Quartermaster Corps Research Articles

Layering for a Cold War: The M-1943 Combat System, Military Testing, and Clothing as Technology.

This article analyzes a World War II-era Army field jacket and the principle of layering it represents as a technology of war. The M-1943 jacket, designed in military laboratories and issued to soldiers in the European Theater, represents a scientized approach to layering clothing developed on test expeditions and in new research and development laboratories run by the Quartermaster Corps. Drawing on both histories of technology and histories of design, this article shows how the M-43 jacket operated as part of a broader assemblage of testing facilities, institutions, and individuals. The debate within the Army about how best to equip soldiers points to the struggle to control the growing authority of scientific expertise in the military bureaucracy. The science of dress, more than personal or subjective experience, shaped how the American military equipped soldiers for war and contributed to the expansion of military research laboratories in the Cold War.

A Female Sanctuary on the Former Western Front: The Gold Star Pilgrimage Rest Houses in France, 1930–33

The U.S. Army’s Quartermaster Corps erected temporary rest houses for the Gold Star Mothers and Widows Pilgrimages at the military cemeteries of the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) in France between 1930 and 1933. The army intended the architecture of the rest houses to be familiar to the pilgrims and to provide them with a female place of comfort and respite. The decision to create the rest houses demonstrated the government’s desire to include women in the commemoration of World War I, yet its choice to demolish them at the end of the pilgrimage program indicates the constrained role of women in that process.

Extreme Weather Conditions: Military Medicine Responds to a Korean War Winter.

Figures 1 and 2 illustrate the M-1951 Cold-Wet Uniform (extreme cold), from base layers through outer garments. This cold-weather gear replaced the World War II era M-1943 to become standard issue for American soldiers during the Korean War. The Cold-Wet Uniform could be supplemented with a heavy parka, a component of the Cold-Dry Uniform. The parka could replace the field jacket, or be worn on top of it. The Army Medical Department had good reason for documenting the new uniform and publicizing its development through photographs like the two featured here. In the fall of 1950, American soldiers and their commanding officers were unprepared for their first Korean winter, when temperatures could plunge to more than 30 degrees below zero and arctic winds from Siberia yielded deadly consequences. A Life magazine article from February 1951 reported that more than 5,000 U.S. troops in Korea suffered from frostbite that first winter. For some, evacuation and medical care was timely, but others lost feet and hands, as well as fingers and toes. Army surgeons realized that many frostbite diagnoses during World War II had, in fact, been trench foot and that their treatment programs were not designed to manage the dangers of a truly severe winter. Without proper prevention and treatment, soldiers fell prey to frostbite in catastrophic numbers, leaving their units less effective in the field. The Medical Corps responded swiftly to the need. New treatment regimens were developed for troops in the field and severe cases were transferred to Percy Jones Army Hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan, where doctors worked to save gangrenous limbs that would have almost certainly been amputated during the last war. But medical care was only one part of the solution. The Quartermaster Corps also designed uniforms to protect soldiers from extreme cold while allowing them to perform their duties as much as possible. This included layers of head coverings, protection for the hands, and the “Mickey Mouse” boots designed to withstand extreme cold. Today, this work is continued by organizations such as the U.S. Army Institute of Environmental Medicine in Natick, Massachusetts, where experts focus their research on the health and performance of the warfighter in extreme conditions. Their most recent publications note that frostbite still accounts for the largest number of cold injuries per year; however, their guidance on countermeasures and risk assessment far exceed the resources available in fall 1950. The early research and development initiated during the Korean War reflects the continued missions of military medical research assets to provide their soldiers and civilians with the necessary equipment to carry out missions in all climates and conditions, all over the world.

부사관학과 학생들의 소방안전교육 경험과 생활안전의식에 관한 연구

The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the awareness survey on the experience of fire fighting safety education and living safety consciousness of college students in the department of noncommissioned officer. Additionally, making provision of basic references and the effective fire fighting safety education is another important purpose of this study. In order to evaluate the awareness, the survey consist of 43 queries based on 6 queries for general characters, 9 queries for experiences of fire fighting safety education and 30 queries for living safety consciousness. The collected data from survey was analyzed using SPSS 20.0 win program. The interrelationship for general characters was confirmed using analysis of frequency, percentage, independent T-tset, ANONVA analysis, and regression analysis. The results show that the experience of fire fighting safety education and living safety consciousness of students from the combatant branch and ordnance corps are higher than those students from quartermaster corps. This may be attributed to the presence or absence of safety relevant courses on a curriculum. Therefore, the presence of safety courses on a curriculum should be one of important points for improving the experience of fire fighting safety education and living safety consciousness of these college students.

