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Maria
Mikorska’s Spring Held No Hope,
published in London
in June 1941 is a difficult, hard, emotional read, even in the genre of
Holocaust literature.It quickly paints
a documentary history of bestial behavior of the Nazis in Poland.I wonder though what happened to the
mentioning of the Jewish issue in all of this reportage of inhuman
transportation and treatment of humans, as the reference almost never
occurs.
Reading
though this 52-page pamphlet of terror and horror, I wondered what exactly
happened to the missing reportage of the hunting and killing of the Jews as a
group.. The period of 1939-1941 saw the beginning of the Endlösung der
Judenfrage1(“The Final
Solution of the Jewish Problem”) in which 90+% of the 3.5 million Polish Jews
alive in the Polish Second Republic were killed and exterminated, the primary
victims of the Nazi Holocaust.At this
point in the war the Nazis were removing Jews from their cities and
establishing regional ghettoes.Once the
Jews were collected in this manner it was easier for the administration of
their extermination.
Getting
back to Spring Held No Hope and the lack of identification of the Jews as a
persecuted group I turn to pp 24 and 25 (illustrated below and clickable).
The examples of inhuman transport and the
direct extermination of men, women and children by starvation and hypothermia
mention the cities Jarocin, Gdynia, Siedlice, Skierniewice, Lublin and
Otwock:all of which had large centers
of Jewish populations that were removed by the Germans directly after the
invasion and removed to ghettoes though this fact is not mentioned in this
pamphlet. Ostensibly the collection of Jews was not in an effort to seize
property (as the majority of the Jews in Poland at this time had little
wealth) but rather to supply labor (being a group with the potential for
hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of humans capable of performing slave
labor). The Jews in Gdynia (for example)
were sent to Siedlice to establish a larger Ghetto immediately after the
invasion; by 1942 the tens of thousands of occupants were either shot and
killed or sent to Treblinka; 2,000 or so remained after this, though most of
them were also soon sent to Treblinka; those remaining were all executed when
the ghetto was completely liquidated on 14 April 1943.
I
am in no way saying that it the murder of Poles during the Nazi occupation was
limited to Jews—the 3.5 million Polish Jews represented 10% of the Polish
population; of the remaining 90%, or 32 million or so Gentile Poles, some 3
million were killed by the Nazis, or about 10% of that population.
These
are horrible stories told by Mikorska—but I’m bothered by the lack of the
recognition of the Jews as the major, featured target in all of this and wonder
if the author suffered an enormous sin of omission. This is far from being a singular event--even the important and highly significant Eisenhower report on the concentration camps of May 1945 does not signify the Jewish people as anything out of the ordinary--and may well be indicative of the general practice of dealing with the Jewish aspect of the Nazi exterminations.
Notes
1.
The name and practiced of the Final Solution was infamously adopted at the
Wannsee conference on 20 January 1942, liquidating the ghettoes and sending the
occupants to the six major concentration camps of Auschwitz, Belzec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór and Treblinka.
I've written elsewhere in this blog on the Holocaust; for more, search "Holocaust" in the Google blogsearch in the left column.
(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 20th 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.
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:
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.
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.]
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 DutchHarbor
and FortMears 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.
[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.
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 20th 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.
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.
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 ArmyQuartermasterMuseum.
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.
Earlier today I made a post on some of the images in my collection of WWI News Service Photographs. (These were photos that were sold by an image agency to newspapers and journals which looked for stock photos of, well, whatever, and after paying a use fee would include the photo in the story they were reporting.) This photo is one of three in a series that show German POWs being marched around a town in France and stopped here and there for a photo. The picture was taken deep into 1918, within a month or two of the end of the war,.when the Germans were already defeated. From the look of things, these soldiers were done: tired, mostly beaten, dirty. They at least had most of their buttons on their coats (which is actually a very big deal, keeping your overcoat closed in cold weather to keep warm and alive), their boots looked warn but intact, and they looked not terrible undernourished (though I doubt anyone in the group weighed more than 150 pounds).
The group is bookended by two remarkable figures: the soldier on the left looks not 16 or so, but with a not-new ground in toughness. He's all smooth face and baby fat, though he has at least survived the grueling fighting. The soldier on the right could be the prototype for any number of propaganda posters that popped up in Berlin in the early 1930's advocating the sold-out but not defeated German soldier of the Great War whose fate must be avenged.
