JF Ptak Science Books

The Reverse of the Origin of Species and the American Civil War, 1862

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1759

This pungent bit appeared in Punch magazine 8 February 1862, and was a vicious attack against the Americans (almost entirely directed at the Union North)  in the second year of the U.S. Civil War.  What Mr. Punch saw in "his" editor's mind was a "sinking" of the American race to the level of the "Red Indian", the whole of the nation reverting to some previous developmental state, far removed by their actions to a more primitive people, a different sort of "evolution"--in fact, what the spoofing (?) and chiding editors saw in the Americans' actions was a reverse of Darwin's theory.  These same people were already uncomfortable with Darwin (at this point three years past the publication of the Origin¹) but so long as using the book to a comfortable goal was concerned it seemed a perfect fit, a proof for the reverse of the Origin.  As we see in the second short article:

"If there is any truth in the theory of the Origin of Species there may be an inversion of the originating process..."

Chief (and first) among the complaints was the blockade action against the Confederate port of Charleston (South Carolina).  The "stone fleet" is incorrectly described in the wonderful "Science in 19th Century Periodicals" website as being of Confederate origin.  The Stone Fleet was actually part of  a Northern action, being a large contingent of ships brought south and sunk in the waters off Charleston Harbor in the hopes of preventing Confederate blockade runners from escaping the ring of Federal ships already present there.  There were also a number of ships sunk off the coast of beautiful Tybee Island, there to be used as breakwaters and landings for Union ships operating just south of Savannah. 

The behavior of the United States, so far as Mr. Punch was concerned, just wouldn't "do".

"SEVERAL scientific observers of late years have noticed the fact that the physiognomy of the American of the United States is beginning to exhibit a resemblance to that of the Red Indian.The barbarous act of sinking a stone fleet at the entrance of Charleston Harbour and the ferocity with which the permanent ruin of that port and city was anticipated by the Northern Press indicate an internal and moral change corresponding to that of the exterior Vindictive war is as characteristic as lankiness of features or a sallow complexion. It may be that when LORD MACAULAY'S New Zealander alter having visited London Bridge shall extend his peregrination to New York he will find the site of that once populous city to have reverted to hunting grounds their inhabitants hunting grounds their living in wigwams wearing top knots and mocassins and having their coloured faces tattooed. The representatives of the present Yankees will then be armed with tomahawks, rush to the tight with war whoop, scalp their enemies slain in battle, and torture their prisoners at the stake. Such is the level of humanity to which the people who have outraged civilisation by a crime against the commerce of the world are too evidently descending. Their posterity when about to go forth to battle will put on their war paint and even now perhaps the Government of MR. LINCOLN might supply a powerful stimulus to valour by issuing some pots of that ornamental material to the Federal army."

Later in the year Mr. Punch again addressed "Brother Jonathan", (a reference from Revoutinary War days to Americans in general, but more so during the Civil War, when "Brother Jonathan" and "Johnny" were both used...its also intersting to note the use of "Johnny Red" and also the appearance in "When Johnny Comes Marching Home") and again invoked Mr Darwin and the Origin, and again using the "Indian type" as the state to which the "model Republic" was sending itself towards, with Americans "descending to the very lowest place", an "inversion of the originating process". 

"Thus Jonathan you see you are sinking from bad to worse from savage to lower savage and your manifest destiny at that rate of decadence is the zero of humanity."

It is a rather bad letter, brother-to-brother, so to speak., Mr. Punch claiming that Americans will descend to gorillas, "Apes with foreheads villainous low".  Surprisingly (to me, anyway)   Mr. Punch slips easily into very vile characterizations of other types of human beings in use by metaphor--these don't need to be singled out here but can be found in the original, below.  And so the Manifest Destiny of American--"declared" or at least the phrase originated just 17 years earlier by John O'Sullivan in the Democratic Review in an article "Annexation" regarding Texas--so far as England was concerned was to be excruciatingly, intolerably, low; so low inn fact that it is the very proof of the stuff that the Origin of Species theory runs in reverse.

