Ptak Science Books

The Invasion of America, 1942, Part II

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 877

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 Dutch Harbor and Fort Mears 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.

On the History of Normalcy: Oskar Sclemmer & Dance, 1927

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 876 

Jean Bouillard (the famous physician), Joseph de Lalande (astronomer and director of the Paris Observatory), the Paris Academy of Sciences, the French Academy of Sciences, Jacques Babinet, and the University of Bologna are examples of people and entities sharing something fantastically uncomfortable—they all ridiculed the initial presentations of what would become some of the most magnificent achievements of the last 500 years.  Bouillard incredibly and improbably insisted that Edison’s phonograph was impossible and a hoax, Lalande thought it utterly impossible to fly, the Paris Academy found it absurd that steam could be applied to locomotion, the French Academy rejected Lavoisier’s findings that meteorites do indeed come from space, and the great Bologna spat on the idea of Galvani’s researches. So it goes.  There are thousands and thousands of cases like these.  Jenner, Semmelweis, Galileo, Harvey, Copernicus—all produced monumental achievements, and all faced incredible scorn and rebuke. Some had it even worse than this: Dante, Marco Polo, Walter Raleigh, Cervantes, Cellini, Voltaire, Pushkin, Turgenyev, Dostoyevsky, Baudilaire, Verlaine, Machiavelli, and etc.(and Galileo) not only found vast rejection, but were also imprisoned. (Some actually produced works in prison that would also be rejected: Raleigh wrote his history of the world in the White Tower, Pushkin, Eugene Onyegin; Marco Polo, his travels.  Plato of course was also sold as a slave.) This list in general could go on and on--an encyclopedia of mistaken thought and stubbornness could easily be produced from centuries of thought like this, thinking that went outside the boundaries of “normalcy”. 

 

The funny thing about “normalcy” is that all it seems to measure is the time it takes to move from one state of “normalcy” to the next.  People should know better than to expect that there should be no periods of extended non-change.

It is interesting to think about how new ideas like these are perceived.  I came to think about this searching for a picture of the wire costume for the black series in Oskar Schelmmer’s (1888-1943, designer, artist, dancer and by 1923 the Master of Form at the Bauhaus) Triadic Ballet ("Triadisches Ballett”)¹ of 1927. Better than a still, I actually found clips of the dance on youtube, which just floors me.

I imagine that Schlemmer didn’t find a very happy reception to his dance and costumes.  He was outside the sphere of even those re-inventing dance in Germany in the early 1920’s.  His concept of movement, among other things, differed from those of the other pioneers of this period, people like Mary Wigman, Francois Delsarte, Emile Jacques-Dalcroze and Rudolf von Laban—his inspiration came not from the center of the dancer’s experience, but from the costume itself, “which eliminates the torso” and “which the dancers measure out rather than feel out or explore”². 

It is phenomenal to me to see these changes in dance in such a short time, and how much of this movement would have been nearly impossible to conceive as an art form only a decade or so earlier. Except to the minority of people like Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, who had already rejected the restricting forms of classical ballet—the work of Schlemmer must’ve felt like a lightning strike.

 

1. See this on Musikperformance.

2..From Germany in the Twenties, the artist as Social Critic, a Collection of Essays, 1980, pg. 91.

Balloons, Zeppelins & Dirigibles: Ideas Fabulous and Not So

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

I should've included this list in yesterday's post about a 1909 zeppelin tramway but it slipped my mind. Here then are most of the posts I've made on zeppelins, balloons and dirigibles, mostly having to do with unusual deep-thought applications of their soon-to-be-replaced technologies.

I like the History of Horses in Flight the most...

Towards a History of Horses in Flight in the 19th C (here) 

 

Balloon Bridges and 600-Foot-Long Airships  (here)  

 

Escape Pods for Women Balloonists, 1820: the Fabulous "Minerve" Balloon (here)

History of the Future: Electric Balloons, Tethered Eagles and an 18th century Space Station  (here)

Zeppelin paper Model 1924  (here)

Advanced Sci-Fi Dirigible Notion, 1909 (here)

 

Vision: Looking Straight Up, Down, Across and Through--1525-1905  (here)

BadTech 100 Years Ago: Zeppelin Tramway

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 875

Here’s a highly-flammable, closely-space and heavy-but-flimsy scenario just waiting for its first monstrous mishap. 

