 Good evening and welcome to the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States and I'm pleased you could join us here in the William G. McGowan Theater for a special Veterans Day program on U.S. Army Signal Corps photographers at the end of World War II. Welcome whether you're here in the theater with us or capturing us on Facebook or YouTube and a special welcome to our C-SPAN audience. Our partner for tonight's program is the U.S. Army Center for Military History. We thank them for their support and extend a special thanks to the Center's Executive Director, Mr. Charles R. Bowrie, Jr. Before we get started, I'd like to tell you two other programs coming up soon in this theater. On Thursday, November 21st at 6.30 p.m., we'll mark the 15th anniversary of the movie National Treasure with a special screening here in the McGowan Theater and fun activities related to the film and the declaration. Come dressed as your favorite National Treasure character and you might even win a prize. It's still the number one question after 15 years asked in the Rotunda. Can we see the back of the declaration? And on Thursday, December 12th at 7, join us for a special Bill of Rights program celebrating the U.S. Bill of Rights as an inspiration to the world. A panel of scholars and authors will explore the unique history of the Bill of Rights and the ways in which it has influenced national constitutions around the world. Check our website, archives.gov, or sign up at the table outside the theater to get email updates. You'll also find information about other National Archives programs and activities. And another way to get more involved with the National Archives is to become a member of the National Archives Foundation. The Foundation supports all of our education and outreach activities and you can visit their website archivesfoundation.org to learn more about them. The Army Signal Corps photographic collection is one of the largest in the National Archives still picture branch. The roughly one million images covering World War I through 1981. Chronicle military activities during war and peace on the front line and on the home front. And as we will examine tonight, the aftermath of war. In this Veterans Day tribute, we remember and honor the soldier photographers who through their images were witness to the post-war destruction in a world forever changed. Now I would like to welcome Lee Reynolds, the strategic communications officer for the U.S. Army Center of Military History. He retired from the Army Reserve in June 2017 at the rank of Colonel with more than 35 years of military service in the active Army and Army Reserve. Colonel Reynolds deployed three times. He commanded the American Forces Network Iraq in Baghdad, was Director of Media Operations and Assistant Spokesman for Military Commissions at Guantanamo Bay Cuba and was the Chief of Media Operations and Senior Spokesman for Detention Operations at Guantanamo. He was also an Assistant Professor of Military Science at the University of Southern California. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Lee Reynolds. Good evening. Thank you, Dr. Mr. Ferriero. And also thanks for the National Archives and Records Administration for hosting and co-sponsoring the event with us here this evening. As mentioned, my name is Lee Reynolds. I am the strategic communications officer for the U.S. Army Center of Military History. The Center of Military History is responsible for recording the official history of the U.S. Army in peace and war while also advising the Army staff on historical matters. 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. That's history.army.mil, M-I-L. To learn more about our core responsibilities and our mission, and to find out more about the publications that we produce and about the museums that we manage around the world, including the new National Museum of the U.S. Army that opens in just seven months on June 4th, 2020. We're very excited about that, and I think you will be too. So, market calendars, June 4th, 2020 for the National Museum of the U.S. Army. We're proud and honored to support the 75th Commemoration of World War II with this evening's panel presentation. This evening, we're honoring the World War II soldier photographers from the Army's Signal Corps collection here at the National Archives. These Signal Corps photo teams, carrying what was then state-of-the-art equipment, would go out into combat operations, often by themselves, and cover the events where civilian journalists either wouldn't go or couldn't go. The results, as you'll see here tonight, captured on film through their lenses were some of the most iconic pictures of World War II. These images were not just used by the U.S. Army, but they could be seen in newspapers and magazines and films throughout the United States and the world. Now, at the end of tonight's presentation, we're going to have about 20 minutes for questions and answers. There's a gentleman on this side, and I'll be on the other side. We'll have some index cards. If you have a question, please write it down on the index card and pass it to the side. We'll also supply some pencils, just to signal us if you need a pencil or an index card. So at this time, I'd like to bring to the stage our panel members. Now, I'd like to introduce Dr. Eric Velarde. He is the Digital Historian for the Center of Military History and the Army's principal Vietnam War historian. He's also author of a recent book about Vietnam called Staying the Course, October 1967 to September 1968. Dr. Velarde. Thank you. So as you heard, I am a Vietnam War historian, but as the Digital Historian for the Center of Military History, one of my other jobs is to research and produce a pair of commemorative websites for the U.S. Army in World War II that you can find on our website, history.army.mil. In the course of producing these, which I'm still doing, it's going to take a little while. A lot of research, a lot of work. But 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 the soldier in the war that we couldn't get anywhere else. So 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 isn't, I think, is well-known, but really out of it. So I will introduce our panel members first before we begin. Beginning on the far right, we have Richard Kayhan, a former picture editor for the Chicago Sun Times, and the author of no less than 24 at my account books on history and photography, many of them on your beloved hometown of Chicago, but some more recent books that have widened the aperture, so to speak. For your most recent book, which is Aftershock, Human Toll of War, which is available in our lobbying available online, co-author Mark Jacob, who was a former editor for the Chicago Tribune, and in his own right author on eight books on history and photography. So we have a real powerhouse team. The third author is not here tonight, but I will mention him. Michael Williams has worked with Mr. Kayhan in many occasions and with you on at least one occasion. So we actually have a trio of people behind this examination of Signal Core Photographer of Second World War II. Our third panelist is Rebecca Reigns, who is a long-serving historian at the Center of Military History. When I got there in 2000, she and her husband were there and had been dear friends. She was the branch core historian and wrote the official history of Signal Core Branch, getting the message through. So we're so glad to have your expertise here. And our final panelist is Katelyn Crane Enriquez, 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. She's able to, I mean, I'm very envious, because she can rummage through those files any time she feels like it. So she's going to tell us a lot about how the collection came to be and how it was organized. So to start, I'd like to hand off to Richard and Mark to tell us about this journey of