I'm not sure why the editorial cartoonist used the elephant in the hunt scene and how it relates to Mr. Darwin, though I guess it sends the overall message of The Ridiculous regarding the American affair, at least in the eyes of Punch--England still smarting from the Trent Affair, still newly developed.

Notes:

1. The title in full by C.R. Darwin, On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life, would stay so until it was shortened to The Origin of Species in its sixth edition of 1872. By the time these two articles in Punch appeared, the Origin already in its third edition (published in April 1861).  In all of this, the enormously popular book was printed in not-large quantities.  The first edition of November, 1859 sold out on the first day, and was printed in an edition of 1250 copies, of which about 1170 were for sale.  Darwin was immediately put to work on a second edition (rather than simply reprint the first edition), and the work appeared two months later, in January 1860, in an edition of 3000 copies.  The third edition appeared in April 1861 in an edition of 2000. The fourth edition appeared in 1866 (2000 copies); the fifth, in 1869 (2000 copies0, and the sixth and last in Darwin's lifetime came out in 1872, in 3000 copies, the largest print run during CD's lifetime.  So, the most important book in the history of biology (?) sold a total of 13,170 copies or so as published in England by John Murray. 

Humanitarian Propaganda II--POWs and the Hope for Those at Home, 1943/1944

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 281 (from 2009) Extended [Part of the History of Nothing series.]

War propaganda is distributed across all levels of society during a time of conflict.  I've made a number of posts concerning Nazi and Japanese propaganda but no so much on the Allies' side.  These pamphlets come from a small stash of mine relating to Red Cross activities and prisoners of war (POWs), and they fall chiefly I think in The History of Nothing series, mainly because of the chances that all of these packages wouldn't stop and be used by German troops rather than going all the way through to POWs.  The expectations of the Home Front concerning the disposition of their loved ones as prisoners of the Nazis were clearly illusory, what with steamed and pressed trousers and clean sharp shirts.

The Atomic Crossbow of Leonardo da Vinci

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1753

Leonardo understood "big", especially when it came to weapons, and he understood what the concept of 'big" meant to adversaries and enemies of the folks with the "big" weapon--a bit of psych-ops in the mid-Renaissance by the High Renaissance man. 

Leonardo's crossbow (drawn around 1486) should have worked. He certainly understood the idea of stored power in his many drawings--bent and twisted and torqued wooden arms and such--and the concepts of enormous potential is certainly reeking through-and-through this fantastic weapon.  The bow itself seems certainly like a laminated object, adding to its strength via flexibility, the giant bow-string drawn back by a very considerable worm and gear, the whole of which is set to give flight to a large stone more so than an arrow. And that stone was supposed to be able to be delivered to its target over and over again, with minor adjustments, which would have placed it head-and shoulders above cannons, whose recoil made it really quit impossible to re-aim the instrument with any accuracy at the same target over and over again.  The main compliment of the crossbow, then, was reproducible accuracies. (In this vein it is interesting to recall "Operation Crossbow", a Combined Bombing Operations during WWII that took place in 1943 and 1944 against the Nazi installations for the V-2 and V-3 weapons--a directed effort to remove a threat which was even more "precise" (if by "precision" we mean marginally guided weapons loaded with high explosives).)

The "atomic" part of the title of this post is I know far from the mark of being metaphorically correct--the scale isn't anywhere near being accurate.  Offhand to have an "atomic" crossbow in relation to a nominally normal crossbow in similar scale of the Fat Man weapon in scale with an "average" 500-pound bomb (40 million pounds in relation to 500 pounds) the atomic crossbow would need to be miles wide. 

 

The Death Ray and Cloud Writing--Battlefield to Breakfast in a Few Short Years.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1749  [Part of the Strange Things in the Sky department.]