This image is from the wonderful website of Alejandro Polanco Masa’s Tecnologia Obosleta, dedicated to antiquarian, paleofuturistic and non-existent technologies.  It comes from the December 1909 issue of Scientific American, and according to the article was an “impracticable mode of transit” envisioned by an unnamed German engineer.  It was a rigid structure airship--which means that it received its shape from a hard internal frame covered by a skin, rather than a balloon or dirigible, whose shapes are almost entirely dictated by a gas filling out their envelope—and looked a lot like Count von Zeppelin’s new (1899) LZ-1 flying machine.  No doubt the engineer with this land-based system had been caught in the considerable zeppelin fever which existed at the time.  It  stretched the engineering boundaries of the possible more than just a little, and looks to me like a disaster that should’ve happened almost immediately.  It was also supposed to speed along at 125 mph, by who knows what means. Seems to me that there would be fifty towers per mile for a huge flammable Zep carrying not many people--it doesn't seem to make sense to me, particualrly when railroads would've done a better job safer and cheaper moving more people and, of course, the freight that these things just couldn't carry.   The SciAmerican ended: “There are engineering as well as financial objections to this scheme.”

See HERE for other posts on balloons, dirigibles and zeps.

Sublime Mundane Pamphlet Titles: "Are Baby Teeth Important?"

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 874

One of my favorite categories/threads in this blog is the sublime-mundane pamphlet title.

Envelope Facts, Notes on Reading Aloud, Saturn Has Rings, Know Your Groceries, Zipper Repair, Flagpole Painting,The Fine Art of Squeezing, Thirst and two dozen others have bobbed to the surface here like antique lobster pots finding their way to the daylight after 50 years of the big dark cold—at this point, no one cares what’s inside, sort of-- just the very story and appearance is good enough. 

 Sometimes the story and the title of these indredibly-titled beasts are both fascinating, though usually it is not the case: the contents of the pamphlets with some of these bizarre titles are just a plain slice of Wonder  Bread, a big nothingness.  The work on flagpole painting is an incredible title—and it turns out that the contents make the pamphlet the veritable Ulysses of books of its genre, of which it may be the only one. But so it goes.  At least everything that you’d need or want to know is in there if you needed or were moved enough to paint a flagpole.  Zipper Repair too is in this category—it really is an exhaustive treatment on repairing zippers. 

Today’s installment of five titles has only one in that first category, the remainder being fundamentally eyebrow-raiser titles with somnolent contents, exciting and sleepifying in one five-second motion.

 A Short Treatise on Hickory Handles I am sure is still useful to anyone making their own hickory-handled tools.  It is a beautiful work—considered, referenced, insightful, well-written and nicely illustrated.  It is, in its own special way, achingly wonderful. Not knowing anything about hickory handles I was very surprised to see that their story played out to 30 pages--it was so well written and documented that I read the entire thing.  At one point in time, hickory handles were important.

 The others are really more bark than bite—but their titles are just weirdly gorgeous.  "After Forty...What?" held hope, but the 1934 pamphlet didn't identify 40 as the new 60--it was concerned with (illustrated) tooth decay, and held no daydreams. Ditto "The Most Important Tooth"--I was hoping fo rit to be some one gigantic tooth in a field in Kansas, but I was wrong.  Somehow the six-year-old molar is the most important, the seat of its infection leading to disease throughout the body.  I dunno.  I won't even go into the other two for fear of spoiling their titled wonders.

Some other examples:  here, here and here.

[Where do these odd things come from?] 

Mapping the Invasion of America, 1942

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 873

[Also see my 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. 

MORE maps in the extended section, below:

WWII Bombing Accuracy Calculator

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 872 

I found this object in my paper-calculators box (moveable disk calculators made of paper, two going back to A. Kircher in the 1660’s)—I’m not sure why it was there as it is not paper, though it is an interesting calculator.

[Images are greatly expanded in click mode.]

