Transcripts For CSPAN3 World War II U.S. Army Signal Corps Photos 20240712

Photographers. That National Archives cohost of this event. The Army Signal Corps photographic collection is one of the largest in the National Archives. Roughly 1 million images from world war i to 1981, chronicled military activities during war and peace of the frontline, as the front line i like to welcome the Strategic Communications officer for the u. S. Army center of military history. He retired from the army reserve and 2017. He had the rank of colonel and 35 years of military service. He deployed three times and commanded the American Forces network in iraq baghdad plus direct Media Operations and assisted spokesman for commissions at guantanamo bay, cuba and was the chief of Media Operations and a senior spokesman for detention operations at guantanamo. He was also an assistant professor of military science at usc. [applause] good evening and thank you. My name is lee reynolds. It i am a strategic medications officer for the u. S. Army center of military history. The center is responsible for recording, the official history of the u. S. Army in peace and war and also informing the army staff. Our core responsibilities are to educate the public and the force, to inspire young men and women to serve, and to preserve our army heritage. I invite you to visit our website at history. Army. Mil to learn more about our coresponsibilities and mission. And to find out about the publications that we produce and about the museums that we manage around the world including the new Natural Museum in the u. S. Army that opens in just seven months in 2020. I think you will be excited as we are. Again that is june 4, 2020. We are proud and honored to support the 75th commemoration of world war ii with Tonights Panel presentation. This evening, we are honoring the world war ii soldier photographers from the armys signal corps collection here at the National Archives. These signal corps photo teams carrying what was then stateoftheart equipment would go out into combat operations often by themselves and cover the events where civilian journalists either would not go or could not go. The results as you will see her tonight captured on film through their lenses some of the most iconic pictures of world war ii. These images were not just used by the u. S. Army, they could be seen in newspapers and films throughout the u. S. And the world. At the end of tonights presentation, we will have 20 minutes for questions and answers. There is a gentleman on the side and i will be on the other side and we will have index cards. If you have a question, please write it down and pass it to the side. Just signal us if you need a pencil. Or an index card. ystat this time, i would like o bring to the stage our panel members. [applause] our first is a digital historian for the center for digital history and a principal vietnam war historian. He is also the author of a recent book about vietnam called staying the course october 1967 to september 1968. As you heard, i may say i am a vietnam war historian but as a digital historian, one of my other jobs is to research and produce a pair of commemorative websites for the u. S. Army in world war ii. You can find that on our website. History. Army. Mil one of the things that i found most valuable is looking through the signal corps photographic collection. They provide such a rich source of information and tell us so much about the experience of a soldier in the war that we cannot get anywhere else. I am pleased tonight to be moderating a panel of experts who will tell us more about this incredible part of army history in the Second World War that isnt well known but it should be. I will introduce our panel members. First, on the far right we have a former picture editor for the chicago suntimes and the author of no less than 24 books on history and photography. Many of them on chicago. Some more recent books that widen the aperture. For your most recent book which is after shock which is available in our lobby and Available Online. Coauthor marc jacobs who was a former editor for the chicago tribune. In his own right, author of eight books on history and photography. We have a powerhouse team. The third author is not here tonight but i will mention him. Michael williams has worked with us in many occasion. We actually have a trio of people behind this examination of signal corps photographers. Our third panelist is rebecca raines. She is a long serving historian. When i got there in 2000, she and her husband were there and have been dear friends, she was the Branch Historian and wrote the official history of the signal corps branch getting the message through. We are so glad to have your expertise here. Our final panelist is caitlin who is an archive specialist at the College Park Branch of the National Archives. In the Still Picture Branch and an expert in world war ii photography and knows quite a lot about how the collection was organized. I am very envious because she can rummage through those files anytime she feels like it. To start, i would like to hand off to richard and mark to tell us about the journey of how they came about writing and producing the book aftershock. First off, i should tell you that i dont think i am as much as an expert as he said as a photo lover. People call me a photo historian. I didnt know that existed until i heard it. I like to tell stories through photographs because i think the photographs take us instantly back and set is up so we can understand life events better. This book, aftershock, we started three years ago. We wanted to do a book about world war ii. There is an incredible collection of books about world war ii and so we wanted to figure out a way i promised to turn off my cell phone and i want to keep that promise. Are you in trouble . Yes. We started about three years ago and decided to concentrate on 1945. The reason we chose the signal corps in the army was the army was on all continents across the world during world war ii and they were on the ground in world war ii. Even though the navy and marines and coast guard had great photographs, we thought there was a continuity among army photographs and signal corps photographs. We concentrated on 1945 because many of the still photos and films of the photographers took of 43 and 44, the action photos we are all aware of, they have been shown in a lot of books and somehow when 1945 came around, theres not as much attention to the book. Frankly, it is an antiwar book. Somebody i recently interviewed on the radio, they said i would be classified as liberal because of antiwar and i suggested that conservatives, the military, everyone who has a heart and a conscience is against the war so i dont think this is radical in the least. I want to tell you