JF Ptak Science Books

An Episode in the History of Bread Photography: Monumental Bread and Infographics, 1914

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1662

In the history of pictures of bread, this loaf seems to be about the biggest.  The 60-million-pound loaf is meant to represent a week's ration for teh newly-fighting German army.  The war, the Great War, WWI, was just beginning when this article hit the newsstands on 22 August 1914.  There wasn't much yet printed in the Scientific American regarding the war, and it seems as though this was the first cover of the magazine to deal with the new world-ender.  But in the blazes of the guns of August (B Tuchman) the end of the conflict might've looked a little close at hand.  I doubt that many would've seen the 100,000,000 dead and wounded that would come as a result of the war, at this point just finishing its first month.

I am not sure why, but the editors of SA chose to think about supply for their first stab at making a cover-comment about the war.  It does give some idea of the sheer numbers of people involved, at least on the German side.  Hoiw this is iterated by a 400-foot-tall loaf of bread, I can't exactly say.

(Are potatoes one tenth the density of :"meat"?  The potato sack and the meat chunk look to be about the same size, though the meat bit is less than a tenth of the weight of the potatoes.) 

Two issues later--5 September 1914--we see the following artistic display of quantitative data, a much more effective way of generating understanding on the differences in troop strengths among the waring countries:

 

The United States would not get involved in WWI until 1917, and so American statistics were not included in this image.  But if they were, the U.S. Army's size would be somewhat larger than little Montenegro there at the far right.  Given the American population of 92,000,000, the army was quite small, with barely 98,000 soldiers under arms (half of whom served overseas). (Montenegro's force of 50,000 was somehow pulled out of a population of 350,000 people--Belgium, with a population of 7 million, had an army more than double the size of that of the U.S.)  Of course this was a peacetime, hands-off army for the United States, and by the end of 1914 President Wilson expanded the standing army to 140,000; by 1918, when the newly-instituted draft¹ really kicked in, more than 4,000,000 people would be in the armed services, half of whom would serve overseas. 

Notes

1. Beginning in 1917 all males between the ages of 21 and 30 were required to register for the draft/military service, and by September 1918 more than 23,000,000 men had done so.  This was an extraordinary leap from the Army totals for 1914.   

Kolberg and Sachsenhausen, 1945--Visions of Fantasy and Reality

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1661

At the end of WWII there was a tale of two battles, both by the name of Kolberg.  One was a propaganda tool filmed in Agfacolor at the request of Josef Goebbels, a movie begun in 1944 about the mythically-endowed victory of Germany over Napoleon at Kolberg.  It was an epic, costly movie made at a time when the 180,000 "extras" composed of Wehrmacht troops could not be spared, but it was seen by Hitler and whoever was around to agree with him that a movie selling selflessness and sacrifice (blood sacrifice) was more valuable than a military victory¹. When it was finally put to bed, the movie "opened" virtually nowhere in Berlin in January 1945, as  the city was becoming a bombed-away shambles--much more so in the next three month.  The visions of resistance-to-the-last-breath played in few places outside of Hitler's bunker, where the dictator professed the qualities of sacrifice and the fight-to-the-death messages in the movie, though not applying those necessaries to himself.  

The other Kolberg battle was the Battle of Kolberg (a Baltic seaport city in Pomeria located about halfway between Berlin and Koenigsberg), which took place in real life from 4-18 March 1945.  It was a fight between the Germans and combined forces of the Soviet and Polish armies--it ended in Polish hands on the 18th following the retreat of the Germans and he destruction of most of the city.

It is ironic that the defeat of the Nazi forces in the real city of Kolberg occurred at nearly the same time as the wasteful film of the 1807 battle extolling the virtues of heroism and sacrifice was released.

It is interesting too that the  actor depicting the leading German hero in the movie Kolberg (directed Veit Harlan and Wolfgang Liebeneiner)  Heinrich George--who acted in a number of Nazi propaganda films after finding ways to get back into favor following his pre-Nazi pro-Communist politics--found himself arrested and imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he died of "complications" in 1946.

Sachsenhausen was one of the longest-lived concentration camps, being in operation from 1936 to 1950.  From its beginning to May 1945 it was of course a Nazi concentration camp (Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen), where from 1943 until the fall of Nazi Germany it was also an extermination camp.  As many as 200,000 people were seized and sent through Sachsenhausen and its satellite/tributary camps. From the end of 1945 to 1950 it was operated by the Soviet Union, where another 15,000-30,000 people were imprisoned, Heinrich George being one of them. 