how they came about writing and producing this book, Aftershock. Thank you, Eric. First off, I should tell you that I don't think I'm as much of an expert as he says as a photo lover. People now call me a photo historian. That's a term that I never knew existed until I heard it. I like to tell stories through photographs because I think that photographs take us instantly back and set us up so that we can understand life events better. This book, Aftershock, we started about three years ago. We wanted to do a book about World War II. There's an incredible collection of books about World War II. So we wanted to figure out a way, oops, I promised to turn off my cell phone and I want to keep that promise. Were you in trouble? Yeah, yeah. Okay. So we started about three years ago and we went through the archives and we decided to concentrate on 1945. First off, I should say, the reason we chose the Signal Corps and 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. So even though the Navy and the Marines and the Coast Cards produced great photographs, we thought that there was a continuity among Army photographs and Signal Corps photographs. We decided to concentrate on 1945 because many of the still photos and the films that Signal Corps photographers took of 43 and 44, the action photos that we are all aware of, they've been shown in a lot of books and somehow when 1945 came around and the war started waning, there's not as much attention to this book. Frankly, it's an anti-war book. Somebody, I was recently interviewed on the radio and somebody said that I would be classified as a liberal because of anti-war and I suggested that conservatives, the entire military, everybody who has a heart and has a conscience is against the war. So I don't think that this book is radical in the least, but I want to tell you a little bit about our journey. So this is a book about men and they all were men in World War II who went to war with cameras instead of guns. The truth of it was that they were provided side arms but as every photographer said, there was 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 quote mistake of saying that they were interested in photography and they went through months of training to become photographers along with becoming soldiers, but it was the guns that they took and I think that's courageous. I believe that they left an incredible gift to future generations and our generations right now by the photographs that they took of the war because they teach us and the sub-head of the book is the human toll of war. They teach us exactly that and I think that's why their photographs are important. So there's a couple of miracles that you're going to be witnessing tonight. The miracle that they took the photographs, the miracles that the photographs were saved so well in the National Archives and so available and the miracle that now we as a future generation appreciate them and see its importance. So these are photographs of two of the photographers. I should say that the man on the left, they're holding speed graphic cameras and those were the common cameras that press photographers like Ouija, like you see in films, that's the kind of cameras that they held. Edward Norbeth on the left is holding a flash unit. They did use flash but not very often. You can imagine they didn't use flash during battle. It's not the thing to have a flash go off while you're photographing. But it's important to recognize that these incredible photographs were made with this really primitive, these really primitive cameras that took, that used four inch by five inch negatives and they could only put in two negatives at a time and then they'd have to switch to another magazine. So very different from photography today. Let's see. Another miracle, not only that they took the photographs but they were all processed, almost always very near the battle scene in the back, away from the front lines, a couple of miles away from the front lines. But they were processed there. The film was then sent to London later in the war to Paris and then they were radio transmitted back to the United States. As Eric said, they were used in a variety of reasons, sometimes strategic, sometimes for magazines and for newspapers and they were a very important part of the war effort. So if you've gotten a chance to see the book and a couple of people have bought it, they're available outside, what makes this book so special? Well, a couple of things. First that it was, that it focuses on 1945. The first photograph in the book was taken on January 1st, 1945. The last photograph was taken the last days of December. We couldn't find a December 31st photograph. But every picture shows what, basically the book shows what the world looked like as the war came to an end and as peace came. But the other thing that makes this book so unusual is the clarity of the photographs. And I think if you've seen the book you'll see. We were given a chance by the National Archives to scan the original negatives, put it on a scanner to create the book. And we were allowed to do 10 scans a day. That's the rules of the National Archives. My colleague Michael Williams and I were there for a week so we did 100 because they counted, they let us do 20 because we had two people. And Alyssa, are you here? Alyssa, your last name is? McConnell. Alyssa McConnell came to the archives, must have been for several months and did a beautiful job of scanning 10 pictures a day. But we stuck to the rule. So here's a four by five-inch negative. And you'll see what it looks like as a positive. So this is an execution of a German general, Anton Dossler, I think December 1st, 1945. And actually it was one of our harder negatives because everything is so backlit. And here is the way it looks in the book so you can see the process. We not only showed the image area of the negatives, we always showed the edges of the negatives because we think these photographs are important evidence and we wanted to show the entire negative. So oftentimes you'll see on the edges of the negatives the numbers, the signal core numbers and the signal core numbers are the numbers that the National Archives still uses to find these photographs. So how do we pick our photographs? I would guess there are about 100, between 100 and 200,000 signal core negatives from 1945. And we used contact sheets at first to kind of look at what was there. And this is an example. So a contact print is a print that's exactly four inches by five inches, the same size as the negative. And it's been made, it's taken the negatives and literally putting light through them and making it print the same size. So that helped us a tremendous amount. So we got to see the contact prints, the front side of the contact prints, and we got to see the backside of the contact prints. And that gave us a sense of what pictures we thought we should use for the book. I think we had two rules. We were looking for historically important pictures and we were looking for artistically important pictures. The book is rough. We didn't spare many, we wanted to show truly the human toll of war, but we also looked a lot for humanity. So we looked for, so I'm sorry, these are the files that the contact prints are in. And it was a little bit of a challenge because the World War II photographs are kind of combined with the Korean War photographs. So you've got to go through a lot of looking. And then we looked at 8 by 10 prints to get a better idea of what the photographs look like. But you can see the difference even in this picture of a print and a scan from a negative. What we're seeing in this book are images that have never been, well, many of them have never been seen before or never been published before, but even the ones that have been published, the very famous pictures, they've never been seen like this because they've always