Female Announcer: Form the Library of Congress in Washington,
D.C. John Cole: Welcome to the Library of Congress (Library).
I'm John Cole.
I'm the director for the Center of the Book in the Library
and I'm pleased to welcome you to another in our series of "Books
and Beyond" talks about volumes and authors who are based at the Library
of Congress, both the collections and, in this case, the authors.
The "Books and Beyond" series does focus on any kinds of books
that have a Library of Congress connection and it's a real pleasure
to be able to really get down to the raw stuff here,
looking at the materials in the Library of Congress that relate,
in this case, to World War II.
Before I introduce our speakers, I want to say a couple
of points about our presentation.
First of all, we'd like you to turn off all things electronic.
We are filming this presentation, as we do other presentations,
for later viewing and hearing on the Library of Congress website.
Secondly, we are going to have book sales,
but the book sales will be starting after the presentation begins,
and they will continue afterwards.
And the signing -- you'll be able to buy the books -- sorry.
[inaudible] Okay.
You'll be able to purchase the books outside
and come back in to have them signed.
What we're celebrating today is really not only the Library
of Congress, the book "365 Days," talking about World War II,
but also books that are part of a continuum,
and in many ways it is a continuum that has been anchored and sparked
by the chief editor and organizer of today's volume
and three previous volumes that I've hauled out of my office in order
to take a look, quickly, at our resources.
Today's book, "World War II: 365 Days," has been preceded
by projects organized by senior editor Margaret,
also known as Peggy, Wagner, in the Publishing Office.
Peggy, since I've -- we are old friends, and I've known Peggy
as sort of the war expert in Library of Congress resources
and she certainly has proven that just in recent years,
not only with this book, but with "The Library
of Congress World War II Companion," which was published
by Simon and Schuster in 2007.
Again, Peggy is the lead editor, but she organizes teams
to put these books together,
and it's really quite a remarkable achievement.
And certain members of the teams are in the audience today,
but we won't break that down.
She brings in the resources that are needed to do the job.
Previously, Peggy pulled together a book called the
"Civil War Desk Reference," which was published in 2002 by Stonesong,
and its companion volume is the preceder [sic] actually --
the volume preceding this particular three --
it's "The Civil War: 365 Days."
So, you have before you quite an organized effort at looking
at the Library of Congress's resources
and putting them into book form.
Peggy herself has been an editor here for a number of years.
She has worked with many staff members and,
outside of these four books which we will be celebrating today,
particularly looking at the World War II books,
I also want to thank her for being the editor for a couple
of my books through the years.
And that was a way that I learned to be the meticulous writer
that I now am, by having an editor like Peggy.
Peggy is joined today by Athena Angelos from the Publishing Office
who is the -- really a picture editor, and I've worked with Athena
in the past, and Tom Wiener from the Veterans History office,
who is going to be our third and final speaker.
But we're going to start with Peggy Wagner,
who has a prepared presentation and she has assured me
that this has been -- it's a well-edited presentation
and that it will go quickly and I'm pleased
to present Margaret "Peggy" Wagner.
Peggy? [applause] Do you want this book here?
Peggy Wagner: No, I've got it.   John Cole: Okay.
You've seen it?   Peggy Wagner: I have seen it, yes.
Thank you very much.
My first question is can you all hear me?
Good. I want to thank John, and I'd also like to thank Anne Boni
and Staceya Sistare and Guy Lamolinara of the Center
for the Book's dauntless team for co-sponsoring this event
and for scheduling it so appropriately close
to the Memorial Day commemoration.
I'd also like to salute my Publishing Office colleagues sitting
over there.
They are, themselves, a great team, and, as John mentioned,
many of them worked with me, as did Athena,
on some of these other books that we produced.
This, I should explain, that the image up on the screen --
someone just asked me if it was the cover of the book, and it is not.
It is the title page of the book.   It's an image that's so very strong.
It's from our Prints and Photographs collections and the designer
of the book liked it so much that he put it
as the title page of the book.
I am going to start our presentation tonight -- or this afternoon--
by introducing you to a person that I've come to think
of as a respected acquaintance, even though,
regretfully, I have never met him.
This is World War II U.S. Marine Eugene Sledge.
In the year 2002, his second volume
of World War II memoirs was published posthumously.
His first book, "With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa,"
is justly considered a classic.
But, in the second volume, "China Marine," Sledge said something
about his experience getting back into civilian life right
after the Second World War that made a very big impression on me,
and I included this quotation in the book.
"I was totally unprepared for how rapidly most Americans
who did not experience combat would forget about the war,
the evils we faced and how incredibly tough it had been for us
to defeat the Japanese and the Nazis,"
he wrote after describing an encounter
with a particularly obtuse college registrar.