In addition to the many horrors of Sachsenhausen, there was also this--it was the center of a plot to destroy the British economy with the production and distribution of a hundred million pounds worth of counterfeit British currency.  The lead counterfeiter at Sachsenhausen, Salomon Smolianoff (a gifted artist who once said "why make art when you can make money?") was an inmate with exceptional skills and who basically headed the team of workers responsible for this effort,  For good work in his part of pulling down the economy of Great Britain, Smolianoff was rewarded with an occasional go at a ping pong table, as well as less-rancid pieces of meat. 

[One of the forged Sachsenhausen notes.]

This was operation Bernhard, named for its director, SS Major Bernhard Kruger (the leader of the VI F 4a Unit in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office) or RSHA), who was responsible for the operation from 1942, and which eventually extended from Sachsenhausen to other camps, most notably a major operation at Auschwitz.  More than 134,000,000 pounds of what the Brits considered to be the most perfect counterfeits ever were produced, but for various reasons--not the least of which was sabotage instigated by extraordinarily brave concentration camp internees--the vast part of the plan was never implemented. 

As it turns out, Smolianoff survived Sachsenhausen, survived the war, and then became a puff of smoke. He was a wanted-but-not-found fugitive, and spent his last days in Brazil, painting.  And creating toys.  He died in 1976.

Bernhard Kruger (born in 1904), also survived the war.  When the pound-forging plan was scuttled in 1944, he moved the idea over to American currency, which he worked on until the end of the wat.  Although he was kept by the British for two years, and then by teh French for one year, he was eventually released, and faced no charges until a Denazification court ordered him to trial, where he was somehow acquitted.  He died an old man, aged 85, in 1989, in his bed. 

Notes:

1.  At least this is so as reported by Sir Ian Kershaw in his biography, Hitler, 1936-1945.

11 11 11: Veterans Day

Veterans Day repost:

I want to thank all Veterans today, all of our Veterans everywhere, for all of your sacrifices. I particularly want to say to say how much I appreciate the members of our family who have served: Uncle Pete (USMC, WWII), Uncle Ray (RCAF, RAF+USAAF, WWII), Uncle Stan (Navy, WWII), Uncle Alex (Army, WWII), Uncle Joe (Army, Korea), Uncle Jerry (Army, WWII), Uncle Frank (USAAF WWII), Uncle Walter (Navy WWII) and my other Uncle Stanley (Army, WWII), Uncle Francis (Army, WWII), Uncle Vincent (Army, WWII), cousin Billy (USMC, Vietnam) and Grandpa (Army, WWI); Patti's father Melvin Lonnie (Navy, WWII) and stepfather Boyce (Army, 2nd US Cav WWII), Uncle Guy (USMC WWII), Uncle Max (Army WWII) and her four relatives in the CSA. Nearly everyone was in battle, and nearly everyone came home. [Image: Uncle Walter looking at the 5-star Blue Star flag, Housatonic, Mass, 1943.]

Big Numbers and WWII Aircraft--Artistic Displays of Quantitative Data

JF Ptak Science Bools  Quick Post

This post continues an earlier series on the artistic display of quantitative data--putting a face on big numbers. In particular it extends a collection of images of Second World War airplanes, "A Big Sea of Planes:  Quantitative Display of World War II  Bombers. The images below appear in the 17 October 1942 issue of the Illustrated London News in an article about the possibility of replacing seaborne troop and materiel transport across the Atlantic from America with the big Martin JRM Mars aircraft, getting the troops there faster and safer and releasing at least part of the naval force for wartime activities.  The images are pretty compelling:

 The caption states that 5000 Mars planes could get 500,000 soldiers to Europe.

 These were big planes¹ (200' wingspan, 117' long, 38' high, more below) and could haul 130+ troops.  By the time though that the powers-that-be were figuring out who the main contractor would be for production (and those production numbers in early 1942 were about 500 per year, at that point, anyway) the Battle of the Atlantic was already--in 1943--fairly well decided.  The U-Boot problem was solved enough for a continuous flow of soldiers and supplies, though not without a high cost in the first half of the Atlantic campaign.  (Overall, from 1939 to 1945, some 3,500 Allied merchant ships  and 175 Allied warships were sunk, costing the lives of 72,200 Allied sailors and merchant seamen.  The Germans lost more than 780 submarines along with fully three-quarters of all sailors in the U-Boot fleet, making some 30,000 men.)

