Just when you thought there weren’t ANY World War II propaganda posters you hadn’t seen on the Internet, John Ptak proves you wrong with a selection of posters from Fascist Italy. I kind of liked this one with the Axis powers and their formidable allies such as Finland and Romania all pumped up for some guy named Vince Remo.
This is a calculator designed for use by WWII bombardiers to determine the accuracy of their bomb loads during missions. John F. Ptak tells us about the provenance of the device, which was developed by a group of scientists including Vannevar Bush, who is widely considered one of the original visionaries of the modern computer age. It’s also interesting to learn about the relative inaccuracy and imprecision of WWII aerial bombing in comparison to the astoninshing precision of modern missiles and smart weaponry.
That picture is a closeup of a part of a much larger illustration that appeared in a British newspaper just weeks after the surrender of Germany in 1945. The illustration represents the hundreds of warships that were lost by the Royal Navy in the Second World War. John Ptak writes about this image and its sobering impact at his blog Ptak Science Books, and also offers a large black-and-white poster of the image for purchase, as well as the original print itself.
UPDATED: For historical comparison’s sake, check out today’s post from Ptak about the remaining Japanese fleet from the same newspaper/artist a few weeks later.
Buncha links related to WWII:
A special ceremony was held at Westminster Abbey last week to honor the few surviving veterans who served in the RAF during the Battle Of Britain on its 70th anniversary. As the Daily Mail article notes, these are the men who inspired the memorable quote from Churchill: “Never was so much owed by so many to so few”. It is thought that only 79 veterans are still alive; 17 of them were present for the event on Sunday.
A couple of weeks ago, a little old lady living alone in a flat in the seaside town of Torquay was found dead. Her neighbors thought she was just another lonely old woman, and, because she had no surviving family, arrangements were made to bury her in a council grave, but as her effects were gone through, it turned out that she was one of the top British spies of the war, known to history as Agent “Rose”. The NY Times obit details some of her exploits. Her funeral was held with military honors.
Still stinging over the Thilo Sarrazin incident, German chancellor Angela Merkel also suffered another public embarassment recently when a political ally made public statements blaming Poland for inciting the Second World War.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that the late, noted WWII historian Stephen Ambrose probably fabricated material in his biography of Dwight Eisenhower, “The Supreme Commander”. Ambrose claimed to have conducted personal interviews with Eisenhower and used that material in his book, but his claims are contradicted by Eisenhower’s calendar of events — Eisenhower was somewhere else at the times Ambrose said they met, and there is no verifiable record of the two meeting alone. Ambrose was also accused of plaigiarism in writing his final book.
If you’re looking for some quiet time spent reading this holiday weekend, here are a few recommendations:
The Library of Congress has an immense collection of film-related resources dating back to the very beginning of the medium in the late 19th century, but has had to fight an ongoing battle to preserve, restore, and archive materials that are subject to physical deterioration in a way that other media are not. The supervisor of the LOC’s Film Preservation Laboratory, Ken Weissman, wrote this article for Creative COW Magazine about their work and the challenges, both technical and curatorial, of preserving over a century’s worth of film history.
The Bavarian town of Oberammergau has been staging a Passion Play every ten years since the 17th Century. This Der Speigel article focuses on the conflict between the play’s current director, an Oberammergau native who went on to become a leading theater director in Germany, and some of the townspeople as they clash over issues of modernity vs tradition. Among the contentious issues: removing anti-semitic content from the play (What? German Catholic anti-semitism? Unpossible!) and allowing non-Catholics and non-Germans to appear in the play (What? Racism? In Germany? No wai!). Hey, who is this guy, HITLER? (complete with special guest appearance by Papa Ratzi himself!)