The Death Ray is a long-discussed idea, extending back as far to Archimedes at least--discussed, attempted, abandoned and dismissed.  But as a matter of fact, the thing was actually invented, and deployed, though not int he sense of an EM weapon, or LRAD/ultrasonic, or Teller x-ray laser, or even a Wellsian heat ray (below).

The "Death Ray" made its appearance in the 1880's, but not in the normal sense of what we would today think of as a "weapon"--this death ray could locate the enemy hidden miles from the front, or pick out ships at sea far from shore, and so on, removing stealth capacity, making it possible for these elements to be identified as targets, and then possibly removed, though not by the ray itself. 

This "death ray" was the search light.  In the 1880's when the technology of electric lighting was still in its first practicable decade, the idea of being able to focus a beam of light from a lantern source hauled on a single-mule carriage and powered by an on-board battery, small steam engine  and Gramme dynamo was a spectacular. achievement. 

[This image appeared in the Scientific American in 1886 and features what is probably a one-foot diameter mirror, making it capable of illuminating an object up to about a mile away.  Something with a three-foot diameter could work its magic on object up to four miles away.]

This defensive/offensive weapon/device was very soon afterwards made into a trickle-down appliance that was placed into commercial use almost immediately.  The standard use of course would be upgrading lighthouses, but one special use was using a large mirror in a device to project an advertisement on the clouds in a city--ads in the sky.

[Source, La Nature, 1894; also reprinted in Scientific American in the same year.]

Such a device was used experimentally at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago for the World's Fair of 1893, flashing the daily attendance on the clouds.  I'm not sure why the greater revenue-generating employment of this technology took another year to develop.  And so "The Death Ray", from Battlefield to Breakfast Cereal in a few short years. 

The Post-War Lives of the Nazis: Topf, Designer/Maker of the Auschwitz (and etc.) Crematoria

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1745

The firm that produced crematroia for numerous Nazi death camps managed to stay in business in Wiesbaden  until 1963.

What happened to the firm J.A. Topf & Sohn (of Erfurt), the company that supplied the mass incineration devices,  the crematoria, used by the Nazis at concentration and extermination camps (from 1939-1945) including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Belzec, Dachau, Mauthausen and Gusen ?

Well, in general, most of it dissolved, and the company's CEO, Ludwig Topf, committed suicide in May 1945.

Ludwig's brother--Ernst-Wolfgang, 1905-1979--however, escaped prosecution and re-started the company in the late 1940's, operating a crematorium business in Germany until the new Topf business went into bankruptcy in 1962. It sold mostly refuse/garbage grade incinerators, but, still, there it was.

[Circular for Topf describing the crematoria they constructed for the Nazis; of particular interest in this page is the entry for May 11, 1942, for a crematorium for "“continuousoperation corpse cremation oven for mass use". Source: here.]

The leaders of Topf firm would argue after the end of the war that they did not know what the crematoria were really being used for, despite numerous visits for site inspection and repair to Auschqitz and Dachau. Karl Pruefer, the original designer of teh ovens, revealed on interrogation by Soviet officials just after the war that "I have known since spring 1943 that innocent human beings were being liquidated in Auschwitz gas chambers and that their corpses were subsequently incinerated..."  There can be little doubt that Topf knew exactly what was going on with their crematoria--in fact, at one point, Kurt Pruefer (pictured at left, in Soviet custody, undated, from Der Spiegel, Archiv) suggested that the use of his crematoria at the extermination camps actually saved lives by disposing of diseased corpses and preventing the spread of fatal diseases and epidemics.(The exact early reference was to preventing the spread of typhus in Buchenwald in 1939.  The Nazis adopted a practice in some of the mostly-Russian camps in the East of introducing typhus-laden prisoners into general population so that the disease would spread and aid in the extermination of the camp inhabitants.)

