A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Point, and many other places... 5000+ total posts since 2008.. Contact johnfptak at gmail dot com
For all of the greatness of the man, Franklin Roosevelt for whatever reason came up decidedly short on the issue of accepting German Jewish immigrants seeking to escape Nazi Germany (in the 1930's) and then later, during the war, having a terrible record in the response to the concentration camps (1940-1942) and (somewhat later) on the identification of the extermination centers.(1943-1945). It is certainly a large stain on this legacy, a despondency that is confused, confusing, and highly open to debate.
This came to mind when I reviewed an older post on this blog on books/propaganda issued by the government printing office--in particular, the "Books are Weapons" series, which is a collection of strong images used in connection with Roosevelt's statement about books/weapons:
What struck me today for the first time is FDR's use of "concentration camp", which is surprising to me--at least the "me" at my level of understanding FDR and the Holocaust--because when this poster was issued by the Government Printing Office in 1942 Roosevelt had spent very little public time on the issue. And in the course of the next 24 months or so, Roosevelt had more evidence of the gigantic crimes being perpetrated by Germany but still had very little publicly to say on the matter. 1942 though seems to be early for this sort of statement--and to find it in a mass-produced vehicle like this poster was a jolt.
The text on the monolithic book that stand free and tall and immobile in spite of the Nazis in the foreground and their small pyre of burning books:
"Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny. In this war, we know, books are weapons." --Franklin D. Roosevelt. 1942 (the date referenced from the Library of Congress page on this poster http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/96502725/ Another post on this blog shows two other variations on this poster: http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2014/09/books-are-weapons-in-the-war-of-ideas.html)
This is a very long story, but for right now it seems a relatively certainty that the situation of the Jews in Germany and the rest of Europe was fairly well known and established within the Roosevelt White House, and even so too to some extent in the popular press. By 1943 there was probably no doubt whatsoever with what was going on--in an example of Roosevelt's association with the contemporary knowledge of the Holocaust the FDR Presidential Library offers the following O.S.S. document on the destruction of the German Jews:
I found this lovely infographic in the August 29, 1914 issue of The Illustrated London News, coming a little more than three weeks after the beginning of WWI. It is one of the earliest issues almost fully dedicated to war coverage, and in its many articles covers the fall of Namur, the fight at Mons, the destruction of the HMS Amphion, and images of long lines of Belgian refugees, the fight at Haelen (and the dog-drawn heavy machine guns), and the first drawing of the BEF in action in France. The image below addresses what was seen early on as the war's premier issue in military strength, which was seen in the power of navies, and hence the depiction of the relative "strengths" (projectile weight (760-1400 lbs), barrel length, "muzzle energy", steel penetration) of the big shells:
I think I've never seen a display quite like this one, before.
And just for the fun of it, "caliber/calibre" from the Oxford English Dictionary:
This very graphic allegorical map was published at the beginning of the Civil War in 1861 and was intended to depict General Winfield Scott's not-bad plan for the eventual destruction of the Confederacy. He called for isolating the Southern states by a naval blockade and by a push from the West and also an advance up the Mississippi River. The problem with the plan for most people was that Scott saw correctly that the new war was going to be long and costly--this at a time when most saw the conflict as a months-long affair. Part of the correctness of Scott's recognition of a long war was that the Northern states had fewer than 20,000 troops, and that many more would be needed and that the army would need to be gathered, trained, and built, none of which would happen quickly. But the general faults with the plan do not diminish his important contribution that the Civil War would a total war, and that the conflict would not be over any time soon.
[For a good and concise article to get you started in understanding Scott's' plan, see B. Wolfe, "Anaconda Plan", (2011, May 9), in Encyclopedia Virginia: http://www.EncyclopediaVirginia.org/Anaconda_Plan.]
(I bumped into the Anaconda Plan map on cnn.com or something like that, in a piece on 15 great maps or some such, but there was almost no backstory...)
[Source: the Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/item/99447020/]
This orderly and semi-pastoral bird's-eye view of the earliest part of the war in the west of WWII appeared in The Illustrated London News on September 30, 1939, three weeks or so after the Nazi attack on Poland. The foreground shows about 40 km of the front from the river Nied to the Saar and south to Saarburgken, with the Siegfried Line in the distance. The map shows the region into which 40 French divisions advanced from September 7-16, meeting little resistance from the outnumbered German troops who by and large fell back to more defensible positions.
Not much happened.