been seen from prints. And then the larger, as great as enlarged images are, can't stand up to scanners. Negatives, which are filled with information, and scanners love each other. And so this is really a book of 1945 and of 2019. I don't want to go back, but let's just try. At least we got it moving. The next way we started looking for pictures, we started to find subject areas. Each picture is not only, there's not only prints of them, but you can look at pictures through metadata. And this is an example. These are pictures of bridal couples. And again, we were looking for humanity to include in the book, and that led us to pictures like this, which is a pretty 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, married a Japanese prisoner and a Japanese woman, and you can see the soldier in the back playing the accordion. So we were always on a lookout for that. Oh, there we go. I'm going to go back. Next, we started to want to tell the story of the single photographic companies. And we left still photos, and we went into the main text area, and we looked up these seven companies, everything they had, and you can see that there was, I hope you can see this, there was a large learning curve. I think I got everything wrong on this request. They even changed my name, but it was every location, every, you know, and it talks about how helpful the National Archives was even helping a newbie like me. And I should mention that the scanner and the, the scanner and the negatives is open to anybody. You don't have to be, anyone who walks in can scan 10 photographs a day. And 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 single core photographers. So we started with the photographs, and then we really went after the men who took the photographs, and that became a really important project. We located, there were about 70 photographers who took the 300 pictures in the book, and we tracked down the story of almost every one of the photographers. Everyone had passed away. There are still a couple of single core photographers that are alive, but imagine, it's 75 years later, they were generally between 20 and 25 by the time they got overseas. So they're at least 95 years old. So we talked to each of their families, and I can't tell you how proud they are of their parents because, again, they went to war with such courage and left such an important record. Let's see. Okay, so Mark. So this is our cover photo. This is, which we think goes great with the title of Aftershock because this is a PFC Jack Pulliam, a Pennsylvania kid who was an infantry soldier and was captured in the Battle of the Bulge. He was captured, taken back to Germany to work slave labor. After about a month, he escaped with a comrade and hid in a house in Germany, and a German officer came in and Pulliam killed him to remain free and then hid in a fruit seller. And as the allies were coming through, the allies found him there, and this is him right after that, and he's wearing the cap of the German officer whom he killed. And he's got this thousand-yard stare. He has the most exhausted face I've ever seen, and he just looks like he's been through what the whole world had been through for years. And so we felt that he was clearly emblematic of the kind of point we were trying to make. And we tracked down Jack Pulliam's family, and they shared a 19-page memoir he had written that described his entire ordeal, and we use that in the book. So running these pictures, just to be really clear, the Signal Corps photographers who took these pictures were on the run a lot, and they were not trained journalists. So just to be pretty clear, the captions really stunk sometimes. They were pretty terrible, and we had to do a lot of investigation to try to find out, you know, name the spellings, all kinds of things, and so we had to work hard at that. We wanted to find, you know, we just didn't want to have death and destruction. There's plenty of death and destruction in the book, but we wanted to give readers a real sense of what it was like in that year as the world was coming to terms with how terrible total war had been over five or six years. So this is three 14-year-old German kids who have been enlisted into the military because Germans didn't have anyone left by that time. We love this picture, the baby faces, and also the kid on the right, he must have been issued that overcoat recently because he has a button in the wrong button. So they were in a hurry, and they certainly were captured fast. Again, we wanted to find unusual pictures. This is one of my favorite pictures. It shows a man who's missing a limb demonstrating how to ride a bike for GIs who had limbs amputated because of the war. So they are sitting there watching him show them how they will be able to ride a bike even though they're missing arms or legs. This is the German city of Heilbronn, and I hope you can see there's a single American GI walking through this devastated city. The extent of the devastation of some of these cities in Asia, in the Philippines, all over the place is amazing. I'm not sure why I did that. Here's Heilbronn. The reason that scanning these negatives really made a difference in pictures like this because you see so much definition in these half demolished buildings. The odd thing is, when we were working on the book, Rich and Mike and I would say, that's a beautiful picture. Some of the pictures really are beautiful. It was odd because these are pictures of ugliness to a great extent, but they were so beautifully taken by these soldier photographers. These are troops who have been wounded in some way, and they're on litters. They're being lowered into a landing craft from an aircraft carrier. In the book you'll see quite a few pictures of injured soldiers, but you'll also see 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. In fact, according to one estimate, it was three to one civilians to soldiers. That's the thing about Total War, and one of the points you wanted to make is that nobody is spared. This is one of the most devastating scenes. This is the old walled city in Manila, 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, and the fighting in the old walled city of Philippines was some of the toughest of the Pacific War. I just love this picture, and it's just so sad. These are Chinese who have returned to the Philippines to collect the skulls and bones, the remains of their loved ones. Those remains are from the entire Chinese diplomatic corps that was in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded. The Japanese invaded. In 41, the Americans left. MacArthur and the rest of them, most of the Americans left. Of course, there were some holdouts in Botanical Regidor. MacArthur volunteered to take the Chinese diplomats with him, and they said, no, we have to stay. There are 100,000 ethnic Chinese on the Philippines Islands. We have to protect them. The Japanese came in. They demanded that the consular staff collect a gigantic amount of money from all these ethnic Chinese on the islands. The diplomats refused. They were marched to a cemetery, and they were executed. Their family stayed in the Philippines for the entire war without knowing the fate of their loved ones. They didn't find that out for sure until the Americans recaptured the Philippines. We were able to track down the daughter of the consul general, the Chinese consul general, who was among the remains there. She's 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, you've seen this picture before. She said, no, she had never seen the picture before, even though it included... I said, your father's remains there. She said, I presume so. She said, her mom was not in this picture because they had already left the United States, but she said, I can identify every person in that picture. I know them. That's when you're a historian doing a history book