"I felt like some sort of an alien and I realized that this sort
of thing would confront me for the rest of my life."
World War II is much farther away now.
It's much more difficult for us to look beyond the myths
and misapprehensions and glimpse the terrors and complexities
of this huge conflict that changed the world
and profoundly altered the role of the United States within it.
It was most appropriate, then, for the Library of Congress,
the Nation's memory, repository of vast World War II materials and home
of the Veterans History Project, to collaborate with Harry N. Abrams
in the publication of this aptly-nicknamed "brick book," which,
as you'll find out when you pick it up, is good for muscle tone
as well as the mind [laughs].
It holds, by recent official count 571 illustrations,
almost all of them drawn from the LC collections which were, of course,
also the principle source for the many quotations
from wartime figures, both celebrated and unsung,
that lace through the text.
You'll meet only a very few of these individuals
in the warp-speed chapter-by-chapter tour that I'm about to take you
through before turning the proceedings
over to Athena Angelos and then Tom Wiener.
Please bear two things in mind: first, all of the illustrations
that you'll see are in the book, but in preparing for this presentation,
we both downloaded and scanned so that the images on the screen are
of a variety of qualities.   The images in the book, however,
are all uniformly beautifully reproduced.
Second, each chapter in the book covers a wide variety
of events and aspects of the war.
Much, much more than we can talk about this afternoon.
In keeping with the general 365 days format, which is the format
that Abrams adopts for all their brick books,
the book is arranged into 12 chapters.
The first of these, "Prelude," reviews the events
and conditions that lead to the war.
World War II began only about two decades after the conclusion
of what was once called the Great War of 1914-1918.
A conflict considered so horrible by those who survived it,
that they believed it had to be the war to end all wars.
This prayer, published in 1924 by the Women's Pro-League
of Nations Council of New York, reflects the determination
of so many people around the world to find a path to permanent peace.
The prayer reads in part, "Grant unto us such clear vision of the sin
of war that we may earnestly seek that cooperation between nations
which alone can make war impossible."
Cooperation was not foremost in all minds, however.
It was in part the reverberations from what we now call World War I,
exacerbated by the traumas of the world-wide Great Depression,
that lead to the rise of Benito Mussolini and the Fascists in Italy
and Adolph Hitler and the Nazis in Germany.
Here we see Hitler, in the center in a dark suit,
and Mussolini in his characteristic hands-on-hips pose in 1934,
during the political courtship that preceded formation
of what Mussolini dubbed "the Axis Alliance."
By the 1930's, as Italy invaded Ethiopia, and both Italy
and Germany brutally intervened in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939,
the military had become the most powerful force in Japan.
Where many had come to resent Western attitudes reflected
in such actions as passage of the U.S. Oriental Exclusion Act in 1924.
In this 1941 image, published in Tokyo, Emperor Hirohito
on a white horse reviews his troops as Japan embarks on a quest
to establish its own empire in the East as a source of economic
and political power and as a means
of breaking Western influence in Asia.
The next chapter, "Wars East and West,"
covers the trauma-filled years 1937-1939, when the world,
still struggling with the effects of the Great Depression,
saw full-scale war break out between Japan and China in July 1937.
The Japanese believed that this would be a short
and profitable conflict.
It was to last for eight devastating years.
Here, artist -- Japanese artist Tenkyo Ohta depicts the Shanghai
conflagration, a scene from only one three-month battle in 1937.
This battle killed hundreds of thousands of people,
In Spain, Hitler's Luftwaffe led the merciless aerial bombing attack
on the Basque city of Guernica in April 1937,
a raid that appalled the international community and did much
to bring anti-fascists from around the world to fight
against Spain's Fascist leader, Francisco Franco,
and his German and Italian allies.
Nurse Solaria Kee, whose picture you see here,
served with the American Medical Bureau in Spain.
Wounded and furloughed home,
she later traveled throughout the U.S. urging African Americans
to support the anti-fascist forces fighting what she termed "the enemy
of all racial minorities-- fascism--
and its most aggressive exponents-- Italy and Germany."
In the meantime, Hitler continued the political maneuvering
that resulted in the creation of so-called Greater Germany,
as Austria then Czechoslovakia fell under Nazi control.
Then, in September -- on Sept.
1, 1939, the German fhrer launched a full-scale military attack
against his next target, Poland, portrayed in this poster
by Polish-American artist Arthur Szyk
as St. George battling a dragon.
The attack on Poland led Britain and France to declare war on Germany.
Americans now looked with apprehension
at the conflicts blazing across both their flanking oceans.