세 개 지점을 최단거리로 연결하는 전략기지의 위치선정

Faster and cheaper transportation of the war supplies to the frontlines is essential for winning a war. This paper proposes a method to select the optimal location of the strategic military base, e.g., the Quartermaster Corps, that minimally connects three frontlines using the optimization technique. The results are also compared to the Steiner Tree theoty.Keywords : Optimization(최적화), Minimal Path(최단 경로), Strategic Military Base(전략기지), Steiner Tree

Effect of Military Conflicts on the Formation of Emergency Medical Services Systems Worldwide

This article briefly reviews the evolution of medical support during wars and conflicts from ancient to modern times and discusses the effect warfare has had on the development of civilian health care and emergency medical services (EMS). Medical breakthroughs and discoveries made of necessity during military conflicts have developed into new paradigms of medical care, including novel programs of triage and health assessment, emergency battlefield treatment and stabilization, anesthesia, and other surgical and emergency procedures. The critical role of organizations that provide proper emergency care to help the sick and injured both on the battlefield and in the civilian world is also highlighted.

Gerald G. (Gerry) Eggert (1926–2012)

In 1983 Gerry Eggert hired me to teach at Penn State's Berks Campus. He was very friendly and very honest: “We know you can publish,” he said, or words to that effect, “but we'll fire you if you're not a good teacher.” Fair enough, I said. About twenty-five years later, when I spoke about Benjamin Franklin to a group of retired faculty, Gerry was the host: after my talk, he repeated to the group what he had told me when I was hired, and said that as they could see, I could still teach.Gerry was a mentor to both me and other faculty, including Gary Cross, whom he hired when he was head of the Penn State History Department (1980–85). He had a great sense of humor coupled with a humane, practical approach to administration. He knew the art of the possible, never got our hopes up too high, but also never let us down when he could support our scholarship or help our careers. He was an outstanding scholar of American business and labor history, the author of five major books: Railway Labor Disputes: The Beginning of Federal Strike Policy (University of Michigan Press, 1967); Richard Olney: Evolution of a Statesman (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974); Steel Masters and Labor Reform, 1886–1923 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981); Harrisburg Industrializes: The Coming of Factories to an American Community (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993); and Marking Iron on the Bald Eagle: Roland Curtin's Ironworks and Workers' Community (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). He also wrote a pamphlet on The Iron Industry in Pennsylvania that has always been a bestseller for the Pennsylvania Historical Association and numerous scholarly articles. One, “The Black Experience in Nineteenth Century Harrisburg,” won the Philip S. Klein Prize awarded by the Pennsylvania Historical Association for the best article published in Pennsylvania History in 1991–92.Much of Gerry's energies centered on Pennsylvania history. His scholarship focused on the typical rather than the sensational, and as a result we have a far more balanced understanding of Pennsylvania and American business and labor history. The United States has had many medium-sized industrial cities that were not the scene of spectacular strikes, growth, or decline, like Harrisburg; rural iron works like Curtin Furnace; and skilled workers who participated in reform movements outside of labor issues like the Pennsylvania steel masters. But they have generally attracted less attention than the large cities, factories, and violent strikes that have sometimes been presented as the whole story.Gerry's contribution to history went far beyond teaching and scholarship. He served on the board of directors (1986–2001) and was president of the board (1994–95) of the Roland Curtin Furnace in Bald Eagle. That visitors may still enjoy this historic site that illustrates in microcosm how the iron industry that spurred Pennsylvania's economic growth operated we owe largely to him. And the Pennsylvania Historical Association owes much to Gerry's great efforts on its behalf. He was the business secretary from 1985 to 1991 and president in 1995–96. His last public speaking appearance, I believe, was at the 75th annual meeting of the Association in State College (2008), where he joined a distinguished past presidents panel that discussed the history of the journal and association. Having retired from the History Department in 1991, in 1994 he received the Liberal Arts College Alumni Society Emeritus Distinction Award for the faculty member in the college who had accomplished the most while retired.Gerald Eggert was born in rural Michigan, and always told everyone how glad he was to have escaped the life of a farmer. He earned his BA at Western Michigan University in 1949 and his PhD in 1960 at the University of Michigan. He served in the United States Army Quartermaster Corps from 1946 to 1948 and taught public school in Battle Creek, Michigan, before embarking on his scholarly career. He taught at the University of Maryland and Bowling Green State University before coming to Penn State. He is survived by his wife of fifty-nine years, Jean, a brother and a sister, three children, and six grandchildren.

