Munitions Factory Research Articles

A strain of Arthrobacter that tolerates high concentrations of nitrate.

A gram-positive strain identified as Arthrobacter globiformis CECT 4500, tolerant to up to 1 M nitrate, was isolated from the grounds of a munitions factory. Under strict aerobic conditions, this bacterium used a wide variety of C-sources to obtain the energy required for growth, which took place when the nitrate concentration in the medium was below 150 mM. Cells of this bacterium growing in the absence of nitrate were seen as individual cells or forming pairs, whereas cells grown in the presence of nitrate formed short filaments. With ethylene glycol as the C-source, optimal conditions for the full nitrate removal by Arthrobacter were established under laboratory conditions with wastewaters from the synthesis of dinitroethylene glycol.

Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia.

On the eve of the Civil War, more African-Americans lived in Virginia than in any other state - 490,000 slaves and 59,000 free blacks - and they were active participants in the single most dynamic event to shape the American consciousness. Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia is the first comprehensive study of Civil War Afro-Virginian history and culture. Through it we witness every aspect of black life: slave and free; rural and urban; homefront and battlefield; at work on plantations but also in munitions factories in Richmond; as wartime Union spies and as soldiers in the Confederate army.

Vera Brittain: A Life (review)

Reviewed by: Vera Brittain: A Life Russell Gollard (bio) Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge, Vera Brittain: A Life. London: Chatto and Windus, 1995. 581 pp. Clothbound, £25.00 net in UK only. Vera Brittain (1893–1970) is of interest because of her literary output (29 published works including histories, novels, and poetry) and also because of her classic memoir of World War I, Testament of Youth, which traces her movement from jingoistic patriotism to pacifism and recounts the loss of her fiancé, brother, and virtually all her male friends in the carnage of the Western Front. Unlike most women of her generation, Brittain did not witness that carnage vicariously; she served as a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD), first in her home town of Buxton and later in France and Malta in the brutal conditions of military trauma-evacuation hospitals in the pre-antibiotic age. Vera Brittain: A Life is a full-length biography of this British feminist, pacifist writer whose stature will certainly be enhanced by this excellent work. Nowadays, most readers familiar with Brittain’s work were [End Page 266] introduced to it at university or through the infrequently repeated BBC dramatization of her Testament of Youth. The trajectory of Brittain’s fame reached its apex during the thirties, when she was a best-selling author as well as a sought-after and renowned lecturer both in England and the United States. She was also a famed pacifist (as opposed to isolationist)—not a popular position with the rise of dictatorships during the thirties. Berry and Bostridge in many ways follow the methodology set by their subject in her two most famous works, Testament of Youth (London: V. Gollancz, 1933) and Testament of Experience (London: V. Gollancz, 1957). Like Brittain, they follow a chronological pattern and offer rich details from letters, interviews, and other histories in order to bring life and nuance to their work. The biography begins several hundred years before the birth of Vera Brittain in Victorian England, in a first chapter appropriately but forbodingly titled “A Bad History of Inheritance and Environment.” The lack of an intellectual tradition in her own family coupled with Brittain’s own early identification with both special teachers and women writers (such as the early feminist Olive Schreiner) encouraged an academic ambition that took her to Somerville, one of Oxford University’s women’s colleges. It is difficult not to read the chapters that follow without a sense of gloom, knowing the effects that World War I would have, both on a personal and international level. Her attraction to Roland Leighton, whose family bore a literary pedigree that impressed Brittain, is superbly chronicled in this biography, with many details of Buxton life, and Brittain’s own evolving thoughts on warfare and patriotism while at Oxford. Difficult as it is to add new detail to Brittain’s second chapter of Testament of Youth, aptly titled “Provincial Young Ladyhood,” Brittain’s biographers manage to convey the stultifying social expectations of this Victorian spa town on an intelligent young woman, as well as her reaction to them. We also learn of Brittain’s need to contribute something of worth to her country, a compulsion that would continue through World War II (by which time she was an avowed pacifist) and that led her to train to wear “the starched blue and white uniform of an auxiliary VAD nurse.” Berry and Bostridge continue, The VAD scheme had been established in 1909 to provide aid to the sick and wounded in the event of a military invasion. At the outbreak of war, the Voluntary Aid Detachments had 74,000 members, and their numbers increased dramatically less than a year later when it was expanded to deal with the severe shortages in the [End Page 267] supply of professional nurses created by the devastating effects of trench warfare. Unlike other war work for women—in the munitions factories or the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, for instance—VADs were almost exclusively drawn from middle- and upper-class families. It was therefore an entirely respectable occupation for a girl of Vera’s background, and Mrs. Brittain had happily cooperated in making arrangements for her at...