[Topf, still in business, 1953]

The two Topf brothers claimed innocence for themselves and for their company; Ludwig committed suicide because he and his firm had done nothing wrong, and had felt beaten by lawless countries and did not intend to be taken captive by them; feeling that justifying his actions would be impossible, he killed himself  on 30 May 1945. The text from his suicide note is below.¹

The evidence against the firm was exceptional and substantial, an example of which (from the Nuremberg Trials, is seen below²), and their culpability overwhelming.  I'm not sure how Ernst -Wolfgang was able to survive the various net that he managed to wiggle through (unlike a number of other of the firm's officials who wound up being captured by the Soviets and whisked away to cold justice far from Moscow), but he did; and not only that, but was able to start over in the business that he knew best, keeping it running until 1963, well into a time when it was recognized that the shell of buildings from his old business be kept intact as a memory to horror. 

Notes

1)  Farewell letter by Ludwig Topf, May 30, 1945 (excerpt, underlining in original) (from Topf und Sohne website)

   "If I have made the decision to evade arrest it is for the following reason: I have lost all belief in any law in this world now that my family has also done me so much wrong and harm. If I am arrested, the greatest of all wrongs will be done to me. I never consciously or intentionally did anything bad; instead it has been done to me.
I was never cowardly – but I was proud. Handing myself over to the mercy or mercilessness of a foreign country is something I cannot do, because I have learnt the bitter lesson that there is no law and no decency left in this world. That is why I, as a decent person, today have one remaining opportunity to determine my fate as I see fit. And that means immediate departure from a world that in general has become unbearable, and in particular has persecuted and wronged me."
"If I ever believed that my innocence as far as the crematoria are concerned (and my brother is just as innocent) would be recognized and honoured, I would continue to fight for justification, as I always have until now – but I think people need a sacrifice. In which case the least I can do is provide it myself. I was always decent – the opposite of a Nazi – the whole world knows that. If I were still able to feel at peace in the heart of a family, the struggle would be worthwhile – but the Topf family that showed composure, integrity and self-confidence has ceased to exist. I was its sole representative as far as that was concerned. Indeed I am so alone that I have no need to ask anyone's forgiveness, not even for a suicide."

2) From the Nuremberg Trials, Day 193, 2 August 1946 [Source, Yale University, Project Avalon]:

"In the office records of the Auschwitz Camp there was discovered a voluminous correspondence between the administration of the camp and the firm of Topf and Sons. Among them the following letters:

" 'I. A. Topf and Sons, Erfurt; 12 February 1943.

" 'To Central Construction Of lice of SS and Police, Auschwitz.

" 'Subject: Crematoria 2 and 3 for the camp for prisoners of war.

" 'We acknowledge receipt of your wire of 10 February, as follows:

" 'We again acknowledge receipt of your order for five triple furnaces, including two electric lifts for raising the corpses and one emergency lift. A practical installation for stoking coal WAS also ordered and one for transporting the ashes. You are to deliver the complete installation for Crematorium Number 3. You are expected to take steps to ensure the immediate dispatch of all the machines complete with parts.' "

"I omit the next document which deals with "bath-houses for special purposes" (gas chambers), and present to the Tribunal as Exhibit Number USSR-64 (Document Number USSR-64), a document which is appended to the report of the Yugoslav Government. This is a certified photostat of a document externally having all the official character of a business document from a "sound business firm." The name of the firm is Didier-Werke. The subject of the correspondence-the construction of crematoria "designed for a large camp in Belgrade." The document presented by me characterized the firm Didier as a firm with considerable experience in construction of crematoria for concentration camps and which advertised itself as a firm that understood the demands of its clients. For placing the bodies. into the furnace, the firm designed a special conveyer with a two-wheeled shaft. The firm claimed that it could fill this order much better than any other firms, and asked for a small advance, to draw up draft plans for the construction of a crematorium in the camp.

 

Re-publishing a Rare Work on French Parachutists, 1943

JF Ptak Sciene Books   Quick Post

I've always enjoyed reading about the Airborne, and when I came across this pamphlet it looked immediately interesting. It was printed in England (1940-1943 or so) for distribution (I guess) in occupied France or to the French in exile, and possibly for recruit (but at least for a hearts and minds campaign to show that France was fighting back).  It tells quite a story in its pictures, which to me shows men trying to do as much as they can with, well basically nothing. 

