Category: Militaria

The Invasion of America, 19?? (1935 Scenario for Invasions via Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 898

(This is a
continuation of the Invasion of America
series, started here.)

Even
before WWII, the American military and variously-aligned
think-tank subsidiaries had for years hypothesized U.S. invasion scenarios. For convenience’s sake, they were color-coded
so as to not confuse one invadee with another: for example, there were War Plan Citron (an invasion of Brazil); War Plan Emerald (intervention in Ireland); War Plan Green (war
with Mexico); War Plan Indigo (an
invasion of Iceland); War Plan Lemon (an invasion of Portugal); War Plan White: (plan
for dealing with civil disturbances cause by Communist insurgents), and many
others. (I cannot find the color-coded plan for the 20^th century
invasion of Canada,
but it did exist.)

Lesser
known are the U.S. military’s
preparation for the invasion of America.

This
two-page spread (all that I have of a longer article) appeared in Fortune
Magazine for September 1935. It was undoubtedly generated
by a number of causes, not the least of which was the rearming of Nazi Germany (referred
to in this article as a ‘miracle”), which could theoretically cause some amount
of concern in semi-fortress America. It was also an opportunity for Chief of Staff
General Douglas MacArthur to whip up a little hell in Congress for the federal
government to give the military some more money so that there was more to the “fortress”
part of America
than two oceans.

Basically
the plan seems to call for a standing, ready army of specialist forces that
were agile and highly trained, a large network, of anti-aircraft batteries and detection
areas, and of course a large buildup of the Army Air Force. All of this of course cost money, and almost
all o fit would’ve been directed towards MacArthur and his subordinates. (It is
interesting and odd to note that the Fortune article notes that three of the
top four major general assistants to MacArthur were Irish (“see the four big
shots…with three Irish names”).)

[Due
to difficulties in the size of this map I have to present it in three sections,
but I’m sure that the overall flavor will be maintained.]

The most prominent feature (besides the black
invasion routes) are the terribly antiquated (even for 1936?) depictions of
coastal defense canons. Perhaps this was
disingenuous to include them with such flair, what with the main point of the
article lending itself towards air invasion, but there they are, protecting the
American coastline from a ripping adventure from the sea.

But
as we can see the successful invasion routes are coming from odd places—from Alaska,
Canada, the Caribbean) against which the U.S. seemingly had no defense. This was especially true in the Pacific
Northwest (“here defense system is weak”) where America
was entirely susceptible to attack and invasion “from army basing in Alaska”. The rest of the west coast didn’t fair so
well, though the only other direct threat was from “25,000 able-bodied male
Japanese…Californians suppose they have secret arms and drill at night in dark
halls”.

The
southwestern and southern California areas
were relatively secure, except in the case of an enemy capturing Mexico; then, “an attack here would almost certainly
be launched, in conjunction with one against San Antonio”.
I guess there would be long intrigue, much preparation and enormous
effort to attack and secure Mexico,
and I’m assuming that the thinkers behind constructing this map assumed that the
U.S.
would be doing nothing during this prolonged period of time.

The
attack on America in the
Gulf would ostensibly come from Mexico
and “an enemy basing in the Caribbean”, with a central interest in Birmingham and Norfolk. But the main thrust coming to the U.S. from unnamed horribleness would be coming
through the St. Lawrence and points east in Canada, swooping down on Lake
Champlain, the Mohawk Valley, Troy, Buffalo and Detroit. I know that there were bigger industrial
concerns in these places in 1936 than there are now, but, well, my god there
would be better places to begin an attack on the U.S.
than from Montreal and Toronto.

In
all of this I see that the industrial northeast is left alone, save for a “feint”
attack to dislodge resources and attention away from the movement against the Virginia coast. There’s
the navy yard and industry and shipping and etc. there, but it would seem a
terrible waste to attack here rather than a much juicer and more northerly
series of prizes.