 Below, a cutaway for the Mars:

Stats and Technical data on the Glenn-Martin(from Jane’s Fighting Aircraft of World War II, (1945):

WWII German Comic Book Propaganda

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The Bilderbogen vom Krieg--some examples of propaganda aimed at German children, efforts to convince them of the winning of the war, evidently a universal attempt....

Source:  Deutschsprachige Comics und Romanhefte vor 1945 here.

On the History of Blank, Missing and Empty Things: the Heart of Some Sort West

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post   (Part of the series on the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things.)

I've owned this photograph for a long time.  It has been in the files for many years, waiting for something to happen to it, waiting for it to be a little understood in some slight way of identification.  I've still not gotten around to it.  To me, it has always seemed like a photograph of a small post out in the American Far West, 90 men in dress uniform inside their "fort", or outpost, the commander and the camp dog addressed in front and the sergeants out on the flanks.  The enlisted men stand at ease. 

I'm really not sure though who or where they are.  The camp is very spread out, for one thing.  And for the age (I reckon this to be made around 1885, perhaps a little earlier) I would've thought that boots would've been visible under trousers.  And their hats/helmets--they really don't look to be made for the sun, and also seem too much of a bull's eye/target.  That's on first glance--nothing about their uniform seems fitted to the place:  no protection from the sun, trousers caught on low burrs and scrub, and so on.  But the uniforms--and helmets--seem to be in line with the Prussian-influenced dress of the time (or at least around 1882), including the ribbon-y materials draped around the commander's neck.  (I really don't know enough about U.S. Army uniforms to make a good qualified guess about who these men are.)

But the photo as art has always intrigued me, capturing the heart of a lonely place.  I know, though, that having spent  a little time hiking in the desert that the place is hardly empty, or blank.  But it can still be lonely if you want it to be, a state which isn't dependent on any of the conditions mentioned in the title of this post--its a created space, the loneliness.

I've wondered too about who those people are,  sitting together, (huddled?) at the far end of the soldiers' barracks, a speck visible over the shoulder of the sergeant (the last figure on the right in the top photo)? I suspect they must be Native Americans, or at least indigenous people.  They've faded into history too with the rest of the people in the photograph, a chance at a piece of tangible memory missed because, well, no one made any notes (that survived, at least) about the image. 

The photograph looks hot and cold to me at the same time...

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

A History of Changing Sides, Part 1: a Half-Fascinating, Wholly-Horrible Biography of a Forgotten Man

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1642

This is the first post in a new series on this blog on "changing sides"--that is, having a new allegiance, Adopting/acting on an something completely out of the mainstream of the personal experience, believing in the opposite of an established belief; to leave something, falling away or rejecting one thing for its opposite or something different, done with integrity or with the abandonment of honesty. 

Jacques Doriot.That was the name on the pamphlet that I pulled out of a stack of pamphlets segregated for their cover art.  Les Communistes et le chomage was written by Doriot in the year after he became mayor of St. Denis, an ancient commune just north of Paris, in 1932.  That was years, of course, after Doriot returned home from being a POW of the Germans in WWI and found himself joining the French Communist Party (PCF), a group in which he rapidly succeeded.  HE went to jail for the violent protest of teh French occupation of the Ruhr, emerging into the political arena as mayor of St. Denis.

At one point he was taken by the Communists, but a bitter debate erupted after which he was expelled from the Party (in 1934).  He abandoned thoughts of the communists and established a new ultra-nationalist Parti Populaire Français (PPF) in 1936.  From there things went downhill, but not yet downhill and on fire. 