The pamphlet shows up nowhere, not even in the massive 70-million item librarians' reference database, the OCLC.  So I decided to scan the whole (short) thing and make it available.  Enjoy. [The original is also offered for sale in our blog bookstore, here.]

Japanese Propaganda: the Invasion of China, 1931-1938

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This Why/Who/How pamphlet on the Sino-Japanese War fully and incredibly lays the blame for the war in the hands of China, reminding me a lot of an earlier propaganda pamphlet that I wrote about here on the threat of Poland to Nazi Germany (1939).   Even the title of the war "the Sino-Japanese Conflict" is misleading--placing the Chinese first in the description of the fighting invests the idea with the primacy of the Chinese role simply because it is before the hyphen.  Japanese-Chinese Conflict certainly sounds different, yes?   (Click on image for a readable size; also see below for the rest of the pamphlet..)

The Chinese tried to tell their story, but I think not nearly as successfully as the Japanese--also this was complicated by the fact that Europeans had been mucking around in China for almost a hundred years by the time the Japanese got to it in 1932, so their voice raised against a foreign intruder was definitely not as loud as it might have been had the foreigners not been devastating China for such a long period of time beforehand. 

When this pamphlet was published, the war-in-earnest had been waged already for a year, mostly through engagements over a cresting wave of "incidents" in which Japan found it more and more necessary to "protect" itself from China while at the same time trying to harness/steal as much of China's natural resources as possible.  It would take another six years for total war to set in, the end result of which (in the 1937-1945 timetable for the event) found 20-35 million Chinese soldiers and civilians dead and wounded, while the Japanese lost in the vicinity of 2 million.  This war was basically folded-in to WWII after 7 December, though it is by far the bloodiest war fought in Asia in the 20th century.

Manuscript and Carbons on the U.S. Naval Bombardment Survey, July 1945

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I just wanted to point out that over in the books for sale section of this blog I posted a bit on a small archive of manuscript and carbon copy material that comprise what seems to be the summary of the U.S.Navy (and Allied) bombardment of Kamaishi, Muroran, Hitachi, Kushimoto, Shimizu and Hamamatsu, forming the Navy Bombardment section of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey.  This was about the extent of the Allied naval bombardments against Japan, as it was not possible for battleships to maneuver close enough to the Japanese homeland to fire against industrial and production centers.  (It may have also been the case that the aircraft used to protect the assaulting ships could have perhaps done as much damage to the targets as the ships themselves.)

For those of you with an interest in these things I've posted the entire working copy of the "executive" summary of the report, as well as covers of some of the rest of the sections of the survey, here. 

[The archive is from the estate of J.D. Coker, who served in the U.S. Navy on the US Strategic Bombing Survey Ships' Bombardment section, and who later became a leading official in the U.S. Atomic Preparedness programs (such as the President's Committee on Emergency Preparedness).]

Philippine Announcement of one of the Last Japanese Surrenders, 15 September 1945

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1714

This announcement comes from the U.S. Army public relations office in Manila ("General Relsease  - 40") and dated 18 September 1945.  It states that "what remains of the Japanese 10th Imperial Division was surrendered September 15th by Lt. Gen. Okamoto to Brig. Gen. Leo M. Kreber", this coming weeks after the formal signing of the Instrument of Surrender aboard the U.S.S. Missouri on 2 September 1945.

The 10th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army (formed 1898) was transferred to the Japanese 14th Area Army in the Philippines from China. There it was involved in the Battle of Luzon (9 January to 15 August 1945), where the "what remains" of it statement comes from.  In that battle, more than 250,000 Japanese troops were engaged, with more than 205,000 killed (with only 9,000 captured). On the Allied side, 175,000 troops were engaged, with 8,000 killed and 29,000 wounded. 

