Front line and the home front. Aftermath ofne the war. In this veterans day tribute we remember and honor the soldier photographers who, through their images, were witness to the postwar destruction in a world forever changed. I would like to welcome leigh reynolds, strategic medications officer. He retired from the army reserve in june of 2017 with the rank of colonel with more than 35 years of military service in the active army and army reserve. Colonel reynolds deployed three times commanded the American Forces network in iraq and baghdad director of Media Operations and assistant spokesman for military commissions at guantanamo bay, cuba and was the chief of Media Operations and senior at guantanamo. An assistant professor of military science at the university of southern california. Please welcome lee reynolds. [applause] good evening. Thank you dr. And also thanks to National Archives administration for cosponsoring the event. My name is lee reynolds. The strategic medications 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, inspire to serve and preserve army heritage. I invite you to visit our. Mil to at history. Army 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 4, 2020. We are very excited about that and i think you will be too. June 4, 2020 for the National Museum of the u. S. Army. We are honored to support the 75th commemoration of world war ii with this evenings panel presentation. We are honoring world war ii soldier photographers from the armys single core collection here the national are fives. 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 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. At the end of tonights presentation we will have 20 minutes for questions and answers. Cards. Have some index if you have a question, write it down and pass it to the side. We will also supply some pencils. Signal as if you need a pencil or index card. At this time i would like to bring to the stage our panel members. [applause] i would like to introduce dr. Eric bullard, digital historian for the center of military history and the armys principal vietnam war historian. Author of a recent book about vietnam called staying the. Ourse dr. Villard. Thank you. As you heard i am a vietnam war historian. A 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 world war ii that you can find on our website. In the course of producing these, which im still doing. Its going to take a little while. A lot of research, a lot of work. One of the things i found most valuable is looking through the signal corps photographic collection. They provide such a rich source of information and tell us oh much about the experience of soldiers in the war that we could not get anywhere else. I am pleased to be moderating a panel of experts who will tell us more about this incredible part of army history, the Second World War that isnt wellknown but ought to be. I will introduce our panel members. Right,ng on the far richard k hand, a former picture editor for chicago suntimes and the author of no less than 24 photographytory and , many of them on your beloved hometown of chicago. Some more recent books to widen the aperture so to speak. For your most recent book, aftershock, which is available in our lobby and available jacobs,coauthor mark who was a former editor for 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 mr. Cannon many occasions and with you at least one occasion so we have a trio of people. Ehind this examination rebecca raines, a long serving Historian Center of military history. She was husband the branch core historian and wrote the official history of signal corps branch getting the message through. We are glad to have your expertise. A final panelist is caitlin crane an expert and world war ii photography. About how thelot collection was organized. Envious because she can rummage through those files anytime she feels like it. She could tell us a lot about how the collection came to be and how it was organized. To start, i would like to hand off to richard and mark to tell us this journey of how they came about writing and producing this book. Thank you, eric. First off i should tell you i dont think i am as much of an as a photoe says lover. People now call me a photo historian. A term i never knew existed until i heard it. I like to tell stories through photographs because i think photographs take us instantly so that wet us up can understand life events better. This book, aftershock, we started about three years ago. We wanted to do a book about world war ii. Theres an incredible collection of books about world war ii so we wanted to figure out a way i promised to turn off my cell phone and i want to keep that promise. Boy are you in trouble. So we started about three years ago. We went through the archives and decided to concentrate on 1945. First off, i should say the reason we chose the signal corps and the army, 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, the marines and the coast guard produced rate photographs we thought there was a continuity corpsn among army photographs and signal corps photographs. We decided to concentrate on 1945 because many of the still photos and films photographers took of 1940 three and 1944, the action photos we are aware of, theyve been shown in a lot of books. When 1945 came around in the war started leaning started waning theres not as much attention to this book. Frankly, its an antiwar book. Recently interviewed on the radio someone set i would be classified as a liberal because of antiwar and i suggested conservatives, the entire military, everybody who has a heart and consciousness is against the war. I