about our journey. This is a book about men who went to war with cameras instead of guns. The truth of it was that they were provided sidearms but as every photographer said, theres no way to shoot pictures and shoot guns at the same time and they all chose cameras which is pretty remarkable. Most of these men were not experienced photographers. Somewhere along the line as they were being enlisted or as they were filing papers, they made the mistake of saying they were interested in photography. [laughter] they went through months of training to become photographers along with becoming soldiers. It was the guns so they took that was courageous. I believe that they left an incredible gift to future generations. And our generations right now by the photographs they took of the war. They teach us and the subtitle of the book is the human toll of war, they teach us exactly that. I think thats whether photographs are important. You will witness a couple of miracles tonight. The miracle they took the photographs, the miracle that the photographs were saved so well in the National Archive and so available and the miracle that now we as a future generation appreciate them and see its importance. These are photographs of two of the photographers. I should say that the man on the left, they are holding Speed Graphic cameras and those with a common cameras that prepped photographers like you see in films, thats the kind of camera they held. The man on the left is holding a flash unit. They didnt use flash but not very often. You can imagine they did not do it during battle. Its important to recognize that these incredible photographs were made with very primitive cameras that used four inch by five inch negatives and they could only put in two negatives at a time then they would have to switch to another magazine. Very different from photography today. Another miracle, the photos were all processed. Almost always very near the battlefield a few miles from the front lines. The film was then sent to london later in the war, to paris then they were radio transmitted back to the united states. They were used in a variety of reasons. Sometimes strategic. Sometimes for magazines and newspapers. They were a very important part of the war effort. If you got a chance to see the book, what makes this book so special, and had a focus on 1945. The last photograph was taken the last days of december. Every picture shows, basically the book shows what the world looked like as the war came to an end and as peace came. What makes this book so unusual is the clarity of the photographs. If you have seen the book, you will see. We were given a chance by the National Archives to scan the original negatives, put it on a scanner to create the book. We were allowed to do 10 scans per day. Thats the rule of the National Archives. We were there for a week so we did 100 because they counted. They let us do 20 because we had to people. Alyssa mcconnell came to the archives, mustve been for several months and did a beautiful job scanning 10 pictures per day. Here is a fourinch by five inch negative. You will see what it looks like as a positive. This is an execution of a german general. December 1st 1945. It was one of the harder negatives because everything is so backlit. This is the way it looks in the book. We not only showed the imagery of the negatives, we always showed the edge of the negative because we think these photographs are important evidence. We wanted to show the entire negative. Oftentimes, you will see on the edge, the signal corps numbers and those are the numbers that the National Archive still uses to find these photographs. So, how did we pick the photographs . I would guess there are between 100,000 and 200,000 negatives from 1945. We used contact sheets at first to look at what was there. This is an example a contact print is a print that is exactly four inches by five inches same as the negative and it is taking the negatives and putting light through them and making a print the same size. That helped us tremendously. We got to the front side and the backside of the contact prints. That gave us a sense of what pictures we should use for the book. We had two rules. We were looking for starkly important pictures and artistically important pictures. The book is rough. We wanted to show the toll of war but we also looked for humanity. Im sorry these are the files to contact prints are in. It was in a bit of a challenge because the world war ii photographs are combined with the korean war photographs. You have to go through a lot of looking. Then, we looked at a by 10 prints to get a better idea of what the photographs looked like. You can see the difference even in this picture of a print and a scan from a negative. What we are seeing in this book are many images that have never been seen before. Even the ones that have been published, they have never been seen like this because they have always been seen as prints. As great as enlarged images are, they cannot stand] 1fn up to scanners. Negatives, which are filled with information and scanners of each other. This is really a book of 1945 and of 2019. I dont want to go back lets try. At least we got it moving. The next way we started looking for pictures is we started to find subject areas. Not only prints of them but you can look at pictures through metadata and these are pictures of bridal couples. Again we were looking for humanity to include in the book and that led us to pictures like this which is a remarkable picture from the philippines. This is a japanese soldier and a woman and they were hiding out after battle and when they were captured, they professed their love for each other so this is an american chaplain marrying a japanese prisoner and a japanese woman and you can see the soldier in the back with the accordion. We were always on the lookout for that. Next, we started to tell the story of the signal graphic companies. We left still photos and we went to the main text aria and we looked up the seven companies, everything they had. There was a large earning curve. I think i got everything wrong on this request. Even changed my name. But it was every location and it talks about how helpful the National Archives was. I should mention that the scanner and the negatives are open to anybody. Anyone who walks in and can get 10 photographs per day. These are some of the items that we found in the text. We found yearbooks, we found morning reports, we found newspapers, it was incredibly helpful in telling the story of the men who were the signal corps photographers. We started with the photographs and we went after them. That became an important project. There were about 70 photographers who took 300 pictures in the book. We checked down the story of almost every one of the photographers. Everyone