JF Ptak Science Books

Simple Alphabetical List of Major Civil War Battles

I just wanted to introduce the first of a series of new pages on this blog devoted to the U.S. Civil War. The 150th anniversary of the war begins soon, and I plan to do a Civil War day-by-day newspaper article for contemporary coveragre of thhe war, beginning in December.

Alphabetical Listing of Major Civil War Campaigns, by Battle

Allatoona Georgia October 5, 1864
Amelia Springs Virginia April 5, 1865
Antietam / Sharpsburg Maryland September 16-18, 1862
Appomattox Station Virginia April 8, 1865
Appomattox Court House Virginia April 9, 1865
Aquia Creek Virginia May 29-June 1, 1861
Arkansas Post / Fort Hindman Arkansas January 9-11, 1863
Atlanta Georgia July 22, 1864
Athens Alabama January 26, 1864
Averasborough / Smiths Ferry / Black River North Carolina March 16, 1865
Auburn / Catlett's Station / St. Stephen's Church Virginia October 13, 1863
Auburn / Coffee Hill Virginia October 14, 1863

Buckle-Up for the Nuclear Holocaust--The Fat Man's Big and Terrifically Bad Idea

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 1221

Atomic and Nuclear Weapons   and The History of Bad Ideas series

This is one of those ideas that just went viciously bad on contact, turning into an enabler of  the very thing that it was supposed to help prevent:  turning the Easter Bunny into Dr. Strangelove.  In the History of Bad Ideas, this one is top-tier. 

LIFE magazine published “How U.S. Cities Can Prepare of Atomic War:  How M.I.T. Professors Suggest a Bold Plan to Prevent Panic and Limit Destruction” in their 18 December 1950 weekly issue, just in time for Christmas.  The plan was a partial response to the dire situation faced by the U.S. in Korea and the growing threat of China and of course the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal.  The government recognized that there was little planning in place to deal with the outcome of possible nuclear attack, and established the Federal Civil Defense Administration to help deal with the “problem”.  The problem  was how to make U.S. cities somewhat prepared to deal with being bombed with nuclear weapons—given that cities had a hard enough time dealing with 5:30 pm commuter gridlock, throwing a hundred megatons of explosive power into the equation made things more difficult. 

One reaction was to construct concentric outer highways around metropolitan areas, “life belts around cities (which) would provide a place for bombed-out refugees to go”. In the birds eye view provided here, we see the plan in action, the main parts of which are an 8-lane “express” highway belt 10 miles away “from the built up edges of the city” , and a 6-track railway belt five miles further out, these accompanied by various feeder arms stretching straight-away from downtown.  In between the two outer rings would be land that would be kept free of development, so that farms and tent cities could be constructed after the attack. There would also be major collections of hospital and fuel depots in the greenbelt area.  Infrastructure would already be in place (gas and electricity, supplied with power from who-knows-where).   Shopping centers and a giant “motor pool:” would also already be in place, waiting for the Doomsday clock to strike midnight. 

One of the overwhelming presumptions here is that the interspersed green life living within the concentric rings of escape and transport routes would survive the attack. As would the highways.  Why on earth wouldn’t that infrastructure be attacked as well? Given the proliferation of weapons, it would seem highly unlikely that The Aggressor would target just downtown areas of major cities—they would of course have to include the safespots as well. Not that there would be that much of a change in targeting parameters:  exploding a series of 1 or 5 or 10 megaton warheads over a city like the one pictured here would pretty much decimate anything within the 15-mile life zone set out for survival.  With weapons in this megatonnage range, we’re talking about an explosive force that would be inconceivable, even using the Hiroshima explosion as a currency.  It is hard to imagine what happens when you deliver 3 or 4 5-megaton weapons to a city like this; when each of them would have the explosive force of 5,000 or so Hiroshimas, it is pretty clear that nothing will be left.

This planning gap reminds me of the question dealing with UFO running/landing lights:  why are they there?  Even assuming a modest strike in the kiloton range (which simply would not be the case) why would these defensive structures not be a target, particularly, oh dear sweet creator, since they would actually be forming an enormous target, and one that even a half-blind flying pig could find from altitude? Ultimately, it wasn’t a good question to ask because the answer would reveal the helpless, soulless situation for what it was.  It was precisely an adult version of the ‘duck-and-cover” cartoons that showed the good students who got under their (wooden) desks being shielded from the atomic nastiness that just knocked down their school.  And of course these concentric evacuation and mobilization rings, even if they had miraculously survived a purposely modest attack, and even if they actually worked to handle the flow of millions of people in their eight lanes, and even if all of those millions driving these highways didn’t have any accidents that would choke the flow of traffic (and on and on), we still haven’t approached the radiation question.  For it was in the greenspace between the two concentric rings in which tent cities for the evacuees and homeless would come to life, some ten miles from ground zero (if, again, they weren’t themselves directly bombed with weapons in the megaton range). 

So, in short, the way that these efforts would work is if (a) there was a lot of lead time to the attack, (b) everyone left the city in an orderly fashion, (c) nobody had any traffic choking accidents, (d) there was no radiation, and (e) one and only one “antique” nuclear weapons was used in the attack.  Given these parameters, the plan just might work. 