I learned a big lesson from it.   The “Small Target Bombing Probabilities” calculator, issued by the insufferably-little-known National Defence Research Council (NDRC)1 in the early 1940’s during WWII. 

Marked “Restricted”, it calculated the number of bombs that would successfully be delivered given (1) the number of bombs, (2) the “aiming error”, and (3) target size. It would then generate results for “(a) the expected number of hits for the indicated number of bombs”, (b-e) the probability of at least one hit to four hits.

What is surprising to me was the number of bombs that didn’t find their target. For example, a 70,000 square foot building bombed with 200 bombs had a 50% chance of landing within 1200’ of the target’s center, and one in 100—or 2 bombs of the 200—will find their mark.  I don’t think that I’ve ever seen figures like this before, and I’m surprised at the 1% hit rate.

Notes

1. The establishment of the NDRC was announced so: “It is announced by Science Service that the following committee has been appointed in the United States to correlate "scientific research on the mechanisms and devices of warfare": -- Nature 146, 191-191 (10 August 1940).

“Members included: Dr. Vannevar Bush (chairman), president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, formerly dean of the faculty of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Prof. Richard C. Tolman (vice-chairman), dean of the graduate school and professor of physical chemistry and mathematical physics at the California Institute of Technology; . Dr. Irvin Stewart (secretary), formerly Federal Commissioner for Communications and chairman of the Committee on Scientific Aids to Learning; Rear Admiral Harold G. Bowen, director of the Naval Research Laboratory, Anacostia, D.C.; Conwiy P. Coe, U.S. Commissioner of Patents; Dr. Karl T. Compton, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, formerly professor of physics at Princeton University; Dr. James B. Conant, president, formerly professor of organic chemistry, Harvard University; Dr. Frank B. Jewett, president of the Bell Telephone Laboratories; Brigadier General G. V. Strong, assistant chief of staff, U.S.”

Joseph Stalin’s Flying Circus: the Maxim Gorky Aircraft, 1934

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 871

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 20^th 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.

{Photos int he CONTINUED READING section.)
Notes 

See:

http://www.dictatorshipoftheair.com/wp-content/themes/content/excerpt2.pdf

http://dictatorshipoftheair.com/2007/01/04/the-ant-20-maxim-gorky-in-flight/

The Great Terror

1.The Holodomor (the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

2.Robert Conquest The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (1968) , The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (1970)   Lenin (1972) , Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps (1978) , Inside Stalin's Secret Police: NKVD Politics, 1936-1939 (1985) ,The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986) , Tyrants and Typewriters: Communiques in the Struggle for Truth (1989) , Stalin and the Kirov Murder (1989) ,The Great Terror: A Reassessment (1990).

The Architect’s Lament (Writ in Stone): Stockholm, 1914

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 870

Years ago when I lived in DC,  a neighbor in Georgetown who was suitably upset about being told how he could decorate the front of his townhouse spray-painted the rules and regs of private house decoration right on the front of his home.  In colors, urban-graffiti style, about 10 feet high.  As it turns out, his (influential) neighbors were wrong about how restricted the colors were that he had chosen to paint his house, and that he was perfectly within his rights to answer his complaint by painting that n the front of his house.  He made his point.  For several years. 

 

An extreme case of venting and protest—in the pre-mass communication era—was found in Stockholm.  The façade of the house designed by the architect Klemming is decorated with his 40-foot high incised complaint against the building bureaucracy of the city.  As it turns out Klemming was not allowed to proceed as he wished, running into regulations preventing him from carrying out the design that he wanted.  Defeated, he built what was allowed, and then found a way to revenge—ironically, there was no regulation to keep him from his permanent, stone-cold anti-reg voice. 

 

I suspect that few architects, or builders, would disagree with Kemmling’s sentiments.

 (The text is clickable)

The rant reads, in part:

“A year was quite enough

For the building of this house,

But a long time was needed

To get permission for it.

Three years were passed

Before granted it was.

The fight was won at last,

But the wonds caused were severe.

To give full account of

 how the fight proceeded

this space would be too small…”

And ends:

“Oh Land , oh Town, consider well,

When bills of law are passed, lest private right be violated

And working spirit killed.”

 

The Battle of Berlin, 1935

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 869

 

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.