had passed away. There is are still a couple of signal corps photographers alive but imagine, 75 years later, there were generally between 20 and 25 when they got overseas so they are at least 95 years old. We talked to their families and i cant tell you how proud they are of their parents as they went to war with such courage and left important records. This is our cover photo. We think it goes great with the title of aftershock because this is a pennsylvania kid who was an infantry soldier. He was captured in the battle of the bulge. He was captured, taken back to germany to work slave labor, after about one month he escaped with a comrade and hid in a house in germany and a german officer came in and william killed him to remain free. Then he hid in a free cellar. The allies found him there and this is him right after that. He is wearing the cap of the german officer he killed. He has a stare. He just looks like hed been through with the world through for years. He was clearly emblematic of the point where trying to make. We tracked down someone who shared a 19 page memoir that they had written and we used that in the book. Running these pictures, gets to be pretty clear that signal corps photographers and these pictures were on the run a lot. The captions were terrible sometimes. we love this picture, the baby faces. Also, the kid on the right he must have an issue for that overcoat recently because he has that on the wrong button. They were in a hurry and they were captured quickly. This is one of my favorite pictures. It shows a man who is missing a limb demonstrating how to ride a bike for gis who had their limbs amputated during the war. This is the german city and i hope you can see, there is a single american g. I. Walking through this devastated city. The extent of the devastation of some of the cities in asia, from the philippines and all over the place is amazing. Im not sure why he did that. Scanning these negatives really made a difference in pictures like this because you see so much definition. The odd thing is, when we were working on the book, we would say thats a beautiful picture. Some pictures really are beautiful. It was odd because these are pictures of ugliness. But they were so beautifully taken by these soldier photographers. These are troops who have been wounded in some way. They are being loaded into a Landing Craft from an aircraft carrier. In the book, youll see quite a few pictures of injured soldiers but also a lot of pictures of civilians. One of the things that really defined world war ii was the extent to which civilians were killed as opposed to soldiers. According to one estimate, it was three to one civilians to soldiers. Thats the thing about total war. We want to make the point that nobody is spared. This is one of the most devastating scenes. This is manila, the philippines. The guy with the crutches is one of the 30 japanese soldiers who surrendered. The rest of them did not surrender they fought to the death. The fighting in the old city of the philippines was some of the toughest of the pacific war. I love this picture. These are chinese who have returned to the philippines to collect the skulls and bones, the remains of their loved ones. The remains are from the entire chinese diplomatic corps that was in the philippines when the japanese invaded. The japanese invaded, the americans left, macarthur and most of the americans left. There were some holdouts. Macarthur volunteered to take the chinese diplomats with him. They said no we have to stay there are a hundred thousand chinese on the philippines islands we have to protect them. They demanded that the consular staff collect a gigantic amount of money from the chinese on the island. If the diplomats refused, they were marched to a cemetery and executed. Their families stayed in the philippines for the entire war without knowing the fate of their loved ones. They didnt find that out for sure until the americans recaptured the philippines. We were able to track down the daughter of the consul general. She is living in new york city now. She became an american citizen and had a career in publishing. When we tracked her down, i asked her, i said have you seen this picture before . She said no she had never seen it. I said are your fathers remains are there . She said i presume so. Her mother was not in this picture because they had already left for the united states. She said i can identify everyone in that picture. When youre a historian doing a book and trying to track down facts from 75 years ago, its amazing when you find someone who was there. We treasured that. A lot of the pictures in the book showed american bravery. This shows an interesting chapter in the war. This is a place after it was liberated. The americans came in and liberated this camp where so many cruelties have taken place. One of the toughest duties for the soldier photographers was taking pictures of death camps. They get there and they see the depravity and have the human beings have been treated and the gis were furious and they were rounded up all of the ss guards against a wall and they put a machine gun up there and as they put the first round in, the german soldiers broke they started running at them. The american troops opened up and shot more than a dozen of them. In what some people might view as a massacre. No one was disciplined over it. This is again, not the kind of picture youre going to see in 1945 in an american publication. One of the values of the book is how it takes the 2019 view of how things happened in 1945 and if its not a propaganda book its a truth book. For both good and bad and theres plenty of both. This is a very interesting picture. This is a soviet slave labor camp and was pointing out the guard who is the most cruel in the area that he was in. It was taken by a photographer named harold roberts. Everyone loved this picture but he took this picture with a Speed Graphic camera, and those cameras only had two negatives you could load at any one time. He takes the picture, gets ready to reload, and the prisoner punches the guard in the face. Harold roberts is always upset he missed that picture, he thought it would have been even greater than the picture he took. This is emily mary lakeman, one of the archivesposter women. This is a photograph of her taken after she was involved in the longest death march in the war, a group of mostly jewish women were marched hundreds of miles over six months. They ended up in a tiny barn in volare, czechoslovakia. They were liberated in the barn. A signal corps photographer took her picture days after she was found and he asked the women, does anyone have a photograph of themselves before the holocaust, so we can compare the two photographs . She happened to have a photograph of herself that