"Blitzkrieg!"
covers the tumultuous year 1940, when in April
and May Hitler emphatically ended the relatively peaceful
"Phony War" period by first invading Denmark and Norway,
and then making the big push into the Low Countries in France.
That push was so successful [that] the fall of France,
a supposedly well-armed and invincible country,
was particularly shocking, [so] that masses of people began
to believe the highly-exaggerated rumors
about a so-called fifth column of spies and sympathizers
who helped the German invader.
The British, who now stood alone against the Nazis
and faced the threat of imminent invasion,
began wondering what the 60 to 75 thousand Germans, Austrians,
and Italians then living in Britain might do.
In June, their fifth column fears led them to intern thousands
of aliens, including Jewish refugees from Germany,
some of them in cordoned off townships
like the one you see pictured here.
That same month, the United States passed a controversial piece
of legislation, the Alien Registration Act, or Smith Act,
required the registration and fingerprinting
of all aliens living in the United States.
An even more controversial piece
of legislation was enacted a few months later.
Condemned by its opponents as legislation
that would subject American youth to syphilis and slavery,
the Selective Service Act of September 1940,
instituted the first peacetime draft in U.S. history.
Here, Gen. Louis B. Hershey participates
in a Selective Service lottery in Washington,
D.C. "A Global Conflict" covers the year 1941.
For 11 months of that year the U.S. remained officially non-combatant.
But a few American aviators, including these men,
photographed in March 1941, and all of them are identified in the book,
bucked official U.S. neutrality by joining the British Royal Air Force,
which formed three all-American Eagle Squadrons.
Generally, however, Americans still hoped to stay
out of the shooting war, although they were increasingly more willing
to support those fighting the Axis by measures short of war,
including through the Lend-Lease program,
which was established in March.
The chapter looks at battlefield action in North Africa and Greece,
where this picture was taken, and at Hitler's abrupt termination
of his brief and world-shocking alliance with the Soviet Union
by means of a massive German invasion
of that huge country on June 22.
It also traces the political negotiations and military planning
in both the United States and Japan
that preceded Japan's surprise attack on the U.S. Naval Base
at Pearl Harbor, where this picture was taken
of the burning battleship, USS West Virginia.
That attack instantly transformed the United States
into a combatant in, what was, now, a global war.
"
[Interlude:] Allies versus the Axis" is one of several thematic chapters,
or interludes, each of which examines a particular aspect
of the war, rather than the events of a specific year or years.
This chapter looks at some of the major characters involved in,
and some of the differences and different characteristics
of the Allied and Axis alliances.
In this May 1942 drawing, "United Nations," Miguel Covarrubias depicts
in glowing colors the leaders of 26 Allied nations
that had signed the declaration by the United Nations that January,
featuring front and center, in the first row, " the big two" --
Roosevelt and Churchill, flanked by Chiang Kai-shek
and Josef Stalin who, with them, made up,
Artist Saul Steinberg forswore color and used wry humor
to depict Axis leaders in this drawing titled "Balance of Nations."
Each leader [is] doing his own thing as the group hangs together
over a very un-firm foundation consisting of a keg of dynamite,
a rifle, and a cannonball with a lit fuse --
materials appropriate to both their internal and external relations.
Yet, in the beginning, the Axis seemed absolutely invincible.
"Axis Ascendant" outlines the events of 1942,
as Germany's Wehrmacht maintained its stranglehold in Western Europe
and forced its way deeper into the Soviet Union
and the Japanese captured one Allied bastion after the other.
Suffering bitter losses in the Pacific, from the Philippines
to Guam, the United States scrambled to field and train armed forces
and accelerate the building of ships and planes that would be used
to deploy them around the world.
At the same time, fears of a Japanese landing on the West Coast,
racial prejudice, and apprehensions about fifth column activity,
contributed to a decision for which the United States government has
since attempted to make amends.
After President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19,
more than 100,000 West Coast Japanese and Japanese Americans,
including this family being forced from their home
on Bainbridge Island, Washington,
were interned in camps under military guard.
Of course, the Japanese never even attempted a West Coast landing --
although some of their submarines did take potshots at the coast --
and the United States gradually mustered its forces and began
to strike back at Japan and its Axis partners.
American submarines were in Japanese waters in January.
In April, Jimmy Doolittle led his famous bombing raid against Tokyo;
in early August U.S. Marines landed on Guadalcanal
in the Solomon Islands and, on November 8,
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower headed the first large-scale combined
Anglo-American operation of the war,
when the largest amphibious invasion force in history to that time swept
into western North Africa.
Here we see GIs battling snipers on the street of Algiers.