Factory as Environment: Industrial Hygiene, Professional Collaboration and the Modern Sciences of Pollution

During her 1916 study of the munitions industry the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, pioneer industrial disease investigator Alice Hamilton devised a crude but ingenious way of locating out-of-theway plants. She learned that factories producing picric acid or nitrocellulose emptied huge orange and yellow clouds into the sky. Hamilton came to recognize the kind of damage this smoke could have upon the surrounding countryside: how, example, the landscape surrounding one New Jersey plant for wide stretches...lay blackened and festering in the sunlight.' Yet Alice Hamilton, these ominous effects pointed mainly toward the dire events unfolding inside the munitions factories. She followed the colorful but destructive smoke like the pillar of cloud by day that guided the children of Israel, to track down workers poisoned from contact with nitrous

The Aesthetics of Disruption: German Theatre in the Age of the Media

In the early 1960s, certain new developments in Western theatre occurred which in some ways seemed to complete the process of the re-definition of theatre that was initiated by the historical avant-garde movement at the beginning of this century. In a decisive move against the long established bourgeois, educational and commercial theatre, now theatre was explicitly being defined as the “detailed investigations of the actor-audience relationship”. As before, this new definition led to the search for new theatre spaces and genres and a new manner of using signs where the focus shifted from the semantic to the pragmatic level. Performances were held in a disused workshop (Richard Schechner's Performance Garage in New York), a factory (Ariane Mnouchkine's Theatre du Soleil in a former munitions factory in Vincennes), a slaughter house (Bremen), in cinemas (Bremen and Bochum), in an exhibition hall (the Schaubuehne Greek project), in a film studio (the Schaubuehne Shakespeare project at the Halleschen Ufer 1976–7), in a tram depot (Frankfurt), in the 1936 Olympic Stadium in Berlin (Gruber's Winterreise 1977).

John Stuart Anderson, 9 January 1908 - 25 December 1990

Stuart Anderson (‘JS’ to most colleagues, and in this memoir) was born on 9 January 1908 at 134 Englefield Road, Islington, London (U. K.) and died on 25 December 1990 at the Woden Valley Hospital, Canberra (Australia). He was the youngest child and only son of John Anderson (1850-1916), a master cabinet maker who was born and brought up in Aberdeen, and Emma Sarah, née Pitt (born Ipswich, died 1937). Knowledge of his ancestry is limited and contains no suggestion of science, his antecedents being in business or teaching or, in the case of his maternal grandfather, a sailor. His parents, both widowed, married about 1901-2. Being of his father’s previous marriage, two step-sisters were much older than he, by about 20 years; his sister Olive was about four years older. His father was a good violinist and also played the cello; he enjoyed musical evenings with his daughters and friends, playing instrumental quartets and sometimes more ambitious efforts such as, on one occasion as JS recalled, ‘Handel’s Toy Symphony’ [ sic .]. The house was well stocked with books, especially the main classics of the Victorian period; but family circumstances, at first ‘modestly prosperous’, declined in the years just before and during World War I, catastrophically so in 1916, when his father died. Just before that, his mother went to work in a munitions factory, his sister left school early and they suffered upwards of ten years of great difficulty and acute poverty. He believed that these years which, due to his mother’s ‘overdone ideals about gentility’, were solitary and self-contained ones, left on him a permanent mark; a lack of self-confidence, mainly manifest as shyness and an inability to get on with people. He was certainly a private man but, at least after he passed the age of 30, his younger colleagues did not detect this supposed lack of self-confidence.