Almost everyone was cupping a ciggy.
Lastly, the guy third from the left seems to be a Canadian guard, not that this group was going to try to escape.
In
my collection of WWI News Photo Service Agency photographs I would say
that half or so of them show scenes like this--semi-informal group
portraits of military support groups. 500 portraits like this seem to
be a lot, and I'm not sure why these images are so well represented.
Except of course that there weren't that many images (overall) of
active-battle scenes.
These bakers, working at a front-line
support station, from my read were probably taking a break, and the
photographer took the opportunity to draw them together for the
portrait. I don't know why they're separated so, but they do look as
though they have a real camaraderie--it is just a wonderful picture,
full of friendship and loyalty, and I'm sure it has never been
published before.
The
RAND Corporation (Research And Development) is a think tank
originally formed in 1946 by the US Army Air Force as part of a contract to the
Douglas Aircraft Company.After 1948
RAND Corp was funded by a number of different sources, private and
governmental, and left the sphere of being a direct arm of the U.S. military. (Maybe.)It still did enormous
amounts of work on behalf of the military, and seems to have
been their chieftheoreticians during
this period.It was also the time that
the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was formulated at , partially under the direction of we’ll-see-him-again-down-the-road
Robert McNamara.And of course much
else.
This
publication is an internal RAND document, not
meant for the eyes of the outside world, at least in 1957.I own a number of these reports, and I must
say that this one is odd—it is rather flippant, sometimes oddly and darkly
(dare I say it?) funny.It is also short
(four pages) and gets to the very meaty part of the issue immediately.The author(s) assume that the US and the USSR
will have achieved a point of stasis such that it would make absolutely no
sense for either actor to actually employ their arsenal (and excluding “the
possibility of the button pusher ‘flipping his lid’ “.The paper attempts then (“let’s jump right in
and assume we find ourselves in this stalemated period”) to envision the next
kind of war in which the ICBM would not be an active factor. “We therefore
postulate here that the kind of war we will be engaged in…in the period of
nuclear stalemate of the non-violent war, the opening phase of which has been
called the cold war.”
The tools of war in this non-violent war, the report
speculates, included: (1) the State Department as a Weapon, issuing “an
aggressive, imaginative foreign policy”. (2) Economic Weapons, which
interestingly included “inflate USSR economy by surreptitiously flooding the country with undetectable counterfeit
currency”.(I remember that the late
Sen. John Moynihan suggested in the first Iraq
war, televise don the floor of the U.S. Senate in the final debate on
engagement, that we do this exact thing in Iraq…especially
since the Iraqi dinar was being printed in London.) The third section was “Psychological
Weapons”, and was very tongue-in-cheek short (?), suggesting “ideas a la
Hitchcock, e.g., turn Stalin [dead in 1953] over in his grave some dark night,
etc.” I’m not sure what to make of that, especially as the paper finishes on
this line: “This list is open for additions and suggestion.”Indeed. Out of all of the internal reports that I've read from RAND this is the only one that approached its topic with such dark familiarity and removed humor.
(See also the new post on picturing massive numbers here.)
I've written four or five posts on glorious quantitative visual displays of massive amounts of WWII bombers, most of which I've gathered together below. This subject came up today when I found another of these images in a small hand-out broadside published by the National Savings Committee of Great Britain, urging people to save money and be thrifty, keeping money in the banks, in an effort to control prices and have money available to the government for war production. The legend states: "For it is by the measure of our self-denial that we can prove worthy debtors to our airmen; and by our Savings that we can help to give them wings for victory". The point is driven home by a now-familiar representation of hundreds of bombers rising from the horizon--a remarkable vision, especially if you tried to visualize the real thing.
Here are a few other similar images:
(A) This widely circulated and published photo appeared in 1942 (particularly in LIFE Magazine in 17 September 1942 and the Illustrated London News in the next month), and showed 4,500 aircraft models suspended from the ceiling of Chicago’s Union Station It is the result of an inspiration derived from President Franklin Roosevelt’s assertion that America would produce 185,000 war-focused aircraft in 1942 and 1943.