she had carried in her shoe. That is her on the right as a teenager so she gave the photograph to the Army Photographer to make a print and a copy. Somehow the photographer was sent away, and she lost the single photograph that she had of her youth. Flash forward to about 1995, she returns to the archives as mary robinson, she has gotten married, and her husband joins her, and they find both photographs before they returned to volare for a 50th anniversary celebration. So if you go down into the basement of the college park National Archives, her story is told. But there is a twist. My father was the doctor who helped them. These women weighed about 75 pounds, and it would have made sense to give them food, but that was a disaster. One soldier slipped one of the women a small chocolate wafer, and she died almost immediately. Her body couldnt take it. And my father helped them come back. And i knew the story about my father, but i had no idea that there was a photograph of my father. The reason why i couldnt find the photograph is because they spelled his name wrong. His name was aaron cahan, not aaron cohan. That was a real personal connection for me to this whole collection. I knew the story because the women who he helped, told my mother about my fathers work. When they returned to czechoslovakia, they said captain cahan was our hero. Good evening. It is nice to see you all here. Im very happy to be part of the panel tonight, with the authors of this fascinating book. Thank you for asking me to be part of this panel. It gives me a chance to talk about the Army Signal Corps, one of my favorite topics, about its background dentistry and world war ii. When the signal corps was founded in corps on the eve of the civil war, it was given a broad mandate to provide communications for the army, not defined more specifically than that, and all the equipment that went with it. Over time, the mission encompassed a wide variety of functions, which is one of the things that makes the signal corps interesting to study. Photography would eventually be included in the signal corpspurview, but that didnt happen for a few years. During the civil war, the army had no photographers. Hunting photographs were captured by civilian, Matthew Brady. Haunting photographs were captured by a civilian, Matthew Brady. But the photographic process was more cumbersome even than world war ii. The cameras they used had glass plates that were very fragile, and they needed such a Long Exposure time that there was no way you could capture action. So it would take the development of smaller cameras, and the invention of rolled film, which didnt happen until the 1890s, to make combat photography feasible. Meanwhile, the signal corps did perform photographic work in the 1870s, when it took on such jobs as photographic maps in the records of the civil war that were being compiled by the War Department. In 1894, the signal corps became responsible for supervising the War Department library, which included the brady photos at that time. Because he had fallen on Financial Difficulties later in life, he had to sell his collection, and the War Department had purchased it. So in the 1890s, the signal corps gets a little more involved in photography even though it is not officially a part of their job. In 1894 the signal corps added photography to the signal corps located at fort riley, kansas. They later published a manual on photography to use to teach the soldiers. The photographic function still wasnt officially assigned and wouldnt be for quite a while. The war in spain in 1898 of the army with its first opportunity to try its hand photography. The signal soldiers took cameras into the war zones and captured the fighting in cuba, puerto rico and the philippines but the real comingofage for signal corps photography came during world war i. In july 1917, the signal corps established the photographic section that had responsibility for ground and Aerial Photography at home and abroad. And aviation was one of those additional functions the signal corps had for a time during world war i. Signal corps cameramen took still and Motion Picture images, but officers were reluctant to allow cameramen too close to the front, so they took very few photos of actual combat. Censorship was strict, and no graphic images were shown to the public at all. Nevertheless, by the wars end, the signal corps had accumulated 750,000 Motion Picture films used for training, propaganda and other purposes. With all this material, the signal corps needed specialized facilities. In 1919 the signal corps built the Photographic Laboratory and film vault on the grounds of the army war college, now known as fort Leslie J Mcnair in southwest washington dc, the post where the u. S. Army center of military history is now located. What goes around comes around. The outbreak of world war ii created a huge demand for army photography, and required the signal corps to up its operations. The War Department finally issued regulations that give responsibility to the signal corps for all photographic work, except that specifically assigned to other branches, so a broad authority. The emphasis was on combat photography, and cameramen served at the front lines. To administer this wartime buildup, the Photographic Division was in the office of the chief signal officer, and became the Army Pictorial Service in june 1942. We have a picture of that office, i believe, after dday in april 1942, and another in august 1941 that is a little bit smaller. One notable thing is how many women were working in the office at that time, because the draft had happened, the men were serving, and they picked up the duties. Another thing about this office is that it was located in what was then known as the munitions building located on the mall, about where the Smithsonian National History Museum is today. The War Department had its headquarters there until the pentagon was completed, and the chief signal officer had his office there. Earlier the signal corps purchased the former paramount studios at astoria, long island, which became the signal corps center, and after undergoing renovations it opened in may 1942. The center provided a modern facility for training, film production, processing, and distribution to be consolidated, leaving the laboratory in Washington Free to focus on still pictures. While the army tried to draft professional photographers, there werent enough. So to meet the demand, the signal corps conducted photographic training at astoria for both still and Motion Picture cameramen. In new york city, they were receiving instruction from press photographers in new york. That is were everything was based, and they could show these men how to take newsworthy photos, which isnt always the easiest thing to do. The center also