Minding Children or Minding Machines... Women's Labour and Child Care during World War II

The distinction between women's 'public' and 'private' work is an important one, and it is only by comprehending the significance of the private work of women that one is able fully to make sense of the nature and limitations of their public work. These limitations become particularly apparent during a period such as the one under consideration, when attempts to modify the nature of public work encounter directly the constraints related to the private sphere. It is helpful in examining women's public work in Australia during the war-time period to follow Kramar's1 division of the period into three phases. The first, lasting from the beginning of the war in September 1939 to the entry of Japan in December 1941; the second, from the end of 1941 to late 1943; and the final stage, from late 1943 until the Japanese surrender in September 1945. During the first phase, from the beginning of the war until the bombing of Pearl Harbour by the Japanese, Australian governments sought to assist the Allied war effort in Europe and the Middle East and to build up the national economy. This entailed an expansion of munitions production, the raising of armed forces, and the maintenance of production for civilian consumption. The strong demand for labour during this period was met by transfers between sectors of the labour market and by the absorption of large numbers of previously unemployed men and women. There was no absolute labour shortage, although a shortage of skilled labour quickly developed. It seems that, during this initial phase of the war, women's enthusiasm for work exceeded the enthusiasm with which it was greeted. There are indications, though, that by mid-1941 the government had begun to give some serious consideration to the employment of women. A departmental report to the Minister for Labour and National Service concluded by observing that the absorption of women into the workforce had not, as yet, proceeded very far, and that the main difficulty in the employment of women was the legal barrier to their employment in many occupations. It also noted that there had been considerable transfers of women from 'non-essential' work, especially domestic service, to munitions and other 'essential' work. In this early stage of the war, then, women appear to have been mainly taken up in the expansion of war-related industries and civil production, rather than replacing the male workforce to any great degree. The female workforce was also clearly the subject of categorisation relating to marital status. In April 1941, when newspaper articles appeared telling of the urgent need for women to work in munitions factories, Mrs Dorothy Cronin wrote to the Minister for Labour and National Service protesting that she and other married women employed in one such factory had, three months previously, been given the choice of resigning within 48 hours or being escorted off the premises by the

The "Theatre du Soleil's Mephisto" and the Problematics of Political Theatre

Those who saw the performances of the Th2atre du Soleil during the early seventies and who are not unsympathetic to their politics may recall how the empty workshops of an old munitions factory came alive with a theatre that unabashedly celebrated the utopian promise of a future golden age of justice and friendliness, while dramatizing contemporary power relations in France. They staged the euphoria of the French Revolution and its recuperation by the bourgeoisie in 1789, the ephemeral victories and eventual defeats of a section of Paris sans-culottes in 1793, and the strange tale of a ruthless and violent land of capitalist degradation and ugliness in L'Age d'or. By producing the material in the forms of the fable, the fairytale, and the modes of popular theatre from the commedia dell'arte to Brecht's dialectical realism, the Soleil rediscovered the social and political character of historical narrative and dramatic form. The Cartoucherie, the old, converted munitions factory which houses the Theitre du Soleil, celebrated the brief triumphs of '68 when power, stripped of its legitimizing mythologies, appeared obscenely vulnerable, giving form and direction to the boundless optimism of that era. The Soleil pursued its dream of the emancipation of labor from capitalist relations of production long after the student movement, as Eagleton put it, was flushed off the street and driven underground into poststructuralist discourse.'