and you're trying to track down facts from 75 years ago, it's just amazing when you can actually find somebody who was there. So we really treasured that. Now, a lot of the pictures in the book show American bravery. This show is an interesting chapter in the war. This is Dachau after it was liberated. The Americans came in and liberated this terrible camp where so many cruelties had taken place. And the photographers are right there with them. One of the toughest duties for these soldier photographers is taking pictures of death camps. And so they get the Dachau, they see the depravity and how human beings have been treated and the GIs were furious and they rounded up all the SS guards and they lined them up 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. So the American troops opened up and shot more than a dozen of them and what some people might view as a massacre. There was an army investigation and nobody was disciplined over it. Obviously it was in difficult situations. But this is, again, not the kind of picture you were going to see in 1945 in an American publication. And that's one of the values of the book is how it shows, it kind of takes a 2019 view of things that happened in 1945 and it really does not, it's not a propaganda book, it's a truth book. And for both good and bad, and there's plenty of both. This is a really interesting picture. This is a Buchenwald and this is a Soviet slave laborer who's pointing out the SS guard who was the most cruel in the area he was in. And it was taken by a photographer named Harold Roberts and Harold, everyone loved this picture but Harold Roberts was always annoyed by the idea of this picture because, so he took this picture with a speed graphic camera and those cameras only had two negatives that you could load at any one time. So he takes the picture and he's getting ready to reload and the guard, I mean the prisoner hauled off and punched the guard in the face. And Harold Roberts was always upset that he missed that picture that he thought it would have been even greater than the picture he took. And Rich, I want you to tell this story. So this is Emily Mary Reichman who's one of the archives poster women because I'll explain why but this is a photograph taken of her 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 and they ended up in a tiny barn in Volari Czechoslovakia and they were liberated in that barn. A signal corps photographer took her picture just days after she was found and then he asked all the women does anyone have a photograph of themselves before the Holocaust so we can compare the two photographs. She happened to have a little photograph of herself that she had carried in her shoe that's her on the right as a teenager and so she gave the photograph to the army photographer to make a print and to make 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 and she returns the archive as Mary Robinson she's gotten married and her husband joins her and they find the both photographs before they return to Volari a 50th anniversary celebration. So if you go down to the basement of the college park her story is told but there's a twist. My father was the doctor who helped them. These women weighed about 75 pounds and it would have made sense obviously 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. Their bodies couldn't 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 and the reason why I couldn't find the photograph because they spelled his name wrong. His name was Aaron Cahan and not Aaron Cohen and so when I found the card I took a photograph of my father unfortunately we didn't bring it tonight but that was a real personal connection for me to this whole collection. And the women wrote your... They did. I knew the story because the women who he helped had written my mother a new bride in the 1940s about my father's work and when they returned to Czechoslovakia I read an article about it and they said Captain Cahan was our hero. Okay. Good evening. It's nice to see you all here and I'd like to say I'm very happy to be part of this panel tonight. These authors are a fascinating book and I want to thank Eric for asking me to be part of this panel and it gives me a chance to talk about the Army Cine d'Accord one of my favorite topics and a little about its background history and then how the tutorials for us are going to be during World War II. When the Cine d'Accord was founded in 1860 right on the eve of the Civil War the Cine d'Accord was given a broad mandate to provide communications for the Army not really defined any more specifically than that and all the equipment that went along with it and over time that mission has encompassed a wide variety of functions which I think is one of the things that makes the Cine d'Accord so interesting to study. Photography would eventually be included within the Cine d'Accord's purview but that didn't happen for quite a few years. During the Civil War the Army had no photographers. The haunting images that we were familiar with were captured by civilians like Matthew Brady I think probably all of you have seen some of his photos but the photographic process was incredibly primitive and cumbersome even more so than in World War II the cameras were huge they used glass plates that were very fragile as well as hard to handle and they needed such a long exposure time that there was no way that you could capture action all the photos are static and so it would take the development of smaller cameras and the invention of old film which didn't happen until the 1890s to make combat photography feasible. Meanwhile the Cine d'Accord did perform some photographic work in the 1870s when it took on such jobs as photographing maps for inclusion in the official records of the Civil War that were then being compiled by the War Department and in 1894 the Cine d'Accord became responsible for supervising the War Department Library which included Brady's photos at that time because he had fallen upon financial difficulties later in life he had to sell his collection and the War Department had purchased it so in the 1890s it's when the Cine d'Accord gets a little more involved in photography even though it's not officially part of their job in 1894 the Cine d'Accord added photography to the curriculum of the Signal School which was then located at Fort Riley, Kansas and two years later the Corps published a manual photography to use to teach the soldiers and although Signal soldiers were using cameras to document events as an additional duty the photographic function still wasn't officially assigned it wouldn't be for quite a while the war in Spain however in 1898 presented the Army with its first opportunity to try its hand at combat photography and Signal soldiers took cameras into the war zones to capture the fighting in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines but the real coming of age for the Cine d'Accord's photography came during World War I in July 1917 the Cine d'Accord established a photographic section that had responsibility for both ground and aerial photography both at home and abroad and aviation by the way was one of those additional functions that the Cine d'Accord had for a time through most of World War I Signal Corps cameraman took both still and motion pictures with photographic units serving with each Army division but officers were reluctant to allow the cameraman too close to the front so they took few photos of actual combat plus the censorship was very strict and no graphic images were shown to the public at all nevertheless by the war's end the Cine d'Accord had accumulated approximately 30,000 still pictures and 750,000 feet of motion picture film that were used for training, propaganda and historical purposes so now with all this material to handle the Cine d'Accord needed some specialized facilities to do the job therefore in 1919 