Recovering the Korean War Dead, 1950–1958: Graves Registration, Forensic Anthropology, and Wartime Memorialization

During the Korean War, the American Graves Registration Service, U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps, developed an innovative system to recover, identify, and repatriate deceased U.S. servicemen. In doing so, the U.S. armed forces returned their dead to the United States during major combat operations for the first time in military history. This article describes and analyzes the handling of the Korean War dead. It concludes that the wartime program exemplified the country's adaptation to limited war during a time of prosperous insecurity.

The Dead of Winter: How Battlefield Investigators, WWII Veterans, and Forensic Scientists Solved the Mystery of the Bulge's Lost Soldiers (review)

Reviewed by: The Dead of Winter: How Battlefield Investigators, WWII Veterans, and Forensic Scientists Solved the Mystery of the Bulge’s Lost Soldiers Bradley Lynn Coleman The Dead of Winter: How Battlefield Investigators, WWII Veterans, and Forensic Scientists Solved the Mystery of the Bulge’s Lost Soldiers. By Bill Warnock. New York: Penguin, 2005. ISBN 1-59609-085-5. Pp. 314. Notes. Bibliography. $24.95. In late 1944 German forces on the Western Front made a bid to breach American defenses, capture Antwerp, and destroy opposing armies, thereby compelling the Western Allies to accept a political settlement. Instead, a swift U.S. counterattack wrecked the German Army. The entire action, known as the Battle of the Bulge, inflicted heavy losses on both sides, many [End Page 872] in the dense Ardennes Forest. From 1944 to 1951 the American Graves Registration Service recovered and identified the remains of most U.S. soldiers killed during the fight. The Quartermaster Corps, however, could not account for all deceased Americans, some lost in the forest, others recovered but unidentifiable. Thereafter, locals periodically came across American and German dead; the encounters, however, produced few lasting consequences. Then, in 1988 two Belgian battlefield relic hunters, Jean-Louis Seel and Jean-Philippe Speder, unintentionally uncovered the remains of a missing American soldier near the Losheimergraben crossroads. Excited by the discovery, determined to find others, they partnered with military history enthusiasts, U.S. veterans, and European anthropologists to search for unrecovered Americans. The self-dubbed MIA Project has since located the remains of eight additional U.S. servicemen. Bill Warnock, the group's chief historian, recounts their efforts in The Dead of Winter. Beautifully written, The Dead of Winter shows how the MIA Project combined archival research, oral histories, and tenacious field work to find missing Americans. In addition to case studies in applied history, Warnock offers compelling vignettes on wartime happenings and loss incidents. The book then follows recovered human remains through the U.S. government identification system and final interment. Regrettably, Warnock presents these interlocking stories without an overarching analytical structure, therefore leaving important questions unanswered. What is the proper relationship between private and official accounting efforts? Can the U.S. government learn anything from the MIA Project experience? How are recovery and identification activities (past and present) related to American politics, society, and culture? To whom do human remains truly belong? Neglecting these critical issues, The Dead of Winter will disappoint some readers. Portions of the book, including descriptions of MIA Project excavation procedures and intra-governmental relations, may also intensify existing controversies among U.S. military authorities, private investigators, and families of the dead. Yet the power of this book resides in Warnock's storytelling. And for that reason, The Dead of Winter will be circulated and enjoyed by the general public and military historians, even if it has little long-term intellectual impact. Bradley Lynn Coleman U.S. Department of State Washington, D.C. Copyright © 2006 Society for Military History

"The Supply for Tomorrow Must Not Fail": The Civil War of Captain Simon Perkins, Jr., a Union Quartermaster (review)