trained many specialists required for photographic work, such as camera repair men and maintenance personnel, as well as lab technicians. In 1943, the army augmented its facilities at the war college by opening a still picture sublaboratory at the newlycompleted paramount. The following year the signal corps consolidated all its still picture Laboratory Operations there. The pentagon also housed the signal corps still picture library, with the Motion Picture counterpart located at astoria. By the end of the war, the still picture library held over 500,000 photos, and those are just the ones they considered worthy of keeping. Many were destroyed. For these men working in the offices and the laboratories, members of the Womens Army Corps worked in many film laboratories and libraries run by the signal corps. The photographs brought the distant war home to americans in a way that had never been done before. The signal corps photographic companies documented Field Operations around the world, and they accompanied troops on various assignments, amphibious landings and whatever. And they usually operated in small groups, so they could be in more places at once. I have a photo here showing the equipment these signal corps cameramen used. It is a lot better than what Matthew Brady had, carrying around, but it is still pretty bulky and hard to move around with. They also mentioned they couldnt carry a rifle with all this stuff, so all they had to defend themselves was a pistol and a knife. So they were pretty vulnerable out there. You see blackandwhite photography was the norm for combat coverage, but army cameramen did use color to a limited extent. They had portable dark rooms that they could process still pictures quickly in the field to use for tactical purposes, to show enemy emplacement and things of that nature. The development of telephoto techniques as technology kept improving enabled electronic transmission photographs, so pictures could reach washington from the front in minutes. And the pictures taken by Army Photographers illustrated the nations books, newspapers and magazines, and the caption, photo by u. S. Army signal corps, became almost as well known as commercial trademarks. Lucky for us, the army insisted photographers include detailed captions with their photographs, and they did provide at least part of the time the who, what, when and where of who and what they were taking pictures of. The government still placed restrictions on the kinds of images that could be shown, although not as heavily as world war i. Many pictures in the book i was looking at before i came out would not have been seen by the public during the war, but it still received a much more realistic look at warfare than they ever had before. Besides capturing combat action, photography served other purposes. One of the most important and interesting ways things were mailed by which personal correspondence and letters soldiers were riding back home was microfilmed to save cargo space on ships and airplanes. At the receiving end, the film was developed, enlarged, printed into four and a half by five inch reproductions that were then mailed to the addressee. They called an official photo mail. The signal corps also developed unofficial photos soldiers took and sent to them as necessary. For all its accompaniment, the Army Pictorial Service did face criticism. In august 1942 it came under scrutiny by the Senate Special Committee Investigating the National Defense program, which was chaired by senator harry truman. The controversy centered around signal corps Motion Picture activities and their ties with hollywood, not so much still picture operations. But for short time the Army Pictorial Service was moved from signal corps control, but it reverted back after the committee concluded its hearings in july 1943. Despite the administrative upheaval, the Army Pictorial Service continued to function effectively. This picture shows you the kind of conditions they were dealing with. Cameramen did traveling jeeps to get around the battlefield, but it wasnt always easy to reach where they were going. One of the things you dont see many pictures of our cameramen themselves, and there were many wounded. They were vulnerable when they were taking the pictures, kind of sitting ducks for the enemy to shoot. This is one of those cameramen who suffered injury. In the closing days of the war, a signal corps photograph of the big three World Leaders at the potsdam conference became one of the First Published news photos transmitted by radio for reproduction in fullcolor. I dont have a picture of that tonight. It is but one of the many memorable images captured by the photographers of the Army Pictorial Service during world war ii, and those men risked their lives and many gave their lives, to create an epic, visual record of the cataclysmic, worldwide conflict. They left behind a remarkable legacy that has stood the test of time, as we have seen tonight. That legacy still speaks to us today. [applause] i get the privilege of working with the Army Signal Corps collection. It is our largest collection. And it is the most used collection. I dont think there is a signal day i have been at work that it hasnt been requested. And in preparation tonight, i went through the paperwork that documented that transfer of the photographs to us and yes, we keep records about records. So the Army Signal Corps photographs were transferred to us in four different chunks. We call them sessions. They came over in four different years. But in reading the paper work, there was an interesting quote. They were praising the worth of the documents, and the worth is not just the value monetarily, but the historic value and research value. And they wrote, this material is a part of the oldest, continuing its photographic file in the history of the government, and the bestknown file because of its coverage of the military operations of the united states. Therefore the importance of the records need not be stressed. I believe we have over 18 million photographs and this is the oldest and largest collection. So in my role at the National Archives, i work with researchers that come in, experienced and novice researchers. I help you locate what you are trying to find. Doesnt mean we will find it, but i try to point you in the right direction. When you come in, you are the expert on your subject, and im just the person who uses the information you give me to help you find the photos you are looking for. I always like to start with setting expectations, and things that you dont find in the signal corps collection, or in a lot of our military records. We dont have a photo of every Single Person who has served in the military. If you are looking for your relatives, there may be a photo of them, but it doesnt