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 th