The planes in this photo were hanging 60-feet above the floor of the station, with wing spans between one foot and four feet (for the bombers). It was a fantastic, blustery, iconic effort to show what it meant to look at 4500 planes—and these paled in comparison to a drawing (which I unfortunately do not have) that appeared in the Illustrated London News on 21 February 1941, showing the entire production fleet of 185,000 aircraft—a column of planes one mile wide and 117 miles long.
Using this photo then to interpolate that full production figure of 185k, you’d have to piece 48 of these photos together to show full production, or a version of this photo that was 8 inches wide and 32 feet long. (The second image of Union Station and the planes is by FSA photographer Jack Delano.)
(B) This arresting cover image for The Illustrated London News of 21 February 1942 illustrates the (new) American production program for planes and tanks for 1942 and 1943 (It reminds me too of an earlier post I did with a similar cover for LIFE magazine here.) The caption reads: "185,000 planes form a mile-wide blanket of bombers under a blanket of fighters stretching 117 miles" which is actually a double blanket of planes--if they were thinned out to form one layer it would stretch one mile wide from Washington D.C. to New York City, which is quite an unimaginable ribbon.
The reality of the situation was greater than this: by 1945 over 300,000 planes were produced, 275,000 of them after Pearl Harbor. And this from a combined aviation industry which before 1939 had produced fewer than 6,000 planes a year. The war effort increased this by orders of magnitude, and by war's end there were 81 production facilities with a combined area of 175 million feet, all bumped up within four years. I've never read about it, but I have no doubt that one of the key ingredients to this sort of hyper-successful undertaking was organization--the oversight and control for this process must've been fast and decisive, with little room for mid-level anything. I think that this is the only way the whole thing could've worked so well.
(C) This tremendous display is half of a double-page spread that appeared in The Illustrated London News for 7 September 1940. It was meant to bolster the civilian population of Britain during the time of the German attacks, shoping that "Over one thousand Nazi aircraft (were) brought down over Great Britain in ...20 Days..." The artwork, drawn by Bryan de Grineau, actually depicts 1000 planes, and accurately depicted ones at that. What the graphic doesn't tally though are the airmen losses, which would be considerably more thanb the 1000 aircraft: for example, of the aircraft involved in the sustain air-invasion of England, the Dornier 215's had a crew of four, Dornier 17's three, Heinkel 111's four, Messerschmitt 110's two, and Junkers 88's three. Thus there were thousands more airmen lost, a commodity that the Nazis could little afford.
(This continues a thread on The Battle of Britain and also a post on "What 185,000 Planes Looks Like"). The results of the battle (and if you take a look at this earlier post for the full narrative), in terms of aircraft and humans, were, for England: 1,023 fighters: 376 bombers, 148 coastal command aircraft for a total of 1,547 aircraft and 544 pilots and aircrew killed. There were also 27,450 civilians killed and 32,138 wounded. The Germans lost 873 fighters and 1,014 bombers for a total of 1,887 aircraft and 2,500 pilots
I find this visual display of quantitative data beautiful and compelling--and overwhelming in its way.
The Battle of Britain was fought primarily from 10 July to 31 October 1940, so by the time this image was published the Brits had been able to turn the tide of Hitler's plan. (The air strikes wouldn't really end until the Nazis turned their attention to the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa in May 1941.) And that plan, named Luftschlacht um England, was to overtake and destroy the British capacity in the air, for as long as the English had command of the airspace there would be no way that the Nazis could force an invasion by land/sea (at least in the minds of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht and Hitler). And so the Nazis failed--it was their first major defeat, and, especially, with the turning of attention east, it was a pivotal point of the war.
(D) This last image is a “Not a Display of Toys”, shows only one section of a large airfield “in Europe” (actually in U.S.-administered Munich). There’s about 300 B-17’s (e?) parked wingtip to wingtip, off duty now from the fight in Europe, but (as the caption says) prepared for a fight in Japan. I don’t think anyone in high command had any doubt that these planes had seen their last action. The atom bomb worked, and would work again (and again, and more so if necessary), and the fear that these planes would make their way East was not a real concern. This photo represents about 7% of the highest number of B-17's in service in Europe at any given time.