mean their name is captioned, and therefore i wont be able to identify your relative for you. We dont have unit photos. We have unit photos, sometimes captured at basis, but we dont have those platoon photos or unit photos taken at boot camp. And the portraits that are taken at boot camp or graduations, we dont really have either. The signal corps was very detailed, they kept great records of their records, so we have those with a name that appears in the caption. Hypothetically, it should be in the same index. The photographs are not organized by date, so it is incredibly impressive that you have found 1945 photos, because those skip around. You can look in a box and see all of world war ii in one box. It is not in a chronological order. Im not entirely certain how the numbers were assigned. Sometimes we have people coming in with a photo that they have, and they want to find the original because they want to scan the negative, but they dont have the scanned negative, they dont have the signal corps number, so we work with them to go through the indexes and attempt to find the signal corps number. On some photographs there are two numbers, seal number and a signal corps number. We have no way of getting from that seal number to the signal corps number, so it is a lot of working with the subject in the image in order to locate it. Some images, they are taking some color photography, i believe in early 1945, the end of 1944. Most of our color photography for world war ii is in 1944 and 1945. There is some from 1941, but the bulk of our collection this is pearl harbor, december 7. This may be one of the earliest color photos we have found, but i have not gone through all one million photographs. [laughter] so i work with the public and i field questions. And i always say, you are more of an expert on the subject of world war ii, but if you want me to help you find an image, i can do that. You should come prepared if you want to do research, specifically on world war ii units, but this could be used for korean war and vietnam era. If you are looking for a specific unit, having the unit lineage helps, because you can look under the heirachy of it, a specific regiment, you might want to know what division they were attached to. That is very useful. Locations where they served, you can look under geographic locations, and having specific towns helps a lot. Rosters, so you can look under names, especially commanding officers. That is really, really useful. And then subjects, subtypes of artillery that used, you can look under various subjects. So i always say, always come prepared. Because i can do some limited research with you, but if you have all that information, i can show you way more places to look instead of if you just have one name and thats it. Your research day is done. In terms of the signal corps, we have three copies of the signal corps prints or photographs. There is a four by five negative, eight by 10 prints, and four by five contact prints. We do pull original negatives, and we will pull 10 a day. We limit it because they are the original copy and we dont want to serve too many at one time. They are also in these drawers, so we are pulling them individually out of the drawers, and there is room for error when you put them back, and we want to make sure they get back and correct locations, because things have been misfiled, and found decades later. [laughter] and yes, that is basically what i do as a researcher, on a daily basis. [applause] let me say a few things in addition to the great comments we have heard here. There are three things i want to add, they have been touched on, but i want to reinforce them. For one, the Army Signal Corps photo collection is one of the Great National treasures. Most historians dont give photographs their proper due. I think there is a wealth of information. I personally learned so much by spending so much time with the photographs. I love text, no problem with text, but there is just something about the images and the information they contained. The second point i want to reinforce that there is information in those photographs you are not likely to find anywhere else, or not obtain in the same way or with the same force. For example, looking at the world war ii signal corps photos, and i go to the archives and have a different system. I dont have the luxury of pulling the negatives, so i stand there with an iphone, and do my photoshop fairy dust and take out the scratches, put them on our website and social media. But the process of actually fixing them up is important, because i look really closely at them. You are finding stuff that you would just pass over. Variations in equipment, particularly 1945, the american soldier in 1945, that is a raggedy ann character, it is not the put away, straightened out soldier. They are trying to survive in conditions that are unspeakable. You see them wearing German Air Force jackets, with the fleece inside, or they have got some kind of nonstandard boot, or they have three k bar knives strapped to various parts of their bodies. And unless you look at these photos, you would not know that. One of my favorite thing are tankers, what the tankers were doing to uparmor their vehicles. They were facing panthers and tigers, so they are loaded with sandbags, railroad ties, all this other stuff. So the way that they do it, you can only appreciate that by seeing it. The third point and probably the most important, every Single Person in those photos is someone, is a son or daughter or an uncle or a father or a brother, and so many of the relatives of those people are still with us. And i know this, because when i put this all on social media, within the last two weeks, two people in their early 20s contacted me going, that is my grandfather. So it is wonderful to know that there is a continuity, that people do understand this. So keeping this photographic collection alive and making it available is really one of the best ways to honor our veterans. And that is what tonight is about. Before we go to question and answer, i would like to show you a fiveminute video i produced using some of the photos i have scanned and enhanced, and segments to a musical accompaniment which i felt somehow suited the images. So if you will stop for a few minutes and think about the contributions of the Army Signal Corps photographers, this is my tribute to them. music [video presentation begins] music music music music [applause] at this time we will start with questions and answers. Feel free to raise your hand, and people on the left or right will pass you pencils and cards, the first question is, will you accept negatives or photos from the korean war into your collection . We do. Our Army Signal Corps collection starts with civil war Matthew Brady photography and goes