffe was at 400,000 (growing to 1.7 million by 1943) and had enormous growths in quantity and quality
of armaments. It was all astonishing, and almost all gone again in another six years.

This is an exclusive graphic of German nothingness, an accurate graphic in 1934 and again in 1945, but in the middle, it was totally incorrect. Twelve years from nothing to nothing, with the disgust of Hell to pay in between.

It is simply extraordinary to see the disparities of the
Nazis displayed so

Notes:

1. Printed in Die Illustriete Zeitung, 1934.

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The Care and Feeding of Missile Systems–1950’s Ads

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 948

The following illustrations are all taken gloriously out of context from ads appearing in the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers, published in 1957-1958.

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Bad Sounds Department: the V-1, 1944

I remember seeing a film (with sound) many years ago, when I was little, back in the mid 1960’s, of a V-1 in flight. The flying bomb issued a terrifically awful sound, punctuated by the silence when its engine turned off and it fell to its target in silence. It sounds like death.

[The V-1, or Vergeltungswaffe 1, (“retaliation”, or “vengeance” weapon), or Fieseler
Fi 103, or Buzz Bomb, or Doodlebug, was a flying bomb (on the order of a very primitive
cruise missile guided by a gyroscope autopilot) launched against population centers
in England by the Nazis during the June 1944-January 1945 period. The bomb was about 27’ long and 17’ wide,
weighed 4,700 pounds, and reached 400 mph with an 1,800 pound warhead. Its 8,000+ sorties killed more than 6,000
people.]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1qsBGTkVSk&feature=related

And again:

And again, here:

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Aviation & flight — Militaria — Technology, History of
Blank and Missing Things: German Submarine Importance in Graphical Comparison, 1912.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 937

In the midst of a massive building campaign by Germany and a building-response by England the French journal L’Illustration published these two side-by-side pictorial comparisons of their two navies, which wound up being reprinted in the Illustrated London News soon afterwards in June 1912. [Royal Navy, left; German Navy right]

Germany began a rebuilding campaign in 1902 which by 1908/9 was seen by the British Admiralty as a “stab at the heart” of England’s military supremacy, and so the construction wars were undertaken. It’s a complicated period and a complex race, which I just can’t get into in a short post, so let’s just say that the Brits wound up the winners of the competition when these images were printed in June 1912.

The hidden element of some great importance, a trump card that would played in just 750 days, would be the small dot-like drawings labeled “sous marins”. These would be the submarines, and it would be the subs that would be perhaps the most significant aspect of the entire German navy.

This was true in spite of what looks like an overwhelming preponderance of subs in favor of the Royal; Navy, where the count was 68 to Germany’s 24. It was really a question the type of sub, and as it turns out there were only 8 or 9 of the English count that could’ve been considered for blue water ops.

Germany began the war with 24 submarines in 1914; they recognized the ship’s importance and by war’s end ramped up production, winding up with 351 in total production and with 178 in action in 1918 alone. Of that overall number fully half (178) had been destroyed in combat, with another 11% sunk via other means. There were more than 12 million tons of Allied shipping destroyed by the German sub forces from 1914-1918 (half of that in 1917).

So these two illustrations do portray an overwhelming Royal Navy, but they certainly do not give any hit whatsoever to the coming importance of the German submarine fleet.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Histories of Smallness — Information, Quantitative Display of — Militaria
Things They Took To War, 1915

JF Ptak Science Books Post 923

The 27 Feb 1915 issue of The Illustrated London News is remarkable. Yesterday’s post was generated by an image appearing in it of sappers mining under a battlefield to create an underground attack on the enemy’s trench lines. A few pages into the issue shows a series of pictures describing the regulation issue for an enlisted man headed into combat—simple, scary, and heartrending. And of course a true measure of the courage and fortitude of these millions of men who marched to the Front with all what today looks to be not-adequate material. It is hard for me to imagine going off to conquer your enemy and your own fear with these sorts of supplies, marching along with all of these slight bits jangling and clanging to each of my steps.

[All of the images are expandable.]

The images themselves are, I think, unintentionally spectacular for their design and arrangement, not the least of which is the fact that all of the materiel is suspended from rope or wire.

There is no way for me to know what of this material was instantly discarded (if any), or what was thrown into ditches because they didn’t make sense or were too heavy or cumbersome or got in the way. Or what of these supplies were actually carried into battle. Given the nature of the fighting, perhaps all of it was carried in and out.

Basically though the pictures just make me uneasy, nervous; so many things look so slight and needy. The canteen looks tiny; there’s only two pair of socks (!?) but two pipes; the “grocery ration” looks inadequate; the ammunition pouches look stingy. But the “housewife” looks useful, and its always good to have scissors, and a handkerchief. I’m not so sure about the purse.

It just seems to me an amazing display of the stuff that the British soldier was given to haul into the future with him.

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History of Goodbye — Industrial & Technological art — Militaria
Missing Things Making Holes: Soviet Bread-not-Bombs in Finland, 1940

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 917

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

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

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

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

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

    3.1   they weren’t being bombed; and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 916

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

Nestled in the corner of this page–at about 2×1 inches–is this lovely little graphic, showing that 1.5 bil could purchase 300 Queen Marys, which this delightful little design showed to great effect, and a hidden gem inside of a gem. First is a detail of this detail,

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

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

And then the Army:

And of course the Territorial Army:

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

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

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Militaria — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — Technology, History of
When Civilians Aren’t Civilians: Blowing Up Bomb-Proof Cities, 1927-1934.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 915

We’re a few days past the 95^th anniversary of the
first aerial bombing of a city, the first in the long and unhappy calculus of
eliminating things and people in civilized settings by dropping high explosives (and etc.) on them
from the air. 19 January 1915 saw the first bombs dropped from an airship
during WWI, two German Zeppelins lighting up Great Yarmouth, Sheringham and
King’s Lynn in the U.K.—the
physical and strategic outcomes were minimal; the psychological and
intellectual aspects were not.

The effectiveness and temerity of bombing escalated
exponentially–virally by the end of WWII. Aerial bombing’s future
effectiveness and devastating potential was recognized by the early 1920’s, particularly
in the form of the Hague Conference
(1924), where the bombing of cities and civilians was theoretically controlled,
if not outlawed.

Of course the definitions of “bombing” and “cities” and “civilians”
and “non-combatants” were very loosely writ and were completely open to
(completely) wide interpretation in practice, and were especially liable to
racist necessities. I should also add that the concepts of “defended” and “undefended”
cities were—somehow—nebulous.

An encyclopedia could no doubt be written on nothing but the
these awful bits of bombing. And for another example of this I turn to
the French, who can supply more than their share, per capita, pound-for-pound,
to this equation. No, not the French return to Indochina in 1945 (after having
done business with the occupying Japanese forces for the entire war) and their
resurgent colonialism as practiced against the Vietnamese, or the heinous
practices against the Algerians just prior to that country’s
independence: it is their bombing practices in Damascus. Not the Syrian bombings of 1945
(which also included many other places like Aleppo,
Hama and etc.) but the French civilian bombings
of Damascus in
1925. For it was in that year that the League of Nations found that the
French really weren’t bombing and killing civilians indiscriminately when they
were doing so; they were, ironically, bombing themselves, and so their actions
were not illegal. (It was problematic, identifying “civilians”, as the
League didn’t necessarily grant the same sort of “humanness” to all human,
finding categories for barbarians and savages. It was acceptable to bomb
those later two categories, but not the first.) So the French sought to subdue
a rebellion against their oppressive rule in that country, identifying the
Muslim population centers in Damascus
as probable hotbeds of activities for the “bandits” that were causing them
their problems. October 18, 1925 is when this particular outrage
occurred; the Syrians protested, and the League considered.

And that was
about the size of the story for the Syrians, because as it turns out, the
French were just maintaining an order that for them was a simple police action;
civilians populations could not be bombed in the eyes of international law, if
the bombing was being done to a foreign people; since the French were there and
occupying the country, they were conducting a police action, and in a sense
were merely bombing themselves, loosening them from the barriers of whatever
international law could be applied to their actions by the League of Nations.