Reviewed by: “The Supply for Tomorrow Must Not Fail”: The Civil War of Captain Simon Perkins Jr., a Union Quartermaster Kathleen Gorman “The Supply for Tomorrow Must Not Fail”: The Civil War of Captain Simon Perkins Jr., a Union Quartermaster. By Lenette S. Taylor. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004. Pp. 260. Cloth, $35.00.) The history of the Civil War has seemingly been written from every conceivable angle. Lenette Taylor's "The Supply for Tomorrow Must Not Fail" provides the reader with a different view by looking at the war through the eyes of Union Assistant Quartermaster Capt. Simon Perkins Jr. Taylor believes that Perkins and his fellow quartermasters were crucial to the Union victory and have not yet been given the credit they deserve. She strives to remedy this lack of credit by revealing the Civil War career of Perkins through careful and exhaustive analysis of primary sources. In Taylor's view, Perkins clearly represents the entire Quartermaster Corps. Twenty-three-year-old Simon Perkins joined the Union Army in 1862 from Ohio, after having served briefly with the 19th Ohio in 1861. He was from a wealthy and influential family in Akron and had some previous business experience (which would serve him well during the war). Perkins was appointed a captain in the quartermaster corps. For much of his military career, he worked providing supplies for the Union Army in the West. He helped move animals, food, supplies, and people to where they were needed for the war effort. Perkins remained a captain in the army (a not uncommon problem for quartermasters) until he resigned in 1864. He spent the last years of his life in Pennsylvania working at an assortment of jobs. As quartermaster Perkins helped supply the Union Army as it moved through Tennessee, Mississippi, and into Georgia. Military records and letters allow Taylor to carefully show how Perkins and other quartermasters went far beyond the call of duty to assist the army in every possible way. One of the most interesting parts of the work is Taylor's description of Perkins's role in acquiring buildings for the use of the military in Nashville. This is one of the few parts of the work where Taylor is able to show the effect of the work of the quartermasters not only on the Union Army but also on Southern civilians. Through military records, Taylor illustrates the complex and vital role the quartermasters played in the Union victory, but she is less convincing in suggesting they have been largely ignored. They have not been the subject of much individual study (aside from the works discussed in the "Preface"), but they have been given credit in almost every major work on the Civil War. Even textbooks note the huge advantage the Union had not only in the availability of its resources, but also its utilization of them. Additionally, despite her yeoman efforts in finding Perkins's personal and family records, the reader is left without much information about the man. His work is well detailed, but the rest of his life is almost entirely absent. Neither Taylor nor the reader is exactly sure why he resigned from [End Page 102] the military in 1864. Did he resent his recent transfer, lack of promotion, or really need to attend to a crisis at home? But, as Taylor notes, it may not be possible to find all the answers from the limited available sources. Despite his often crucial role in the war, Perkins still remains largely in the shadows. Taylor writes well and does an amazing amount of work with limited resources. She deserves much credit for bringing Perkins and his fellow quartermasters into the limelight. However, this is a work of most use to those Civil War scholars with specialized interests. For those readers interested in the logistics of supplying the massive Union Army with what it needed to fight, "The Supply for Tomorrow Must Not Fail" is invaluable. Kathleen Gorman Minnesota State University Mankato Copyright © 2006 The Kent State University Press

Bullets and bacilli The Spanish-American War and military medicine

Bullets and bacilli The Spanish-American War and military medicine

How science happened to me.

The paper I choose to discuss is “Relative importance of diffusion and chemical reaction rates in determining rate of exchange of gases in the human lung, with special reference to true diffusing capacity of pulmonary membrane and volume of blood in the lung capillaries” ( J. Appl. Physiol. 1957;11:290– 302), by F. J. W. Roughton and me, the culminating article in a group of four, which described the separation of the resistance of carbon monoxide (CO) or oxygen (O 2 ) to diffusion in the pulmonary capillary blood from the resistance through the pulmonary alveolar membrane, as well as the measurement of pulmonary capillary blood volume, all in vivo . I was a medical house officer at the Peter Brent Brigham Hospital in Boston under George Thorn in 1944 when Dr. (Col.) John H. Talbott, commanding officer of the Quartermaster Corps Climatic Research Laboratory, located in the environmental chambers of the Pacific Mills in Lawrence, Mass., called to tell George that Clifford Barger, then at the Climatic Research Laboratory, had contracted tuberculosis so he needed a replacement, and did George know of anyone. Thus, in December of 1944 I found myself in an old New England mill town investigating heat loss from the extremities, temperature regulation, and the effectiveness of footwear and handwear in protecting soldiers under cold conditions. We had published some papers on peripheral blood flow and heat exchange by the end of World War II when I was discharged. I then used the GI Bill to study mathematics (of the baby type), physical chemistry, and physics at Harvard for a year before returning to take up a residency at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. After this I spent two years supported by a Life Insurance Fund, now defunct, as a post-doctoral fellow with Eugene Landis at the Harvard Department of Physiology, still working on temperature regulation, but by the hypothalamus in cats. I looked around for a faculty position in internal medicine, interviewed at Hopkins, where they thought I was applying for admission to medical school, when surprisingly I was offered a faculty position in the Graduate School of Medicine at Penn by Robert Dripps, director of anesthesiology, then in the Department of Surgery of the School of Medicine, and Julius Comroe, in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology. The salary was handsome for the time, $6000, and Landis thought it indecently large, but I accepted. This changed my area of research from temperature regulation to respiration, through no intellectual initiative of my own. When I moved to Philadelphia, the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology of the Graduate School of Medicine was housed in a basement that flooded when it rained, but it had, or shortly gained, a remarkable faculty. Julius Comroe, Seymour Kety, Ward Fowler, Arthur DuBois and George Koelle were a few of the names, and there was a great excitement about the place. The philosophy was to apply the respiratory physiology that had been learned in the air and sea during World War II to the diagnosis and treatment of pulmonary diseases. Wallace Fenn had a similar philosophy for the founding of the Journal of Applied Physiology . I was assigned a small basement lab in the original School of Medicine building, with a new mass spectrometer and carbon monoxide (CO) analyzer, both of which had been ordered by Comroe with advice from Seymour Kety and John Lilly. The mass spectrometer was built to order from a low mass resolution (1 / 80) Instrument made by Consolidated Engineering Corporation to detect leaks in large capacity vacuum equipment. The CO meter was an infrared instrument, built to order by Max Liston, on a principle used by the Germans during World War II. Julius suggested that I repeat an experiment of Marie Krogh in 1914 that measured the diffusion capacity of the lung: the ability of the lung to exchange gases with capillary blood. In order to investigate the possibility of O 2 secretion in the lungs, she had measured the rate of disappearance of CO from the lungs during breath holding by inspiring a gas mixture containing a small amount of CO, immediately and rapidly breathing out an alveolar sample, holding the remaining lung gas for an additional 10 s, and then delivering a second alveolar sample into a rubber bag. The proportional drop in alveolar CO in 10 s plus the alveolar volume permitted her to calculate the pulmonary diffusing capacity for CO (D LCO ), a measure of the efficiency of the lungs in exchanging gas, defined as