This period of the war has often been referred to as the "Phony War" due to the lack of action, though it wouldn't seem so "phony" if you were killed in the process, as thousands were. Winston Churchill referred to it more as the "Twilight War", which is far more appropriate--and this no doubt more meaningful to Churchill int he light of the HMS aircraft carrier "Courageous" being sent to the bottom by Nazi torpedoes with the loss of more than 500 sailors...there was certainly not a bloody thing "phony" in that.
The French referred to this period as the "Drole de Guerre", which they really shouldn't've done--their Saar offensive of mid-September being stunted and odd, came to a halt, and the troops called back to the doomed Maginot in October.
The Twilight War continued until late April, and then in May, it was certainly all over, as the Nazis attacked Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. And then of course came France. In just about the same amount of time that the Saar Offensive occupied, the Germany advanced and forced France to surrender, the curtain coming down on June 22. Calm before the storm, and all that--the rest of the war was more storm before the storm, until there was storm no more.
Judge magazine (1881-1947) was a U.S. satirical weekly that for several decades published insightful/devastating political cartoons of the highest caliber. (Judge was a sort of knock-off of Puck magazine, started by writers and cartoonist/artists dissatisfied with that fine journal; Judge itself was done in in the same way after a fashion--Harold Ross, who served as editor of Judge for a few months in 1924 went off and started his own magazine, The New Yorker, which slowly and then rapidly cleaved away readership and talent from Judge until Judge was no more.)
It seems to me that when leafing through a volume for 1918 that Judge published more cartoons and sketches relating to World War I than cartoons for any war that I have seen in any magazine. I'm not that familiar with Judge relative to other magazines, and was very surprised to see that nearly every page has some sort of illustrated war content. In the issue for October 12, 1918--just four weeks before the end of the war--I found this image:
It is complex and at first looks to be very layered, but I think that it turns out to be not so, that it is flat, and uni-dimensional, and not very satirical--it is however very pointed, and barbed, and makes its case very quickly, in a sort of way that makes you begin to chuckle until you realize just what the content is. The work is by artist/illustrator/designer John (Johnny) Gruelle, who in the same year introduced the world to his creation of Raggedy Ann (patenting the design a few years earlier, in 1915, https://www.google.com/patents/USD47789.)
[The Judge was located at 225 5th Avenue, the Renaissance-style 13-story building converted into condos where the active selling price is about $2,670/sq foot1, or about 3.5 million/unit, somehow making this property worth a combined $600 million or so.]
The very next page comes this condemnation of the German leader Kaiser Wilhelm II, employing the very well worn "Ages of Man" scenario:
And just a few pages later, another interesting image, this one being another entry in this blog's collection of images of the world used in advertising/cartoons:
There were many more war-related illustrations in these few dozen pages, with these three having the most appeal and greatest impact--pretty good stuff spread out over just two or so square yards of magazine pages.
Notes:
1. See http://streeteasy.com/building/the-grand-madison
Claude-Étienne Minié (1804-1879) was an influential military designer and French officer who designed what was to become know as the "Minie ball". This was a cylindrically-shaped conical-pointed bullet the design of which greatly increased fire at long ranges. The bullet was designed in 1847 and soon became standard issue in Europe and (especially?) in the U.S. during the Civil War. I'm taking notice of these projectiles after having made this very accidental discovery of the machine that formed them in the Victorian review of technology and invention, Great Inventors, the Sources of their Usefulness and the Results of their Efforts, printed in London in the rockingly good year of 1864. It makes me think about the fabulous machinery that produces stuff like bubble gum--glorious metallic ideas for production and packaging, all combined in effort to produce a piece of fluff that you chew on and then discard. With the Minie Ball, though, you have a massively-geared machine used to produce little bits of metal meant to pass more efficiently and with more accuracy through a body. (Also it is another representative of a genre of illustration of looking at the object straight on.)
The cover of the book is interesting in its own right, being bound in an elaborate publisher's cloth with gilt-stamped decorations. Books before, say, 1800, were almost entirely bound according to the wishes of the customer, who would/could purchase the sheets and have them bound according to their wishes. That, or booksellers would offer the book for sale in a small election of available bindings. The cloth binding that we would recognize today really didn't start to make an appreciable appearance until the 1830s, when a simple cloth cover replaced its more-elaborate brethren, making things much easier for the publisher and the bookbinder, allowing for much less expensive production and a quicker turn-around time. It also brought in a far greater distinction in the now-divergent industries of bookselling and publishing--and of course bookbinding. So the entry of the semi-standard plain cloth binding also brought in the possibility for design and art in standard book production, with less to the introduction of the decorated cloth cover.
