A bird's eye view of 1919

We’re not war historians, by any measure. You won’t catch us watching Nazi documentaries on A&E, and we generally can’t tell one general from another, whether he be Allied or Axis. And the only war history we’ve ever been inclined to read is the work of the late, great Ernie Pyle, who wrote not on the macro level, but the micro, relating the experiences of the common soldier while eschewing more sweeping accounts of battles and campaigns.

And if possible, we know even less about World War I than WWII. It’s just long enough ago as to seem out of reach. We don’t really know what caused it and what the end result of it was, other than a simple accounting of the winners and losers. (Hey, we’re not proud of our ignorance here; we’re just being up front about it.)

World War I was fought in such an unusual fashion—all those trenches!—that we too often can’t get our heads around what exactly the participants experienced in fighting it.

This is due in part to the fact that we grew up with World War II movies on the tube constantly. We didn’t watch them terribly frequently, but they were ubiquitous and one couldn’t avoid them entirely. Not so with pictures that depicted the first World War, though we’ve since watched many movies about that War to End All Wars, as our cinematic interest has expanded to include the 1920s and ’30s, when they were made by the dozens.

But perhaps the most moving World War I-related footage we’ve seen dates from the summer of 1919. It was shot by an amateur and on location, not at a studio, using a camera attached to a airplane flying over battle sites along the Western Front and capturing the still-all-too-apparent devastation from above. This footage, shot by a French pilot named (and we’re only guessing at the spelling here) Jacques Tralee de Priveaux, was only recently discovered in a vault in Paris and was included in a recent BBC documentary The First World War from Above. The pilot—we’ll call him Jacques, since we know how to spell that—later joined the French Resistance and was killed during World War II. His daughter, an infant when he died, had only seen photos of her father until she was shown this footage.

Trust us, you’ll be moved by what you see in this clip—by the lingering pain of war that Jacques captured from above nearly 90 years ago, and by his daughter’s emotional first glimpse of her father in his vital and vibrant prime.

When the world was waiting for a sunrise

Here’s some remarkable and moving color footage of the celebration of VJ Day—August 14, 1945—in Honolulu (where they certainly had every reason to celebrate, and with gusto, the victory over Japan). The footage is credited to one Richard Sullivan, who shot the footage along Kalakua Avenue in Waikiki.

Enjoy.

Goodbye to another glorious gal

Remember the photo on the right? Sure you do, we’ve all seen it dozens of times. It was taken by the great Alfred Eisenstaedt on August 15, 1945 — VJ Day — in Times Square, and it captures, as Emma Brown put it in today’s Washington Post, “the relief, euphoria and optimism that Americans felt at the end of a horrible conflict.”

It’s not known just who the sailor was, but the identity of the nurse he’s smooching so enthusiastically was established some years. It was Edith Shain, who died, aged 91, on Sunday, as announced on her web site.

Other women claimed to be the nurse over the years, but Eisenstaedt flew to California in 1979 to meet with Ms. Shain, and after one look at her legs, he said she was the one.

Life.com, the web site for the magazine’s photo archive, released a statement saying, “While Life magazine itself never officially endorsed any of the claims by any of the men or women who came forward saying that they were the sailor or the nurse in the photograph, Shain’s claim is the one that, over the years, has held up best and has been most widely accepted (and most often celebrated).”

Shain, who worked enthusiastically on behalf of veterans’ causes in the years after she’d become widely accepted as the authentic recipient of that famous celebratory buss, is survived by three sons, six grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

The Karen Files, pt. 7

Another in an ongoing series of posts celebrating the life of our mother:

It’s easy, sometimes, to think of our parents as somehow older than they are. We too often were guilty of thinking of Karen as being of the Greatest Generation, of imagining her listening and dancing to the big bands during the height of the Swing Era.

But she was born in 1933. She was just a child when Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, and the rest were flying high. Heck, she was just 11 when Glenn Miller died.