My affair with the JAP.

During World War II, the US Army Quartermaster Corps established a Climatic Research Laboratory on the second floor of an old building of the Pacific Mills in Lawrence, MA, on the banks of the Merrimac River. The mission of this organization was to test equipment, particularly clothing, for the use

The Evolution of the Modern Ambulance

The 19th-century concepts of rapid transport and treatment of the injured developed primarily in the military contexts of the Napoleonic and American Civil wars. Before the 1790s, wounded soldiers were either left on the battlefield until the day after the battle or carried to the rear lines by comrades. Under the direction of Napoleon's surgeon, Dominique Jean Larrey, the Grande Armee developed mobile field hospitals, or ambulances volantes (flying ambulances), as well as a corps of soldiers specially trained and equipped to remove the wounded from the battlefield and initiate treatment. Follow¬ ing French practice, for most of the 19th century the word meant both a horse-drawn transport wagon and crew as well as a mobile field hospital.1 A system of railroad ambulance cars and base hospitals appeared on the Union side during the American CivilWar—developments that have prompted many historians to cite the Civil War as the be¬ ginning of the modern military ambulance system. It is important to note, however, that systematic practices for care of the wounded existed in substantial form only in the Union Army and then only because prominent civilians, in¬ cluding several physicians, expressed outraged at the lack of treatment for the wounded in the war's first years. For ex¬ ample, at the second battle of Bull Run in August 1862, 3000 wounded Union soldiers lay on the battlefield for 3 dayswith no medical care, and 600 languished for 1 week.2 Union am¬ bulance wagons existed before that time, but they were not under medical direction, and an inspection team led byWilliam Bowditch, MD, reported sufficient atrocities of poor care to enable the Surgeon-General to gain control of ambulance services from the quartermaster corps, which previously had not considered care of the wounded a major priority.3 Civil War medical experiences shaped a whole generation of postwar medical reformers, particularly in the northern states. Under the stewardship of Edward B. Dalton, MD, New York City, which then comprised only Manhattan, as¬ sumed world leadership in ambulance services in the late 1860s. Forging an alliance between public agencies and hos¬ pitals and private hospitals in Manhattan, Dalton and his successors crafted a system that divided the city into ambu¬ lance zones, with each hospital accepting responsibility for its zone. Most service requests came through the police, whose stations maintained dedicated electronic links (via telegraph and, later, telephone wires) to hospitals. Also, citizens made use of fire alarm signal boxes dispersed around the city. Horse-drawn ambulances, which carried 2 pa¬ tients, a driver, and an ambulance surgeon, also carried medi¬ cine chests that included emetics for overdoses and poisonings, anesthetics, morphine, amyl nitrite for cardiac patients, as well as other drugs and equipment. Despite their impressive array ofmedicines and equipment,most 19th-century ambulance sur¬ geons limited their field interventions to first aid, performing definitive care on arrival at the hospital. Although 19th-century technology may seem crude to us, meticulous logs kept during the 1880s documented a typical 8-minute response time from receipt of signal to arrival on the