dont think this book is radical in the least. I want to tell you about our journey. Men, and book about they all were were men in world war ii, who went to war with cameras instead of guns. They were provided sidearms but as every talker 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 filing mistakeey made the of saying they were interested in photography. They went through months of training to become photographers , along with becoming soldiers. Courageous. Is i believe they left an incredible gift to future generations and our generation right now, by the photographs they took of the war. They teach us the subtitle of the book is this the human toll of war. They teach us exactly that. Youes a couple miracles will be witnessing tonight. The miracle that they took the photographs, the miracle that the photographs were saved so well in the National Archives and so available and the miracle that we as a future generation appreciate them and see its importance. These are photographs of two of the photographers. I should say the man on the left , they are holding Speed Graphic cameras and those were the common cameras press photographers like you see in films, thats the kind of cameras they held. On the left hes holding a flash unit. They did use flash but not very often. As not the thing to have flash going off while you are photographing. Its important to recognize these incredible photographs were made with this really primitive these really primitive cameras that used four inch by five inch negatives and they can only put in two negatives at a time and they would have to switch to another magazine. Very different from photography today. Another miracle, not only that they took the photographs, but they were all processed. Very near the battle scene. Away from the front lines, a couple miles away but they were processed there. The film was sent to london later in the war, to paris, and they were radio transmitted back to the United States. They were used in a variety of reasons sometimes strategic. Sometimes for magazines or newspapers. They were a very important part of the war effort. If you gotten a chance to see the book and a couple of people bought it. They are available outside. What makes this book so special, couple of things. First, it focuses on 1945. The first photo in the book was taken january 1, 1945, the last was taken in the last days of december. We could not find it december 31 for the graph december 31 photograph. It showed what the war looked like at as the war ended and peace came. The clarity of the photographs. I think if you 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 a day. Thats the rule of the National Archives. My colleague Michael Williams and i did 100. They let us do 20 because we had two people. Mcconnell came to the archives, must have been for several months, and did a beautiful job of scanning 10 pictures a day. We stuck to the rule. Heres a four by five inch negative and you will see what it looks like as a positive. This is an execution of german general anton dr. December 1, 1945. It was one of our harder negatives because everything is backlit. Heres the way it looks in the book. You can see the process. The imageryshowed of the negatives, we have always edges,he ages the because we think these photos are important evidence and we wanted to show the entire negative. Oftentimes you will see on the edge of the numbers. The signal corps numbers. Those are the numbers that the National Archives still uses to find photographs. So, how do we pick up photographs . I would guess there are between fromnd 200,000 negatives 1945. We use contact sheets at first to look at what was there. Ais is an example of how contact printer is a print that is is exactly four inches by five inches, the same size of the negative. Andas taken the negatives made a print the same size. That helps a tremendous amount. We got to see the contact prints, and we got to see the backside of the contact. That gave us a sense of what pictures we thought we should use for a book. I think we had two rows, we were looking for starkly important pictures, and artistically important pictures. The book is rough. We wanted to show the human toll of war, but be looked a lot for humanity. These are the files. It was a little bit of a challenge because the world will the World War Two photos are kind of combined with the vietnam photos so you have to go through a lot of looking. At each by 10 prints to get a better idea of what the photographs look like. Looked like. You can see the difference between a picture and a scan from a negative. What we are seeing is are images that, many of them have never been seen before, but even the ones that have been published, the very famous pictures, they have never been seen like this. They have always been seen from prints. Cantenlarged images stand up to scanners. Negatives, which are filled with information, and scanners love each other. S is really a book of make 1945 and 2019. Am i pointing the right way . Yikes. I dont want to go back. Lets just try. We started to find subject areas. We were looking for humanity to include in the book. That let us us to pictures like this which is a remarkable picture from the philippines. Japanese soldier and a woman. They were hiding out after battle. Captured, they profess their love for each other. This is an american chaplain marrying a japanese woman. You can see the soldier in the back playing the accordion. We were always on the lookout for that. Lets see. I am going to go back. Next, we started to tell the story of the single photographic companies we left still photos and we went into