World War II Map by Map
If you’ve been hanging around here on the Margins for a while, you know I have a weakness for reference books.
These days I try to exercise some self-control when it comes to adding a volume or three to my hoard.* The bookshelf dedicated to references books is close to full** and every book added requires me to make hard choices about books currently on the shelf.
Nonetheless, several weeks ago I gave in and bought a book that I’d been eyeing for months: World War II Map by Map, published by DK for the Smithsonian. I justified it for two reasons. First, I was looking for good maps of the North African campaigns of 1941 and none of the books already on my shelves had one. Second, the book I’m currently working on requires a strong grasp of WWII, even though it is not military history in the most technical sense of the term. *** But I will happily admit those were just excuses to place the order. The fact is, I am a sucker for an historical atlas, and this looked like it would be a good one.
World War II Map by Map lived up to my hopes. It is a thing of beauty—not a surprise for a volume created by DK and the Smithsonian working together. Divided into five sections, beginning with the years between the two world wars and ending with a section titled “Endgame and Aftermath”, the book uses maps to both tell the broad story of World War II and to provide a detailed focus on smaller stories within the broader arc. The book is enriched by photo essays on subjects that are not easily told by map, such as code breaking and Germany’s “V-weapons”.
In the short run, I found the two maps dealing with the North African campaigns of 1941 enormously helpful, particularly when paired infographics on the same subject from World War Infographics, another reference book I was pleased to add to my shelf. Going forward, I suspect I’ll be turning to it over and over again as I think about World War II.
Sometimes you just need to understand what’s happening on the ground.
* “Collection” suggests a more orderly and informed process of acquisition than I can claim.
**It’s too shallow to accommodate my favorite expansion technique of shelving books two-deep. Bad planning on my part.
***Personally, I think the most technical definition of military history is too narrow to teach us much about war. As the late military historian Peter Paret said at the Prtizker Military Museum and Library’s “On War” symposium several years ago, “You can’t get answers to the big questions about war by staying at the level of tactics and operations.” It was music to my ears.
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For anyone who might be interested: I’ll be speaking about Women Warriors as part of the on-line Lunch and Learn series at Norwich University, October 21, 11-12 Central Time. Here’s the registration link: https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/8634144165090842127
Chicago Celebrates Casimir Pulaski
For my first ten or twelve or thirty years in Chicago, I was regularly taken by surprise by a local holiday. On the first Monday in March, Chicago’s administrative offices, and public libraries are closed for Pulaski Day, a holiday honoring Casimir Pulaski, the Polish nobleman who fought on the colonial side in the American Revolution and is sometimes grandiosely described as the father of the American cavalry. More than once I’ve been greeted at the door of the main library by a notice that the library was closed in celebration of Pulaski Day. It did not make me feel celebratory.
The official word is that Chicago first celebrated Pulaski Day in 1986. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled across a news item in the Chicago Tribune on October 6, 1938 with the headline “Mayor Kelly Designates Oct. 11 as Pulaski Day.” * The piece was short, only two sentences. No explanation was given, other than the fact that it was the 159th anniversary of Pulaski’s death.
The piece was tucked in below a long article by Sigrid Schultz describing the Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Many people believed Poland would be Hitler’s next target. Creating a holiday celebrating a Polish hero who had long been emblematic of both American and Polish freedom in this context seems to me to be a statement of solidarity, even if it was aimed at Chicago’s largely Polish population. A small thread in a larger story.
*Pulaski made the news more recently in 2019, when an exhumation of his bones (for reasons that are still unclear to me) revealed that though he identified as male, he probably had intersex characteristics. This discovery has added nuance to the discussion of remains that appear to be women warriors, and has given people who don’t want to believe in the existence of women warriors a new weapon in the discussion. But I digress.
Before the Women of Hidden Figures
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve recently been working on a book for 8 to 12 year olds about an incident in WWII. Non-fiction books for kids inevitably include one of my favorite things: sidebars.* Sidebars are a chance to explore an issue that enriches and expands the central text. They also are often a chance for me to learn something new. I did not, however, expect to learn something new about the role of women in World War II, a subject I’ve spent a lot of time on in recent years. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled across a reference to something I’d never heard of: women calculating the trajectories of missiles for the army. I did a quick literature search to verify that it was true, added a sentence about it to my side bar, and set the question aside for later investigation. The time for later investigation has come.
Changes in military technology made it possible to fire an artillery shell or drop a bomb from an airplane with greater accuracy than ever before, but that accuracy wasn’t the result of seat of the pants decisions made by soldiers in the field. Accuracy required someone to create complex firing tables that provided soldiers with the correct trajectories, drop points, elevation angles and muzzle velocities. Those tables were location specific. They had to take into account temperature, air density, wind, and target positions. In the days when “computer” referred to a person rather than a machine, those tables were calculated largely by hand.**
When the United States entered the war in 1941, the army needed more computers and needed them quickly. Instead of pulling computers from the limited pool of able-bodied men, they recruited young women with a gift for mathematics, many of them straight out of high-school. They were the heart of the Philadelphia Computing Section (PCS) at the University of Pennsylvania, where they became experts in the science of ballistics calculation.
Six of those women—Betty Jean Jennings, Kathleen McNulty,*** Frances Bilas, Elizabeth Snyder,*** Ruth Lichterman and Marilyn Wescoff—were selected to be part of the group that produced ENIAC, the first electronic computer. Male engineers designed the machine and turned the question of programing it over to the female computers. Their first program was designed to compute a shell trajectory.
The women’s role in the success of ENIAC was discounted almost immediately. Their part in the project was literally left out of the picture: the first public photo of the project, which appeared in the New York Times, was a wide shot that included both men and women working on the machine. When the photograph was reprinted, the women were cropped out. Grrr.
* I first met sidebars in my third-grade social studies text. I remember it clearly: it was nerdy love at first sight.
**They also used a 30-foot-long mechanical calculating machine called a Bush differential analyzer, shown in the picture above.
***Also shown in the picture above/