The economic planning and management of the Tyl in the Soviet armed forces

THE SOVIET MILITARY SECTOR was usually considered to be performing much better than the rest of the Soviet economy. It was supposed to benefit from an absolute priority in the supply of scarce resources and skilled labour, and from a good system of quality control owing to the 'consumer sovereignty' that the military enjoyed. The combination of these two factors supposedly explained why the 'quality' (whatever that term may mean exactly) of military products-and thus the defence capability of the Soviet Union-was much higher than the quality of civilian products. Some scholarly observers of the Soviet Union had gone as far as to claim that the military sector formed a sub-society of its own, totally separated from the rest of Soviet society, with its own rules of operation, particularly concerning economic matters, its own system of incentives and rewards, and even its own ideology (in its most extreme form this thesis was expressed by Castoriadis).1 In this article I wish to challenge this thesis. I have chosen to cover the period 1982-1987, beginning with the 1982 reform decree and followed by the Andropov succession, and ending with the start of perestroika, because it represents the last 'normal' period of the Soviet system. The military production sector, i.e. the enterprises under the jurisdiction of the nine defence production ministries,2 will be left aside. The focus will be placed on the Soviet armed forces themselves and, within these, especially on their Tyl, that is the 'rear services', which include the Soviet counterpart of the Quartermaster Corps, the Ordinance, the Military Engineers, the Military Health Services, and all the support services. The Tyl is an institution with a direct economic function, and even an important production function, as it includes farms producing food for the conscripts and for the network of military stores, railway construction firms, and plants producing furniture, hydraulic pumps, mobile cooking stoves for manoeuvres, and whatever supplies the armed forces may need. However, one has to bear in mind that the Tyl produced itself only a small part of all military supplies, and that the Soviet armed forces had to obtain large amounts of goods from the civilian economy and from the military production sector. As there is no institution similar to the Tyl in Western armed forces, we shall follow Scott & Scott's practice by using this term untranslated.3 This analysis relies exclusively on Soviet military sources, and in particular on the journal of the Tyl itself: Tyl i Snabzhenie Sovetskikh Vooruzhennykh Sil, henceforth TiS.4 The Tyl was directed by Deputy Minister of Defence and Chief of the Tyl of the

Sidney Milton Edelstein (1912–1994)

Memorial SIDNEY MILTON EDELSTEIN (1912-1994) ANTHONY S. TRAVIS With the passing of Sidney Edelstein the Society for the History of Technology has lost an irreplaceable friend. Industrialist, bibliophile, and scholar, Edelstein was never happier than when discussing the intricacies of ancient and modern dyestuffs and pigments or the early years of his own career in the held of textile chemistry. Most histori­ ans of technology know about Sidney Edelstein mainly through SHOT’s annual Dexter Prize, which Dexter Chemicals has sponsored since 1968, and through the generous support that enabled Melvin Kranzberg to bring SHOT through its early years. Sidney Edelstein’s held of vision, however, was vast and often hidden by his gentleness and modesty. His spectrum of activities was as broad as that of the colors he loved and lived for. Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Edelstein was an outstanding pu­ pil of chemistry at the Baylor School. He entered MIT at the age of sixteen to study chemistry and later in his course took a special inter­ est in the application of microscopy to the study of cellulosic fibers. Returning home, he applied his experience to the needs of the local textile industry, for which mercerization, the treatment of cotton with alkali to enhance sheen and improve dyeing qualities, was a major, but not always well-understood, activity. His success led to a research appointment with the American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists (AATCC), followed by posts in industry. Among other things, Edelstein improved the luster of cotton, enabling it to compete with the new rayon. By the end of the 1930s, he was an acknowledged specialist in the use of mercerization to make cotton goods shrinkresistant . Dr. Travis is deputy director of the Sidney M. Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Permission to quote from or reprint this memorial may be obtained only from the author. 216 Sidney Milton Edelstein (1912—1994) 217 Sidney M. Edelstein Shortly before the United States entered the Second World War, Edelstein applied his expertise in mercerization to help the Army Quartermaster Corps bring about improvements in the production of mosquito netting. Subsequently, he tackled problems related to the production of camouflage fabrics by studying past technology, namely, the patents of John Mercer, the English colorist who in the mid-19th century discovered the process later named after him. Mer­ cer’s work led Edelstein to experiment with a zinc-based process. This solved the outstanding difficulties, and billions of yards of fabric treated by the new process were supplied to Allied forces. The out­ come of Edelstein’s reputation in problem solving related to textile processing and finishing was the founding of Dexter Chemical Cor­ poration in New York during 1945. In 1940, Edelstein began to collect books and documents related to the history of alchemy and chemistry. Three years later this interest was extended to the history of dyeing technologies. By the end of the 1940s his publications on research into textile processing werejoined by scholarly and popular articles on historical topics. With the inten­ tion of introducing practitioners in the field of textile chemistry to the history of their profession, many of his historical articles were published in the pages of the American Dyestuff Reporter. Edelstein also chaired the archives committee of the AATCC. Frequently, his interests in modern textile-related problems stimulated an investiga­ tion of the past. This was especially the case with static electricity and bleaching. In 1972, thirty of Edelstein’s historical articles were brought together in Historical Notes on the Wet-Processing Industry, a highly readable introduction for specialist and general reader alike. 218 Anthony S. Travis Edelstein’s interest in the chemical past brought new friendships, mainly amateurs like himself interested in the history of alchemy, chemistry, and chemical technology. He encouraged the development and expansion of this interest as secretary of the history of chemistry division of the American Chemical Society, a post that he held for eighteen years. Appropriately, in 1956, during the celebrations for the 100th anniversary of the discovery of William Perkin’s mauve (the first aniline dye), Edelstein’s contributions to science and technol...