Speaking of Hitler…well, sort of…this article from conservative mag City Journal by Judith Miller (yes, THAT Judith Miller) details the use of biological weapons by Japan during their invasion and occupation of China up to and during the Second World War. Like the heinous “research” done by Joseph Mengele in Hitler’s concentration camps, the Japanese Army’s Unit 731 used hundreds of innocent Chinese peasants as guinea pigs to test human physiological response to weaponized biological agents; the lucky peasants were murdered once the “research” was done, but many have lived for decades with the results. The U.S. and Soviet Union downplayed these particular atrocities, since they both benefitted from information from captured Japanese scientists for their own biological warfare efforts, but now there is an effort to create a memorial to the Chinese people victimized during the war by preserving the place where much of it happened, not unlike the preservation of Auschwitz as a World Heritage Site.
And, because you’ll need something a little more uplifting after THAT, here’s a good article at WFMU’s “Beware of the Blog” that chronicles the long career of Betty White. I, for one, don’t really care for the current Betty White meme; it’s twee and insincere in my opinion and smacks of the effort by people on the Internet to seem earnest-yet-secretly-ironic. Nevertheless, Betty White has been around FOREVER, and she’s one of those celebrities who didn’t seem to be famous for anything in particular except being a celebrity for a very long time (really, until she joined the Mary Tyler Moore show). This article covers how she got that way in the first place.
You are, I’m sure, familiar with the expression “there are no atheists in foxholes”, but it’s a statement dripping with irony, because while the implication is that deep down everybody is really a believer, the actual meaning is that in moments of terror people will say or do ANYTHING to save themselves, regardless of how it fits with their normal worldview. In other words, what it really demonstrates is the hypocrisy of espousing a religious viewpoint in a moment of mortal weakness, not the “underlying inevitability” of religious belief. You know, sort of how like torture will make people say anything to make it stop…a sort of Spanish Inquisition, if you will. (insert obligatory Monty Python clip here)
To wit, the story of this New Hampshire fellow, a World War II veteran named (amusingly enough) Milton Christian, who was recently awarded the Bronze Star for his military service — an award that was held up for decades due to red tape. His heroism earned him a chest-full of other military decorations, too, but as he reminisced about the horror of being in combat, he explained that it was the very experience of being trapped in a foxhole that made him come to the conclusion that there is no god:
“Some things you forget; other things stay with you and you replay them over and over again in your mind, like it was yesterday,” he said, closing his eyes.
“The very first time I heard artillery fire, I’ll never forget the sound, the whistling that filled the air. You dive in a hole, smoke rising all around you. There were six or seven of us together that day, and as soon as it’s over, you look around to make sure everyone is still alive. That time, we all made it,” Christian said. “That is your baptism.”
“They say there are no atheists in foxholes. But as we sat in those holes, praying that God would save us, I thought about the fact that the other side was doing the same thing. And then I wondered if God is just playing some kind of game with us. Pretty much I decided at that point there was no God,” Christian said.
“For the rest of my life, I’ve tried to do the right thing. I raised a beautiful bunch of kids — and they truly are my greatest accomplishment. So I’m not worried about what’s next. If there is a God, I think he’ll know that I just did the best I could. That’s all a man can do.”
I am reminded of another aphorism, too:
An interesting collision of two very different aspects of American involvement in the Second World War: today is the anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066, which authorized the imprisonment of over 110,000 American citizens of Japanese descent, in 1942. It is also the anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945.
The internment of the Issei and Nisei (1st and 2nd generation) Japanese lasted the entire duration of the war and into 1946, even though the Supreme Court found it unconstitutional in January, 1945. Compensation for material losses took decades; the last compensation payments were not made until 1992. Though the judgment of history has clearly been that the internment camps were utterly unnecessary and a fundamental violation of the civil rights of American citizens, even now there is argument about whether or not the camps represent a precedent that would allow the government to imprison citizens based on a perceived threat to national security in the bogus “War on Terror”. It stands as one of the United States’ most shameful actions in an era of history where our noble intentions were often undermined by our ignoble actions.