No
attacker is named in what I own of this article, and there is a very curious
absence of any threat coming from the already-warring Japan (save for
the Japanese super secret nighthawks in San Fran). The article does make a case—apart from the
map—that national defense was at a low ebb insofar as manpower and ordnance
were concerned. But it scoots around the
issue of the war of Japan
against China
and the vast militarization of the Nazis.
(Of course, this is Fortune magazine, and Krupp and Hoechst and other German firms, and Standard Oil, and the Bank for International Settlement, and Ford, and SKF, and etc. abetting
the Nazi war machine were doing some nice business in the U.S., so perhaps it
would’ve been best not to make Nazi money upset with some bad press.)

Taking
all sorts and manner of considerations into account, this is just simply a
miserable attempt to reckon what the future might bring to America in the
hands of unlabeled enemies—it is simply a rousing caroling of general fear of
attack from places unknown.

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JF Ptak

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Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Militaria
Nazi Propaganda: the British Threat to Germany, pre-War 1939

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 897

I’ve written twenty or so posts here about (mostly) graphical propaganda of World War II, and most of that coming from the Axis (and mainly Nazi) end. A popular theme among this limited exposure seems to be the Germany-surrounded meme: Germany under attack from all sides: massive attacks being directed by the British from air and sea,

airstrikes coming in from thousands of planes in Czechoslovakia, Poland moving on the ground and in the air to invade south-eastern Germany, retaliation mounting from the French, and on and on. And somehow when all of this is presented in cartographical form to the average reader, and when it is presented over and over again, the propaganda must take its toll.

Tonight’s installments come from the Illustriete Zeitung (Leipzig), and were printed just before and just after the start of the general hostilities of WWII (meaning the invasion of Poland, and not the actions against Austria or Czechoslovakia, and not the war in the east beng waged against China by Japan).The first comes in the 27 July 1939 issue–featuring a remembrance of WWI on the cover, showing a devastated field of battle with a spanking-new heavy dagger thrust into the heart of the field–and shows John Bull pulling strings of an advancing/attacking navy in the one hand while the other controls a firing network for cannons facing Germany based in its contiguous-bordered countries. (The image was created by the prodigious Richard Lipus and titled “Englishe Kriegspolitik”.)

The second piece was published just after the start of the war (21 September 1939) and attacks Neville Chamberlain (contrasting words and deeds) and his “treacherous” involvement with neutral countries.

Not particularly virulent, these maptoons undoubtedly helped to form a Nast-ian image in the commonplace psyche of the German people about the treacherousness of the Brits and of their dire situation of being surrounded by potent and threatening enemies.

Some of the other posts on this blog relating to WWII propaganda:

Maps
as Propaganda https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/08/maps-as-propaga.html

Maps
of the Polish “Corridor” https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/09/propaganda-in-maps-the-polish-corridor-1939.html

Maps
of Naval Disaster https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/05/jf-ptak-science-books-llc-post-624-the-admiralty-regrets-to-announce–was-for-years-the-standard-beginning-to-an-offici.html

Anti-Nazi
Propaganda https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/08/antinazi-propaganda.html

Nazi
Propaganda and the Threat From Czechoslovakia
https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/08/propaganda-maps.html

Humanitarian
propaganda for Allied families with family members who were POWs https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/09/humanitarian-pr.html

Nazi
Germany and Scaring the Will to War (Germany surrounded, again) https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/10/nazi-propaganda.html

Nazi-directed
scare tactics published in English https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/08/nazi-propagan-1.html

The
Luftwaffe and RAF present their (graphical) popular cases https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/09/graphical-and-a.html

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JF Ptak

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Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Militaria — Perception — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Joseph Stalin’s Flying Circus: the Maxim Gorky Aircraft, 1934

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 871

The Maxim Gorky (Gorkii, ANT-20) was the largest plane of its time, a craft intended to show the world of the vast technical prowess of the Soviet Union. There is now doubt that the plane was huge–112’ long, 22’ high, with a wingspan of 206’ (and 5,200 sq ft surface area), and weighed in at 59 tons—and was indeed the largest plane in the world.