The surrender of the Japanese forces in Manila was one of the last of the major surrenders of armies and army groups would surrender: the Japanese army would surrender at Singapore on 12 September, Saigon on 13th September, and Hong Kong on 14th September. There were pockets of resistance that would hold out for years afterwards, but so far as large organized forces were concerned, this was pretty much the end of the fighting. 

{The original is for sale in our blog bookstore, here.]

Flying Tanks, 1930's-Style

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

There wasn't much pretty in the physical outcome of this thinking--to construct "flying" tanks for quick maneuvers into battle situations--but I think that I like the thinking in it, especially as it seems that the aircraft-end of the tank was re-usable. Still, there was the whole "landing" part of the operation, which meant that (at this time, anyway) the tanks had to be placed and not parachuted to the ground, which also means that the armor would be relatively removed from the field of battle.  But this would be better than driving the things there, or hauling them all on a train  for quick transport.

[Source:  Popular Mechanics, vol 65, 1936.]

Also I guess I'm partial to the design of the tank--which I'm guessing was a fixed-position mobile canon--because it seems so strikingly modern. (Except for the tread and wheels part, which is the place where battles are won and lost, at least according to Heinz Guderian.)  But I like the design, which at first glance reminded me of the great T-34, the Russian workhorse of WWII, sort of, at least for its low-profile sensibility, but really more like the contemporary   The Russian Chyorny Oryol ("Black Eagle").  It really looks a lot more like the STUG assault gun, here:

[Source: combatreform.org, here; a truly excellent site.]

 

A Managerial Directive on How to Present War News: PM Newspaper, 10 Dec 1941

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1694

PM (short for "Picture Magazine, evidently) newspaper¹--begun 18 June 1940 and ended 1948--was a very strong, left-wing newspaper in NYC, a short-lived daily with a long pedigree of contributors².  The "Memorandum" reproduced here, sent by the Managing Editor John P. Lewis "to the writing staff", was a powerful and interesting directive on how to present the news, and addressed the speech of President Roosevelt of the night before. 

Lewis felt that here, at the beginning of the American end of the fighting war, was the appropriate place to set out a war strategy for reporting and publishing regarding information received from overseas, or unverified sources, or from dispatches from the countries against which we were fighting.  He was clear and very concise--the whole of the memorandum fitting on one side of a single sheet of paper. 

[This piece of ephemera may be purchased through our blog bookstore, here.]

The Roosevelt speech of  9 December 1941 can be found  here.  Some interesting extras as follows:

"Your Government knows that for weeks Germany has been telling  Japan that if Japan did not attack the United States, Japan  would not share in dividing the spoils with Germany when peace  came. She was promised by Germany that if she came in she would  receive the complete and perpetual control of the whole of the Pacific area...This alone if true could be a justification for war with Germany."
//
"Our policy rested on the fundamental truth that the defense of any country resisting Hitler or Japan was in the long run the defense of our own country."

But the main thrust that Lewis was addressing was this:

"I cite as another example a statement made on Sunday night that a Japanese carrier had been located and sunk off the Canal Zone. And when you hear statements that are attributed to what they call "an authoritative source," you can be reasonably sure from now on that under these war circumstances the "authoritative source" is not any person in authority."

"Many rumors and reports which we now hear originate, of course, with enemy sources. For instance, today the Japanese are claiming that as a result of their one action against Hawaii they hare gained naval supremacy in the Pacific. This is an old trick of propaganda which has been used innumerable times by the Nazis. The purposes of such fantastic claims are, of course, to spread fear and confusion among us, and to goad us into revealing military information which our enemies are desperately anxious to obtain."

Lewis was quick to the point:  "President Roosevelt's address Tuesday night gave the American people a quick lesson in phony reporting.  After that address all any newspaper has to do to convict itself of falsifying is to say that it learned something from authoritative sources."

He continued: "The president laid down a very clear line on what people can believe and what they can disbelieve..." and then outlined four major points for his writers to follow:

"1. We will not pass on as news any communique about the conduct of the war from any hostile government without warning the reader that these are claims of an enemy government which wants to confuse us...