The second interlude, "
[Interlude:] Total War," focuses on the conflicts pervasiveness,
reaching into nearly every aspect of life.
This 1942 photograph by Arthur Rothstein of a mural
in New York City's Grand Central Station represents,
among many other things,
the staggering economic cost of the conflict.
Aerial warfare, which was in its infancy during the 1914-18 conflict,
came into full and massively destructive flower during World War
II, and it is a presence in every chapter of this book.
Early on, it was by no means certain
that the United States mainland would escape the kind
of aerial bombardment that the Axis had visited on cities from London
and Belgrade to Chungking.
Thus, camouflage, a wartime art form around the world,
became an art form practiced here too.
This 1943 photo by Marjory Collins shows a camouflage class
Beyond and behind the war of bombs and bullets, World War II was fought
in libraries and radio stations, hospitals and science labs, on farms
and in factories, and, as this poster
for a somewhat less-that-classic British movie,
and Japanese artist Shunsui Higashimoto's depiction
of people watching a newsreel attest on movie screens.
"The Tide Begins to Turn" covers events in 1943.
As fighting continued in the China-Burma-India theater,
the Allies maintained their long campaign in New Guinea.
While their naval and ground forces kept pushing slowly from island
to island in the Pacific, painfully and at enormous cost.
This photo shows U.S. Marines slogging
through knee-deep mud in Bougainville.
Mud, bugs, razor sharp grass and disease were additional enemies
that both sides had to fight in the Pacific campaign.
In Europe, the Red Army achieved one of the turning points of the war
with their hard-won victory at Stalingrad, and followed that up
with a victory at the Battle of Kursk,
which included the war's larges clash of armored forces.
This vivid sketch of one of Hitler's tanks in action is
by German war correspondent Hans Liska.
Farther south, after the Allies pushed Axis forces
out of North Africa and liberated Sicily, Mussolini's government fell.
Hitler rushed major reinforcements to Italy,
assuring that the Allies would face a long and difficult campaign
after they made their initial landings there in September.
Two African American units of the segregated American Armed Forces,
the 92nd Infantry Division and the 332nd Fighter Group,
served with valor in Italy, fighting racial prejudice
at the same time they were battling the Nazis.
Meanwhile, racial tensions also resulted in fighting
on the U.S. home front where, in 1943, race riots erupted
on military bases from Georgia to California,
among civilians [clears throat], excuse me, in Mobile, Ala.,
Beaumont, Texas, and, most bloodily -- in Detroit, and between civilians
and off-duty soldiers and sailors in the notorious Zoot Suit Riots
in Los Angeles, during which this picture was taken.
Excuse me one moment.
"The Allies Close In" considers the pivotal year 1944,
a year of important and very risky Allied landings.
January saw the start of a bitter months-long campaign
to take the town of Casino, Italy,
and adjacent Monastery Hill, during which Pfc.
Peter Sanfilippo created this watercolor depiction
of a hit on an ammunition dump.
In June, the Allies enjoyed a wild Italian welcome when they took Rome.
But news of that victory was quickly eclipsed by word
that the long-awaited Allied invasion
of France had at last begun.
D-Day, June 6, was an all-out gamble made successful by the courage
and tenacity of Allied troops in the face
of what American D-Day veteran Tracy Sugarman has termed
"a deadly tapestry of chaos and carnage."
Twenty-one-year-old Pfc.
Jesse Beazley survived the landing on what came to be known
as Bloody Omaha Beach, where Walter Rosenblum took this picture
of men attempting to help some of the thousands of wounded.
Beazley later recalled seeing horribly wounded soldiers begging
for help.
"They'd just look at you with a pitiful look," he said,
"because you couldn't do nothing for them.
There was mortar shells coming in on us, artillery shells,
machine gun fire, everything imaginable, right on you."
That fall, Gen. Douglas MacArthur began to make good his pledge
to retake the Philippines with landings at the Island of Leyte,
where a U.S. Coast Guard photographer took this photo
of men unloading landing ship tanks, or LSTs.
This was only the very first step in a difficult
and staggeringly costly campaign that was to last well
into the summer of 1945, as other Axis forces continued their perilous
progress toward Japan.   "
[Interlude:] The Most Terrible Conflict" focuses
on the multiple costs and horrors of the war, from the ravages
of the battlefield and the almost unimaginable firestorms caused
by massive aerial bombing, through the sufferings of military prisoners
of war and people forced to live to live under Axis occupation,
to war crimes and the unprecedented crime
against humanity now known as the Holocaust.
The grimness of this chapter --
perfectly represented by Beatrice S. Levy's1943 print "River of Blood" --
is alleviated by examples of inventiveness,
"Unconditional Surrenders" outlines the events of 1945.