through, i believe 1982. After that, it is under the department of the defense. Department of defense records go from 1982 to 2007. What were the most interesting things you discovered from going through all these pictures . I discovered the war was so expensive. We live in a generation that, wars are very limited, and unless you are fighting, unless you have a loved one fighting, a war is not as brutal as world war ii, or a major world war was. We showed the photographs in chronological order, and they bounce around, pictures from europe, than the next picture might be of burma, the philippines, might be, china, italy, the middle east. I read about the extent of world war, but i think i was surprised how huge it was. For me, it would have been the impact on civilians. You dont see that too much in the history books. You see a lot of the combatants and the giant armies fighting each other, but the looks on the faces of the civilians, and the aftershock, every time i go through it again and look at it, they look so forlorn, they just look shellshocked, like they dont know what can happen next. And they are not hopeful. For me, having looked at probably all 55,000 world war i photos, as well as vietnam war, doing a comparison, one thing that stands out to me for the world war ii photos is that seemed to be the golden age of capturing, you know, a couple of those images at the end, the portraits. Yes, the photographer is there and the person knows he is looking at them, so it is not just capturing them in the moment, but there is a realness and a beauty to those images that i just dont see anywhere else. And again, these are soldier photographers, most of whom never received training before, working with those incredibly cumbersome cameras under incredibly difficult conditions. I read all these daily journals that say, bob is covered with fungus from head to toe, but otherwise we are doing great, just this kind of stuff they have to go through to get the shot. And you have to come up with that quality. It is extraordinary, so just the personalities that come out of these photos are really remarkable. Im curious about one thing, because we concentrated on 1945. And im amazed by the quality of the compositions, because most of these people were not professional photographers. Rich and i worked with professional photographers our whole lives, and some of the compositions are so good. Did they get better as the war went on . I think that is fair to say. It is fair to say they did. It is also fair to say they took more photos as time went on. In 1943 there were a fairly limited number of photographic units out there, and of course the number expands. So partly it is the sheer number, but maybe it was the air or the water, but they rose to the occasion. By 1944 and 1945, absolutely, some photos that would stand right up there with anything anyone has produced. And it is interesting, after the war and we tracked down families and found out what they did, how few of them stayed in photography. One became a very famous celebrity photographer. Russ meyer became russ meyer, a movie photographer. [laughter] but most of them left to become journalists or printers or something allied with photography, and i think it is because they had seen it all. What was there now to prove, after world war ii . What was there to photograph . I think they wanted to start new and start fresh. And one can also imagine just the horrors that they had seen. And sometimes, one thing i really appreciate is those photographers who went the extra mile to write more on the caption sheets. In the movie i showed you, toward the end, the African American tanker in the tour with the machine gun, the black tanker, there were five photos, and Army Signal Corps photographer met up with this unit, the 761st tank battalion, pattons black panthers, the First Black Army unit in combat, right before their First Combat Mission in november, 1944, and happens to take photos of all five crewmembers, including that person. In 12 hours, they are all dead. They go into action, they buttoned up, which means they close up the vehicle, because there is action, and the exhaust system gets partly blocked, so they all died of carbon monoxide. So they are found in their fighting positions without a scratch on them. It just kind of blows your mind, these incredible photographs. And who knew that 12 hours later . So when you get the back story of some of these things, it just adds another layer. You mentioned the book focused on 1945, and the question here is, how did you decide on this topic . What sparked your interest . Why world war ii . Erik showed a picture of a soldier with a cigarette hanging down, near the end, and that is how it all started. We found that the photograph was so beautiful, and wanted to focus on the end of the war. And you talk about how every generation that has their own war, because we forgot how bad, how terrible war is, and we created the book because we wanted to create this lasting record, not that we were creating a lasting record, but the photographers were creating a lasting record. And we help people look at the book and realize how serious any war is, doesnt have to be a total war, and that is the gift they left behind. And 1945 is not just when world war ii ended, it is when the atomic age dawned, and thats when there is so much happening. There is a picture in the book of jewish refugees getting ready to go to palestine. A picture of the vietnamese protesters wanting to have independence for vietnam after world war ii, which they couldnt get, if you remember. The french went back and reoccupied, and later the americans were involved in the vietnam war. So the book is about the end of something and also about the daw n of something. The first use of napalm, the first atomic bomb blast, so it is very contemporary. The question here is, any africanamerican photographers in world war ii . And were any photographers assigned to companies such as the four 42nd, the asian and japaneseamerican unit. There were really good pictures of the four 42nd, but they are not my book because it happened in 1944 when they saw their best action. I never got any connection to an africanamerican photographer. There was a japanese photographer, japaneseamerican photographer who later became lbjs photographer. But he started in the middle of 1945, but a great question. I can speak to that, because i went out to find, among other topics, and indeed i found a number of photos. For example, the 92nd Infantry Division was an africanamerican division that saw action in italy. And the 93rd saw action in the pacific. The 93rd included such famous black regiments as the 24th and 25th and the three 69th which had been the harlem hekllfighters in world war i. But unless you dug into the archives, you wouldnt know. I went into records and found after action reports from the 93rd. It is a fascinating record, and photos there as well. So yes, they are there, and that is a part of the treasure hunt, to go looking for, and every time i go it is a treat, because i almost inevitably stumble on something that i hadnt been looking for, which is cool. So yes, that and the 442nd, and the 100th Infantry Battalion from hawaii, there are photos of them and they are there. Do you know how many combat photographers there were . And if you know how many were killed in action, wounded or missing . And is there any postwar associations that were formed for these photographers . We had a great deal of problems figuring out how many photographers and how many casualties. We estimate it was in the hundreds, not in the thousands, but i am guessing 500. We counted 24 casualties, but there must have been much more, because they were on the front lines. So statistically that should have much more than a couple of dozen, but we could only anecdotally find 24. A very interesting book called armed with cameras about signal corps photographers features the photographic companies, and the numbers are always difficult to nail down. That is kind of how this came about. I was looking for someone to speak, and my friend, i met him at some of the history conferences, just a fantastic guy, he had written about the civil war, vietnam, and i had no idea he wrote about this, until i looked, so i talked to him, he is fishing, so he decided, these other guys that i know. But just a plug for the textual branch, there is a massive history of the Army Signal Corps in world war ii written right during and after the war. It is on the second floor, that has a lot of that statistical information. I encourage you to read it, because i dont have it on me. [laughter] im not gonna do it for you. Is there any interest or effort to digitally enhance any of these photos, digitize them and make them Available Online . I guess the question is for me. It has been talked about, but in terms of how you decide what is going to get digitized, we have over 18 million photographs. You tend to choose stuff that is on glass. The entirety of the Matthew Brady stuff is digitized. So glass plates and lantern slides get prioritized. The cost of digitize is enormous, it is not as simple as just scanning and throwing it up. It takes manpowers, those captions need a lot of editing not editing, just proofreading, and it is a lot of work. In terms of negatives and prints, ideally you want to digitize from the negative, but sometimes there are negatives missing that were not transferred to us. So you have to go track down a print, so it is not just a one for one, there is a big gap in the negative, so you need to go to the print. It is a lot of work. A question here about german photos. Were any german photos captured, and are they in the collection . We have a large collection of captured records. Record 242, seized records. A lot of it is heinrich hoffman, hitlers personal photographer. We also have eva brauns photo albums. We have not digitized those. There is a translation issue. We need to german speaker to translate, so there have not been many formats, glass plates, 35mm, it is an enormous collection. I dont think anyone has ever gone through all of it. Speaking of germany, an interesting story. Signal corps photographers wrote captions and always included their names in the captions, but they were never ever credited with the photographs in america. Life magazine would run it and it would always say, signal corps photography. One photographer put his negatives, a pigeon carried his negatives. It was supposed to go to london but ended up in germany. And the germans published the photograph, and gave the photographer his name credit. [laughter] where in the College Park Campus is the signal corps Photo Archive located, which building . A2 is in college park next to the university of maryland. We are on the fifth floor, cant miss it, it is the only door to walk into. The negatives and prints are housed in our building. A more recent question. Are photos from military photographers today being archived . Yes. 2007 to present is that the defense Image Management center, and eventually those photos will come to us. Last question, in the era of social media, how can you use social media to help educate and inspire using these pictures, young men and women today . We are on twitter and facebook for the book. The great thing about this is that this is the peoples property. All of us own these photographs. So that should be shared widely. I see eriks stuff on twitter, and i hope he sees our social media. It is a great way to get people to stumble across something that they had no idea that they would find interesting, and then spark a passion for it. I really do think that it is the potential for these photographs to be seen more widely now than they were seen 30 or 40 years ago. Absolutely. Im fixing them up and publishing them every day on various channels, and they appear on the cmh website. I think we will publish them on my channel because i have subject Matter Experts around the world who help me with the captions. And they are no, that wasnt that, that was something else. They live in france, they will go outside and take a photo, and it is that thing. So especially in our busy age, you throw a hundredpage book at someone, it is probably not going to happen. But if you have 30 seconds to look at a picture, you find that picture interesting, you want to go deeper, you go to the cmh website to find out more, you buy the book, which is available in the lobby afterwards. There will be a signing. Please do stop. And at libraries, bookstores, amazon and other places. But you will do your part to help spread the good word about this, again, a Real National treasure. The cool thing about putting them online is that we have experienced already, twitter accounts that started a month ago is that people will comment and say, my grandfather did this, he told me about it, and it is just part of every familys story. And they talk to each other, which is great. You get this whole conversation that is like, nontoxic. [laughter] so doing a little bit for good in this world. But again, we will have a signing, so please stop by. On behalf of the u. S. Army center of military history, i want to thank our cosponsors, the National Archives, for the opportunity for the event tonight. I want to thank our speakers as well, and all of you for attending. Lets have a round of applause for our panelists. [applause] [captions for more information on the army role in world war ii, and information on the Army Signal Corps photographers, visit our website at history. Army. Mil. Thank you, all, for coming. Have a great night