"2. We will never report anything from "Authoritative" sources or anonymous synonyms. 

"3. On the actual conduct of the war, the only material which we will pass on as absolute fact is material from the American communiques."

"4. In covering war stories as well as other news, we will carefully segregate fact reporting from opinion reporting and editorial conclusions."

Lewis was also particularly demanding in his policy regarding personal opinion in news stories: "Where we want to express an editorial opinion, we will label it "Editorial."

And Lewis meant it, too. Unlike almost all newspapers, PM editorials  were signed.  The newspaper also took no advertising, hoping to keep the paper running on sales and subscriptions.  And so it did, for eight years--not long by long-running standards of  newspapers, but fairly long for the times, and for the type of business plan practiced. 

In any event I enjoyed the crispness and clarity of Lewis' directive.

Notes:

1. The publisher was Ralph Ingersoll (1980-1985), who before coming to PM was the managing editor of Time-Life, and who was also the business plan designer and then managing editor of Fortune magazine; and the silent partner in the whole thing was MArshal Fields III, who pretty much bankrolled the newspaper from a distance.

2.  It was a very considerable staf.  From Wiki:  "Journalist I. F. Stone was the paper's Washington correspondent. His award-winning series on European Jewish refugees attempting to run the British blockade to reach the Jewish homeland in Mandatory Palestine became the book, Underground to Palestine. Staffers included theater critic Louis Kronenberger and film critic Cecelia Ager. Weegee, Margaret Bourke-White and Arthur Leipzig were the photographers. The sports writers were Tom Meany, Tom O’Reilly and George F. T. Ryall (who covered horse racing). Elizabeth Hawes wrote about fashions, and her sister Charlotte Adams covered food. Other distinguished writers who contributed articles included Erskine Caldwell, [Myril Axlerod], McGeorge Bundy, Saul K. Padover, James Wechsler (eventually the paper's editorialist); Penn Kimball, later dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism; Heywood Hale Broun; James Thurber; Dorothy Parker; Ernest Hemingway; Eugene Lyons; Ben Stolberg; Malcolm Cowley; future Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill and Ben Hecht.

Map of Nazi Invasion from Uruguay

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I've post a number of thing son this blog relating to Nazi invasion routes to America and the potential threat of Poland to Nazi Germany, all stories more vividly enhanced (whether true or not) by maps--as a matter of fact, maps seem to be validity enhancers to just about any story, for it seems that maps represent a will of some sort, and where there's a will, there's a way, and so there must've been a good Nazi plan for attacking South America via Uruguay.  Except that there wasn't.  But the map looked good, and certainly it made people think.

 

[Map source from the Bahia Sin Fondo blog, here.]

For example, see the posts Invasion Routes to America:  Nazi Invasion Scenarios of the U.S. and Germany Surrounded (map below).

[Source:  Why We Fight, the Battle of Britain.]

WWI--Post-War Photographs, November/December 1918

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I have made numerous posts on this blog using images from my archive of American news service WWI photographs, though there are few depicting scenes just after the end of the war's end on 11:00 a.m. on 11/11/11. These photographs below do so, and all come from the National Library of Scotland (which can be accessed here). They are all "British Official War Photographs", which was a service similar to its American cousin--various news and photo agencies were given access to images produced by a pool of photographers, all of which passed by the eyes of a military censor. They were for the most part aimed at the "correct" version of the news, though given the subject matter there were plenty of images that were extremely powerful.  In a war that claimed 100,000,000 casualties, the photographic image was a powerful war-time propaganda tool. 

[Original reads: 'SCENES ON THE WESTERN FRONT. WAR TROPHIES SECTION. German trophies from Vimy Ridge and Messines. In centre is Prussian Guards drum.']

On the Cost-Effectiveness of Killing: Poison Gas (1921) and Atomic Bombs (1945)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1678

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--it has that certain stripe to it, bearing the certainty of wrongness that becomes more visible with each passing month.  (The pamphlet is available for purchase from our blog bookstore, here.)  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".