This photo by Toni Frissell of U.S. GIs grabbing a few minutes' rest
in Western Europe representing all the bone-tired members
of Allied armed forces who began the year still slugging it
out with Axis troops from Italy to Okinawa.
In the spring, not long before Hitler's suicide
and Germany's surrender, U.S. troops began opening the gates
of Nazi concentration camps and seeing
for themselves the irrefutable evidence of this slave labor
and organized mass murder that were the hallmark
of the Third Reich's so-called New Order in Europe.
This photo of liberated inmates
of the Ebensee Concentration Camp was taken
by S. Sgt. Charles M. Amsler of the U.S Third Army Medical Corps.
After the Germans surrender, many GIs were slated to be transferred
to the Pacific, to join
in what Allied war planners expected would be a prolonged
and bloody campaign to take the Japanese home islands,
set to commence in November.
But months of conventional bombing and two atomic bombs brought the war
in Asia to a close in August.
U.S. Navy Lt. Robert L. Balfour was present
at the main surrender ceremony aboard the battleship USS Missouri
in Tokyo Bay, and he received this certificate
to commemorate the occasion.
The main shooting war was over, but much of the world was
in terrible shape, physically, and economically.
In some regions, civil wars
or nationalist uprisings had already begun, or were on the verge
of breaking out, and there was a deepening and dangerous rift
between the Western powers and the Soviet Union.
The book concludes ["Aftermath"] with a consideration
of the continuing aftermath of the war.
In addition to the economic and political reverberations,
there were, of course, more personal aftereffects.
I had not intended to do this.
These photographs show some of the remarkable work done
by U.S. Army surgeons, but they cannot show us the mind
or emotions of this wounded man.
USO sketch artist Mimi Korach Lesser,
who drew the portrait of Pfc.
Oakley Gifford, on the right, provided a testament to the spirit
of similarly wounded men when she reported on her experience
in a hospital specializing in plastic surgery.
"The veterans were disbelieving that an artist would want to draw them,"
she said, "so it took great daring for a GI
with half his face disfigured to approach me with bravado
and ask what I was going to do about him.
Posing him with his good side facing me,
I was able to sketch what his face would look
like after rehabilitation was complete.
Talk about success.
This opened up a stream of eager, brave, sad men.
Now they could have pictures sent
to their loved ones that were positive."
"World War II: 365 Days" ends with this photo of veterans Richard Cozad
and Kenneth Johnson, taken by L.C. staff member Michaela McNichols
at the dedication of the World War II Veterans Memorial
on Memorial Day weekend, 2004.
Two years later, a number of U.S. World War II vets traveled to France
to attend the ceremonies commemorating the 60th anniversary
"To see this beach [clears throat], to see this beach
where many friends lost their lives gives me chills,"
veteran Ken Ewing told an Associated Press interviewer,
"and it makes me think we should never forget.
We must never forget."
And now I'd like to turn the podium over to Athena.
[applause] Athena Angelos: All right, thanks everyone
for coming this afternoon.
I want to especially thank John Y. Cole from the Center for the Book
for hosting this and many other interesting events here
at the Library.
Also, thanks to Tom Wiener from the Veterans History Project,
who will be up right after me.
I also have to thank everyone from the Publishing Office.
It's a wonderful group of people that are always very supportive
and full of good cheer, and this project was done
on a very short timeframe, so all the help
that we got was greatly appreciated.
This book would not have been possible without the many talents
and collections acumen of the many librarians, reference staff,
cataloguers, and digital imaging experts, especially of the Prints
and Photographs division.
I'm especially grateful to Margaret E. Wagner for inviting me
to join her on this terrifically challenging
and extremely rewarding collaboration.
I'll give you a second to look at that.
So, this cartoon is not in our book, but I think it captures how Peggy
and I felt at times towards the challenge before us:
that of telling the story of World War II as completely, accurately,
and compassionately as we could in pictures
and in words -- in 365 increments.
While 365 pages may seem like a lot more
than what Peppermint Patty got here,
Peggy and I can still confirm that it's Peanuts.
I married a punner.
This is especially true when culling from the vast
and diverse collections of the Library of Congress.
Today I'd like to share a bit about our collaborative process
of researching, selecting, and arranging what turned out to be,
as Peggy said, 571 images used in this book.
I'll also highlight some of the sources and collections
that were especially useful.
I won't go into much detail about specific people and events,
because I think Peggy's wonderful text does that,
and we hope you'll buy the book.
This next image -- this was also not in the book,
but I think it can be good to see what didn't make it.