the main text area and looked up the seven companies everything they had. You can see there was i dont think you can see this. There was a large learning curve. I think i got everything wrong on this request. They even change my name. Location, it talked about how helpful the archive was. Even helping a newbie like you. I should mention that the scanner and the negative is open to anybody. Who walks and can scan 10 photographs today. These are some of the items that we found in the text. We found your books. We found morning reports. We found newspapers. It was incredibly helpful in telling the story of the men who were the photographers. We started with the photographs, and then we really went after the men who took the photographs. That became an important project. There were about 70 photographers who took 300 pictures. We tracked down the story of almost every one of the photographers. Everyone had passed away. There are a couple of core photographers to live, but imagine 75 years later, there were generally 25. We talked to each of the families, and i cant tell you how proud they are their parents because they went to war with courage and left an important record. Lets see. Ok. Our cover photo. I think this goes great with the title of aftershock. This is pfc. Jack, a pennsylvania kid who was an interest tree soldier endless an infantry soldier and captured. He was taken back to germany to work slave labor. After a month, he escaped with a comrade. He hid in a house in germany. An officer came in. He hid in a fruit cellar. As the allies were coming through, they found him there and this is him right after that. He is wearing the cap of the german officer who he killed. He has got this thousand yard stare. He has the most exhausted face i had ever seen. He looks like he has been what the whole world had been through. We tracked down jacks family and they shared a memoir he had written that described his entire ordeal. We use that in the book. Just to be clear, the signal core photographers were on the run a lot. They were not trained journalists. Be clear that the captions really stunk. They were pretty terrible and we had to do a lot of investigation to find out all kinds of things. We had to work hard at that. Didnt just want to have death and destruction. There was plenty of death and destruction 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 without terrible total war had been over five or six years. 314yearold german kids who had enlisted in the military because germans didnt have anyone left at that time. We love this picture. Right, he had must that she must have been issued that overcooked because he has the button on the wrong button. They were captured fast. Again, we wanted to find unusual pictures. This is one of my favorites. It shows a man who is missing a limb demonstrating how to write hadke for gis who have limbs amputated because of the war. He is showing them how they can write a bike without arms or likes. This is the german city. Single american g. I. Walking through this devastated city. The extent of the devastation of some of these cities in asia and philippines, all over the place is amazing. Not sure why i did that. The reason that scanning these negatives made a difference. You see so much definition in these half demolished buildings. The odd thing is, when we were working on the bark the book, written by i would say that is a beautiful picture. Some of these pictures really are beautiful. It was odd because these are pictures of ugliness too. They were so beautifully taken by these photographers. These are troops who have been wounded in some way and they are being lowered into a Landing Craft from an aircraft carrier. Will see quiteu a few pictures of injured soldiers. You will 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 31, civilians and soldiers. Totals the thing about war. One of the points want to make is that nobody is spared. Of the most devastating scenes. This is manila, manila, the philippines. The guy in the crutches is one of the 30 japanese soldiers who surrendered. The rest fought to the death. In thehting, even philippines was some of the toughest of the pacific war. I love this picture. It is so sad. These are chinese who have returned to the philippines to collect the skulls and bones the remains of their love for ones. Loved ones. The rains are the remains are from the chinese diplomatic corps that remained when the japanese invaded. The japanese invaded in 1941, the americans left, macarthur and the rest of most americans left. There were still some holdouts. Takethur volunteered to the chinese diplomats with him. They said no, we have to stay. There are 100,000 Ethnic Chinese on manila. The japanese demanded the counselor staff collect a gigantic amount of money from all of these Ethnic Chinese on the islands. The diplomats refuse. They were executed. Ther families stayed in philippines for the entire war without knowing the fate of their loved ones. They did not find that out for sure until the americans recaptured the philippines. We were able to track down the daughter of the general the chinese counsel general were who were among the remains there. She is living in new york city now. She became an american citizen and had a career in publishing. Herracked her down, i asked if she had ever seen this picture. She said no, she had never seen the picture before. I said your fathers remains are there. She said i presume so. She said her mom was not in this picture because they had already left the United States. She said she could identify every person in the picture. A historian during a history book and youre t