The Battle of Iwo Jima was intended to secure a pair of airfields on that tiny Pacific island as a precursor to the preparations for a possible invasion of the Japanese home islands. One of the fiercest battles of the Pacific Theater, it lasted over a month and resulted in the deaths of 20,000 Japanese troops (out of about 22,000 stationed there) and over 27,000 American troops (out of an invasion force of 70,000). More Americans died at Iwo Jima than in the invasion of Normandy. Over the years there has been substantial debate about the strategic importance of securing Iwo Jima — its usefulness as an airfield for long-range fighters did not materialize in the remainder of the war — particularly given the enormous numbers of casualties. Nevertheless, Iwo Jima became one of the most iconic battles of the entire war, with the famed photograph of the Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi becoming a permanent totem for the Marine Corps and a symbol of the achievements of all the branches of the American military in World War II. In the half century since the end of the war, that symbolism has cut both ways in terms of the valor and persistence of the men who fought the war, and the huge sacrifices of lives for objectives that were badly judged.
Historian David Silbey, who is one of the regular contributors to the history blog “The Edge Of The American West”, has a wonderful post today examining these two events and their meanings then and now.
Here’s a gripping story of how one person, a teenage boy named Eddie Weinstein, managed to escape from one of the most notorious Nazi extermination camps of the Second World War, Treblinka. Weinstein is now 84 years old, but was 17 when the Germans turned his home town of Losice, Poland into a ghetto for Jews and then began to systematically deport them to labor camps. Weinstein escaped from the labor camp and returned to Losice, only to discover that the Germans had begun to ship all the Jews to a camp in Western Russia called Treblinka. At Treblinka, Jews were simply sorted into groups and murdered, either shot as they got off the trains or taken immediately to gas chambers.
Weinstein managed to escape, despite being shot in the leg by an SS Trooper, and once again returned to Losice. He and his family went into hiding and successfully managed to avoid being caught for the remainder of the war. He eventually joined the Polish Army after the Germans fled and fought on the Russian front lines as they pushed into Germany.
Of the people shipped to Treblinka, only 100 survived, and now Weinstein is the last living survivor.
Proving that no record of history is ever final, this recent article from the London Daily Telegraph says that British historian Andrew Roberts has uncovered papers from Churchill’s assistant Lawrence Burgis that included original handwritten notes from Churchill’s War Cabinet meetings. In reading the notes, which were supposed to have been destroyed once formal meeting minutes were published, Roberts found a treasure trove of information about Churchill’s opinions, ideas, and decisions throughout the war as captured first-hand by the younf Burgis. They reveal insights into Churchill’s thinking that weren’t well-known, even despite the reams and reams that have been written about the war and Churchill himself over the last half-century. In the Telegraph story, we learn that Churchill was nearly as taken in by Joseph Stalin as Franklin Roosevelt was when they met in person at Yalta, and believed Stalin’s promises not to occupy Eastern Europe after the war. Churchill’s dislike for Mohandas K. Gandhi is also mentioned; he criticized the South African leader Jan Christian Smuts to his own face for failing to “get rid of” Gandhi during his years of imprisonment in South Africa.
Churchill is such an engrossing figure and his character so complex, that these notes are interesting glosses on the man all on their own, but absolutely add a great deal more to understanding the workings of the War Cabinet, the internal political struggles of the Allied leaders, and the sereis of consequences that determined the nearly three quarters of a century that have transpired since.
Oh, and Roberts’ book has just been published in the U.K.. Not yet published in the U.S., but I do believe Amazon UK ships to the States if you’re dying to get this book. I do very much want to read it, but will probably wait for the American edition.
I don’t know if you can quite make this out, but look at the middle of the picture. (Might be easier to make out on the bigger version) Those two things that look like feet are, in fact, the feet of a WWII pilot who parachuted out of his aircraft over the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea only to get caught in the trees of the jungle canopy and die there. His remains have been covered by moss, which has helped to preserve them in nearly original condition for over 60 years. The body was only recently discovered by accident by a group of locals hiking the rugged terrain on a photo expedition.
The identity and nationality of the pilot are as yet unkown — British, American and Australian air forces all patrolled the area — but the Australian Defence Department expects to send a recovery team to the area soon.
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