I -- as an image researcher and the picture editor,
I'm drawn toward the weird and wacky, like this coconut portrait
of Hitler, and, fortunately Peggy, who is a linear thinker unlike me,
knew when a traditional portrait like this one of Spaatz and Eaker,
might better serve to carry our more serious narrative.
Peggy Wagner: But I liked the coconut.
Athena Angelos: She liked the coconut.
We're going to get the coconut into something.
And thoughtful collaboration is a wonderful thing.
Here, sandwiched between Gen. Stillwell
and Lt. Gen. Wedemeyer is this fun minimalist line drawing
of Chiang Kai-shek, by the artist Covarrubias.
At the start of this project, we already had a sizeable collection
of material that we either hadn't been able to include
in earlier World War II projects, or that we hadn't been able to show
in color, and here's an example of some leaflets that were produced
by the U.S. Army Psychological Warfare Branch in 1944,
and distributed in the Pacific Theater.
Next is a -- this is the black and white version
of a silkscreen entitled "Fascism,"
and it's from the collection called the -
"From the Artists for Victory" exhibition.
And this is the earlier scan that you would have seen online
for many years, and here's the color version that we were able
to reproduce in the book.   If you haven't already noticed,
Peggy and I have very different styles of thinking and of taking
in information, but I really believe
that our different approaches only added
to the richness of this very heavy book.
While we think all the images are strong, we hope you'll agree
that the spreads, often combining different media,
result in visually dynamic
and contextually more complex presentations.
Some of these can be seen without use of posters and other media.
So, here we have a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) poster
on the left and a nice photograph of Roosevelt
and other officials enjoying a lunch hosted at a CCC camp.
This next spread, from the "Blitzkrieg!"
chapter, show a soldier drawn by a German-Jewish refugee child,
juxtaposed with a 1940 German poster that,
according to the cataloging translation, which I trust,
accuses the Jews of starting the war and of perpetuating it.
[The] Prints and Photographs Division has an excellent collection
of World War II era posters covering a variety
of promotional goals from all over the world.
Here's one from Russia that we used in the
"Unconditional Surrenders" chapter.
The translation of the text is "So it will be with the Fascist beast."
This poster, also used in the "Blitzkrieg!"
chapter, depicting the tragedy near Iran-Algeria, which Peggy spoke
of -- we were just amazed when this dramatic French poster was
discovered by Jan Grenci of the Prints and Photographs Division.
I couldn't find a photograph depicting this exact occurrence,
and we were just so pleased because I think the drama relayed
in the poster is much better
than a black-and-white photograph would have been.
This is also a Jan Grenci find.   The request I gave her was,
"bring out the weirdest World War II material you can find," and she came
up with this and I think it kind of speaks for itself.
It's a 1943 poster produced by the California Dairy Council.
Next, I'll talk a little bit about photography.
The following three images are from the Farm Security Administration,
Office of War Information Collection,
that forms an extensive pictorial record
of American life between 1935 and '44.
In total, the black and white portion of the collection consists
of about 171,000 black-and- white film negatives,
all of which can be viewed online.
Here, we have the Dorothea Lange photograph
of a migratory field worker and his children
at their home in California.
This is used in the chapter that covers 1937 to '39.
This is an official Navy photo of a convoy
that was transferred to the OWI in 1944.
And this, used in "The Allies Close In" chapter,
is a 1944 photograph featuring first lady Eleanor Roosevelt enjoying a
concert being given by Pete Seeger at the opening
of a United Labor canteen union in Washington.
Another source of photography that I really like working with is the
"New York World Telegram and Sun" collection.
Among the tens of thousands of prints that ran
in the newspaper during the war years, many of them came
from the Army Signal Corps or other government sources,
although I find them somewhat easier to find in the
"New York World" collection than at the National Archives.
The collection also includes many wire service images.
This one shows -- this is a Signal Corps picture
of a Japanese Imperial Army commander
as he's boarding the USS Missouri in September of 1945.
That's, of course, in the "Surrender" chapter.
This next shot is by a New York World staff photographer
and it shows the happy, homebound troops arriving in New York Harbor
in 1945, and this was also in the "Aftermath" chapter.
And I love this spread.   Here we have a 1951 photograph
of an Italian model showing off her atomic hairdo, and it's paired
with the 1951 "Atomic Bombing Care" children's picture box,
which the little knobs on the side you could wind and scroll through,
matching up pictures and words to learn good bomb shelter behavior.
Also, obviously strong for World War II material
from the German perspective is the Library's Third Reich collection.
If you enter "Third Reich collection" in the Prints
and Photographs online catalog, you'll discover over 500 entries,
most of which represent sets of images or multiple albums,
documenting most aspects of the Nazi regime.