the Cine d'Accord built a photographic laboratory and film vault on the grounds of the Army War College now known as Fort Leslie J. McNair in Southwest D.C. which just happens to be the post where the U.S. Army Center of Military History is now located so on goes around comes around the outbreak of World War II of course created a huge demand for Army photography and required the Cine d'Accord to really up its operations in that area the War Department finally issued regulations that gave responsibility to the Cine d'Accord for all photographic work except that specifically assigned to other arms and branches so it received a pretty broad authority and this time the emphasis was placed on combat photography and the cameraman as you've seen served at the front lines now to administer this war time build up the photographic division within the office of the Chief Signal Officer became the Army pictorial service in June 1942 and we have a picture there of that office I believe after D-Day in April 42 and it's also another one of it in August 41 it was a little bit smaller but one of the notable things is how many women are working in the office at that time because the draft had happened the men were serving and they picked up the duties the other thing I'd like to mention about this office is that it was located in what was then known as the Munitions Building which is located on the Mall out here about where the Smithsonian's National History Museum is today and the War Department had its headquarters there until the Pentagon was completed and the Chief Signal Officer had his office there so that's what was happening now earlier the Signal Corps had purchased the form of Paramount Studios at Astoria Long Island which became the Signal Corps photographic center after undergoing renovations it opened in May 1942 and the center provided a modern facility where training film production processing and distribution could be consolidated leaving the laboratory in Washington free to focus on still pictures while the Army tried to draft professional photographers as was mentioned earlier the need outstrip the supply they just weren't enough so to meet the demand the Signal Corps conducted photographic training at Astoria for both still and motion picture cameramen and in New York City they had the advantage of receiving instructions from the press photographers in New York this is where everything was based at that time and they could show these men with the news worthy photos which isn't always the easiest thing to do the center also trained the many specialists required for photographic work such as camera repairmen and maintenance personnel as well as laboratory technicians in early 1943 the Army augmented its facilities at the War College by opening a still picture sub laboratory at the newly completed Pentagon near the Signal Corps consolidated all of its still picture laboratory operations there and the Pentagon also housed the Signal Corps still picture library with its motion picture counterpart located at Astoria and by War Zen the still picture library held over 500,000 photos and those were just the ones they considered worthy of keeping many were destroyed and to release men from the front working in the offices and in the laboratories members of women's Army Corps worked in many of the film libraries and laboratories run by the Signal Corps now the Signal Corps photographs brought the distant war home to Americans in a way that had never been done before and as our authors have mentioned the Signal Corps photographic companies documented field operations around the world and they accompanied troops on their various assignments amphibious landings and whatever and they usually operated in small groups so they could be in more places at once and I believe I have a photo here Eric kindly let me use a few of the photos he'd scanned at the archive showing the equipment that these Signal Corps camera men used it's a lot better than what Matthew Brady had you could carry it around your neck but it's still pretty bulky and hard to move around with and I think they also mentioned they couldn't 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 now again as you see in black and white photography was a norm for combat coverage but the camera men 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 such as to show enemy emplacements and things of that nature the development of telephoto techniques as technology kept improving enabled the electronic transmission of photographs so that pictures could reach Washington from the front in minutes and as already has been mentioned as well the pictures taken by army photographers illustrated the nation's books newspapers and magazines and the caption photo by US Army Signal Corps became almost as well known as a commercial trademark and lucky for us the army insisted that photographers include detailed captions with their pictures even if they weren't always perfect but they did provide and at least part of the time the who, what, went and where of what they were taking pictures of and the government still placed restrictions upon the kinds of images that could be shown although not as heavily as in World War I and many of the pictures in the book I was looking at it before we came out would not have been seen by the public during the war but they still received a much more realistic look at warfare than they'd ever had before now besides capturing combat action photography served other purposes and one of the most interesting and important of these was V-Mail by which the personal correspondence that soldiers were writing back home was microfilmed to save cargo space on ships and on airplanes and then back on the receiving end the film was developed enlarged and printed into four and a half by five inch reproductions that were then mailed to the addresses Signal Corps performed a similar service for official documents which they called official photo mail now the Signal Corps also developed unofficial photos that soldiers took and centered them as necessary now for all its accomplishments the Army Pictorial Service did draw some criticism in August 42 it came under scrutiny by the Senate Special Committee investigating the National Defense Program which was cheered by Senator Harris Truman of Missouri most of the controversy centered around the Signal Corps's motion picture activities and their ties with Hollywood not so much as still picture operations but for a short time the Army Pictorial Service was removed from the Signal Corps's control but it reverted back after the committee concluded its hearings in July 1943 and despite this administrative upheaval the Army Pictorial Service continued to function effectively and this picture shows you the kind of conditions they were dealing with so the cameraman did travel in jeeps to get around the battlefield but it wasn't always easy to reach where they were going and one of the things you don't see as many pictures of are the cameraman themselves and they were many wounded they were vulnerable when they were taking the pictures sitting ducks for the enemy to shoot and it's one of those 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 full color of course I don't 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 a unique epic visual record of the cataclysmic worldwide conflict they left behind a remarkable legacy that had stood the test of time and we are seeing tonight a legacy that still speaks to us today I get the privilege of working with the Army Signal Corps collection it is our largest collection it is the most used collection I don't think there is a single day that I have been at work that it hasn't been requested and in preparation tonight I went through the paperwork that documented the transfer of the photographs to us yes we keep records about records so the Army Signal Corps