She remembered and enjoyed that music, sure, much as we remember and enjoy the pop music of the 1960s, when we were kids. But it wasn’t the music of her adolescence and young adulthood. She grew into young womanhood during the post-big band era, when the focus moved to vocalists. Big bands were still around, sure, but they weren’t the dominant force they had been.

Hers was the era of pre-rock ‘n’ roll vocalists like Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Nat “King” Cole, Patti Page, and Margaret Whiting.

For that matter, Karen wasn’t so old when rock ‘n’ roll began to capture the nation’s attention. She was 21 when Bill Haley and the Comets recorded “Rock Around the Clock” in 1954 and 23 when Elvis Presley‘s recording of “Heartbreak Hotel” became a No. 1 hit in 1956. She wasn’t likely to be found among the squealing teens at a Presley performance, but she wasn’t necessarily old enough to view the young rock-n-roller with the alarmed disapproval so many of her elders did. Presley was, after all, less than two years younger than Karen.

Similarly, we’re often a bit surprised to be reminded that Karen was just a kid during World War II and the events that preceded the United States’ involvement in it. This was brought home to me by the documents that make up this week’s installment of The Karen Files, which we found while sorting through the thousands of snapshots and documents Karen left behind.

The documents accompanying this text are pages from ration books. Until coming across these, we had no idea that children received ration booklets, too. It makes sense, though; obviously, a family of ten would have greater needs than a family of three, so assigning each child their own ration books (to be used, no doubt, by their parents) seems the ideal way to assure that each family gets what’s coming to it.

We’ve scanned and posted all the pages of the ration books for your consideration here. Perhaps many of you have seen ration books before—after all, every American had one, and of those millions of books, surely not a few got stashed when they were no longer needed, for later generations to come across, as we did, in dusty cartons long stowed away in attics or basements.

We learned a few not terribly weighty details about Karen’s life in May, 1942, from these documents. She lived at 509 South 4th Street in Okemah, Oklahoma (we knew she had grown up in a different house than the one where we visited our grandparents, but we didn’t know where it was). She was nine years old, stood four feet and one-half inches tall, and weighed 68 pounds. Her eyes were blue then, as always, and her hair was listed as blonde (light brown, we’d have to call it). Again, these details have no real import, but small things can have an impact when you’re trying to imagine loved ones at particular points in their lives.

We wish we’d thought to ask Karen what the heck she thought of Elvis Presley when he hit the national stage or how it felt to be a child during World War II. There are so many questions that we don’t think to ask our folks, even when we spend a lot of time thinking about the old days. Then a loved one’s mind grows feeble, due to illness or advanced age, or a life comes unexpectedly to an end, and it’s too late to ask.

View all this week’s Karen Files images.

Food rationing, revisited

Did you ever wonder what home cooking was like back during World War II, when so many staples and other foodstuffs were rationed?

You need wonder no more, if you’re in London (or have the wherewithal to book a flight), as the Imperial War Museum has mounted a new exhibition, The Ministry of Food, covering the practice of food rationing that began in Britain in 1940 and lasted for (and this was news to us, we have to admit) 14 years, an era in which propaganda featuring a character named Potato Pete urged Brits to get their starch not from bread, which was made with imported (and therefore difficult to obtain) grain, but spuds

As a Time Out London restaurant review describes, the exhibition “explains how our food imports were reduced by enemy attacks on our merchant navy, and how we had to reinvent the ways that we grew, transported and consumed food.”

The exhibition was cited in a restaurant review because the museum’s cafe, which has been redubbed Kitchen Front, is now serving “authentic war-time austerity recipes,” though the reviewer warns that “for a more fortunate generation brought up on meat, sweets, fats and deftly used spices, the drabness of austerity cooking can come as a bit of a shock.”

We can only imagine that WWII reenactors all over the world are planning their excursions even now, excited (if not quite salivating) at the prospect of reenacting a family dinner comprising home cooking impacted by the severe food shortages of the day. Here’s hoping they don’t leave 1940′s-era gratuities to the serving staff.