The reality of the craft was closer to its rear wheel, which was manufactured of metal and filled with cement.

The plane was built by TsAGI was big—it was also ponderous, pretentious, terrifically slow (cursing speed of 141 mph and top speed of 171), and just a beast. It was built very quickly, and it showed; it offered nothing new so far as design is concerned, being a cobbled montage of existing blueprints. It did set world records for lifting stuff, but beyond that, it was a half-dead behemoth..

Construction on the Gorky began in the midst of the Great Famine, a murderous Stalinist rampage which the result of planning and control on the collectives that killed 7-8 million Russians and Ukranians¹ and which also destroyed the Ukrainian resistance, and which was also one of the most disgusting of the 20^th century genocides…but there are so many to choose from. (See Robert Conquest, the Harvest of Sorrow²).

The Gorky was a magnificent nothing. It was dedicated, finally, to a serve as a propaganda tool for the inglorious voice of Joseph Stalin, fitted into service with a movie/film, theater, print shop, photo lab, press room, radio station, and other creature comforts. The Gorky, the “Victory Over the Air”, met its end 18 May 1935 in a crash with two other Soviet planes during maneuvers, crashing near Sokol Station, killing everyone on board and another 35 on the ground.

I’ve included photos of the interior of the plane which illustrated and article in the 19 January 1935 issue of The Illustrated London News. I could find no other pictures of the inside of the plane online.

{Photos in the CONTINUED READING section.)

Notes:

See:

http://www.dictatorshipoftheair.com/wp-content/themes/content/excerpt2.pdf

http://dictatorshipoftheair.com/2007/01/04/the-ant-20-maxim-gorky-in-flight/

The Great Terror

1.The Holodomor (the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

2.Robert Conquest The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (1968) , The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (1970) Lenin (1972) , Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps (1978) , Inside Stalin’s Secret Police: NKVD Politics, 1936-1939 (1985) ,The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986) , Tyrants and Typewriters: Communiques in the Struggle for Truth (1989) , Stalin and the Kirov Murder (1989) ,The Great Terror: A Reassessment (1990).

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Aviation & flight — Bad Ideas — Militaria — Technology, History of
The Battle of Berlin, 1935

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 869

Well, it wasn’t really a battle, but the Nazi government was
getting ready for one. As reported in this 30 March 1935 issue of The
Illustrated London News. There was an
elaborate preparedness drill conducted in the Kreuzberg district of south Berlin ten days earlier—“the
most realistic air raid exercises ever planned”.

The Germans attacked themselves with scores of low flying
planes that dropped “deafening” false bombs; meanwhile the streets were swirling
with gases that smelled like poison gas, cars were blaze, abandoned buildings were
lit up with pyrotechnics, and there were heaps of rubble here and there. The population not otherwise engaged in
defense measures were all sent to evacuation shelters and centers. There were drills for gas attacks and
subsequent decontamination, firefighting, saving people from collapsed
buildings, caring for children and the elderly, aid stations, medical triage,
and so on. Anti-bombing measures were also
taken for nighttime raids, with blackouts, and general light-lessening measures
on all levels and quarters—for example, streetlights and street sign lamps were
replaced with much lower wattage bulbs. It
looks like it was a pretty big event–I’ll have to check my Illustriete Zeitung/Leipzig for the
German coverage.

Without being an historian of the 1930’s preparations for
war defense, it seems to me that there was an awful lot of this going on in England, France
and Germany
through most of the decade.

[The illustration above is a charming overstatement of the obvious, right down to the little flaglettes on either side of the (500-pound ?) bomb. The sign reads “Closed Thoroughfare//Danger to Life” (sorta).