photographs were transferred to us in four different chunks we call them a session so they came over in four different years but in reading the paperwork there was a really interesting quote and I want to read it to you guys they were appraising the worth of the documents and the worth is not just the value monetarily but it is the historic value and research value and they wrote this material is a part of the oldest continuous photographic file in the history of the government and the best known file because of its coverage of military operations of the United States therefore the importance of the records need not be stressed and that's a lot to say there we have I believe 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 researchers and novice researchers and I help you locate what you are trying to find doesn't mean you will find it I try my best to point you in the right direction and so when you come in you are the expert on your subject and I am just the person who uses the information you give me to help you find the photos that you are looking for but I always like to start with setting expectations and things that you don't find in the Signal Corps collection or a lot of our military records we do not have a photo of every single person who has served in the military if you are looking for your relative there may be a photo of them but it doesn't mean their name is captioned and therefore I will not be able to identify your relative for you we don't have full unit photos we have unit photos sometimes captured at bases but we don't have those platoon photos and unit photos taken at boot camp and then the portraits that are taken at boot camp or graduation we just don't really have either that said we do have name indexes and the Signal Corps was very detailed they kept great records of their records so we have name indexes so if the name appears in a caption hypothetically it should be in this name index the photographs are not organized by date so I think it's incredibly impressive that you found 1945 photos because those skip around you can be in a box and see all World War II in one box it's not in any chronological order I'm 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 don't have a Signal Corps number so we work with them to locate the indexes to attempt to find the Signal Corps number you may have noticed on some of the photographs there are two numbers there is a field number and then there is a Signal Corps number we have no way of getting from that field number to the Signal Corps number so it's a lot of working with the subject of the image in order to try to locate it and just real quick this image is a Dr. Reins touched upon it they are taking some color photography this is taken in St. Vith we are going to leave in early 45 into 44 most of our color photography for World War II is in 44 and 45 there is some 1941 but I think the bulk of our collection is going to show this is Pearl Harbor on December 7th I think this may have been one of the earliest color photos I've found but I could be wrong I have not gone through a million photographs so yeah just I work with the public and I field questions and I will always say you are more of an expert they 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 things that you should come prepared if you want to do research specifically on World War II units but this can be used for World War II and Vietnam era if you are looking for a specific unit having the unit lineage helps because you can look under the hierarchy of it so if it is a regiment you might want to know what division they were attached to that is very useful the locations where they served you can look under geographic locations having specific towns helps a lot rosters so you can look under the names especially commanding officers that is really really useful and then subjects so types of artillery that they used tanks things like that you can look under various subjects and so I always say just come prepared because I can do some limited research with you but most of the time if you don't if you have all that information I can show you way more places to look instead of you just have one name and I that's it that's your research day is done so in terms of the signal core we have three copies of the signal core print or photographs they showed us there's the 4x5 negatives we have 8x10 prints in the albums and then we have the 4x5 contact prints we do pulled original negatives and we will pull 10 a day and we limit it because they are the original copy and we don't want to serve too many at one time but also they're in these drawers and so we're pulling them individually of the drawers and there is room for error when you are putting them back and we want to make sure that they get back in the correct locations because things have been misfiled and found decades later and yes so that's basically what I do is assist researchers on a daily basis so let me just say a few things in addition to the great comments we've heard here three things I think I want to add to this I think they've been touched on but I want to reinforce them for one the army signal core photo collection is one of the great national treasures I think most and I'm calling you out guys most historians don't give photographs the proper do I think there is a wealth of information I personally have learned so much by spending so much time with the photographs I mean I love text no problem with text but there's just something about those images and the information they contain so second point kind of reinforcing that is there is information in those photographs you're 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 core photos I go to the archives I have a little different system I don't have the luxury of pulling the negative so I stand there with an iPhone and and then do my Photoshop fairy dust and take out the dings and scratches and put them on our website and social media but the process of actually fixing them up is important because I really look closely at them and again you're finding stuff that you would pass over variations in equipment practically 45 the American soldier in Europe in 45 that is a raggedy and character is not the putaways straightened out soldier they are trying to survive in conditions that are unspeakable so you see them wearing German Air Force jackets with the fleece inside or they've got some kind of non-standard boot or they've got three K-bar knives strapped to various parts of their body and unless you really look at these photos you wouldn't know that one of my favorite thing are tankers with the tank crews we're doing to up-armor their vehicles because particularly the Sherman's facing the Panthers and the Tigers they're loading sandbags and railroad ties and all this other stuff and so the way that they do it you can only appreciate that by seeing them and then the third point probably the most important point is every single person in those photos is someone is a son or a daughter 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 out on social media within the last two weeks two people in their early 20s contact to be going that's my grandfather so it's wonderful to know that there is a continuity that people understand this and so keeping this photographic collection alive and making it available I think is really one of the best ways to honor our veterans and that's what tonight is about and so before we go to question and answer I'd like to show you a short five minute video that I produced that I've scanned and enhanced and then some video segments too with the musical accompaniment of the prelude Das Reingeld which I think somehow suited the images so if you will stop for a few minutes and think about the contributions of the Army's signal corps photographers this is my tribute to them they have questions and answers if you still