Doriot supported the idea of France becoming more like its Facsist neighbors Germany and Italy, and when the war rolled into existence in 1939, Doriot jumped on the foreign Fascist bandwagon.  In France.  He supported the occupation of the Nazi's French occupation of the north, but when that proved to not be fascist enough for him, he toddled off to Paris where he found a better reception for his pro-Nazi sentiments among the Nazis themselves, what with the Vichy government providing too-soft a version of governance.  His transformation was in full blossom by that time, when in 1941--after having an Ezra Pound-like experience in espousing pro-Nazi beliefs on Radio Paris--he and Marcel Deat went almost all the way into the heart of the Fuhrer, creating the Legion des Volontaires Francais (LVF), which was a French force organized to fight with the Wehrmacht^. (The French were hardly alone in this, with something like 350,000 soldiers in the Wehrmacht coming from places outside of Germany.  See the note below for troop strength numbers. ¹ )

Not surprisngly the LVF was thrown into the Barbarossa meatgrinder, and was decimated, along with millions of German soldiers as well as more millions of Russian citizens and soldiers. (According to a wiki page, the LVF started out at regiment strength of about 2,400 when they went into battle in October 1941; by the spring of 1942, there were only two batallions left, comprising about 600-800 soldiers in total^.2.) Doriot survived, and in what must have been the high point of his life, was awarded the Iron Cross in 1943. In coming back west he pursued other pro-Nazi activities, including what looks the support of German agents inside liberated France in 1944, which I think would leave an ordinary person completely vacant and a deranged one full of pride and fortitude.

Somehow he made it almost to the end of the war, though had he survived it I am sure that he would have been visited with vengeance and retribution.  (It seems that most of the officers were tried and executed while the soldiers were either sent to jail or offered to work off their debt to the nation via service in the Foreign Legion.) Doriot was killed when the car he was driving in was strafed by a fighter plane on Washington's birthday, 1945. 

It is quite a remarkable, and horrible, little life that Doriot led, a life that actually has me feeling a little hollow as I write about it--very off-putting and upsetting in a dark, struggling way. 

Crowd Series--VE Day, May 1945

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This is an addition to a developing series on images of crowds:

• Ephemeral Uniqueness in Large Crowds, here.
• Crowds and the Press of Humanity:  WWI German POWs, here.
• The Chaos of Hats, here.
• Crowd Series and Berlin Expectations, here
• Clarity and Confusion in the Display of Human Masses, here
• Large Crowds and Singular Persons Series--3 Images.  Here.
• Servicemen and B-17s at the End of WWII, here.
• Imaging Mass Casualties in WWI, here.
• Relief in Capture: Churchill in Carthage and what 230,000 POWs Looks Like, here.
• The Detail is in the Detail: What 20,000 Soldiers and 1 Mule Look Like, 1918, here.

Times Square, New York City, VE Day, May 1945:

Custer--the Limited Man of No Limits--and Exterminating Southerners

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1630

"...I would offer no compromise except that which is offered at the point of a bayonet. I...favor a war of extermination. I would hang every human being who had a drop of rebel blood in their veins whether they be men, women or children..."--G.A. Custer in Richard Slotkin Fatal Environment..., Harper, 1985, pg. 384.

Here’s a bit of Custer legend that is true and seldom heard—if left to his own devices in a Custer-filled world,  the general would have “exterminated” everyone in the South, every one (“men, women or children”) , “with an ounce of rebel blood” flowing in their veins, hanged dead.  At that point the South would be free, and would be repopulated with the “loyal and patriotic” people,l presumably from either up north or Southerners loyal to the Union.^a

This was part of  a long letter (transcript below) to U.S. Senator Jacob Howard, written on 19^th January 1864, in the field.  Custer was feeling on the ropes at the time, needing to defend his loyalty to Lincoln and his policies, and needing to distance himself from Lincoln’s election contender and inferior general, George McClellan. (Richard Slotkin, in his fabulous The Fatal Environment, the Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 notes that Custer needed “to justify himself…(and) disabled his previous affiliations and the nature of his relationship with McClellan…’)

Custer's relationship--real and imagined--with McClellan was putting him in a stench void, creating the possibility of distance between himself and the powers that be--particularly with Senators like Howard and Zachariah Chandler, "who controlled army promotions" (Slotkin, page 384), which meant distancing himself from the higher rank he thought he was destined for. Custer had been on McClellan's staff, and had aligned himself with his war policies, though not necessarily so his presidential ambitions.  Howard, a Republican from Michigan and member of the Military Affairs Committee, believed that Custer was a "McClellan Man" and set against Lincoln, and for that was set to block his promotion to brigadier general.  Custer's  salvaging letter¹ to Howard left no doubt about his supposed non-political feelings and where he stood on Lincoln, the Emancipation, and the treatment of the Confederates:

 

History of Lines: Zig and Zag, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1628   History of Lines Series

In the long history of lines seldom do we see such an indirect way to get safely from point A to point B than by zig-zagging through points A₁ to A₂₀₁. But this was definitely the case for ships in the North Atlantic in the 1914-1918 period.