The cover for the book described here comes from about the second full decade of a standardized-luxury of decoration in cloth-bound books. Over the years I've paid only a little attention to the decorated cloth bindings of scientific books, but never collected them, something I somewhat regret at this point. In any event, Great Inventors... is a good example of a relatively inexpensive but nicely-designed book cover.
Major General George Veazy Strong (USMA '04), in 1943 as the Assistant Chief of Staff of the Army Intelligence Unit (G-2)--a position of enormous importance--delivered his very sober and reasonable summation on the strength of the Axis forces before the U.S. Congress (on October 20 and 21, 1943). which was printed in this report. (It is of historical and bibliographical interested to note that this document was in the library of the Office of Strategic Services (the O.S.S., the precursor to the C.I.A.) before it was sent to the Library of Congress and deaccessioned.)
The document is somewhat over-sized (at 12x9") and is 13 pages of text, followed by 17 leaves of diagrams, some of which are very strong images of superior design. Strong was very highly accomplished, of very wide experience, and was an excellent thinker. His report was concise and thorough, and must have made a mark on his listeners in the House and Senate.
The report seems to be rare--I cannot find mention of it popularly in the social media, and there seems also to be no trace of it in the WorldCat outside of an LP recording (at the Library of Congress), meaning that there seems to be no copies of the printed version in libraries worldwide.
This is an interesting read, and since it appears to be nowhere I believe I should reprint it, here, shortly.
The original is available via the blog's bookstore, here.
There is an image that I have in my head of a grey train car of WWI. There were trains that would pull into stations of large cities, trains with cars of wounded soldiers back from the front, with Red Cross designations on the car sides. Crowds would come to the station to see and cheer the wounded soldiers.
There were some trains that would pull a car at the very end of the line, a car with no cross. It was in these cars that the shell shocked soldiers would sometimes be brought back home.
"War neurosis" and "combat stress" was generally what was known as "shell shock" (not named until 1917 by Charles Myers), and what we'd more commonly referred to today as post traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). Shell shock was little understood during the war, and soldiers who manifested the behaviors associated with it were often accused of cowardice, and desertion, and in some cases faced disciplinary action that could end in jail or (in some cases) death. They certainly weren't necessarily treated as "wounded", and so it seems for the most part they were treated as separate cases.
Given what was known of shell shock the treatment to the modern eye can look severe, odd, and austere, and wrong--soldiers were subjected to electro-shock therapy, physical routines leading to exhaustion, solitary confinement, and simple incarceration. In other cases the condition would be recognized as a defense detriment and in order to alleviate it the soldiers would be sent back from the front for a few days' rest. The problem with shell shock though would continue to grow, and could be seen as a threat to a fighting force in general, and therefore some of the official responses to it left no doubt that succumbing to shell shock was a serious business, and that soldiers so afflicted would be treated differently from other wounded soldiers.2
By 1917 though Major Arthur Hurst devised a new method for treating the shell shocked soldier, with a major emphasis establishing the condition as caused by battle, and not a flight-not-fight syndrome. At the Seale-Hayne Hospital, in Devon, Hurst treated some 300 soldiers over the course of 15 months, from April 1918 to July 1919, and seemed to have caused some real improvement. That said, there were many detractors of his methods, and many more who questioned its effectiveness--to that end there seems to be no longitudinal data to support much of a claim for long-term success in Hurst's treatment.
He did however make a major contribution to the treatment of PTSD by attempting to deal with it medically, and also employing a large dose of occupational therapy in additiion to many other proactive responses to shell shock. In another interesting and pioneering move Austin made use of motion picture cameras to record the before/after effects of his treatments. This however has also come into question because some amount of the "before" images were dramatized1.
I found these videos of the Hurst treatments on youtube, and whether some of the "before treatment" footage was acted or not, the images are very jarring:
There are also a few samples of the magazine/newspaper produced at Seale-Hayner Hospital during this time, with contributions by the patients, some of which is reproduced below:
More photographs are available here: http://seale-hayne.com/?flagallery=seale-hayne-military-hospital
And more: http://www.seale-hayne.com/books/mag1st/#p=1 http://www.seale-hayne.com/books/magWW1/#p=2
The poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) described victims of shell shock in his 1917 poem "Survivors", written while Sassoon was himself being treated for the condition at the more-enlightened Craiglockhart medical facility in Edinburgh, and published in Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918):
NO doubt they’ll soon get well; the shock and strain Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk. Of course they’re ‘longing to go out again,’— These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk. They’ll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died,— Their dreams that drip with murder; and they’ll be proud Of glorious war that shatter’d all their pride... Men who went out to battle, grim and glad; Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.
