Hooker's Point shipyard photos, 1942

THIS JUST IN: This is a lot of 10 photographs of a shipyard construction project in Tampa taken by Burgert Brothers. In 1942, America needed Liberty Ships to aid the war effort, and Philadelphia industrialist Matthew McCloskey began construction of a $30 million shipyard at Hooker’s Point in Tampa. The shipyard would employ 6,000 and produce concrete Liberty Ships to transport war materiel. Click on the photographs to enlarge them. This is only part of an extensive collection of Tampa-related ephemera we have acquired. We’ll show you more later.

Happy birthday, British Lord Mountbatten

Photo by  Allan Warren

It is the birthday of British statesman Lord Mountbatten (1900), who served as Supreme Allied Commander of South East Asia during World War II and oversaw the recapture of Burma. He was head of the British Armed Forces in the 1960s and chairman of the NATO Military Committee. He was a favorite of Prime Minister Winston Churchill and a friend of Noel Coward. He was instrumental in the establishment of India and Pakistan as independent nations. He also strongly influenced the upbringing of Prince Charles, who was his grand-nephew. Mountbatten was assassinated in 1979  by IRA extremists who blew up his fishing boat when he was on vacation in Ireland.

D-Day: June 6, 1944 – A reflection

Here is amazing archival footage of the invasion of Normandy 70 years ago today. Here is a documentary about the D-Day invasion of Omaha Beach. Here is an interesting article giving the timeline of D-Day as it happened.

Happy birthday, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel

It is the birthday of writer Elie Wiesel (1928), who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for his political activism and his writing about his experiences in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Wiesel's book Night (1960) is a sparse account of his experience at Auschwitz and Buchenwald with his father. It is part of a trilogy, which also includes Dawn (1961) and Day (1962), that chronicle Wiesel's life and state of mind during and after the Holocaust. He has written 57 books.

Happy birthday, Michael Ondaatje

It is the birthday of Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatje (1943), who is best known for his novel The English Patient (1992), a remarkable character study of a severely burned English-accented Hungarian man, his Canadian nurse, and an Indian engineer in the British Army. It is set at the end of World War II in an Italian villa. It won the British literary Man Booker Prize and was adapted for film in 1996, and won nine Academy Awards. Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka and educated in England. He became a Canadian citizen in 1962. Ondaatje also wrote The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Coming Through Slaughter (1976), In the Skin of a Lion (1987), and numerous poetry collections.

Happy birthday, Geoffrey de Havilland

It is the birthday of British aviation pioneer Sir Geoffrey de Havilland (1882), whose contributions to aircraft design led to several medals from the British Empire and knighthood in 1944. De Havilland both designed and tested his own aircraft. De Havilland-designed airplanes became the mainstay of the Royal Flying Corps during World War I. His Airco DH-2 proved to be superior to the German Fokker E fighter planes. the Airco DH-4, a single-engine bomber that could fly to 23,500 feet, was considered the best designed bomber during World War I. De Havilland's all-wood Mosquito fighter-bomber was one of the most celebrated planes of World War II. It could even outfly the renowned British Spitfire. After the war, De Havilland designed the world's first commercial jet airliner, the Comet. It went into service in 1949. De Havilland's autobiography is Sky Fever (1979).

Virginia Pope made high fashion news

It is the birthday of fashion writer Virginia Pope (1886), who was fashion editor of The New York Times from 1933 to 1955. She is credited with turning fashion writing into news.  She was the first to send photos of the 1930s Paris shows for publication the next day in New York. When World War II separated American designers from the fashion centers of Europe, Pope produced home-grown Fashions of the Times revues, featuring the work of American designers, and in the process, making them widely known. In addition to two decades of writing about fashion for the Times, her work appears in American Fashion (2007),  an illustrated history of apparel in the United States.