One of the authors of this not-particularly well-thought or original idea was in fact a great and original thinker; this enormous and costly and not effective plan was certainly not one of his best moments.  Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), one of the co-conspirators of this idea, was a boy genius who grew into an adult genius, and that growing part didn’t take long at all.  He graduated with a Harvard Ph.D. in 1912 at age 18 and went on to a distinguished early career as a logician, studying under Russell and Hardy and Landau and Hilbert.  He left that part of his life mostly behind by the end of WWI, dedicating  himself to mathematics.  One of Wiener’s great accomplishments was (during the early stages of WWII) designing the capacity for anti-aircraft guns to be self-aiming, improving their accuracy (and effect) immensely.  This was the foundation of his communication theory which became the basis for his creation of cybernetics, a superior creation with vast applications over many fields. 

By the beginning of the Cold War, Wiener became a pacifist, leading him down a dark and murky road to this “life belt” idea.  Perhaps this approach had precisely the wrong effect:  by lending the idea of sustainable and orderly survivability to nuclear war might have led people top believe that nuclear was survivable; and if there is a game played in which its two players are not necessarily both losers, then the specter of “winning” a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union becomes a possibility, making the whole idea of fighting with nuclear weapons feasible. 

I’ve not a clue as to what the great Norbert Wiener was thinking when he worked this out; even as a (and perhaps “the”) math guy,  the numbers just don’t add up. 

When I put on my Jorge Borges x-ray specs the plan looks prettier, and of course involves libraries.  The outer concentric circles are still there, as are the green spaces, and the express/democratic ways of getting there; but what you would find there, on the highway ring, would be a series of libraries and dataports, and endless stream of books, and words, and numbers. 

Addendum:

One of among many things that I didn't discuss above was the placement of such a greenbelt/lifebelt system for cities like New York, or San Francisco, or Los Angeles.  As we can see in the depiction of a nuclear attack on NYC from Collier's Magazine (1948) there's sorry little area for that highway ten miles out from 42nd Street...

The "Non-Violent" Ultimate Weapon Successor to the IBM? RAND Report, 1957

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 1218

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 chief  theoreticians 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 pamphlet is available for purchase from our blog bookstore.]

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.”

Cyborgs and Robots, 1920's: Man as Machine and Machine as Man.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1217
[Also see my post on producing the geometrical man "Durer's Beautiful Monster", here.]
I’ve written earlier in this blog about the advent of robots and human machines, and I’d like to add these two images to that thread.    Both are male, which is not horribly surprising since the earliest creation of a female robot belongs to the fertile Fritz Lang, who used his creation in his extraordinary movie Metropolis in 1927.  (Male robot-like creations go back fairly deeply into the 19th century; so perhaps the creation of female robots was verbotten because of the possibilities for unacceptable sexual fantasies in the high- and post-Victorian world, struggling under the weight of many and multiply-applied public inhibitions. Perhaps it was because of the possibility of sexual relations with an inanimate object that was the cause for one-gendered robots, or perhaps it was a fear of a powerful, intelligent, unstoppable, superior creation that was also “womanly”.  I don’t know.)

[Both of these images are available from our blog bookstore.]
The first is an image of the “human machine”, a cog-like adaptation of human workers in a Frederick Taylor-like The Principles of Scientific Management study, automatizing and industrializing people.  Though many people had written and worked around Taylor’s 1911 semi-revolutionary book (and not necessarily a good revolution, but one nevertheless), I’m not certain that I’ve seen the worker trussed up so before this, encumbered by so many technical testing elements as to make him look like a cyborg (though that term would still be a while coming into the vocabulary. 

This image is actually testing a person’s energy expenditure while pushing a wheelbarrow on an incline, and utilizes the newly-created equipment of the French physiologist Langlois, which in 1921  may well have measured for the first time  the real-time changes in the rhythm of the heart and blood pressure, changes in body temperature and lung capacity of humans in an activity.  I have no doubt that the results would have been very interesting to cardiologists, and probably didn’t mean a thing to industrialists like Henry Ford, who would’ve plowed ahead with their demands on their workers regardless of what tests said, schedules being schedules and all. 

(I’m no tsure where this experiment fits in, historically speaking, even within the context of biological advances for that very year.  Frederick Banting was able to do some pretty nasty stuff to dogs in a basement lab somewhere at the University of Toronto and come up with a successful treatment for diabetes mellitus–insulin, which would save the lives of millions and earn Banting a Nobel two years later.  In the quasi/fake biological arenas came two biggish events: Jung’s creation of the concepts of introvert and extrovert, and Hermann Rorschach’s one-way conversational device for detecting psycho-pathological conditions (in people).  I suspect that the Langlois data would fit in there somewhere along the rough edge of Jung and Rorschack, if only because the data was real.         

The second image is in a way a reverse sequence of the preceding–an out-and-out robot that was being used to teach human physiology.  In this case, the robot was a steam engine, constructed for the Schoolboys’ Exhibition at the New Horticultural Hall for 1928, perhaps under the  influence of Karel Capek’s newly published drama R.U.R., which coined the term “robot”. The biological functions of humans were reinterpreted along a more user-friendly vocabulary of the steam engine, using pumps, boilers, hinges, belts, pulleys, filters, compressors and a furnace to explain the functions of respiration and circulation.   It was an interesting approach to show these functions on their most basic level–and in less than 75 years, many of these mechanically represented organs were actually replaceable by real mechanical units performing the same task as the biological (as in the heart), while others could be replaced (via transplant).

Man as machine and machine as man.