I doubt that there would be that much need for a sign or flags, but if I was going to use anything at all I might place it a little further away from the unexploded device. (I can just imagine people inching forward to be able to read what the relatively small print on the sign actually said…)

At this point it may be interesting to have a look at an
older post here on the creation of the false Paris.

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JF Ptak

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Future, History of the — Militaria — Outsider Logic — Perception — Perspective
Unusual Aircraft: the Handley Page Harrow, 1938

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 884

I don’t have much to connect with this image, save to say
that it is (to me) an unusual view inside one of Britain’s early heavy bombers, the
Handley Page Harrow. It was a beast of a
plane, 88x82x19, with two 830 hp engines, a big, slowish, wide-turning affair
with 3000 pounds of payload (which doesn’t seem like a lot to me). The co-pilot is standing straight-up in the
control area of the aircraft, with plenty of headroom to spare—something that I
couldn’t do anywhere in the B-17e, and I’m only (just shy of) 6-foot. He seems, maybe, to be calculating ground
speed (with a circular slide or ground-speed calculator?) at the navigator’s table, standing there next to the seated radioman.

It seems that it had a mixed experience during the war. It was intended to be a troop carrier when it
was design in the mid-1930’s, and by the end of the war there were only five of
them left in service, which were removed from the RAF in June of that
year. I suspect that when this image was published in The Illustrated London News on 12 March 1938, Britain was trying to quickly react the growing and desperate situation with Germany, and the Harrow was meant to plug a few gaping holes in the missing bomber bits of the RAF’s forces.

I like the plane’s design, though I think it wasn’t
intended to be a plane seen in combat, necessarily.

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JF Ptak

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Aviation & flight — Militaria
Hermann Goering, IG Farben and Zyklon-B

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 878

I’ve been reading Nuremberg
Interviews (Knopf, 2004) by the American Leon Goldensohn, a psychiatrist who conducted interviews with
19 of the 24 “premier” Nazis brought to trial at Nuremberg in 1945/6. Goldensohn had a relatively workman-like
approach to dealing with his subjects, leaving many dangling questions and
comments not pursued. On the other hand,
he may not have been the type of psychiatrist who asked any questions at all of
his patients, so at the very least we do have an interesting insight into these
failed people that we would not have had otherwise.

Of all the interviews, I was most struck with the incredible
understatements made by Hermann Goering (Field Marshal and once second in line
to Hitler as a hand-picked successor) regarding the extermination camps.
Goering maintained that he really didn’t know anything about them, at all, but
found them offensive to his “chivalric” (if not moral) code. He felt that the
killing of the Jews in this manner would “give Germany a black eye” and as a tool
of warfare it turned out “not to have been worth much”. But Goering continues: “If killing the Jews meant anything, such as
that it meant the winning of the war, I would not have been bothered by it”.

Goering continues to explain that the killing of Jews as a
result of “Goebbels’ hysterical propaganda” and “is not the way of a gentleman”
.Also, the gassing women and children just wouldn’t do. He found gassing women to be “ungentlemanly,
and thus would not have been able to authorize such a thing. Killing children, he said, would not have
been “sportsmanlike”.

Goering said that he had heard “rumors” of mass killings,
but he “knew that it would be useless” to investigate the rumors “even though
it would have been easy” to be do so.
His reasoning: he wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it; and
faced with that, he concluded, “it would make me feel bad”.

I’d give the benefit of the doubt to normal folks who would
say something like this, that there was an error in translation, or some
difficulty, or something. With Goering,
I’d say that this was an accurate statement. Sportsmanship. He didn’t mention men in the gas chambers,
but since he had defined his limits of gentlemanly and sportsman-like conduct,
it stands to reason that the men were fair game in his mind. Only monsters think like this.