Ian Fleming created James Bond series

It is the birthday of English writer Ian Fleming (1908), creator of the James Bond spy novel series. Fleming drew on his experiences as a naval intelligence officer during World War II to create the Bond character, a British Secret Service agent known as 007. Fleming said his character was a composite of several agents he knew during his intelligence career. He took the name from the American bird expert who wrote Birds of the West Indies (1936). Fleming wrote the series while on vacation at his own Jamaican estate. The first was Casino Royale (1952). Fleming wrote 12 Bond novels and two short-story collections. His last two books, The Man with the Golden Gun (1965) and Octopussy and The Living Daylights (1966), were published after his death. Several writers have continued the James Bond franchise, including Sebastian Faulks [Devil May Care (2008)] and Jeffery Deaver [Carte Blanche (2011)]. Fleming also wrote the children's story Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang (1964).

Happy birthday, Studs Terkel

It is the birthday of writer Studs Terkel (1912), who wrote The Good War (1985), an oral history of World War II through people in battle, on the home front and survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The book won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. Terkel specialized in what he called guerrilla journalism, oral histories of ordinary Americans. He wrote more than 18 books, including Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970), and Working, People Talk About What They Do All Day and How they Feel About What They Do (1974) Here is an appearance Terkel made on The Daily Show in 2006.

Happy birthday, Joseph Heller

It is the birthday of writer Joseph Heller, (1923), whose satirical novel Catch-22 (1961) skewered bureaucratic inefficiency and absurd circular reasoning, and became an idiomatic English-language phrase representing a no-win situation. The novel was set during World War II and concerned a fictional bomber squad stationed off the coast of Italy and conducting bombing raids. The Catch-22 of the title referred to a non-existent military rule applied to justify bureaucratic actions. One key instance was a pilot who sought to be excluded from flying the missions because it was too dangerous and anybody who flew them would be crazy to do so. However, Catch-22 said that if the pilot was concerned for his own safety that proved he was rational and, therefore, was not too crazy to fly missions. At first, Heller called his book Catch 18, because the number 18 had special meaning in Judaism, which at first played a larger role in the novel. His agent thought it would be confused with Mila 18, Leon Uris's 1961 novel. Catch-11 was suggested but seemed to conflict with the 1960 movie Ocean's Eleven. Catch-17 wouldn't work because of the World War II movie Stalag 17 (1953). The publisher didn't think Catch-14 was a funny number. Catch-22, it was. It had a duplicated digit like 11 and the 2 represented the déja vu events in the book.

John Toland wrote of Hitler, WWII

John Toland

It is the birthday of author and historian John Toland (1912), whose book The Rising Sun, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971. Toland conducted interviews with Japanese government officials who had survived the war and pored over personal letters and official field reports from military commanders to construct a history of the Pacific war from the Japanese perspective. His was the first such effort in English.

Toland may be best known for his Adolph Hitler: The Definitive Biography (1976), an exhaustive study of the German dictator that reprinted texts of many of his speeches, including the earliest ones before he came to power. The book provided many previously unknown details about the man. Toland tried to provide an objective view of Hitler, an effort that drew criticism and accusations of being a Nazi.

Toland also wrote Infamy: Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath (1982), in which he argued that President Franklin D. Roosevelt and top government officials knew in advance that Japan planned to attack the United States but did nothing about it because they wanted war with Japan. It was a position that drew much criticism from historians and journalists.

Toland once said he considered his histories to be drama and he tried to remove himself from the storytelling and let the characters act on their own. He traveled extensively to gather personal accounts and see the places where the history took place.

Toland wanted to become a playwright. When he was 14 years old, a playwright had  come to live in his family's home. He was greatly impressed and decided that would be his career. In his senior year in college, he managed a student book store and saved up more than $5,000 to go to Yale Drama School. While he was working he was offered a job by a man from Esso, the oil company (later Exxon), to become a junior executive with a good salary and go to the South Pacific. He refused the offer and the Esso man was incredulous. "What a waste of talent," he said.

Later Toland liked to tell people he made all that money so he could write, not because he liked to make money. "Otherwise, I might have eventually become head of Exxon. Wouldn't that be terrible?"

Toland's early career as a writer was dismal. He wrote 25 plays, six novels and 100 short stories. None of them was ever published. In 1954, he finally sold a short story to American Magazine for $165.

His first published book, Ships in the Sky (1957), was about dirigibles, including the ill-fated Hindenburg, the German passenger airship that caught fire and was destroyed at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937. Toland interviewed survivors and presented a harrowing account of the accident in his book.

Jean Anouilh wrote The Lark and Becket

Jean Anouilh

It is the birthday of French dramatist Jean Anouilh (1910), who is best known for plays Traveler Without Baggage (1939), Antigone (1944), The Lark (1953), and Becket (1959).

Traveler Without Baggage is about an amnesiac World War I veteran who reinvents his sordid past to give himself peace in the future. Antigone was a rewriting of the ancient Greek tragedy by Sophocles, and deals with the conflict of practical compromise and idealism. It was first presented in occupied France during World War II and was seen as a veiled criticism of the Vichy government that cooperated with the German occupiers.

The Lark was about the French heroine Joan of Arc, and focused on her rejection of authority. Becket was about English martyr Thomas Becket, who was Archbishop of Canterbury until he was murdered by supporters of King Henry II.

His career spanned half a century, and his work changed and evolved throughout his lifetime. He grouped his lighter comedies and fairy tales as his "pink plays" and his darker realistic dramas and tragedies as "black plays." He classified his historical plays as "costume plays."

His work in the 1940s and 1950s, he called his "brilliant plays," which had settings of wealth and grandeur and featured witty dialogue, and his "grating plays," which were more bitter black comedies. Near the end of his life, he wrote what came to be called his "secret dramas," and were far more focused on the theater itself, dealing with the creative process, writer's block, actors and directors.

Happy birthday, Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell

It is the birthday of British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (1872), whose work won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950. His career spanned 73 years and his substantial body of work includes books on mathematics, philosophy, politics, civilization, education, socialism and more. For much of his life he was an outspoken antiwar activist, serving time in prison twice for his opposition to Britain's involvement in World War I. He held a dim view of the Russian Revolution and Bolshevism. He initially opposed Britain's rearming to fight Nazi Germany but concluded that Hitler's rise to power wasn't conducive to peace in Europe and that fighting him was the lesser of two evils. He disagreed with the conclusions of the Warren Commission in the the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and believed that Lee Harvey Oswald was railroaded. He believed many questions remained unanswered. He was a severe critic of the Vietnam War and accused the United States of committing war crimes. He was a self-avowed atheist who questioned whether religion actually harmed people. He was an anti-imperialist and supported free trade. He advocated nuclear disarmament and pacifism. On the home front, there was less tranquility. He was involved with numerous affairs, sometimes simultaneously. He was married four times, and had three bitter divorces.

Studs Terkel listened to America

Studs Terkel

It is the birthday of writer and historian Studs Terkel (1912), whose book The Good War (1985) won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. He is remembered for his oral histories of ordinary Americans, a style he called guerrilla journalism. He wrote more than 18 books. The Good War told the story of World War II through first-person accounts of people affected by the war on the home front, in battle and after the war was over. It includes people at all levels of society. There is even a section that includes a conversation with survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Terkel also wrote Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970), which includes oral histories of the wealthy, the middle class, and the poor. Terkel's book Working, People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974), compiled the oral histories of ordinary workers. It was widely acclaimed and inspired a Broadway musical. Terkel was host of a weekday radio program on Chicago's WFMT for 45 years. He was also the host of a 1950 TV show, Stud's Place, a variety show with weekly guests set in a barbecue joint. Terkel also acted in plays, movies and radio dramas, usually playing the bad guy. “I would always say the same thing and either get killed or sent to Sing Sing,” he once recalled.