Quiet Images of Great Loss and Heroism–British Navy Losses, 1945

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1216

This enormous, quiet image appeared in The Illustrated London News on 23 June 1945, just weeks after the termination of WWII in Europe.

It graphically presents every ship lost by Great Britain in the defense of “holding the seas against the Axis Powers...holding open the channels of supply and food and war material” from the outbreak of the war to VE day. The inset narrative states that there were on average nearly 3000 British and Allied ships at sea at any given moment, with the Royal Navy patrolling an aggregate  of 80,000 miles of trading routes, day in and day out

[This image is available for purchase--in the original and in a 30x40" poster--at our blog bookstore.]

It is a symbol of loss, of heroism, of lives not lived, of lives saved, of valor, of greatness, of will, of the cold black sea, of burning oil, of red waves, and above all, of sacrifice. Of splendid behavior.

It is a terrible picture of what victory demanded of bravery.       

It is as much an image of a military graveyard as anything else, a Remembrancer, especially for  those who were never recovered.  It is a grid, a finding aid, a visualizer, for all of those sailors lost in a sea that is indifferent to particular memory.


I can’t imagine how this image was received by the Illustrated London News reader on that day.  Did they suck their breath in at the scope of it, of the gigantic reminder of what all of those ships represented?  Was it the sort of image-reading that was forced, a white-knuckle, vacant-chested feeling of sweeping loss?  Of loss and gratitude?  Of gratitude and finding purpose for all of those sacrifices to the island nation?  I suspect that all of those words were in the minds of those readers in 1945–and also for emotions that have no words. 


Notes:
There is also a small inset that shows in comparison the Royal Navy losses for WWI, 1914-1918. 

There is also this, an incredible single-page display of British merchant-marine war losses of 2570 ships.
           

Both images are the work of the incredible G.H. Davis, who provided cut-aways, cross-sections, maps, diagrams an all manner of information to the ILN readers throughout the war.  HE was an inexhaustible man of excellent design sense.

Defeated but Alive–German POWs, 1945. A Remarkable Photograph.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1212

By April 21, 1945–the date that this photograph was published–I should think that those left fighting in the Wehrmacht would have thought that it was time now to be taken prisoner by the British or the Americans, and to not be taken by the Soviet Army.  Thousands of German soldiers made their way west at the tail end of the war, trying to evade capture by the Russians, to find some sort of respite from the fear of being taken away by the Red Army to work and disappear somewhere inside the heart of Mother Russia.  There was a heavy dose of vengeance being unleashed on the captured German forces in the east in partial payback for the devastating assault on the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) by the Nazis beginning on 22 June 1941, and which caused millions of citizens and soldiers their lives.  (Barbarossa was to have been a multi-month long campaign to secure the minerals and farm lands and forests of the Urals and Siberia and the Ukraine, but it lasted for more than three years along an 1800-mile front.  The initial operation was very successful for Germany, but the Blitzkrieg ended quickly, and a long slogging campaign began, one which would be decided not only by weather, but by massive production of Soviet materiel and overwhelming army strength.)

The caption of this Illustrated London News photograph states that this is but a small fraction of the 2,000,000 prisoners then held by the Allied Forces.  Shortly before this it was estimated that the Nazis held some 1.7 million Allied prisoners, which meant that in early 1945 more than 4 million soldiers were held as POWs in Europe.  This enormous figure is exclusive of Japanese prisoners (estimated at about 150,000 in early 1945, with this number being exclusive of any Chinese prisoners), and the number of prisoners held by the Soviet Union. 

Te return rate of German prisoners from Allied camps was very high; that same rate for Germans in possession of the Soviets was very low, something along the lines of 20%.  The Nazi campaign through the Soviet Union showed small mercy and great cruelty; the Soviets reciprocated with the German soldiers they captured.

Overall, this is a tough photograph.  The soldiers were evidently awaiting delousing before being sent onto trains to deliver them to more formal detention facilities. At least when these soldiers got on those trains with what sound like hgih-tin whistles, they mainly survived their ordeal, and the showers that they were going to receive were using water, and not zyklon-B.

Death from Above--the Fear of Aerial Bombing and Gas Attacks, 1932

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1209

Aerial bombing from heavier-than-aircraft comes to a big anniversary soon, on 1 November 2011, a century after the Italian Lt. Giulio Cavotti dropped the first bomb from a plane on oasis-encamped Libyan troops at Tripoli.   Of course things rapidly in the few years following that, so that by the end of WWI people got a good taste of what it meant to controlling pieces of property without actually occupying them, raining chaos and destruction from

    

above.  20+ years later, in the early 1930's bombing became more sophisticated, including a new arsenal of poison gas weapons.  The threat from this weapon was agonizing and palpable–the results of gas attacks upon armed combatants in WWI and  the gassing of civilians in the 1920's and early 1930's  made a hard strike into the social fabric, an enormous gapping new hole to be filled in the heart of fear. [And of course this fear was felt everywhere, from London to New York to Leipzig to Moscow to Milan, as we can see in these few examples below. ALSO: these images may be purchased rfom our blog bookstore, here.]

And this interesting image of a mock (or "mimic" as it was called in the report) attack on Milan in August, 1931:

There were a number of interwar aerial bombings that took place that kept the issue of mass destruction alive and well.  For example,  Britain used its air arm  very convincingly in Iraq, bombing many places including Bagdhad  in 1923; the Spanish bombed civilians into submission in Morocco, near Tetuan, in 1925, and the French crippled and destroyed  their opponents--both military and civilian, it made no difference--in Damascus, Syria, also in 1925.