The Neck of the Bottle: George W. Goethals and the Reorganization of the U.S. Army Supply System, 1917–1918 by Phyllis A. Zimmerman

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 205 on every detail and that Anderson’s greatest gift was for the planning and design of ceremonial spaces and for proportioning and distrib­ uting rooms according to their use. Three designers— Beersman, Schiavoni, and Shaw—who were influential Chicago architects after leaving the firm in 1937 are also profiled. Part 4 is a comprehensive listing of the firm’s output under its names. Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, with roots in the hierarchi­ cal organization of both city and building, slowly adapted to change in civic values which elevated commercial structures and demoted religious buildings. Chappell argues persuasively that commerce had taken the place of faith in the second decade of the firm’s growth to prominence. It successfully adapted its traditional principles of orga­ nization and an updated stylistic expression to fit the changing realities of the urban environment. Cynthia R. Field Dr. Field is director of the Office of Architectural History and Historic Preservation at the Smithsonian Institution. The Neck ofthe Bottle: George W. Goethals and the Reorganization ofthe U.S. Army Supply System, 1917—1918. By Phyllis A. Zimmerman. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1992. Pp. ix + 201; notes, bibliography, index. $39.50. The Neck of the Bottle begins with a generous nod toward “James E. Hughes, Jr., who first suggested the serious need for a detailed account of General Goethals’ wartime activities.” An army historian known for his eccentricity and intelligence, Jim Hewes might have smiled dismissively at the misspelling of his name by a younger historian. However, this error suggested the possibility of additional problems, and further reading showed many weaknesses. The work is conceptually confused and confusing. Difficulties begin with chapter 1, a narrative of Goethals’s involvement with the Emergency Fleet Corporation which has no apparent relationship to the rest of the narrative. Elsewhere, army behavior is explained with an unattributed and probably unattributable quotation: “There is a right way and a wrong way and the army way” (p. 72). The book’s conclusion also has problems. Phyllis Zimmerman contends that Goethals “flew in the face of tradition” and “exerted control over the bureaus” (p. 135) and later denies Daniel Beaver’s assertion that Goethals “had by the end of hostilities concentrated power, contrary to tradition, in a newly created General Staff post” (p. 153). Overall, the author concludes that the supply system failed to meet the army’s needs. When the enemy collapsed, the American Expedi­ tionary Force largely used arms and ammunition provided by Ameri­ ca’s allies (p. 157). Yet, as she notes elsewhere, Pershing and Goethals 206 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE planned toward ending the war in 1919 (pp. 116, 135-36), and the War Department looked beyond, to 1920. Certainly problems existed, but the premature collapse of a foe does not prove that logistical systems failed. Along the way, long passages lack annotation. On page 52, a two-paragraph passage on Goethals’s effort to maintain his authority, in which he is said variously to have “objected,” “contended,” “ques­ tioned,” and “planned,” has no accompanying notes. Two pages later, five paragraphs on changes in the procurement process over two months contain one endnote, to an undated Quartermaster Corps bulletin. The documentation is not always accurate or helpful. At least three citations to War Department annual reports are incorrect. One reference regarding the “transport miracle” (Annual Report, 1919, p. 30) is pretty close, off by one year (1918) and one page (p. 29). Because the book is about government work, that may be close enough for Zimmerman, who had an army fellowship to support her research, either in 1978—79, as stated on the dustjacket, or 1979-80, as noted in her acknowledgments. The infrequent citations to gov­ ernment records in the National Archives rarely identify the series within a record group from which the document comes. So the reader does not know with which body of records the document is filed or from which division or department the correspondence comes. The lack of care extends to production. The text is repetitious, discussing, for example, the nineteen steps in the reorganization of the Quartermaster Department twice, on pages 54 and 78, both...