This was the man who had very well-monied support from
American industrialists in the pre-1945, deep connections to Ford and Standard
Oil, and thus from Standard to IG Farben, and then to Zyklon-B (and also HERE) and back again
to the gas chamber. These connections
are long and arduous, complex—but they really are there, the American support
for the Nazi government, developed mainly for money but also for ideology. One
of significant front man for the Nazi government is also one of Cornell’s 100
most illustrious alumni, Walter Teagle. Teagle was president of Standard Oil
and partnered with the Nazis in 1938, one result being shared research and
patents, some of which were crucial war materials like tetraethyl lead
and synthetic rubber.
(Tetraethyl lead was a fuel additive that in some respects made it possible for
the Luftwaffe to attack and bomb London.)
I use the term “front man” because of Teagle’s blatant lies to the Securities
and Exchange Commission concerning true ownership and control of I.G. Farben’s
American subsidiary, American I.G. Chemical Corporation. (It was happily believed that a Swiss
subsidiary controlled the company rather than its Nazi owners. Teagle of course
knew the truth.)

This is just one of a geographical dictionary of stories on
the American/Nazi business connection and the financing of Hitler. It is a long
and winding mass of roads, none of which is particularly pretty, many of which
lead straight home, again. Henry Ford
was impossibly ugly in all of this, a moral stain. But there were many like him
as well.

Farben made a heavy contribution to the Nazi war effort, on
many levels, in particular with explosives, where the company produced nearly
all of the explosives used by the German army. Farben also swept into countries
freshly occupied by the Wehrmacht to take over the industrial complexes, using
and discarding indigenous workers as they saw fit and necessary. I
think what most people think of when they think of I.G. Farben is their
sustained involvement and investment in the extermination camps. For example, Auschwitz IG (and Buna-Werke) was
a direct subsidiary of IG Farben which ran the Auschwitz III (or Monowitz,
Monowice) labor camp, using and consuming some 50,000 slave laborers at a time
at its various installments around the vast Auschwitz
complex. These workers would be weeded
out from time to time, with those too weak to work sent to the gas chambers at Birkenau.(Zyklon-B was used at Majdanek, Sachsenhausen and Operation Reinhard .)

In the appalling history of the gas chambers, it was almost
by accident that Zyklon-B came to be used to exterminate human beings. Its function to that time was to exterminate
bug pests, but experimentation showed that it worked lethally upon humans. Monumental amounts of Zyklon-B were sent to
the extermination camps, all without question. Dr. Fritz ter Meer, one of the
directors of Farben and who knew exactly what the vast amounts of Zyklon-B was
being used for, was tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to seven years in prison
for genocide and crimes against humanity, though he was released after four
years after the intervention of U.S. High Commissioner for Germany J.J. McCloy.
(It was McCloy again, working with Standard Oil and the Rockefellers, who
ensured that the massive Farben works at Frankfurt was taken off lists of
American bombing targets in 1943 and 1944.)
ter Meer returned to work for Farben after his imprisonment—though it
wasn’t the old Farben anymore, the company having been slightly effaced, broken into
several constituent elements. Ter Meer’s
section of Farben was Bayer, as in Bayer aspirin, where he served as Chairman
from 1952 to 1961. {Image below: political meeting at IG Farben.]

Dr. Fritz ter Meer, a director of IG Farben who was directly involved in
developing the nerve gas, Zyklon-B, which killed millions of Jews, was
sentenced to seven years in prison but was released after four years through
the intervention of Rockefeller and J.J. McCloy, then U.S. High Commissioner
for Germany. An unrepentant Fritz ter Meer, guilty of genocide and crimes
against humanity, returned to work in Bayer where he served as Chairman for
more than 10 years, until 1961.

Kurt Wurster, another director from Farben who was in charge
of the Zyklon-B-producing subsidiary, Degesch ((Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung mbH, or German Corporation for Pest Control), was acquitted of all war crime
charges brought against him. He took
charge of another part of the disbanded Farben empire, serving as CEO of BASF
from 1962 to 1974. The directors of Testa, another Farben subsidiary producing Zyklon-B–Bruno Tesch and Karl Weinbacher – met with a different end in a British Military court, and were executed.

And so on and on the story goes, unpretty tales of
undeserved redemptions. For example, in
the coming fight against the Soviets, the U.S.
government developed a convenient amnesia regarding the atrocities committed by
Wernher von Braun et alia, paperclipping them away to the U.S. to help develop the American
missile and rocket capacities.

[Above: one of the many appearances of Hitler on the front page of Farben’s newspaper, Von werk zu Werk.]

I think I’ve ground to be a bit of a halt, these posts
supposing to be an hour’s effort—there is simply too much to put into a tiny
synopsis like this. I just got stuck on
Goering and Farben. Seeing these images
from one of the many Farben publications with so many swastikas and so much Nazi symbolism made me terrifically sad…Yes, Farben was the largest backer of Hitler in his rise to power in 1931/32 and supplied even more after the election, and of course Farben received the most benefit than any other company in Germany as a result of the victory, but still, there is just so much of it… [See HERE for an interesting short item on the adaptation of Farben to nazism.]

In all of this the survivor has been Zyklon-B itself: it is still in production in the Czech Republic by Draslovka Kolin (Kolin), and is now known as Uragan D2.

[Some vintage footage from the trials at Nuremberg.]

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Bad Ideas — Militaria
The Invasion of America, 1942, Part II

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 877

This is a continuation of an earlier post on mapping the
invasion of America
in 1942.

[It starts: LIFE
Magazine issued a wake-up call of sorts to its readership in their 2 March 1942
issue. I say “of sorts” because even though this hard article (entitled
“Now the U.S. Must Fight for Its Life”) must have sorely sobered some of its
readers, it started on page 15, following big ads for Listerine, Matrix
(women’s shoes, Bell Telephone, Modess, Clapp’s Baby Food, Dot Snap Fasteners,
Goodrich Tires, White Horse Scotch, Pompeian Massage (for shaving), Jack
Benny/Carole Lombard’s “To Be or Not To Be”, Colgate, Yardley powder and
Mimeograph, and a few interspersed puff pieces—and a Ginger Rogers cover
photo. But once LIFE paid its bills, the article got right to business,
responding to a February article by sci-fi/novelist Philip Wylie on the possibilities
of the U.S.
losing the war…]

The article displayed six maps showing possible invasion
routes from the east and west. It was
also illustrated with four unusual graphic images depicting various parts of
the U.S.
attacked and pulverized by Japanese and German forces. [Images like these—outside the science fiction
world–were very uncommon.]

The first image shows the assault and capture of the town of
Dutch Harbor,
“the pivot of Alaskan defense” by Japanese forces. I guess we’re to assume that the American
military base on opposite the town has been overtaken already, with the assault
on the town being a mop-up operation. Odd thing here is that Dutch Harbor
and Fort Mears were actually attacked n 3 June
1942 by a Japanese aircraft carrier (and entourage) which inflicted moderate
damage on the harbor and fort, and killed 78 Americans. This was a diversionary movement, meant to
draw away American attention from Midway.
It didn’t work.

This image shows Japanese mountain troops rounding up the
locals after their successful attack on Mt. Rainier. I’m not so sure why the force was here and
not in Seattle, as (a) there is no port here, and (b) there wasn’t anything
going on so far as war production goers, which was definitely happening north
of here. That’s a very long column of
Japanese soldiers headed towards Rainier; I’m
not sure where they were going. Also
there are two large cannons (88s or thereabouts) taking aim at the mountain. Again, I think here that the mountain would
win in the long run.

The petroleum culture is under attack here in southern California. The Japanese tank commander is shooting a gas
station attendant who has just sprayed the tank with gas and set it on
fire. I’m not sure why the oil
facilities are on fire, unless we did it.