Fiction also harnessed the possibilities of air war, not the least of which included Armageddon-like scenarios for the semi-End of Days through the use of poison gas and “atomic” weapons.  For example, deadly gas used in Anderson Graham’s The Collapse of Homo Sapiens (1923) and Neil Bell’s Valiant Clay (where the poison gas kills 1.5 billion) and Dalton’s Black Death (1934), while Reginald Glossop’s The Orphan of Space (1926) created an alien atomic spaceship which delivered holocaustal death to Soviets and Chinese and Communists in general.  There were many more stories like this, not the least of which were the non-fiction strategy works, like Giulio Douhet, author of Dominion of the Skies (1921), legitimizer of the “strategic” bombing of civilian populations (in spite of the Hague Conference of 1907*), and  JFC Fuller’s The Reformation of War (1923) which emphsized the new importance of air war and power and which also allocated the use of gas, justifying that morality  because it could cause less harm than a conventional attack.

[Image below from :Mr Baldwin on Aerial Warfare", The Illustrated London News for 19 November 1932, illustrating the sort of aerial bombs that could threaten the population of London.]

The fear was real, and the capacity to cause mass death (espcially from poison gas) was substantial, even if in a still-developing form.  Eight years hence, though, it would almost all come true (except for the poison gas part, at least for WWII), and in ways that weren't quite imaginable in 1932--500 B-29s flying criss-cross over Tokyo would've seemed more fiction than science to the 1932-person, even though that technology was only a dozen or so years away. 

Notes

* This is where the bombing of civilian areas was specifically outlawed; what wasn’t defined, however, was what “civilian” meant–turns out that it was pretty loosely defined in the 20's and '30's.

The Atomic Bomb Art of William Shockley, 1945.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1208

“For atomic bombing destruction is still more cheap”--WIlliam Shockley¹.

 (Click image to enlarge; the other four pages are located in the "Continue Reading" section, below.This is also available for purchase via our blog bookstore.) 

This paper is one a small archive of background and draft papers and proposals by the Vannevar Bush group working on the question of the control of atomic weapons and the formalization of the American position regarding the use and control of atomic weapons, October 1945-February 1946. This archive consists of 38 documents relating to the development of U.S. atomic policy, with  contributions by President Harry Truman, Secretary of State James Byrnes, Dr. Vannevar Bush, (future AEC director) Carroll Wilson, Alger Hiss, I.I. Rabi, William Shockley, Frederick Dunn, Joseph E. Johnson, Leo Pasvolsky, Philip Morrison, Col. Nichols, William McRae, Admiral W.H.P. Blandy, George L. Harrison, and others.

I have written elsewhere on this site about Vannevar Bush and the coming atomic/nuclear arms problem--as perhaps one of the pre-eminent scientific minds in the Roosevelt/Truman administrations, Bush and others foresaw the development of the atomic arms race in 1943, and by 1945 Bush became a  fundamental thinker and advocate on the problem. The items in this archive are low-formal background papers, drafts of proposals, informal studies, as well as mature statements of thought that would become implemented in the core of U.S. policy regarding the spread and control of atomic weapons. They are generally carbon typescripts and necessarily of extremely limited distribution, generally have no letterheads, occasionally carry the authors’ full names (although sometimes only initials are used).

The William Shockley paper was written towards the end of 1945 and is on five pages and runs about 1500 words, and is an extension of work he had already been doing for Henry Stimson with Quincy Wright on evaluating the combinations of casualties that would lead the Japanese to surrender³.  He begins this paper with a logical statement of the issue of the economics of conventional and atomic bombing, ending with the sentence “For atomic bombing destruction is still more cheap”.  What Shockley is getting to is the overall cost of the amount of destruction caused per square mile, and the conclusion that he draws over these five pages is the destruction caused by the atomic bomb is 1/100th the cost of conventional bombing per square mile destroyed (“atomic bombing is probably 10 to 100 times cheaper than ordinary bombing”).   

Shockley also recognizes that the problem in the near future will be the increasing cheapness of producing atomic (and greater) weapons, and their developing accessibility to small nations.  “This cheapness is a new factor and indicates that an unparalleled loss of human resources will accompany future wars.  The ability of small nations to do great damage is also a consequence of the cheapness.”  He writes further that taking this thinking to its “logical conclusion”, that at some point in the future a single individual will be able to use this new technology to destroy the world.  The main point though that he was making in this line of thinking was the dispersion and proliferation of the new technology--that an arms race would occur, and that it would be dangerous, and that it could be very very bad.  Shockley has of course nothing to say about any of that or the implications of his finds as that was not his charge. 

After figuring that the cost of destruction by the atomic bomb was about $600,000 per square mile (compared to $6,500,000 per square mile for conventional bombing), Shockley concludes that “since the atomic bomb art is in its infancy, we may well expect future economies of a factor of 10 in cost per square mile destroyed…”

Shockley on the likelihood of casualties during the final invasion of Japan. 