The Multi-Ethnic Community of Women in Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker

In her recent study, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction, Nina Auerbach observes, union of women... is one of the unacknowledged fruits of war.' Auerbach's observation is applicable to Harriette Arnow's masterful proletarian novel, The Dollmaker (1954). Set in Detroit during World War II, the novel realistically portrays the grim lives of the residents of a housing development who are lured to Detroit by the promise of jobs in its munitions factories. Polocks, Hillbillies, Wops, Japs, Huns the women from diverse ethnic backgrounds bond with one another while their husbands are off at war or are working the night shift in a munitions factory. They tend one another's children and offer one another emotional support. Arnow documents in detail the manner in which hatred of people from a different geographical location or a different ethnic group erodes the sense of community, even among the women. However, she draws a distinction between the world of men and the world of women: the male characters

Indemnification Claim Case

War — In general — Enforcement of the laws of war — Compensation and reparation — Dismantling of munitions factory by Occupying Powers in 1945 as part of demilitarisation of Germany — Whether measures amounted to reparation measures — Whether Occupying Powers had acted on behalf of Germany — Treaty terminating Occupation Status of Germany — Whether Federal Republic could abstain from obligation to indemnify demilitarisation under the treaty — Effect of treaty on constitutional guarantee of right to indemnification — The law of Federal Republic of Germany

CHRONIC VASODILATOR THERAPY IN THE MANAGEMENT OF CARDIOGENIC SHOCK AND INTRACTABLE LEFT VENTRICULAR FAILURE

Comment: A pleasant change of conceptualization in the management of intractable cardiac failure. Nitroprusside will probably prove to be a most useful drug, inside the operating room and outside. However, recent reports indicate that it may not be without hazard in a small number of patients given chronic infusions. Apparently the ability of some patients to convert cyanide to thiocyanate is impaired after prolonged nitroprusside therapy, and naturally cyanide buildup carries with it potential problems. This reviewer would like to have had this patient's methemoglobin level measured; he apparently had sufficient nitrates to start his own munitions factory.

Document & Drama in Desert Victory

DOCUMENT & DRAMA IN DESERT VICTORY By Peter Rollins Peter Rollins teaches English and Film at the University ofOklahoma at Stillwater He writes regularly on historicalfilms and on the contemporary cinema. Desert Victory (1943) is a "campaign film " which documents the battle between Rommel's desert forces and the United Kingdom's troops for North Africa. The predicament of the British filmmakers (David Macdonald, director, William Allery, music, and T.H. Hodson, narration) interested me greatly. While reporting the documentary "facts" about the successful North African campaign, it was also their assignment to create a dramatic image of war, which would inspire confidence and enthusiasm among the folks back home. Throughout the film, I kept asking myself which will win out, reportage or drama? After the first showing of Desert Victory in the United States, Manny Färber of the New Republic (April 12, 1943) praised it for its relative lack of didacticism. In its understatement, Färber found it especially in contrast with "the Russian documentaries where the heavy hand of moral purpose is always teaching you a lesson." Somewhat familiar with pre-war English documentaries, Färber traced this subtle use of film as film back to John Grierson and his circle, which included Macdonald. Grierson's teams had discovered a hard-earned truth that "emotion and interest in a film have more chance of taking hold when the event is shown at such length that it can speak for itself." (In all fairness to the Russians, it should be added that Farber's strictures against the "Russian films" can legitimately be applied to Frank Capra's extravaganzas in the Why We Fight series which began to appear in 1943.) Desert Victory indeed has the appearance ofrealism. Music is used throughout the film to build suspense between scenes and to accentuate the pace of the drama of the North African campaign, yet it is the "actual" sounds oftrucks, planes, tanks, individual rifle bolts slamming home, or of men digging their holes, that we remember. The intended effect is obvious. Because our attention is fixed on actual sounds rather than a rich orchestration, we, the viewers, more readily identify with the soldiers and airmen on the screen. We do not become distracted by the impressive panorama of massive armies clashing by day and night. Instead, we are always aware that the fighting men on the screen are standing in the breach for us. Desert Victory is surprisingly candid in its portrayal ofthe anxiety and pain of battle. One sequence in particular can stand as a representative for many. First, we see a squad clearing mines from the sand as it advances across the desert. Next, we see that one member ofthe squad has been hit by fragments from an incoming German mortar round. The camera focuses on the crumpled form of the wounded man as he is being cared for by a buddy. Suddenly, we see an explosion directly in front ofthe camera, after which the scene comes to an abrupt conclusion. This is the kind of cinematic realism which killed four and wounded six of Macdonald's twenty-six man film crew! How are such stark moments palliated? By tightly paced editing, the film convinces the viewer that the entire British nation from Rita the Riveter to the fallen 25 cameraman is part of a perfectly co-ordinated team. Even in the hottest moments of battle, the editing conveys the impression that communications are perfect, that supporting fires are always intense and on target. Under such conditions, a properly disciplined citizen soldier should be willing to go over the top. Not only is the team working at 100% efficiency, but there is an audience to cheer. For example, after Tobruk is taken, the film carries us back via stock footage of Big Ben, etc., to a munitions factory. In a staged sequence, the girls on the assembly line gossip about the victory that their boys have won. A particularly gaunt middle-aged female turns to a younger and cuter companion on the line. She says with conviction, "that '11 show 'em!" Eyes glassy with pride, her friend responds, "There's more where that came from!" The moral which relieves the...