These Heinkel-177’s are bombing an unnamed East Coast war production
plant, crossing the ocean straight from Germany ?). They are presented here essentially as a manned
bomb—the crew was supposed to drop their load, destroy their secret equipment, then
parachute and surrender after auguring in their aircraft. This push-pull
engine configuration on this LIFE magazine
version of a bad aircraft—and the only heavy bomber the Luftwaffe ever produced
in numbers—never was able to drag this aircraft across the Atlantic.
Its maximum bombing range was about 925 miles,
which means even if the crew expected not to return it would still only get about
two-thirds of the way across the ocean.

I’d say that this article might well have established a new
fear-line in the minds of many of LIFE’s
millions of readers, introducing them to the possibility of mainline attack
just a few short months following Pearl Harbor.

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Mapping the Invasion of America, 1942

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 873           Blog Bookstore

[See also Part II of this post, here; and consider a related post on the Nazi sub-orbital Amerika Bomber]

LIFE Magazine issued a wake-up call of sorts to its readership in their 2 March 1942 issue. I say “of sorts” because even though this hard article (entitled “Now the U.S. Must Fight for Its Life”) must have sorely sobered some of its readers, it started on page 15, following big ads for Listerine, Matrix (women’s shoes, Bell Telephone, Modess, Clapp’s Baby Food, Dot Snap Fasteners, Goodrich Tires, White Horse Scotch, Pompeian Massage (for shaving), Jack Benny/Carole Lombard’s “To Be or Not To Be”, Colgate, Yardley powder and Mimeograph, and a few interspersed puff pieces—and a Ginger Rogers cover photo. But once LIFE paid its bills¹, the article got right to business, responding to a February article by sci-fi/novelist Philip Wylie² on the possibilities of the U.S. losing the war.

Losing looked like something that could actually happen in pre- war-ready America³. The war in Europe had been on in earnest since the very end of 1939 (since 1933 in Asia), and the Axis had reached just about the fullest extent of their victories (though there would be more gains in the Pacific to come). By March of ‘42, we had Bataan, MacArthur leaving the Philippines and the fall of rape of Manila, the siege of Leningrad, Corregidor, Java Sea, the Brits leaving Singapore, Malaya, and so much more. The Axis powers in Europe were now in control of Austria, Czechoslovakia. Poland, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Norway, Yugoslavia, Finland, Greece, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and parts of the Soviet Union (Ukraine, Bylorussia, Crimea), and parts of North Africa; plus the allies of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovakia. There was also Italy, of course, controlling Sicily, Ethiopia and Libya., and of course the Japanese controlled large swaths of China, South East Asia, Indonesia and points in-between. The overall situation did not look very good.

The following maps appeared in a two-page spread, detailing ways in which the Axis powers could combine their efforts, focus on America, and take over the country. Maps such as these with arrows being drawn towards America were absolutely uncommon during this time.

Notes

1.This is almost universal SOP for war reporting for almost all media, and which continues today. The Illustrated London News delivered reports of success and disaster sandwiched between ads for socks and trifles, as did the Illustriete Zeitung (Leipzig and Berlin), the New York Times, and so on. I remember very clearly as a kid hearing the reading of the daily list of American soldiers killed in Vietnam on one of the Big-Three networks, somber and intoned, followed instantly by a ad for Coke or Mister Kleen.

2 Wylie (1902-1971) was an interesting guy with a wide reach. In addition to Hollywood-feeding work, interesting fiction, insightful scifi and social commentary, Wylie also provided the inspiration for the creation of Superman (“The Gladiator”, 1930) and Flash Gordon (When Worlds Collide, 1933).

3. Once the war machine in the U.S. got into hyper drive I think that it was impossible for this country to be defeated given its population, workforce, industrial capacity, raw materials, and of course scientific superstrucutre. Also there was also no other country in the world with the necessary (and enormous) components needed to construct an atomic bomb. This is a simplified statement that seems pretty homespuna dn jingoistic, but the fact of the matter is that the U.S. was the seat of overwhelming possibilities and capacities. And yes the Nazis had been slowed down mightily with the expense of dozens of millions of Russian lives and the entire British war machine and on and on—I’m just saying that in the end, the U.S. could not have been beaten.