(The following three paragraphs are taken entirely from CASUALTY PROJECTIONS FOR THE U.S. INVASIONS OF JAPAN, 1945-1946: PLANNING AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS by D. M. Giangreco in the Journal of Military History, 61 (July 1997): 521-82 

“As for Dr. Shockley's initial report to Dr. Bowles, it was not submitted until after Stimson had left for Potsdam. He proposed that a study be initiated "to determine to what extent the behavior of a nation in war can be predicted from the behavior of her troops in individual battles." Shockley utilized the analyses of Dr. DeBakey and Dr. Beebe, and discussed the matter in depth with Professor Quincy Wright from the University of Chicago, author of the highly-respected A Study of War; and Colonel James McCormack, Jr., a military intelligence officer and former Rhodes Scholar who served  in the OPD's small but influential Strategic Policy Section with another former Rhodes Scholar, Colonel Dean Rusk.  Shockley said:

"If the study shows that the behavior of nations in all historical cases comparable to Japan's has in fact been invariably consistent with the behavior of the troops in battle, then it means that the Japanese dead and ineffectives at the time of the defeat will exceed the corresponding number for the Germans. In other words, we shall probably have to kill at least 5 to 10 million Japanese. This might cost us between 1.7 and 4 million casualties including [between] 400,000 and 800,000 killed."--W. B. Shockley to Edward L. Bowles.²  .

No accurate total of German military and civilian deaths was available at the time he prepared his report, but the number was eventually set at roughly 11,000,000. was not invaded and finished the war with just over 7,000,000 casualties, most of them from its armed services on the Asian mainland in fighting from September 1931 to September 1945.

Notes: 

1. The brilliant Shockley’s story is difficult and problematic: from the way in which he misused his interaction with the rest of his team at Bell Labs in the discovery of the junction transistor to his sinful racial and eugenic (and dysgenic) public persona later in life--it is a hard and long one to tell, and I’ll not try to do it here. (I should point out that his attacks started in 1966 when he "delivered the first of a series of controversial papers to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in which he called for a renewed focus on racial biology, synthesizing under the title of eugenics the compulsive element of population control with the targeting of the dysgenic fertility of the black population".[From “Confronting the Stigma of Eugenics: Genetics, Demography and the Problems of Population” by : Ramsden, Edmund in Social Studies of Science, Vol: 39 Issue: 6, 12/2009 pages: 853 - 884.] Suffice to say that I’m very aware of the very long shadows, and I think that other people should at least be aware of them as well, regardless of the staggering importance of “his” (with the wonderful Walter Brattain and John Bardeen) monumental discovery. 

2.  21 July 1945, "Proposal for Increasing the Scope of Casualties Studies," Edward L. Bowles Papers, box 34, Library of Congress.

3. For a detailed look at Shockley's work in this area see Predicting the Termination of War: Battle Casualties and Population Losses, by Frank Klingberg in The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Jun., 1966), pp. 129-171. Dr. William B. Shockley (later a joint winner of the Nobel Prize for his work in developing transistors) was an expert consultant to the Secretary of War, engaged in part in gathering and organizing information bearing on the problem of casualties in the Pacific war. He believed that historical studies of casualties might be helpful &dquo;for consideration in connection with the total casualties to be expected in the Japanese war, the rate at which land invasion should be expected in the Japanese war, the rate at which land invasion should be pushed
ahead in Japan or held back while attrition by air and blockade proceeds, and the relativeapportionment of effort between the Army Air Forces and the Army Ground Forces..."

The cointinuation of the Shockley paper, pp 2-5.   
Click on any image to enlarge it.   

The Most Important Menu in Computing History? Johnny von Neumann, Herman Melville the NORC & the MOBIDIC

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1202

"There is no mystery about these machines[computers]. The mystery is how the human brain has been able to develop them. These devices are merely small tools which men have devised to help them do a better job."--Thomas J. Watson, chairman of the board of IBM, 1954

Here is something that one doesn't get to say very often:  this is perhaps the most important menu in the history of computing¹. And if there's another menu out there of the same or greater significance, then I offer that this is perhaps the most important menu tassle in the history of computation--that seems safer.

In the history of odd bits of historic computeriana ephemera, this tassle joins the ranks of other one-percenters, like this:  the world's first portable computer had a gun rack.  This was hardly a laptop though it was portable, and very well lived up to its Herman Melville-inspired acronym:  MOBIDIC.

The Mobile Digital Computer was intended to be a transistorized van-mounted computer used to store and route data as part of the U.S. Army’s Fieldata system.  The machine was indeed built and deployed by 1959–as were the MOBIDIC A,B,C,D,E and 7a by the early 1960's–and it was a successful component, even though the overall network was not successful.  Fieldata was supposed to integrate all manner of information and distribute it to battlefield recipients. My friend (Dr.)  Carl Hammer (1914-1904), who I knew from being in the neighborhood in Georgetown, was a delightful man who had long and significant history in the development of the modern computer.  He told me one afternoon–stopping in to visit on his constitutional–in his sly and amusing way about working on the MOBIDIC while he was at Sylvania. (He had just finished heading up Remington Rand’s UNIVAC European Division before going to Sylvania.) Anyway he started his story about the MOBIDIC by telling me that it was the world’s first portable computer (sitting in a 42-foot-long semitrailer) and that it had gun racks.  The reason for the gun racks was simple–if something was made by the U.S. Army, and it had wheels, then it had to have a gun rack.  Case closed.

Now let's get back to the NORC.

[This item is available for purchase at our blog bookstore.]

This is the luncheon menu for the dedication of the NORC "Calculator" (the Naval Ordnance Research Calculator) a computer which was constructed principally with IBM parts and built at the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia.  The NORC was the world's first supercomputer, and the most powerful computer on the planet for about ten years (from 1954 to 1963, until it was surpassed by Seymour Cray's CDC 6600 in 1964). 

The NORC was an astonishing accomplishment, difficult to summarize simply, really, though a very good example is that provided by Dr. Paul Herget, the director of the Cincinnati Observatory.  Dr. Herget used the NORC in 1956 to make precise calculations of the earths orbit for the 1920-2000 period.  Dr. Herget said: "We used nine hours of running time and completed more computations than had ever before been done at one time in the history of astronomy.'"

Outside of celebrating the accomplishment of the NORC, the luncheon was also  important for the remarks of the principal speaker, John von Neumann.  Von Neumann of course was perhaps the most expansive mind of the century--a thinker of phenomenal proportions and the father of the modern computer.  His brain was impossibly big.  Impossible. 

During the luncheon von Neumann made prescient and extraordinarily wide remarks on the future utility of the computer.  Some of the highlights (from the entire address, included below):

--it is now "practical and feasible" to forecast, with the NORC, the weather for an entire hemisphere thirty or sixty days ahead

--calculation of the tidal motions of all the oceans, the marginal movements near the continents as well as the main motions of the oceans

--the hydrodynamics of the earth's fluid core

--"In the statistical field, dealing with matters which are not wholly mechanical, such as troop operations and logistic operations which involve purely accidental factors like the prevailing weather during the operation, command decisions which have not yet been officially made can be stipulated and various solutions for various alternatives calculated. This has been done before on a minor scale but it takes too long to do on a large scale. "In this field the importance of NORC is enormous..."

--in the first four hours of operations the NORC  performed more work than any calculator of ten years ago has performed in its entire lifetime. He termed this performance "completely fantastic; I doubt if it has ever been done before."

The last section of von Neumann's comments that were made at the dinner:

"The last thing, which is very important, is said in fewer words, but I think that it is none the less important. And it is this: In planning new computing machines, in fact, in planning anything new, in trying to enlarge the domain of parameters with which one can work, it is of course customary and very proper that one should consider what the demand is, what the price is, whether it will be more profitable to do it in a bold way than in a cautious way, and so on. This type of consideration is necessary -- the world would very quickly go to pieces if these rules were not observed in 99 cases out of a hundred.

"It is terribly important that there should however be one piece in a hundred where it is done differently.

"And that one uses the definition which Dr. Haven (?) pointed out 20 minutes ago, namely to occasionally do what the U. S. Navy did in this case and what IBM accepted in this case: to write a specification essentially to build the most powerful machine that is possible in this day with the present state of the art. I just hope that this will be repeated very soon and will never be forgotten." Source.  

It may be the last statement that is the most important--pressing those of the present and future to perform.

Notes:

1.  The importance of this menu was described to me in a lovely and painterly fashion for the first time by P.J. Mode.

Mundane Images of Necessities of War--Found Bullets and the Battle of Pots and Pans

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1201

A little went a long way, sometimes, in collecting the ends and bits of a campaign or a retiring column or from the attics and basements of village houses, or in scrapyards or dustbins or abandoned yards and buildings. Scrap has sometimes contributed greatly to major war efforts; and sometimes it has contributed just a few hundred rounds of ammunition, gathered from the sick or dying or forces on the move, that have told the tale of change in battle.  When you can only carry so much in a campaign where shooting can be an endless process, you can by definition never really carry enough bullets when you're already carrying enough of everything else.

[These images may be purchased from our blog bookstore here.]

On the other side of the line, the Germans were tyrying to utilize every bit possible as well--here's an example of a round-up of metal goods taken from the kitchens of a small town (looking ,mostlly like mortar and pestel sets).  In towns throughout France, on the other hand, church bells were collected and stored away, hidden from possibel capture and melting by German troops. 

 

:Now for an example from WWII: Salvage (1943) is just simply brilliant!  It is a superb  design, getting its inelegant point elegantly across to the reader, making the collecting of junk  a bona fide war effort, triumphant, superior; it delivers the message gorgeously.  Who wouldn't want to rush out and look for some metal scrap and bits and grow a neighborhood junk yard so that the community could build a tank?  Certainly these two boys--under the watchful guidance of a smiling cop in a black tie--couldn't resist, and from the looks of the progress billboard behind them, nor could anybody else in the neighborhood, as the community collected enough metal junk for 14 tanks.  (Or at least pieces and chunks for fourteen tanks.)

The community was Coatesville, Pennsylvania, and they certainly did their collecting-best.  The two photos below show (top) the scrap yard after two days of collecting, and (bottom) the end of the campaign two months latter.

"One pound of fat contained enough glycerin to make a pound of black powder, enough for six 75-mm shells. Twenty three hundred old nylon stockings contained enough nylon to make one parachute.
Thirty thousand razor blades contained enough steel to make fifty 30-caliber machine guns."   (Lingeman, Richard R. Don t You Know There Is a War On? The American Home Front, 1941-1945. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons 1970, 254-55).  When you have an entire town doing this, you can build tanks; when you have millions of people throwing together to collect this "junk", then you get part of a war effort.  It is also part of a giant propaganda hearts/minds machine, especially for the U.S., which was (and I use this word with some hesitation) cushioned from the effects of the war by two oceans--it reminded people who hadn't contributed a life to the war that there was actually something tangible going on, and that they could do something to help.  It kept peoples' minds in the game.  Rubber was another big concern, as was silk (the controlling exporter of both coming largely from overseas, and in the case of silk, the exporter was Japan.)  Of course there was the introduction of synthetics for both silk and rubber, but the point in fact was that there was indeed a shortage, and the donated and salvaged stuff was necessary. 

Here's a beginning picture for the burgeoning community scrapyard:                                                                                                                                             

Some interesting works relating to salvage drives:

Barringer, Edwin C. The Story of Scrap. Washington D.C:Institute of Scrap Iron & Steel Inc., revised edition, 1954.

Cohen, Stan. V for Victory: America's Home Front During World War II. Missoula Montana: Pictorial Histories Publishing Co., Inc., 1991.

And afterwards:

Hoopes, Roy. Americans Remember the Home Front: An Oral Narrative. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1977.

Lingeman, Richard R. Don t You Know There Is a War On? The American Home Front, 1941-1945. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1970.

O'Neill, William L. A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II. New York: The Free Press, 1993.

And here's one I'd like to see (the cover of):

Wolf, Howard. The Story of Scrap Rubber. Akron, Ohio: A.
Schulman, Inc., 1943.

 

Propaganda and Surrender Tickets, World War II, 1943-1945.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1200

 

A part of the payload dropped on German and Japanese forces were not metal and explosive, but paper. Hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper with real and imagined information, tickets to surrender, reminders of the coming of the end of the war, passages to a prisoner of war camp somewhere that would ensure the soldier's survival of the rest of the war.  Convincing someone to surrender, or making it easier for them to not fight too hard and to surrender, is sometimes easier than to confront and kill them.

For the most part these were distributed in a combination effort between the U.S. Army Air Force (USAAF) and the Royal Air Force (RAF), while the other major segment was done by the Supreme Headquarters of the Army Expedition Force (SHAEF) and the 8th U.S. Army.  There pieces of directed information were very persuasive, but of course they were hardly new—not even the delivery system (via aircraft) was an innovation. 

These leaflets were more or less an “information” service relating factual events and presented in such a way to persuade and convince whomever picked them up that their cause was at this point futile.  In just about every case in the 150 items in my small collection as far as I could determine all of the statements made were indeed correct and accurate.  Leaflets were dropped by the ton during the war that were pure fabrication, intended to confuse the scare the recipient into surrender, deceiving them;  but not these. (For example, a famous use of deception in major confrontations was Operation Quicksilver and the creation of the First United States Army Group (FUSAG), a non-existent fighting enemy that was supposed to distract the Germans while real preparations were underway elsewhere for the invasion of Europe (D Day).
 
There was a distinct threat of terror in many of these leaflets, though the terror would never come from the Americans or Brits—the Russians, however, were another story. (Remember that the U.S. gets into the war at the end of 1941; the British had been fighting since 1939; and the Russians, well, they had been fighting too since 1939 [starting out without chivalry and with cold malice against the Finns], but they did fight against the Nazis once they had been completely deceived by them,  losing 20 million people in the process.  The Germans had much more to fear from them than anything on earth. And rightly so.) The use of terror in propaganda is probably as old as warfare itself—for example the Mongol leader Tamerlane built a pyramid of 90,000 human heads in front of the walls of Delhi to persuade the inhabitants to just forget about fighting, and leave.   The British employed a terror tactic in the use of the Gurkas and their curved and menacing Kukri to great advantage; the Americans had the Phoenix Program in Vietnam (for the assassination of leading Viet Cong and their supporters), and so on, into the sunset.

I do not intend to try and write a thousand-word history of wartime psychological operations here—I just wanted to share some of the extreme emotions and humanity that surfaces in some of these leaflets.  The first (above), for example, translated, asks “Where are your loved ones?” (Sprint, 1945), and hammers away at the soldiers memories of home and family, and about what might be happening to that family now that the war is just about won by the Allied forces, and that the Russians were on their way to Berlin.  These family-driven, hollowing, haunting, nervous questions went, I suspect, to the very heart of anyone who picked it up.
 
The second, “Auf fremder Erde (etc.)” (Spring 1945), roughly translated, called the attention of the German soldier again to the Russians, “On German soil the Russian Deluge is Raging across the Oder toward the Heart of Germany!”  And “On foreign soil you are perishing relentlessly, without value, without influence, on this war which has long been decided!”

The third leaflet, “Deutschland R-Industrie…” (3 April 1945) informs the German soldier that the hear of the German industrial region has been punctured and given up, and that supplies to soldiers in the field would no longer occur—that the fighting man was basically adrift, lost, forgotten, unreachable by everyone except the enemy.

The next example is a 10x8 inch surrender pass that was dropped on Japanese soldiers in the early spring of 1945, and tartly signed “C-in-C [Commander in Chief] Allied Forces”.  There is a very full explanation in Japanese on the back of the ticket, which has not been translated.  It seems rather remarkable to me that this was so well designed, and so attractive, and so large, and that it was dropped from a plane on thousands of Japanese troops.  As were they all, really—just about every one of the leaflets in y house are extremely well written and designed—epistles from a plane to induce surrender to a defeated, tired, dying set of armies.

Odd Person Out--Large Crowds and the Singular Person in Photographs

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1194

[These images are all available for purchase from our blog bookstore, here.]

(1) The Composition of Relief and Happiness--Minus One.  Free France, 1918.