These are just a few examples from the French; there are
plenty more for other countries for every decade, every year. (The Brits in Teheran in 1924, the Italians
at Harar in 1935, Franco/Luftwaffe in Guernica
in 1937, the Japanese against Shanghai/Beijing/Tianjin (etc.) in 1937, and on
and on.)

The Big Fear of bombing from the air and the need to protect
the populations of cities led to all sorts of anti-bomb/bomb-proof
architectural plans, most not very good and not very practical. Such is the price of trying to make your
people happy. I happen to have

a few in
my files, which are seen above and below. (The top images were printed in the Illustrated London News in 134; the bottom in 1927.) The results of the plans were no doubt intended to pursue a common belief that cities could be constructed to be bomb-proof, that the future that national leaders were dragging their subjects into wasn’t necessarily as dire as the possibilities of aerial bombings hinted things might be. Of course the resulting buildings would be massive and impossibly expensive; the prospect for underground cities (and roads!) was just a non-starter. And these future-views would all be obsolete in less than 15 years what with the development of enormous firepower. And I’m not talking atomic.

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On Not Mentioning the Jews in Nazi/Polish/Holocaust Literature: “Spring Held No Hope”, 1942

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 902

Maria
Mikorska’s Spring Held No Hope,
published in London
in June 1941 is a difficult, hard, emotional read, even in the genre of
Holocaust literature. It quickly paints
a documentary history of bestial behavior of the Nazis in Poland. I wonder though what happened to the
mentioning of the Jewish issue in all of this reportage of inhuman
transportation and treatment of humans, as the reference almost never
occurs.

Reading
though this 52-page pamphlet of terror and horror, I wondered what exactly
happened to the missing reportage of the hunting and killing of the Jews as a
group.. The period of 1939-1941 saw the beginning of the Endlösung der
Judenfrage¹ (“The Final
Solution of the Jewish Problem”) in which 90+% of the 3.5 million Polish Jews
alive in the Polish Second Republic were killed and exterminated, the primary
victims of the Nazi Holocaust. At this
point in the war the Nazis were removing Jews from their cities and
establishing regional ghettoes. Once the
Jews were collected in this manner it was easier for the administration of
their extermination.

Getting
back to Spring Held No Hope and the lack of identification of the Jews as a
persecuted group I turn to pp 24 and 25 (illustrated below and clickable).

The examples of inhuman transport and the
direct extermination of men, women and children by starvation and hypothermia
mention the cities Jarocin, Gdynia, Siedlice, Skierniewice, Lublin and
Otwock: all of which had large centers
of Jewish populations that were removed by the Germans directly after the
invasion and removed to ghettoes though this fact is not mentioned in this
pamphlet. Ostensibly the collection of Jews was not in an effort to seize
property (as the majority of the Jews in Poland at this time had little
wealth) but rather to supply labor (being a group with the potential for
hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of humans capable of performing slave
labor). The Jews in Gdynia (for example)
were sent to Siedlice to establish a larger Ghetto immediately after the
invasion; by 1942 the tens of thousands of occupants were either shot and
killed or sent to Treblinka; 2,000 or so remained after this, though most of
them were also soon sent to Treblinka; those remaining were all executed when
the ghetto was completely liquidated on 14 April 1943.

I
am in no way saying that it the murder of Poles during the Nazi occupation was
limited to Jews—the 3.5 million Polish Jews represented 10% of the Polish
population; of the remaining 90%, or 32 million or so Gentile Poles, some 3
million were killed by the Nazis, or about 10% of that population.

These
are horrible stories told by Mikorska—but I’m bothered by the lack of the
recognition of the Jews as the major, featured target in all of this and wonder
if the author suffered an enormous sin of omission. This is far from being a singular event–even the important and highly significant Eisenhower report on the concentration camps of May 1945 does not signify the Jewish people as anything out of the ordinary–and may well be indicative of the general practice of dealing with the Jewish aspect of the Nazi exterminations.

Notes

1.
The name and practiced of the Final Solution was infamously adopted at the
Wannsee conference on 20 January 1942, liquidating the ghettoes and sending the
occupants to the six major concentration camps of Auschwitz, Belzec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór and Treblinka.

I’ve written elsewhere in this blog on the Holocaust; for more, search “Holocaust” in the Google blogsearch in the left column.

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