High-altitude baking at Mayo.

In 1949, the Mayo low-pressure chamber served as an experimental kitchen for testing the baking of cakes at high altitudes. At that time, the Army Quartermaster Corps in Chicago had contracted Pillsbury Mills of Minneapolis to develop recipes and prepared mixes suitable for use at various altitudes. The researchers for the army study believed that they could avoid traveling to the various elevations and could eliminate variables in their test results if they could use the controlled conditions produced in the nearby Mayo low-pressure chamber.

Slave Rentals to the Military: Pensacola and the Gulf Coast

SLAVE RENTALS TO THE MILITARY: Pensacola and the Gulf Coast Ernest F. Dibble Obscurely tucked away in the National Archives are military records that reveal interesting evidence of slave rentals before the Civil War. Little attention was given to this common practice until abolitionist pressures forced Congress to demand explanations from various federal agencies. In 1842, Secretary of the Navy Abel P. Upshur told a House committee that there were "no slaves in the navy" other than a few personal servants. He further reminded the committee of a regulation "against the employment of slaves in the general service."1 Upshur's testimony was inaccurate. Charles Ball, once hired as a slave in the Washington, D.C. Navy Yard, wrote of widespread use of slaves at that installation.2 And in 1851 a visitor to Washington reported seeing "a large number of slaves, who seemed to be forging their own chains, but they were making chain, anchors, etc. for the United States Navy."3 In fact, the Navy rented slaves throughout the ante-bellum period. The response by the Secretary of the Army was much more complete . Noting that only whites could be enlisted, he stated that no regulation existed against using slaves as laborers. He therefore included reports that 106 slaves were employed in the Quartermaster Corps, "mostly ... in Florida;" eight employed by the Commissary Department, two in New Orleans and six in Florida; 28 by the Ordnance Department, 21 in North Carolina, two in Florida , two in Louisiana, and two in Arkansas; and 545 by the Corps of Engineers, listed not by state but by occupation. 492 of the 545 were laborers, whereas the others were designated as teamsters, boatmen, masons, smiths, and carpenters.4 Thus, 687 slaves were being rented by the Army in 1842, mainly by the Corps of Engineers . 1 "Colored Persons in the Navy of the U.S.," Letter from the Secretary of the Navy (A. P. Upshur), 27 Cong., 2 Sess., House Doc. 282 (Aug. 5, 1842). 1 See Charles Ball, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, A Bhck Man (Pittsburgh, [c] 183T), pp. 20ff. 3 Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley, TraveL· in the United States, Etc. During 18491850 (New York, 1851), p. 85. 4 "Colored Persons in the Army," Letter from the Secretary of War (J. C. Spencer), 27 Cong., 2 Sess., House Doc. 286 (Aug. 1ß, 1842), pp. Iff. 101 102CIVIL WAR HISTORY The record of slave rentals given to Congress in 1842 does not reveal the extent or duration of military reliance on slaves before or after that date. Slaves had been rented from plantations to build Fort Moultrie and other works surrounding Charleston, South Carolina , and in Georgia during the period of the American Revolution. And slaves had built fortifications around New Orleans for Andrew Jackson's famous defense of the city in the War of 1812.5 Even though records are spotty, it is possible to detail that slaves were being rented in 1817 in New Orleans, Charleston, S.C., and Fort Hawkins, Georgia.8 The Augusta Arsenal in Georgia hired slaves in 1825, 1830, and 1831.7 Fort Morgan, Alabama was built by extensive use of many slaves.8 Over 100 slaves were being rented at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, in 1821.9 One of the slaves hired at Fortress Monroe and elsewhere sent down to work under his owner at the Augusta Arsenal in 1839. However, the Quartermaster General found the Captain's explanation for hiring his own slaves "altogether inadmissable."10 Congressional interest in the extent of slave hiring by the military in 1842 may have been inspired by a minor scandal that erupted two years earlier in the Quartermaster Corps. F. L. Dancy, superintending the construction of a sea-wall at St. Augustine, Florida, had for several months made an owner sign receipts of $15.00 while giving her only $12.00 for the employ of a slave. The extra money was supposedly given to the slave for Sunday work tending the superintendent's horses. Similar cases became known and Congress demanded a copy of all the charges and evidence on the subject.11 This extra payments controversy revealed an apparently widespread practice...

The Colonial City:

The Colonial City: