Posts Tagged Military

Photo Credit: State Archives of Florida (Florida Memory)

Survivors of the Battle of Olustee gathered at the Monument dedication in Olustee, Florida on October 23, 1912. The Battle of Olustee was fought in Baker County, Florida on February 20, 1864. It was the largest battle fought in Florida during the American Civil War.

Photo Credit: Marine Corps Archives and Special Collections

Left to right: PFC Preston Toledo of Albuquerque, New Mexico and his cousin PFC Frank Toledo of Penistaja, New Mexico, at Ballarat, Australia with the 11th Marines in July 1943. Between 400-500 Native American “code talkers” served in the United States Marine Corps in the Pacific Theater. Their job was primarily to transmit secret tactical messages by using a coded language. This coded language was built upon their native languages and sent over military telephone or radios.

Photo Credit: U.S. National Library of Medicine

Medical staff attend to a wounded Choctaw U.S. soldier at the U.S. National Red Cross Hospital No. 5 in Auteuil, France, c.1917-1918.

Photo Credit: Library of Congress

American Army field hospital inside ruins of church. France. 1918. This church looks to be quite large and, at one time, quite grand. I wish, with photos like these, we knew more details about the church, or at least the name/location of it. I wonder if it was repaired or destroyed after the war? Was it also damaged by the invading German forces during World War II? The endless questions that could be answered if one simply had a name or location….

Photo Credit: England/Flickr

To Phyllis M Baguley, y.2C, 423 Allen St. Lansing Michigan, goes the honor of being the first SPAR to set foot on overseas soil. Pictured here as she suns herself on the boat deck of the former luxury liner that transported her overseas, she led the first overseas contingent of SPAS as they debarked from the ship at Honolulu. Daughter of Mr and Mrs WC Baguley, she is a graduate of Lansing Eastern High School and enlisted in the SPARs in March, 1943.

(SPAR’s were the Coast Guard Women’s Reserve. The name comes from “Semper Paratus”, and “Always Ready”)

Photo Credit: Roy O. Bingham/Denver Public Library

One of many Easter services held on Apennine mountainside by the Tenth Mountain Division. Conducted by Caplain William H. Bell for the 605th Artillery Battalion at Rocca Pitigliano on April 1, 1945. A large group of soldiers sit in a grassy open field with heads bowed. Before them stands the chaplain with a box beside him, a jeep marked beneath the windshield with “Chaplain” in between two crosses, and a portable pump organ.

In the foreground, four men bow their heads together. Corporal Ralph Squires sits at a portable organ and two soldiers face the Chaplain who stands in front of his jeep draped with a white cloth in use as an altar for a small crucifix. Photo Credit: Roy O. Bingham/Denver Public Library

Photo is of Tenth Mountain Division Cpl. Squires playing the organ. Worshipers sit on the grass listening. Photo Credit: Roy O. Bingham/Denver Public Library

Cropped photo. Photo Credit: Daniel Webb/Library of Congress

This portrait shows a group of veteran Union soldiers who were POWs during the Civil War. The banner lists the various Confederate prisons: Andersonville, Libby, Belle Isle and Florence. This photo was taken at a POW reunion, possibly the 18th National Encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic in Minneapolis in 1884. The original title was “Great group of ex-Union prisoners”.

Photo Credit: U.S. Army

Photo is of an air drop of supplies in Operation Junction City during the Vietnam War. Operation Junction City was the largest U.S. airborne operation since WWII’s Operation Market Garden and was the only major airborne operation of the Vietnam War. It began on February 22, 1967 and lasted almost three months with the goal of destroying Vietcong bases and the Vietcong military headquarters for South Vietnam. While American forces captured large quantities of stores, equipment and weapons, it failed to be a turning point in the war.

“Wings for This Man” is a propaganda film produced in 1945 by the U.S. Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit about the Tuskegee Airmen, the first unit of African-American pilots in the US military. It was narrated by Ronald Reagan.

Copa Room showgirl Lee Merlin poses in a cotton mushroom cloud swimsuit as she is crowned “Miss Atomic Bomb 1957.” Merlin was the last and most famous of the Miss Atomic Bomb girls. Photo Credit: Don English/ Las Vegas News Bureau/Las Vegas Sun

Lee Merlin, “Miss Atomic Bomb 1957.” Photo Credit: Don English/ Las Vegas News Bureau/Las Vegas Sun

Nevada became the center of the nation’s eye during the 1950s after President Harry S. Truman authorized a 680-square mile section of the Nellis Air Force Gunnery and Bombing Range for nuclear bomb testing. As each atomic blast lit up the Nevada scenery public interest increased. So much so that Americans around the country witnessed the first televised atomic blast in 1952. Atomic bomb fever began to infiltrate every aspect of society, from household goods to football teams naming themselves the “Atoms.”

Copa Girl Linda Lawson as “Miss-Cue” wearing an A-Bomb crown to illustrate another misfiring of the Operation Cue Bomb on May 1, 1955. She is surrounded by servicemen. Photo Credit: University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries

Inspired by the cultural phenomena, Las Vegas decided to combine two of its major attractions – nuclear bombs and showgirls – into a beauty contest. The first atomic pin-up girl, Candyce King, appeared on May 9, 1952 in the “Evening Telegraph” (Dixon, Illinois) and the “Day Record” (Statesville, North Carolina) papers. She was called “Miss Atomic Blast.” In the spring of 1953, the city of North Las Vegas chose Paula Harris as Miss North Las Vegas of 1953 and gave her the nickname “Miss A-Bomb.”

Operation Cue, in 1955, drew much attention when it evaluated how well houses, items, food, mannequins, etc… would hold up from a nuclear blast at various distances. It was delayed multiple times because of high winds and was nicknamed “Operation Mis-Cue.” This inspired Sands Hotel Copa Girl Linda Lawson to be crowned “Miss Cue” on May 1, 1955. The title was “to illustrate another mis-firing of the Operation Cue Bomb.” Lawson’s ‘crown’ was a mushroom cloud.

Perhaps the most famous “Miss Atomic Bomb” was Copa Showgirl Lee A. Merlin. She was crowned, coinciding with Operation Pumbbob, while wearing a cotton mushroom cloud on the front of her swimsuit. The popular photograph by Don English was distributed nationally. She was the last “Miss Atomic Bomb.”

Nevada National Security Site, “Miss Atomic Bomb,” January 2011.

Photo Credit: U.S. Army

Solider demonstrates the versatility of the standard U.S. Army helmet to soothe his feet during the Korean War.

Photo Credit: England/Flickr

“Sergeant Crawls B. Adams, of Easley, SC, blows a newly acquired horn for an unappreciative audience in St. Barbara, Germany. He is with a tank destroyer battalion attached to the 90th Infantry Division. The audience is Corporal Charles Cole of Mechanicsburg, Illinois, of a field artillery group attached to the 90th Infantry Division.”

[Zim's Note: While not a typical letter, this poem gives the reader insight into the wartime experiences of those who served in the Korean War as well as any letter could.]

Korea, The Chosen Place, a poem

Korea, the chosen place
Ravished by war, laid to waste
All United Nations there engaged
In another history Page.

Korea, tis not a beauty site
To see by day or by night.
The eye beholds only the gloom
Of a country buried in war’s tomb.

Korea, it’s been torn up
and torn down;
Marched up
and marched down.

Korea, blood shed, land and mountains
Have been bathed by youthful fountains.
Brave men here have gone to their reward
Perishing ‘neath the sword.

Korea, twas not a war they say;
Only a police action day by day,
A testing place
For the human race.

Korea, two ideals clashing
Communism and democracy smashing;
The U.N.’s firm stand
Against the hammer red hand.

Korea, a question of peace there,
A question of peace everywhere
Soon it may be inflamed
Again in blood and war’s shame.

Korea, a prayer of the free
That inpeace here we may see
The sword no more to rise
On any land or any skies.
—S/Sgt. Irvin V. Worden

The poem is by S/SGT Irvin V. Worden, on 14 December 1953, while stationed in Korea. This poem is included in the book “Korea, The Chosen Place, a view from Old Smokey”, the story of my fathers experiences in Korea. –Stephen H. Worden

Korean War Project

(Photo Credit: National Postal Museum, Curatorial Photographic Collection)

“US naval personnel gathered around a mail clerk during mail call at an unidentified location in the Pacific Theater during the Second World War. Mail continues to be a critical morale builder for America’s military service members (ca. 1944).”

Photo Credit: Liljenquist Family Collection (Library of Congress)

Two unidentified soldiers in Union uniforms holding cigars in each others’ mouths, photographed between 1861 to 1865. The uniform of the solider on the right has blue chevrons which would rank him as an Infantry Sergeant.