Merhcant Vessel v. Submarine, Some Reasons for Zig-Zagging (a "Confidential" report written by Lt. Commander A.G. Leslie and published by Wood & Co. in Chatham in 1918) presents logical, simple, workable solutions to the problem of the submarine, fallible solutions to what must have seemed to be infallible treachery.  It is a pocket-sized, 5x3 inch talisman and survival guide for those ("For Masters of British Merchant Vessels") responsible for hundreds of lives and thousands of tons of ship, all of the good information boiled down to eight pages of loose type, a way to get around the subs, and weighing in at about an ounce. 

What it really boiled sown to was zig-zagging--plus darkening the ship, posting lookouts, painting the ship the proper color, camouflaging it, and keeping the lights and smoke down.  But over th eight pages Leslie knocks down the idea of zig-zagging over and over again.  And he was right of course, right on all of it, given the conditions of conflict and the state of development of the submarine and the torpedo.  At this point, the torpedo was a point-and-shoot affair, which means the sub commander needed to get accurate info on the speed and the course of the ship (and other stuff of course)--and the one thing that would make this very difficult for the sub was for the ship to change its course unpredictably.  That would mean longer follow time for the sub, longer time above the water line, probable multiple dives using up battery power, and so on, all very problematic for submariners.

Once unrestricted warfare was declared on 1 February 1917 the German subs attacked any and all shipping, including American ships, which led the way for American involvement in April.  The U-boot sunk substantial part of British shipping, but, ultimately, it could not do enough against the escorted convey, and the German moment would be lost.  In the end of it all, of the 360 submarines built by Germany, 178 were lost, after having waged a campaign for four years which saw the sinking of more than 11 million tons of shipping. 

A straight line coursed by the ship would allow the sub to gather its information, site the ship, and sink it.

[The full text is below.  I can't find another copy of this work in any of the likely places, including OCLC.]

Religion-in-the-Foxhole Division: God in Shelters, London 1940

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

On looking at the bombing of Britain from the German side--an article in the popular Illustrirte Zeitung for 5 September 1940 with maps and illustrations, found here.

AS people took cover from bombs and fire in the subway system or in bomb shelters, proselytizers were on their way to work, too, as seen in this slip of a handout, Have You s Shelter?, published around February 1940.  It seems that the maker and distributor of this tiny pamphlet didn't identify themselves save for an address from which more copies of the flyer could be obtained (61 Upton Lane, Forest Gate, London)

People weren't quite yet getting into the shelters for real--this was still the pre-Blitz period, back there in February 1940, and the real attack against England (but particularly against London) didn't begin until September and last through May 1941, which in its course would kill 40,000 civilians (half of whom were in London) and destroy a million homes.  In February it was still speculation, and the church folk who distributed this flyer were out to make the best of it--trying to save souls, trying to ease the nervous burden through belief, trying to do something, anything. Though mostly it seems trying to convince people that it wasn't just German dive bombers that they needed to fear. 

Polling for Opinions on the Japanese, 1944

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1627

I uncovered a few interesting documents this morning from The American Council, Institute of Pacific Relations (in 1944 at the address 744 Jackson Place, N.W., D.C.) relating to collecting opinions on Japan and the Japanese, right at the height of the war.   And this is what the American Council was doing--prep work to assess the extent of public opinion on the treatment of Japan post-war, which entailed reviewing existing polling data (from Gallup) was well as conducting their own original research. [These documents are available from our blog bookstore, here.]

The "first" issue (so far as I can determine)  was perhaps the most aggressive:

Is Japan incurably warlike?

The question was asked of an undefined group over three periods of time  (February 1942 to June 1943) for both Japan and Germany, the statements the respondents having to choose from being: "always want war", "too easily led" and "do not like war" at three different times, from February 1942 to June 1943.  From Feb '42 to June '43, people's opinions that the Japanese "always want war" went up from 48% to 62%, while for the same time the same question regarding the Germans stayed about the same, 22%.  The Gallup Poll for June 1943 reported that for 75% of the respondents only 8% of the folks thought that "we can get along" with the Japanese, while 67% favored our chances with the Germans. 