{See here for my post on Willis R. Whitney's letter/proposal for establishing the American chemical warfare capacity, 1917.]

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

Mr. Quick (born in the first year of the American Civil War and dead four years after the publication of this pamphlet, writing evidently from the cushion of old age) 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.

See also my post here on Hermann Goering and Zyklon-B.

William Shockley--a future Nobelist and probable weak member of a Nobel-team that invented the transistor and which included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, or I should say rather a team of Walter Brattain and John Bardeen including William Shockley--sent forth a memo on the mathematics of destruction and the use of the atomic bomb.  He was part of a largish team working on what to do with the new technology once the bomb had been used and the war won.  (I've written more on this paper here.)

This paper was written towards the end of 1945 and is on five pages and runs about 1500 words, and is an extension of work he had already been doing for Henry Stimson with Quincy Wright on evaluating the combinations of casualties that would lead the Japanese to surrender.  He begins this paper with a logical statement of the issue of the economics of conventional and atomic bombing, ending with the sentence “For atomic bombing destruction is still more cheap”.  What Shockley is getting to is the overall cost of the amount of destruction caused per square mile, and the conclusion that he draws over these five pages is the destruction caused by the atomic bomb is 1/100th the cost of conventional bombing per square mile destroyed (“atomic bombing is probably 10 to 100 times cheaper than ordinary bombing”).

Shockley also recognizes that the problem in the near future will be the increasing cheapness of producing atomic (and greater) weapons, and their developing accessibility to small nations.  “This cheapness is a new factor and indicates that an unparalleled loss of human resources will accompany future wars.  The ability of small nations to do great damage is also a consequence of the cheapness.”  He writes further that taking this thinking to its “logical conclusion”, that at some point in the future a single individual will be able to use this new technology to destroy the world.  The main point though that he was making in this line of thinking was the dispersion and proliferation of the new technology--that an arms race would occur, and that it would be dangerous, and that it could be very very bad.  Shockley has of course nothing to say about any of that or the implications of his finds as that was not his charge. 

After figuring that the cost of destruction by the atomic bomb was about $600,000 per square mile (compared to $6,500,000 per square mile for conventional bombing), Shockley concludes that “since the atomic bomb art is in its infancy, we may well expect future economies of a factor of 10 in cost per square mile destroyed…”

The Children's Battalion--Santa and Guns, 1916

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I don't know the Illustrated History of Santa and Gun Gifts, but I guess that a book could be written if one already doesn't exist.  Well, that or something associating Santa with unusual, or questionable, gifts in his bags of joy could be made into something, something disappointing.  I'm not that person to collect those sorts of images because I have always held Santa in very high esteem, and I don't care to have too many of those images floating in my mind, exploiting some dark corners of unknown memories, disturbing the happy bits with unneeded and unwanted visual info.  But, well, these pictures below, found in the December 1916 issue of the uncommonly-seen journal, Illustrated World, provides a little glimpse into the manufactured desires of kid-wishes for toys during wartime, and so I'll pass them along.  These things do tell us something about the period--like the famous multiple images of Santa hanging cigarette carton Christmas ornaments (seen here in the post on Gift Porn, 1954), or a smoking Santa stuff a stocking with a box of Lucky Strikes--so it makes sense to make sense of them.

 

I guess kids have fairly well always wanted toys (or not) guns for Christmas,  gifts from Santa, or at least so long as Santa has been around or identified as so, and to see Santa with a rifle would not be so unusual, especially given that this was deep into the second year of the bloody Great War.  (I have another interesting image here, somewhere, showing Santa distributing presents to British troops in trenches, riding a tank, but presently I can't find its stack in a stack of stacks.)

Perhaps the issue of playing with guns and cannons and so on was a way of easing fear and distress during wartime; perhaps it meant something soothing for the developing mind of a child.  I don't know.