have a question feel free to raise your hand and one of the people on the left or the right will pass you some pencils and cards but I have a couple to start off with first question I have is will you accept negatives or photos from the Korean War into your collection we do have negatives and photographs from the Korean War our Army's signal corps collection still photography actually starts with 3D photography and goes through I believe it ends in 1982 after that it's under the department of defense and so our department of defense records go from 1982 to 2007 next question I have is what are some of the most interesting or unusual things you discovered from going through all these pictures I discovered that the war was so expansive we live in a generation that wars are very limited and unless you're fighting unless you have a loved one fighting a war is not as brutal as World War II or a major World War was and we actually we actually show the photographs in chronological order and they bounce around there's pictures from Europe and then the next picture might be of Burma and the next picture might be of the Philippines China and then Italy and the Middle East and I read about the extent of World War too but I think I was surprised at how huge it was I think for me it would have been the impact on civilians and you don't see that too much in I mean in 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 in Aftershock I mean every time I go through it again and look at it they look so forlorn and so almost like they just look shell shocked they look like they don't know what can happen next and they're they're not hopeful for me also having looked at probably all 55 or 70,000 of the World War I photos already as well as Vietnam War doing comparison one thing that really stands out for me for the World War II photos is that seemed to be almost the golden age of of capturing you know there's a couple of those images at the end the kind of the portrait you know the photographer is you know there and the person knows that he's looking at him so it's not just capturing him in the moment but there's a realness and there's a beauty to those images that I just don't see anywhere else and again these are soldier photographers most of them never received training before again working with those incredibly cumbersome cameras under incredibly difficult conditions I've read the journals all these daily journals will say well Bob is covered with fungus from head to toe but otherwise we're doing great just the kinds of stuff they have to go through to get the shot and yet to come up with that quality it's extraordinary and so just the personalities that come out of these photos are really remarkable I'm curious about one thing Eric though because we concentrated on 1945 and I'm amazed by the quality of the compositions because most of these people were not professional photographers and Rich and I worked with professional photographers our whole lives and some of the compositions are so good the artistry is incredible did they get better as the war went on I'm not familiar with it I think that's fair to say that they did it's also fair to say that they took more photos as time went on in 43 there were a fairly limited number of photographic units out there and of course the number expands so it's partly it's the sheer number but I got to say I guess something about just the air or the water but they rose to the occasion and so by 44 and 45 again yeah absolutely some photos that would stand right up there with anything that anyone has produced and it's interesting that after the war when we tracked down the families of the photographers and we found out what they did how few of them stayed in photography and one became a life magazine one became a very famous celebrity photographer Russ Meyer became Russ Meyer he was a movie photographer but most of them left to become journalists or printers or something allied with photography and I think it's because they had seen it all what was there now to prove after World War II what was there to photograph and I think that they wanted to and one can also imagine just the horrors they had seen and sometimes I have to say one of the things I really appreciate is those photographers who went the extra mile to write more on the caption sheets and the movie I showed you that towards the end the African American tanker in the turret with the machine gun it was a remarkable set of five photos Army Signal Corps photographer met up with this unit this is the 761st tank battalion Patton's Black Panthers the first Black Army to go into combat this is right before their first combat mission in November of 44 and happens to take photos of all five crew members including that person within 12 hours they're all dead they go into action they button up which means they close up the vehicle because there's action and the exhaust system gets partly blocked so they all die of carbon monoxide so they're found in their fighting positions without a scratch on them so it just kind of blows your mind these incredible photographs and who knew 12 hours later so it's just when you get the backstory with some of these things it adds another layer for Mr. Khan and Mr. Jacobs you mentioned that the book focused on 1945 but the question here is how did you decide on this topic and what sparked your interest why World War II well it's interesting because Eric showed a picture of a soldier with a cigarette hanging down near the end and that's how it all started we thought the photograph was so beautiful that we wanted to focus on the end of the war and we think that it's an important book they talk about every generation has their own war because we forget how bad how terrible war is and we created the book this is kind of because we wanted to create this lasting record not that we were creating the lasting record but we have the photographer to create the lasting record and we hope that people look at the book and realize how serious any war is it doesn't have to be a total war and I think that's the gift they left behind and also the thing about 1945 it's not just when World War II ended it's when the atomic age dawned it's when so much happened there's a picture in the book of Jewish refugees getting ready to go to Palestine it's a picture of Vietnamese protestors wanting to have independence for Vietnam after World War II which they didn't get if you remember the French went back and reoccupied and then later the Americans were involved in the Vietnam War so the book is about the end of something and it's also about the dawn of something the first use of napound obviously pictures of the atomic bomb blast so it's very contemporary the question here is any African-American photographers in World War II and were there any photographers assigned to companies such as the 442nd Asian-American and Japanese unit there were really good pictures of the 442nd the Japanese-American company they're not in my book because it happened in 1944 they saw their best action I didn't see any photographs I never got any connection to an African-American photographer there was a Japanese-American photographer who later became LBJ's personal photographer but he actually started kind of in the middle of 1945 but that's a great question well I can speak to that because I really went out to find among other topics and indeed I found a number of photos for example the 92nd Infantry Division which was an African-American division that saw action in Italy and the 93rd which saw action in the Pacific and the 93rd included such famous black regiments as the 24th, the 25th and the 369th which had been the Harlem Hell Fighters in World War I but that may I found actually I think a fair number but again unless you dug into the archives you wouldn't know and so I went also with the textual records and found all the after