Along with books and other printed materials that make
up the so-called Hitler Library, these items were confiscated
by U.S. military intelligence authorities
and delivered to the Library in 1946.
Here's Hitler and his gang inspecting the newly-conquered city
of Paris in 1940.   And I also really like this spread.
On the left is a collage --
artwork by a child that's part of a collection of birthday greetings
that were made for Hitler for his 44th birthday.
And on the right is a photograph from a sort
of a commemorative Nazi album that is
in the Rare Book [and Special Collections] Division and the Prints
and Photographs Division.
I'll quickly also share a little bit about some
of the cartoon art that we used.
The Library of Congress is the proud keeper of the papers of
and 1,700 original drawings by the beloved Bill Malden,
Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and Purple Heart recipient.
Here he is on the right in a Stars and Stripes office in Rome
and the title of this cartoon is "The Prince and the Pauper."
This caricature of Stalin
by the very talented German artist Josef Plank,
also known as Seppla was used in the "Wars East and West" chapter.
The translation of the title is "Reverie at a Moscow Fireplace."
I also really like this spread.
On the left is a WPA poster for a "Civil Liberties
in Wartimes" lecture in Iowa,
and on the right is a William Gropper cartoon depicting Lady
Liberty being fingerprinted.
Before I leave the Prints and Photographs Division,
I'll quickly share three more of our favorite spreads.
Used in "War's East and West," a photo of Orson Welles on the left,
who broadcast "The War of the Worlds" written by H.G. Wells,
who is rendered in right in a pastel drawing.
Here we have a Toni Frissell photograph paired
with a + lithograph, both illustrating home front experiences.
And lastly, from "The Tide Begins to Turn" chapter,
this surreal charcoal drawing
by American folk artist John Kratky relating to the politics
of Burma along with a New York World photo
of wounded Chindit raiders returning from the Burma campaign in 1943.
Next, I'll show you two examples of visual material
from the General Collections.   This is a great chart illustration
from a Japanese publication "Victory on the March."
Sometimes the art work was on the outside.
Here are two colorful soft-backed book covers
that worked well together in the Total War section.
We, of course, used several items from the Geography and Map Division.
To help illustrate "The Allies Close In" is this commemorative map
of the 743rd Battalion's first 48 days at Normandy.
There's a lot of really interesting information included in there.
And here -- this spread shows another Toni Frissell photograph
of pilots receiving their precautionary escape kits
that included the plane card escape maps
that you see being demonstrated on the left.
Finally, before I turn this over to Tom Wiener
from the Veterans History Project, I'll show a few examples
from that really special collection.
This is a hand-drawn map by veteran James Brown,
recounting his experiences on Tarua and it is very clean in the book --
all that tiny handwriting.
This is a self-portrait and very lively drawing by noted author,
illustrated and friend of the Library --
the charming and esteemed Tracy Sugarman.
And, in closing -- that went fast --
in closing, I'd like to thank everyone again
and express my gratitude for being a part of this amazing project.
I have a really great job, and the creation of this book
with Peggy proved to be a powerful reminder
that no matter how well we think we know our history,
there are always other angles, through words and images,
to be explored and considered.
It seems fitting that I end with an image near and dear to me and one
which I hope, along with many other photos and several hundred letters,
will someday be part of the Veterans History Project.
This last snapshot includes my mother,
the then 23-year old Mary Catherine McGarr, second from the right,
along with some of her Army Nurse Corps comrades
of the 124th Evacuation Hospital, somewhere in France in July of 1945.
Thanks again so much for coming today.
Please buy the book, and here's Tom.
[applause] Tom Wiener: Thank you, Dr. Billington.
Good friend of the Veterans History Project, giving us our time.
I'm happy to be here and I'm very grateful to Margaret and to Athena
for inviting me to be part of this program.
I just want to talk a little bit about who we are.
I think probably 99 percent of the people in this room know who we are,
but for the one person who doesn't
or has a vague idea what the Veterans History project does,
we collect the first-hand accounts of the veterans who served
in the uniforms of the Unites States Armed Services from World War I
through the current wars.
We were created by Congress in the year 2000.
A congressman came up with the idea, Ron Kind of Wisconsin.
We started out as an oral history project.
We soon expanded into collecting letters, diaries, memoirs,
photographs, two-dimensional artwork.
We do not collect medals.   We do not collect uniforms.
We don't collect artifacts.
We collect first-hand accounts of service in all of those wars but,
of course, most especially World War II.
We have over 65,000 individual collections.
Of those 65,000, over 6,000 are fully digitized,
which means that the materials are available on our website
for your examination and I'm going to give a little demo of our website
to show you how to find it.