Ernst Jünger, conservative philosopher

Ernst Jünger

It is the birthday of German writer Ernst Jünger (1895), whose best known work, Storm of Steel (1920), is his personal account of his experiences as a German officer on the Western Front during World War I. It is a particularly graphic work, especially when depicting the horrors of trench warfare. Still, it is considered a book that glorifies war, and raises the life of a soldier to a mystical experience. It has undergone as many as seven revisions, some toning down the graphic details of the war. It was first published in English in 1929. After the war, Jünger kept his distance from the Nazi Party as it rose to power but he did serve in the German Army, and was stationed in Paris, where he hobnobbed with artistic luminaries such as Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso. He was a prolific writer, producing more than 50 books, including several diaries. He became known as a conservative philosopher and was greatly admired by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President Françios Mitterrand. Jünger used mescaline, ether, hashish, cocaine and LSD. He was a friend of Albert Hofmann, who invented LSD, and took it with him several times. When he was 89, he said the ideology of war in Germany before and after World War I was  "a calamitous mistake." He lived to be 102.

Roger du Gard won 1937 Nobel Prize

Roger Martin du Gard

It is the birthday of French author Roger Martin du Gard (1881), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1937 for his work, which included The World of the Thibaults, a sweeping saga (in the tradition of Tolstoy, his hero) of two brothers from an upper middle-class family and their world views before and after World War I. The multi-volume work follows the brothers through their entire lives and death. It is known particularly for the detailed realism of its death scenes. In his Nobel acceptance speech, du Gard said he hoped his work would serve the cause of peace. At a time before World War II, when there were again great tensions in Europe, du Gard said he hoped his book would be read by "the old who have forgotten as well as the young who either do not know or do not care – of the sad lesson of the past."

Georges Simenon created detective Maigret

Georges Simenon

It is the birthday of Belgian writer Georges Simenon (1903), whose fictional French detective, Commissaire Maigret, is featured in 75 novels and 28 short stories published from 1931 until 1972. The detective was known for his pipe and his consumption of alcohol. Simenon went to Paris in the 1920s. Though married, he carried on numerous affairs, including, famously, with Josephine Baker. He lived in a farm house in eastern France during World War II and was accused of collaborating with the German during the occupation. To escape questioning, he fled to Quebec after the war. He came to the United States and traveled the country. He lived for a time in the 1950s in Anna Maria Island, Florida, and later in Nogales, Arizona. Simenon wrote more than 350 novels and novellas as well as articles, pulp novels under numerous pseudonyms and autobiographical works. He was among the most prolific writers of the 20th century, writing 60 to 80 pages a day.

France honors foreigners who defended her

The French have long honored such sacrifice as presented by the foreign volunteers for service in the French armed forces discussed in our previous article, with the presentaion of La Croix de Guerre, or The Cross of War. Belgium has a similar tradition.

The decoration was created in 1915 and is presented to individuals or units that display acts of heroism during war. A grand volume appropriately titled La Croix de Guerre is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

Col. Jimmy Stewart receives La Croix de Guerre

A previous owner told the sort of tale about the book that always delights bibliophiles. He found it, he said, in a used bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris in 1970. It was being used as a doorstop. The beautiful medal that had graced the cover was missing. In those days, though, such medals were easy to find, and inexpensive, so he replaced it with a World War I era Croix de Guerre.

The book is in French and shares the complete history of the medal during World War I and the first two years of World War II (It was published in 1941). General René Victor Boëlle, a commander during World War I, first proposed the medal as a way to recognize brave soldiers. His photograph appears very prominently in the book, along with a reproduction of a handwritten letter from him explaining the rationale for the medal.

During World War I, numerous Americans received the medal, including William Wellman, who flew with the Lafayette Flying Corps, which included the Lafayette Escadrille squadron. Wellman later became a Hollywood film director and made several movies about World War I and World War II. His last film was Lafayette Escadrille in 1958.

During World War II, even more Americans received the award, including singer/actress Josephine Baker, General Curtis LeMay, General George Patton, most-decorated soldier Audie Murphy, and actor Jimmy Stewart, who was an Army colonel at the time.