Get along with them or not, or feeling that they are war-like or not, had little to do with the opinions of people (reported by the National Opinion research Center, August 1942) who thought that reparations should be paid, and paid hard, by the Axis powers across the board, "as much as it is possible to get out of the Axis countries, even if it breaks them".

The following two papers came a little later, closer to the realization that victory was coming, that the war would be over, that victory would be taken--probably at the end of 1944 or the beginning of 1945, when position statements were more circumspect than the earlier public opinions.  "Expert Opinion on Post-War Treatment of Japan"  was more understanding when speaking to the post-war existence of Japan, stating in a number of different ways that "there should be no attempt to keep Japan permanently repressed" and "the Japanese people must work out their own political salvation".  Also that there would be no "continuing burden of reparations payments...as done with Germany after the last war". 

The overall feeling of this and the following document ("The Treatment of Japan") can be found in the section "Teaching Japan a Lesson":  "United Nations effort should be directed toward demonstrating to the people of Japan the advantages of making peace rather than the penalties of losing a war".  The issue regarding the Emperor and whether or not he should or could stay--an issue that would stay with high command right through the second week of August 1945. 

A Paris Made to be Destroyed--Sham Paris, 1917/18

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1613  (Post 656--expanded) 

 

Now this was a case in which you were given the result and had to find everything else for yourself.  -- Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet

There is no doubt a history that could be written on shadow cities, cities that were built to resemble other cities, cities constructed to serve as a deterrent or double, cities set to deceive, cities constructed to be experimented upon. Some were built ot be destroyed.  Like Paris--or "Sham Paris". 

Augustine cleaved two cities from one, the good and the doomed, in The City of God.   The powers that were in Paris at the end of World War I tried to do exactly that—to create a Sham Paris located on the outskirts of the real city—it was to be doomed, offered with confusing lights and displays that would disorient German aviators into bombing and destroying it rather than the real city. 

 

Of course these were also the days of pre-RADAR, and of aviators simply holding a bomb by its fins and letting go once a target was in sight, so the possibility of causing this sort of dissonance was at least palpable. The planes held the pilot and a lot of fuel, and not much flight weight was devoted to bombs, so the bombing runs were necessarily quick and comparatively light (by standards of just a decade later).  So the idea of a Sham Paris might’ve, could’ve sort’ve worked, maybe; but not really.  It had a very strong, fatal, feculent (thank you for this word, Mr. Depp) air about it, like that misty doomsday smell that lifted the Maginot Line out of the earth and dumped it in the dim and stinking past. 

The story of Sham Paris may have been “broken” in The Illustrated London News of 6 November 1920 in a remarkably titled photo essay, “A False Paris Outside Paris—a ‘City’ Created to be Bombed”.  There were to be sham streets lined with electric lights, sham rail stations, sham industry, open to a sham population waiting to be bombed by real Germans.  It is a perverse city, filled with the waiting-to-be-murdered in a civilian target.  Sham Paris seems to me like a reverse city.  And a reverse city in the manner of the cities created by the guilty Cain and Romulus—these two were murders who created cities; Sham Paris is a city of created murders to save the innocent.

Sham Paris was only partially constructed before war’s end in November 1918.  

(All images here are clickable and can be enlarged.)

Its important to distinguish Sham Cities from hidden cities, like Project Iceworm (the underground city built in Greenland) or Mt. Weather (the not-so-very-secret secure and safe bunker for the governing class in Bluemont, Virginia) and so on.  Sham Cities were definitely constructed for deception and/or destruction.  The next city we'll take a look at:  Survival Town, Nevada.

On the Failures and Triumphs of Confederate Digestion: Diarrhea and Urine

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1611

Let's just say it:  the history of diarrhea is not pretty,  It has been a major killer throughout history (coupled with the sometimes historically-indistinguishable dysentery), wiping out perhaps hundreds of millions of people over human history.  Infectious diarrhea and dysentery is especially suited for crowded, cramped conditions with poor sanitary facilities and bad food, which makes armies a perfect place for those diseases to easily succeed.