MORE maps in the extended section, below:

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Fantastic Titles — History of the Future — Information, Quantitative Display of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Militaria
Objects from the Last Full Measure, 1944

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The material documented in this 17 April 1944 LIFE magazine article are the effects
of dead soldiers. It was surprising to
see this sort of coverage, given the place and the time: I do not think that we
will see photographs like this for our currents wars. The title of this short photo essay—the
shockingly stunted and bald “Dead Men’s Things”—should certainly have been
something else with more dignity than a movie title for a schlock Hollywood
B-production of the ‘50’s.The article is weirdly disjointed and heavy handed
considering the great and respectful duty at hand. I’m not saying that the writer didn’t
understand the enormity of the situation, as the article puts it quite
well: “To the people who go there, it
seems a more sacred place than a cemetery and the ordinary things it handles
seem the best kind of memorials to men who will never return…” The clumsy manner in which the whole deal is
presented was probably a series of unfortunate errors by a time-pressed
editor.

The story of the belongings of the killed servicemen goes
like this: the effects were collected by the quartermaster corps in a small village
in France, stored in 11
buildings and 150,000 square feet of storage, and then sent to the Army Effects
Bureau¹ in Kansas City, Missouri.
From there the material was further sorted and checked and
double-checked, and checked again, and then sent on to the next of kin.

It sounds like an overwhelming job, helping in the attempt
to deliver the high honor of restoring the last objects carried by a dead son
into battle to his parents. The thing I
can’t get out of my mind is the continuous rising tide of bags and boxes coming
in from Europe, all intimate reminders of
great loss.

1. “The job of the Commanding Officer, who is
the Effects Quartermaster (Continent), is to receive and safeguard thousands
of’ packages of irreplaceable
personal property until they can be returned to the owner or forwarded to the
Army Effects Bureau at Kansas City for disposition. Q-290 serves as a holding
and reconsignment depot in transmitting the property of casualties from the
unit in the field back to the owner, or in forwarding property of deceased to
the U. S.”

“When a soldier becomes a casualty (either
deceased, hospitalized, captured, interned, or missing), his unit commander
collects all personal property, inventories it, removes government property,
and forwards all the personal items to Q-290, marked with the owner’s
identification and status. If the owner is deceased, the property is documented
and forwarded immediately to Army Effects Bureau, Kansas City, for transmission to the next of
kin. If the owner is hospitalized, the property is placed in storage
indefinitely, subject to disposition instructions from the owner. If the owner
is missing, captured, or interned, the property is stored so that he may claim
it upon return to duty.”– From documentation on the website of the Army Quartermaster
Museum.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — History of Goodbye — Militaria
People Out of Place: Mailrooms and Traffic Islands, Military, 1918

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This is the U.S. Army mail depot at Regents Park, London, braced for and under siege by Christmastime mail in 1917. It strikes me that there are not a million items in this photo–at this time in the war there were something like 35 million people in the services for all countries dedicated to the war effort, which is approximately half the number that served in total. If these letters in this picture were bodies, I reckon that there would be five more rooms like this necessary to tell the visual picture of the war dead and wounded. This aside, I initially focused on the guy in the rear with the white shirt and tie, standing there pretty much overwhelmed by the task of moving all of that stuff…and perhaps with the idea that much of the mound would wind up being undeliverable because the recipient was killed. I wonder if that mail was returned, or not?

On the other end of the spectrum is this bizarrely-titled photo of a
British soldier “guiding” a traffic signal device…the description
says that this is the busiest intersection in all of British-occupied
France. Maybe so, but not at this particular time. Perhaps the
photographer should’ve waited a bit to get a different sort of picture
to make his point, rather than settle for this lonely (if not
beautifully arranged) situation.

Here’s the image without the accompanying text, which was supplied for the end-user of the photo by the news service photography supplier.

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Contraries — Militaria — Photography, history