Urbanization of Utsunomiya

The urban district of Utsunomiya has been remarkably enlarged since Meiji Era. First, military sites in Meiji Era contributed to the expansion in the western and the northwestern parts of Utsunomiya. Then, the southern and the eastern parts were rapidly built up by the establihsment of large munition factories built during the World War II. More urbanization was seen in the southern than in the eastern part because of larger factories in the former. Thirdly, since 1960, the development of industrial areas and residential areas, as well as the construction of small and medium size factories in the suburbs have worked together for the expansion of Utsunomiya.The first and the second steps of urbanization took place on Takaragi Terrace which extends from the north to the south in the suburbs of Utsunomiya. The third step, especially shows us a good exmaple of a close relation between the city development and landforms.Generally speaking, urban districts are slow to expand into alluvial lowlands. There are river terraces formed by several rivers flowing to the south in the sububrbs of Utsunomiya. Remakrable urbanization is seen on the terraces to the east and the north of Utsunomiya. Large factor sites accompanied with residential areas will result in the urbainization of the eastern part in near future.Some people consider that the industrial development of Utsunomiya is nothing but the outer margin of Keihin Industrial District. The development of residential areas in Utsunomiya, however, can hardly be regarded to characterize this city as a residential satellite of Tokyo.

A University Prepared for Victory

T HE American university is today dedicating its physical plant, its expert knowledge, and its moral energies to the winning of the war. It is united in a common effort with the armed forces, the munition factories, and the basic industries. It is wholeheartedly performing a difficult task for which it was ill prepared. Like the schools from which its students came, it had failed to develop before hostilities the widespread knowledge of languages, mathematics, physics, geography, and other subjects fundamental in the conduct of a global war. Is the university to be caught equally unprepared for peace? When our young men-and young women-return from the wars, many of them will return to the university. What kind of university will it be then? Will it be the university they remember, unchanged by the most violent storm in human history? Will it be a meaningless prolongation of the wartime university, a university focusing its forces upon the destruction of human beings? A similar problem confronted the American university of i9i8, and the university failed to solve it, scarcely made an effort to solve it. It merely drifted. It was no better than the society which it gayly served, an acquisitive society materialistic in its interests, unhealthy in its pleasures, disillusioned in its ideals, a society moving blindly toward the disaster which came in I929 and matured in I939. Admittedly, the pressure of this society was enormous, not only in America but also in the associated powers, England and France; even the pathological fool who precipitated the conflict described with tolerable accuracy the decadence of the great democratic societies in the nineteen-

RELATION OF CO-OPERATION TO MORALE

THE increasing stringency of the labour position and the ever more searching demands upon the man-power and woman-power of Great Britain are steadily driving home the lesson that the central problem in efficient production is that of securing effective co-operation. That problem is encountered in the munition factories, in the shipyards and in transport ; it is the dominant factor in solving the important problem of absenteeism. The true secret of the high production-levels of 1940 lies less in the long hours worked than in the spirit of the workers. The whole nation had been lifted to a level which made for effective co-operation and high morale.