In the American Civil War diarrhea was a leading incapacitor and killing disease, perhaps chief among the diseases that killed more people than did the actual fighting.¹  And perhaps no where else did it commit such great tragedy than in the ranks of the Confederate soldiers, who by and large had considerably less than the Union soldiers.  Poor sanitary facilities, bad food badly prepared, close living conditions, weeks/months of stationary encampment during the winter, would all add up to a disaster.  Since the Confederate records of medical treatment are far from complete, we have to look at those of the Union Army to get an idea of what happened with diarrhea--and there, more than 250,000 men were discharged for chronic diarrhea, or roughly 10% of the entire fighting force over the course of the war.  I think it is safe to assume that the Confederate numbers would be at least comparable and probably worse for a fighting force of approximately half that size, though I am unsure of how many of these actually were discharged.  The figures for soldiers suffering from diarrhea who were not killed by it or discharged for it probably ran over a million for both sides.  It would not be easy to overstate the vast impact that diarrhea had on these armies, and particularly for the Confederacy.

On the side of success we have the story of gunpowder.  Or, rather, the failure in the production of industrial nitrates necessary for the production of gunpowder which was addressed by the Southern citizenry, and particularly the women of the South.  Absent the essential component of potassium nitrate, the Confederate states resolved to produce the stuff locally, in the old fashion. Urine (and water from cesspools, privvies, and so on) would be collected, and then (via one of many methods) would be sprinkled on straw or some other similar organic material (to keep the material moist but not wet); the stew would be covered and sunned and allowed to cook for some months at the end of which time the straw would be washed of the material formed on its top, and then dried.  The resulting salts produced by evaporation would be a form of saltpeter, or potassium nitrate, which provides the necessary O₂ for combustion. 

I know that it was at least considered customary and a rule of engagement for the Union and the Confederate soldiers to not shoot each other while attending nature's call; I'm not so sure that this would be the case for the guys in the night waste wagons collecting privvy drawers and urine. 

Just another small, necessarily savage bit in the history of killing. 

Notes:

1. The Union armies had from 2,500,000 to 2,750,000 men. Their losses, by the best estimates:

Battle deaths:	110,070
Disease, etc.:	250,152
Total	360,222

        The Confederate strength, known less accurately because of missing records, was from 750,000 to 1,250,000. Its estimated losses:

Battle deaths:	94,000
Disease, etc.:	164,000
Total	258,000

Fabulously Beautiful Non-Fascist Spaghetti

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1604

{Images sources via 50Watts and Bibliodyssey]

I wonder if there is a dominant semiology for the created cultures of advertising under the Fascist regime of Mussolini (which ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922-1943, and then followed by the Republican Fascist Party which ruled the Italian Social Republic from 1943 to 1945)  or as much so as there was for Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany?  A sweeping and broad generalization at which I'm just guessing at here is that the German model for creating a particular, wide-spread iconology of regime-controlled national images far outweigh their contemporaries in Italy. 

One of the most inspired and perhaps one of the leading iconoclasts in Italy during this time was Federico Seneca, who seemed to stray far from any mainstream representations in the many ads and designs he produced from 1922-1945.  Seneca (1891-1976) really had the chops--he had a remarkable insight for placement and design and produced some beautiful and futuro-odd posters for some of Italy's iconic companies. (The Futurism bit is a little "odd" because Marinetti's attempt to make the/his movement the official art of the Fascist regime was rejected by the pwoers-that-be.)  I pray ask:  who would have thought of such a provocative, spare, impacting design top sell Buitoni pasta?   These creations were masterpieces of advertising poster art, and seemed to have little or nothing to do with Italian politics.

1919 to 1935 or so, Seneca served as artistic director for ad campaigns for Perugina and Buitoni, while from the middle 'thirties to WWII and from his own Milan-based studio he also produced graphics and posters for Italrajon, Fiat and Cinzano.  Then--for me, at least--there is a vast blank spot occupied by WWII, out of which Seneca emerges around 1950, doing more work for Cinzano, as well as Agipgas, Pibigas, Energol and  Lane BBB.

 

Seneca wasn't alone of course in his alone-place--there were plenty of artists in Italy sharing their own nodes of individuality.  For example, this fantastic poster for Amaro Gambarotta tuxedo sales in 1928 by  Saxida

Though certainly this quasi-futurist style could be lovely, highly stylized, and political, as we see in this cover for a book on the young Fascist handbook, Il Capo Squadra Balilla, created in 1935 by Zedda. 

And of course there was plenty of work done solely for propaganda reasons:

But for molding the cultural mind via advertising art, the Italians seemed to stay far-afield of their Germanic brethren.