This remarkable photograph shows the joy and relief of the townspeople of Saudemont, France (20 kilometers south-east of Arras), after just having been freed from German occupation after four years of captivity. 

Saudemont had evidently suffered greatly over the four years, and seemed as though the population of the entire town was going ot be removed along with the Germans--but they weren't, and teh town was simply abandoned, found and recaptured by these Canadian forces.

The images of overwhelming joy are (almost) everywhere:

Except of course for the man at the fulcrum of the image (and the woman behind him), who remained, well, stolid:

But so far as everyone else is concerned:

(2) In this second photograph, taken of American troops at a ceremony at the cemetery of St. Marie, Havre, France in November 1918, the massive crowd (the largest funeral service held in France) is almost entirely focused on the proceedings--except this one serviceman in front, lathced onto the photographer.

(3)

Another extraordinary image of pressed-together humans, of a human sea, a carpet of hatted men.  And believe me, every person in this image of (I'd say) approximately 5000 men has got a hat on.  There are hundreds of folks in the photo who re aware of the photographer and who are looking right at the camera, but there is only *one* person who is lifting his hat to the photographer. 

Gas Masks and Poison Gas, World War I, 1915

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1191

In the long line of potent and horrible weapons, few are as so superbly bad as chemical and poison gas.

[This image is available for purchase at our blog bookstore, here.]

The heading of this full-page photo from The Illustrated London News for 18 December 1915 really is quite understated—“remarkable” really doesn’t quite cover it.  First of all, photographs from moving airplanes were not common; secondly, this is one of the earliest images ever made of a poison gas attack in progress, just eight months after the initial use of German poison gas at Ypres (a first-hand account of which can be seen here http://www.firstworldwar.com/diaries/firstgasattack.htm  The experience of poison gas in warfare was still “new”–newer still for the Russians, who were at the receiving end of this unnamed  Eastern Front attack.

The story on this goes as follows: during the night the German enemy forces crawled with metal and glass canisters of the poison gas to the very front of the Russian lines, or at least to the outer edges of the barbed wire perimeter.  The crawler would retreat, and then the whole of the attacking force would wait until daylight and a favorable wind condition at which time rifelmen would discharge at the canister, a direct hit mixing the contents fo the vials, producing the desired gas.  The wind would then pick up the gas and disperse it, the Germans waiting for the first leg of their attack to take effect on the poor soldiers in the trenches, and then attack once the gas had mostly cleared.

And the associated

And this solitary figure:

The masks devised to deal with the attacks were soemtimes effective, sometimes not--actually, they were occasionally enhancers.  The earliest masks were creepy, unworldly, Coraline-like burlap-and-button-faced affairs--I'd hardly wnt to imagine seeing thousnads of these guys come running up to me with rifles and grenades in their hands attacking my position. 

Women in World War I--Rare Photographs, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1190

[All of the images below are available for purchase; see our blog bookstore for details.]

This is another in a series of posts on images from my News Service Photographs of WWI collection.  All thousand or so of them were made in the last half of 1918 (save for a very few made in 1919) , in the last months of the grueling conflict, and were intended to be used by newspaper and magazines to illustrate stories about the war. An editor would send off a request to one of these agencies for, say, a photograph of marching American nurses, and the agency would send one back (for a fee) along with a caption.   There's really no way for me to determine if these photos were ever published, and there is never an attribution for the photographer. 

Most of the images have an accompanying descriptive text--this was to be used by whomever published the photograph, along with the attribution for the source of the photo. 

In almost every case I supplied a detail of the image, hopefully of something that you'd want to see a detail of. 

ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918.  8x6 inches.  Very good condition.  $150

 

 

 

World War I Photographs--German Prisoners, Mass Crowd Scene, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books

 

This image comes from a collection here of First World War news service photographs,  showing German prisoners being readied for transport home, and dated 20 November 1918.  This group had evidently surrendered just before the armistice was signed, and was sent directly and instantly  to a staging area for transport back to the Fatherland.  The way that many newspapers obtained the war images that they published in their papers was via a semi-centralized pool of war images.  The newspaper would request, say, a photo of German prisoners, and would contact one of these photographic agencies—in this particular case, it was the Central News Photo Service of 26-28 Beaver Street, NYC—and purchase the rights for republication, and then print it in the newspaper along with the story.  In almost every case the photo would be accompanied by a caption mimeographed onto an attached piece of cheap paper, and in this case it reads:  “Waiting to Return Home/a photo just received showing a batch of enemy troops who surrendered just before the signing of the armistice, joyously discussing the coming of peace and the opportunity of returning home to their families.”
I seriously doubt that the copy editor could read the minds of either the photographer or the troops in the photo.  I would imagine that they were definitely joyous about going home ALIVE to their families, but when looking really closely at the picture the thing that seems to dominate the actions of the people is food.  Or cigarettes.  But mostly when looking hard at the faces in the photo, the men just look tired.

Looking very closely at these types of images has always been fascinating; look close enough, under high magnification, and the large photo becomes composed of dozens of smaller photos.  The whole is an assemblage of vignettes, each in themselves a work of art.

Continuing in a more odd tone, I’m also reasonably convinced that after looking at hundreds of faces in a photo like this that you’ll find a picture of yourself.

I did.  This section is a 3200 dpi scan of a 15x10 mm section, and I am undoubtedly and unquestionably the bald bearded man (one of the few people in the image without a hat) at center-bottom.