Notes:
1. "From 1917 to 1918, Major Arthur Hurst filmed shell-shocked patients home from the war in France. Funded by the Medical Research Committee, and using Pathé cameramen, he recorded soldiers who suffered from intractable movement disorders as they underwent treatment at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Netley and undertook programs of occupational therapy at Seale Hayne in Devon. " From: "War Neuroses and Arthur Hurst: A Pioneering Medical Film about the Treatment of Psychiatric Battle Casualties", by Edgar Jones, Journal of the History of Medicine, May 2011, http://jhmas.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/05/19/jhmas.jrr015,
2. "When evacuation to the base hospital is necessary, cases should be treated in a separate hospital or separate sections of a hospital, and not with the ordinary sick and wounded patients. Only in exceptional circumstances should cases be sent to the United Kingdom, as, for instance, men likely to be unfit for further service of any kind with the forces in the field. This policy should be widely known throughout the Force."--Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into "Shell-Shock", 1922.
See also a good entry "War Psychiatry", in WWI Online, http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/war_psychiatry
As stated, this is a simple post of an interesting piece of graphical display of data, this time coming from Life magazine, August 28, 1950. It vividly compares the general production of military aircraft for 1949/50 versus what was coming in 1950/1. We can see comparisons for budget, workforce, aluminum, copper, engines, and of course aircraft (trainers, fighters, transports, bombers), and shows the huge difference between the relative peace of 1949 and the beginning of the Korean War two months earlier than this article in 1950.
I found these schematics in the November 16, 1918 issue of Engineering, published just a few days after the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. No doubt the plans were made from a downed aircraft, and I suspect it was probably not published during the war. This was about the largest plane produced during WWI, and it was a beast. In any event, I've reproduced the plans below.
and
and
And a larger version of the above, just because it looks so cool:
There's some very strong stuff in this U.S. Civilian Defense (CD) pamphlet--the graphics are as razor-sharp as the suggestions that the pamphlet was making. This was issued in the hurtlocker year of 1943, and it called for all manner of civilian volunteers to train for keep-society-together stuff should there be an attack on the United States.
[Image depicts an air warden calling in his observation of a German air attack. The aircraft looks to me like a Dornier Do 17 "The Flying Pencil".]
The "Civilian Protection Jobs" on notice and advised in this pamphlet included calls to citizens for: command section (3 per 1,000 population, 20 hours training); Drivers Corps (5 per 1,000, 38 hours of training); Messengers, (8 per 1,000, 20 hours of training); rescue squad (2 per 1000, 40 hours of training); auxiliary police (4 per 1000, 23 hours of training); auxiliary firemen (4 per 1000, 27 hours of training); fire watchers (15 per 1000, 10 hours training); demolition and clearance units (2 per 1000, 10 hours of training); decontamination units (1 per 1000, 20 hours of training); emergency welfare units (1 per 1000, 7 hours of training). There is also an index for another hundred or so jobs that needed to be filled in time of national emergency.
The cover:
As it happens my copy was one of two sent to the Library of Congress for copyright purposes and it includes this press release, which explains the pamphlet:
I do not unfortunately have much information on this very interesting (and to me unexpected) map, nor do I know very much about the history of Japanese militarism and planning 1925-1935--I do though want to at least post/share it for interested parties.
A Plan of Japan's Proposed Military and Naval Conquest as Revealed in the Strategic Map appears no later than 1933. The single-sheet folded pamphlet contains two pages of text along with the middle two sheets of the map, "Japan's Aim to Dominate the Far East and Pacific Islands". The document was part of a very large collection I bought of the Library of Congress, and according to the pencil notes on the pamphlet it was sent to the L.C. by the "Kuo Min Tang" on May 13, 1933. (It was curious to see the KMT referred to as though it was someone's name, rather than a political party begun in the People's Republic of China in 1894.)
This is a piece of anti-Japanese propaganda coming from the KMT, and it is published by the Chinese National Salvation Publicity Bureau (844 Stockton Street, which looks today like it is the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall) in San Francisco, After all, the Japanese had been savaging around in China on and off since the First Sino-Japanese War at the end of the century, and then again heating things up in the early 'thirties with the Japanese-instigated the Shanghai War and the invasion of Manchuria--the Chinese no doubt were seeking allies wherever they could them.