action reports in the 93rd and it's a really fascinating record and I found photos in there as well so yes they're there and that's sort of part of the treasure hunt is to go looking for and every time I go it's a treat because I almost inevitably stumble on something that I hadn't been looking for but it was really cool so yes that and Infantry Battalion from Hawaii credible photos of them so they're there now the question on do you know how many combat photographers there were and if you know how many were killed in action, wounded or missing and if there are any post war associations that were formed for these photographers Rebecca do you have any answers to that because we had a great deal of problems figuring out how many photographers and how many casualties we estimate it was in the hundreds not the thousands but over a hundred so a very small I'm guessing 500 we counted 24 casualties but there must have been much more because they were on the front line so they should be statistically have much more than a couple of dozen but we could anecdotally only find 24 there is a very interesting called armed with cameras about Singapore photographers and featuring the photographic companies and the author does give some statistics although numbers are always kind of difficult to nail down in fact that's kind of how this call came about because I was looking for someone to speak and my friend Bidermaslawski he's now a retired professor but he I'd met him at some of the early history conferences just fantastic guy he'd written a lot of civil war he'd done some Vietnam I had no idea he wrote until I went and looked and went wow that's Pete so talk to him he's fishing so I'm not going to pull him away but he said but these other guys that I know so yeah but there is just a plug for this there is massive history of the Army Signal Corps in World War II written right during and after the war that's on the second floor that has a lot of that statistical information but again I encourage you to come and read it because I don't have it on me I'm not going to do it for you is there any interest or effort to enhance digitally enhance any of these photos digitize them and making them available online nice for digitization I guess that question is for me it has been talked about but in terms of how you decide what's going to get digitized when you have over 18 million photographs you tend to choose stuff that is on glass so the entirety of the Matthew Brady stuff is digitized because of its intrinsic value and we don't serve that so glass plates and lantern slides tend to get prioritized and the cost the cost of digitization is enormous it's not as simple as just scanning and throwing it up it takes manpower it takes those captions need a lot of not editing but just proofreading and it's a lot of work and in terms of negatives and prints ideally you want to digitize from the negatives but sometimes there are negatives missing that were not transferred to us not because we lost them and so you have to go then track down a print so it's not just a one for one if there is a gap in the negatives then you need to go to the print so it's a lot of work interesting question here it's about the German photos were any German photos captured and are they in the collection we have a large collection of captured records it's a record group 242 seized records a lot of it is Heinrich Hoffmann Hitler's personal photographer we also have Eva Braun's photo albums we have not digitized those also there is a translation issue we need a German speaker to translate as well so those and that's in many different formats there's glass plates 35mm strips these photo albums it's an enormous collection I don't think anyone has ever gone through all of it speaking of the connection to Germany there's an interesting story so signal corp photographers wrote captions and they always included their names on the captions but they were never ever credited with their photographs in America life magazine would run it and it would always say signal corp photography one photography put his negatives so it was supposed to go to London but it ended up in Germany and the Germans published the photograph and gave the photographer his name great and then also where in the college park campus is the signal corp photo archive located in which building we're at A2 which is in college park right next to the University of Maryland we're on the 5th floor can't miss us walking into and yeah the negatives and the prints are housed in our building and then a more recent question are photos from military photographers today being archived yeah so 2007 to present is at the defense imagery management operation center DIMOC eventually those photographs will come to us and then finally the last question here in the era of social media how can you use how can you use social media to help educate and inspire using these pictures young men and women today well we're I mean we have a twitter and facebook for the book the great thing about this is this is the people's property I mean this is all of us own these photographs and so they should be shared widely and like I see Eric's stuff on twitter and I hope he sees he's ours and social media is a great way to get people to stumble across something that they had no idea that they would find interesting and then you know spark a passion you know for it so I really do think that there's potential for these photographs to be seen more widely now than they were seen 20 or 30 or 40 years ago yeah absolutely and again I'm you know fixing them up and publishing them every day on various channels and they appear on the CMH website I often will publish them first on my own channel because I have subject matter experts all around the world who help me with the captions and they're like no no that wasn't that that was something else and they'd live in France and they wouldn't be exact they'll take the walk outside take a photo it's that thing so you know so when I get capture I goes up on CMH and again it's shared to the world I think it's a especially in our busy age right you throw a 500 page book at someone probably not going to happen but do you have 30 seconds look at a picture yeah you do right and if you find that picture interesting you want to go more deeper you know you go to the CMH website to find out more you buy the book aftershock which is available in the lobby afterwards it'll be a signing so please do stop and and online at libraries yes and libraries Amazon I'm sure are the places but you will do your part to help spread the good word about this again it's a real national trend and the cool thing about putting it up online is you just refer to it and we've experienced it already even with a Twitter account that started a month ago is people will comment on it and they'll say you know my grandfather did this and I was there he told me about being you know and it's just part of every family story and they talk to each other which is great right so then you get this whole conversation that's like non-toxic which is like exactly what you know so you know doing a little bit for goodness world but yes again we will be having a signing so please do stop by for the aftershop book and well on behalf of the U.S. Army Center of Military History I want to thank our cosponsors here the National Archives Mr. Ferriero for the opportunity for the event here tonight I want to thank all of our speakers as well and all of you for attending and let's have a round of applause for our panel here tonight I want to say that for more information on the Army's role in World War II and information on the Army Central Corps photographers please visit our website at history.army.mil and as it's been mentioned join us in the lobby to purchase the book and get some signatures from the authors thank you all for coming and have a great night