First of all, you can find it through the Library
on Congress's home page here.
We get a little billing up at the top there.
So, you can click on that and go to our home page.
And on our home page, we have information about the project,
how to participate in the project.
The project, as most of you know, is a volunteer-based project.
We have people all over the country in organizations,
like Loudon Valley High School, which is represented here
by Marty Potts, a teacher at the high school.
Her club out there interviews veterans.
We also have civic organizations,
veterans' service organizations, and also individuals.
Most of our collections are one of a kind, one-off collections that come
from people who say, "I want to sit down with my uncle, my husband,
my grandfather and talk to him.
Or to my grandmother, my aunt, or my niece about what they did
when they served the United States Armed Forces in wartime."
So, if you go to our website, you can figure out how to participate
in the project, how you can get involved in the project.
You can also pick up one of our brochures from the table here
or the table in the corner and learn more about the project.
You can also search the Veterans collections from the home page,
and this is probably how Peggy and Athena did a lot
of their research, starting from here.
You can find out, for instance, if you just limit your search
to World War II, that we have 39,551 collections from World War II.
Now, you can also refine that search.
Say you want all the people who served in the Navy in World War II,
and so you can find out that we have 9,150 people who served in the Navy.
How many of those are digitized?
Well, you can limit it to that, as well, and we have 838 digitized,
Navy, World War II collections.   I can go on and on here.
There's lots of different ways to slice this, but you get the idea
that you can do kind of broad searches from this page.
You can also do some interesting browsing.
For instance, you can find out state of residence.
How many collections do we have from people who were living in the state
of Maine, for instance, when they were interviewed for the project?
148. That's, you know, out of 65,000;
and from the District of Columbia?
292. Also, on this browse page, you can search by race and ethnicity.
So, you can find out how many black and African Americans.
Now, I should tell you that this is a voluntary category
on our biographical data form.
When you turn in a collection, you are to fill
out a biographical data form
with all the information about your service.
This is a voluntary designation.   We are urging people to fill this
in because it gives us a more accurate portrayal of who served.
But, you can see we have 1,280 collections of black
and African Americans in World War II.
Another way you can look at the collections is
through our Experiencing War feature.
Every couple of months, we choose a common theme and we select a dozen
or so collections from that theme to feature.
Our current theme is disabled veterans
and there are several World War II vets in here,
including Franklin Nicholson, who was wounded on Okinawa
in the final days of that campaign,
and his face was severely injured while he was on Okinawa,
and went through life with a reconstruction and is
in great shape now and did a great interview.
We're going -- we also have other collections.
As you see, we've done 24 previous releases,
including a couple of World War II.
D-Day Anniversary, which we did in 2004.
We're going to update that, and do a 65th Anniversary next week.
Among the D-Day collections --
let's see, I think Tracy's in here somewhere.
There he is.
UI wanted to feature Tracy [Sugarman], because Tracy is, like,
our favorite Veterans History Project collection.
The reason Tracy's such a great collection is he's a triple threat.
Tracy was a terrific interview, and you can look
at his complete interview on the website,
or you can actually look at highlights.
And Peter Bartis, who used to be with the project,
and is now in the American Folklife Center,
did a terrific interview with Tracy.
Tracy also was a fantastic letter writer.
He wrote to his sweetheart, June, and we have 271 of his letters
and they're all hand-written and they're beautifully composed.
He was a fantastic writer.
And, of course, Tracy was a fabulous artist, as we've already seen
and here's [sic] examples of a lot of his artwork and a lot
of this material is in the Prints and Photographs collection.
So, you can see how you can explore the project's holdings in a lot
of different ways and that's how they got
to do a lot of their research.
There's a second level of research you can do
in the Veterans History Project.
That is, you can call us and you can say
"I have a more sophisticated search to do" and we will do that search
in our database for you and come up with a list of collections
that fit the criteria that you're looking for.
So, that's my presentation today.   Thanks for coming.
[applause] John Cole: I'm afraid we're going to have
to change the order a little bit.
We have had a wonderful program, but we don't have time for questions,
except we have time for the book signing
out where the books are being sold and I'm going to ask both Peggy
and Athena to step out there.   There is a line waiting.
You can buy the books here -- a very short line, and you'll get them
for the same price as you can get
with the employee discount downstairs, but it's more convenient
to buy them now and to get them signed and you can chat
with our authors at that time.
So, let's conclude with a round of applause for this team effort.
[applause] You know, they have not only once again shown how proud we
should be of the collections of the Library of Congress
on a specific subject, but how proud we can be
of Library of Congress employees.   You did a great job.
Female Announcer: This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.   [end of transcript]