PRODUCTION AND HOURS OF WORK

IN 1915 the Health of Munition Workers' Committee was appointed “to consider and advise on questions of industrial fatigue, hours of labour and other matters affecting the personal health and efficiency of workers in munition factories and workshops”, and in 1918 the final report was published.

Venereal Diseases in War-time

AT an extraordinary general meeting of the British Social Hygiene Council, held on January 29, attention was concentrated upon the circular letter recently dispatched by the Ministry of Health to local government authorities relating to the control of venereal disease in war-time. During the War of 1914–18, some 400,000 members of the armed forces were treated for venereal disease, necessitating the withdrawal of the majority of the patients from active service for periods varying between five and six weeks. To-day, the Ministry is anxious that the great reduction in the numbers of people suffering from venereal disease since 1918 should be at least maintained during the social upheavals that are caused by war conditions. The movements of population from towns to the vicinity of munition factories, military camps and aerodromes in the country districts bring grave problems.

Thermal Power Plants for Emergency Service

A MAJOR interruption of the electric supply in a city of any importance is nowadays attended with disastrous consequences. The provision of some reserve source of power, capable of supplying the vital services at least, is therefore imperative when such failures can occur. The main causes of failures are breakdowns of transmission lines, strikes or enemy bombardment. A paper read by Mr. Hvisten-dahl on November 10 to the Institution of Electrical Engineers distinguishes between the different classes of service to be furnished by stand-by plants. Descriptions are given of automatic and semiautomatic stand-by plants used in towns in Norway and Sweden. Although unthinkable a few years ago, the bomb-proof emergency service station is now a grim reality. Sandbags provide some protection against fragments of stray shells or bombs; but they are little use against repeated attacks from the air, and a large steam-power station is an easily located target. This has led to the construction in several countries of the Continent of bomb-proof stand-by power plants for the essential services in towns or districts or for supplying the power requirements of munition factories. These plants are either of the surface or of the underground type. The plan of a station for an output of 10,000 kw. is shown located in a tunnel cut into the face of a cliff. The turbo-set, boiler and tanks containing sufficient fuel for 7-10 days' service, and the auxiliary starting set, are accommodated in a gallery about 150 ft. long and of about the section of a normal double-track railway tunnel. When ground conditions are not favourable to such a disposition, or the danger of flooding exists, a station of the surface type is adopted, with roof and walls of reinforced concrete about 4 ft. thick, having the appearance of a block of dwelling houses or made inconspicuous in some other way.

ACTIONS AND USES OF DINITROPHENOL

We have recently shown in a series of papers1that alpha-dinitrophenol markedly augments metabolism in doses which are not demonstrably harmful. As this drug may have a number of important clinical applications, it seems desirable to present a summary report of its pharmacologic and therapeutic effects, and to point out certain potential dangers in, and limitations to, its use. During the World War, dinitrophenol was called to the attention of French physicians by cases of poisoning from it in munitions factories. Only incomplete investigations of the actions of the compound were made at that time, as judged by published reports. Recently, Magne, Mayer, Plantefol and others2have extended or completed work begun some years previously but reported simultaneously with our entirely independent studies. We are in general agreement with them as to the main pharmacologic actions of the drug. The experimental studies have been extended by us and

Dr. Charles Hose

DR. CHARLES HOSE, whose death on Nov. 14 we much regret to record, was born on Oct. 12, 1863. From his father he inherited that love of wild Nature which characterised him throughout his life. As a boy, he was a keen naturalist and continued his habit of collecting and observing while at Felsted School. In 1882 he was admitted to Jesus College, Cambridge, but did not take a degree, as in his second year his uncle, the Bishop of Singapore, Labuan, and Sarawak, obtained for him a cadetship under Rajah Sir Charles Brooke, and on April 15, 1884, he landed at Kuching and was at once sent to the Baam district, where he remained for about eighteen years. In 1904 he was appointed Resident of the Rejang district and retired on Aug. 20, 1907, when he returned to England. In 1916, Dr. Hose was appointed superintendent of the munitions factory at King's Lynn, and in 1918 was chairman of the Cotton-waste Mills Investigation Committee.