There are a lot of lines of conquest on this map, encompassing nearly all of South East Asia. The largest sphere of "influence" extends all the way to the Hawaiian Islands, where the Japanese would take the islands by a "naval battle" with the U.S.
I've checked WorldCat for other copies and found only one mention--same thing for the internet.
This map is available for purchase via the blog's bookstore, here.
There's another interesting story on the use of "Archie" as a nickname in another military situation, here, in an earlier post, "George and Archie: Two Misty Names in Making Everything Into Nothing. Hiroshima, 1945."
This interesting graphic appears in the article "Airmen's Sensations in Battle" in Popular Mechanics, November 1916. It hows a cross-section, of sorts, of an air battle with antiaircraft involvement, and to my experience is of a very unusual design. The author writes of being chased by Fokkers and then met by "Archie" (British slang for antiaircraft guns) fire from below. Overall it is an effective design that heightens the sense of the story.
Notes:
"Archie": "Nickname given to anti-aircraft fire during First World War. Said to derive from a British pilot who reacted to enemy anti-aircraft fire by shouting the line from a music hall song 'Archibald certainly not'. This caught on and was inevitably shortened to Archie."-- Phil Jobson Royal Artillery Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations Briefly put, the AA situation during WWI was, well, primitive--necessarily primitive, I mean. There was some improvisation against balloons earlier on but the first AA-downing of a military aircraft was evidently in 1912 in the Italo-Turkish War. In 1916, two years into the war, the development of firepower against aircraft (and the detection of them, which extended to acoustical devices for the greatest part) was still in its very earliest stages.
Major General George Veazy Strong (USMA '04), in 1943 as the Assistant Chief of Staff of the Army Intelligence Unit (G-2)--a position of enormous importance--delivered his very sober and reasonable summation on the strength of the Axis forces before the U.S. Congress (on October 20 and 21, 1943). which was printed in this report. (It is of historical and bibliographical interested to note that this document was in the library of the Office of Strategic Services (the O.S.S., the precursor to the C.I.A.) before it was sent to the Library of Congress and deaccessioned.)
The document is somewhat over-sized (at 12x9") and is 13 pages of text, followed by 17 leaves of diagrams, some of which are very strong images of superior design. Strong was very highly accomplished, of very wide experience, and was an excellent thinker. His report was concise and thorough, and must have made a mark on his listeners in the House and Senate.
The report seems to be rare--I cannot find mention of it popularly in the social media, and there seems also to be no trace of it in the WorldCat outside of an LP recording (at the Library of Congress), meaning that there seems to be no copies of the printed version in libraries worldwide.
This is an interesting read, and since it appears to be nowhere I believe I should reprint it, here, shortly.
The original is available via the blog's bookstore, here.
This two-page spread in the Illustrated London News appeared at the end of June, 1940, nine months into WWII, just two weeks or so before the beginning of the Battle of Britain. This was an extended battle lasting until September 1941 in which there were hundreds of German bombing raids flown over the U.K., with most of the damage and civilian deaths centered in London. In all some 40,000 civilians were killed in the raids, about half of them in London. Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Coventry, Glasgow, Hull, Manchester, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Sheffield, Southampton, Swansea, and other cities were also bombed, some of them pulverized--for example, Hull received an enormous amount of attention for being a port city and easily identifiable by air, and was attacked more than 80 times, and Coventry's central city was decimated. (Enter "Battle of Britain" or "Blitz" in the Google search box for the other posts on this blog on this subject.)
But right at the beginning of this period the popular weekly published this listing of enemy planes--it was a smart thing to do, because it made millions of people into observers and data gatherers.
The artist of this work was the very very busy and talented G.H. Davis, who I have written about numerous times on this blog (just enter his name in the Google search box and you find a number of interesting tech drawings that he completed for the ILN).
What struck me today for the first time is FDR's use of "concentration camp", which is surprising to me--at least the "me" at my level of understanding FDR and the Holocaust--because when this poster was issued by the Government Printing Office in 1942 Roosevelt had spent very little public time on the issue. And in the course of the next 24 months or so, Roosevelt had more evidence of the gigantic crimes being perpetrated by Germany but still had very little publicly to say on the matter. 1942 though seems to be early for this sort of statement--and to find it in a mass-produced vehicle like this poster was a jolt. 
