Month: August 2013

‘Unseen World War I photos’

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I am posting these images with the kind permission from Dean Putney.

Dean Putney, a software developer at boing boing, is currently busy scanning in and publishing pictures from a family heirloom – a photo album with a huge number of photographs from World War I. They were taken by his great-grandfather Walter Koessler, who served as an officer in the German army during the war. Koessler later emigrated to the United States, where he worked as an art director at movie studios, even though he was trained as an architect.

The images are posted at his Tumblr blog, Walter Koessler project. A selection also has been posted at boing boing.

While there are a great many images from WW I, these are quite unique. As he writes at his blog:

1 Walter was German, and he was an independent photographer. Most surviving photos from the war are from the Allies, and they tend to be propaganda or journalistic. Walter’s photos are very personal.

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Photography was going through big changes at the time, and Walter was a major early adopter. Film cameras were fairly new, and he took his in the trenches and everywhere else. WWI saw the first major use of airplanes in war, and Walter took aerial reconnaissance photos from biplanes and hot air balloons.

He has a project at Kickstarter to publish the images in high quality form, and most importantly, as a coherent collection.

If you want to contribute, pledges start at a $1 minimum.

History Friday: Some Curious Facts You Might Not Have Known . . .

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. . . . About the trans-Mississippi West, and the emigrant trails generally.

In the interests of writing what now turns out to be seven books and counting, I spent the last couple of years immersed in a tidal-wave of books about the American West; the California and Oregon emigrant trails, the settlement of Texas, studies of various Indian tribes, the post-Civil War Army, cattle drives and all that.

I have encountered all sorts of amusing things that either I didn’t know, or knew vaguely of, or that are not generally known, except by local historians and enthusiasts. Some of these may come as a great surprise to those who know only of the 19th Century American West through TV shows and movies. Such as:

A flock of sheep was taken along the Oregon Trail in the early 1840ies. And in 1847 a large wagon of nursery stock: approximately 700 live young plants, of various types of fruit and nut trees, and vines. This at a time when it still generally took at least five months to cross two thirds of the North American continent.

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History Friday: US Military Preparations The Day Nagasaki Was Nuked

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It has become something of a tradition for Leftists to commemorate the US A-bomb attacks on Imperial Japan, and on 9 August to try and make the case that even if the first bomb was needed — which it was not — that the second bomb was what amounted to a war crime because the American government and military knew the Japanese were trying to surrender, but wanted to intimidate the Soviet Union with the A-Bomb. This is the heart of Gar Alperovitz’s book Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam in 1965, his 1994 revision Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power and his 1995 book Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb: And the Architecture of an American Myth.

Starting in the 1990’s military historians, using declassified “Ultra” signals intelligence files proceeded to destroy “Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam” and all the books based upon it. Edward Drea’s 1992 Macarthur’s Ultra: Codebreaking and the War Against Japan, 1942-1945, Richard Frank’s 1999 Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire and Robert James Maddox’s 2007 Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism all do a very good job demolishing “Atomic Diplomacy” based arguments.

Atomic Bomb Pit #2 - B-29 BocksCar Loading Site
Atomic Bomb Pit #2 – B-29 BocksCar’s Loading Site on Tinian

Atomic Bomb Pit #2 – B-29 BocksCar’s Loading Site on Tinian

On Chicago Boyz it has also become a tradition for me to write on this subject at this time of year, doing my part to point out the untruths of “Atomic Diplomacy” as well.

See the following posts:
2012 – Nagasaki Plus 67 Years
2011 – Happy V-J Day!
2010 – Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Saving Hirohito’s Phony Baloney Job
and Hiroshima — The A-bomb plus 65 years

This 2013 column will address this subject by concentrating on “US Military Preparations The Day Nagasaki Was Nuked” to point out that in both word and in deed, the US Military believed Japan was going to fight to the bitter end, until it finally surrendered on August 14th 1945. And if Japan had not surrendered, every weapon America had would be involved in the hell on earth which would have been the conquest and subjugation of the Imperial Japanese Military and People.

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Quote from Rudolf Binding, A Fatalist at War

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Recently I read Trench Warfare 1850-1950 by Anthony Saunders, which is very good. Saunders cites to a German war memoir I had not heard of before: Rudolf Binding, A Fatalist at War. It was published in German in 1927 and in English in 1929. I bought it. It is a collection of excerpts from Binding’s letters and diaries. Binding was 46 when the war broke out, and he volunteered, serving in the cavalry. I am only up to December of 1914 and haven’t read enough to assess Binding yet.

I ran into this entry:

Drywege, December 19, 1914
 
What the English do, they do well; they will make good soldiers. Perhaps not so many as people think, but good ones. If England were to introduce conscription it would be more dangerous for us than anything she has ever done. For I do not agree with those who ask contemptuously where they will find officers and N.C.O.s. They will all come — the rowing blues, the leading lights of the cricket and football teams, the athletic trainers, runners and many more. Are the Berlin police to be compared with the English police, although most of them are Prussian N.C.O.s? The English policemen know how to deal with masses; they handle them perfectly. The quality of troops has always compensated for their comparatively small numbers. They have given us plenty of trouble here, too, though they are, in fact, definitely outnumbered.

Binding correctly perceived that leadership talent was dispersed throughout English society, and would be of military value in a mass army.

Interesting that he calls the town, presumably in Belgium, where he is billeted “Drywege.” But there is no town by that name as far as Google is concerned.

The Mentality of the Totalitarian Revolutionary

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Re-reading Doctor Zhivago, I was struck by the following passage:

That’s just the point, Larisa Feodorovna. There are limits to everything. In all this time something definite should have been achieved. But it turns out that those who inspired the revolution aren’t at home in anything except change and turmoil, they aren’t happy with anything that’s on less than a world scale. For them transitional periods, worlds in the making, are an end in themselves. They aren’t trained for anything else, they don’t know anything except that. And do you know why these never-ending preparations are so futile? It’s because these men haven’t any real capacities, they are incompetent. Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. Life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life, is so breath-takingly serious. So why substitute this childish harlequinade of immature fantasies, these schoolboy escapades?

Zhivago’s words here provide an interesting parallel to the observations of Sebasian Haffner from inter-war Germany…

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