World War II Multimedia Database Web Log

July 24, 2006

I'm in the middle of reviewing all 2,000 photos (1856 online) and checking them for accuracy. I'm finding that six years later, there's a lot more information available about the photos then when I started the site. I've updated about 400 photos and I hope to have a keyword-searchable database this fall. It will open up all new possibilities for both my work and for visitors.

For instance, view this photo available from the National Archives.

Since posting that photo, which has the original caption from the Archives, I've done some more research and found Pvt. Fuhlrodt, still alive, in Nebraska.

Warren Fuhlrodt was hit by a white phosperous grenade on Kunishi Ridge on June 15, 1945. The grenade was either captured by the Japanese or possibly a victim of friendly fire. The phosperous hit his back and legs. It's hard to put out and burns more intensely in the proximity of aluminium and metal. With tanks the only vehicles able to survive the journey back and forth to the hospital under machine gun and sniper fire, he was told he could be evacuated — if he could get himself into the tank. So, he crawled, alone and unaided, into the bottom hatch, because snipers would fire on anyone accessing the top hatches. I doubt with severe burns to his legs, he could have climbed up top anyway, but he made it, covered in mud.

A very bumpy, painful ride later, the photo was taken as he was removed, exhausted, from the tank. In the days of few helicopters, he was strapped to the outside of a piper cub (some small plane, he wasn't sure what type) and flown to a field hospital and then evacuated to a hospital ship. He fought with the doctors to keep his leg, as they saw no hope of saving it. He was able to keep his leg and is very happy of that today.

Warren Fuhlrodt is an example of the millions of men and women around the world who somehow do extraordinary things to survive in wartime. I was very glad to have an opportunity to hear his story.

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6/23/06 C-47 "Early Delivery"

First, take a look at this photo.

One of the things I've learned is that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has really maddening captions and dates for their World War II photos. A lot of their online material was captioned by whatever source donated the photo originally.

The NARA caption is "Crew of the "Early Delivery" that supply the ground forces in New Guinea with equipment and foodstuffs." when I captioned this photo originally in 1999, the Internet wasn't as large as it is today, and it didn't have the research possibiiities.

Hence, later on I found "Early Delivery" on the Pacific Wrecks Database. "Early Delivery" was shot down on February 6, 1943 over Wau, New Guinea.

6/1/06 How Do You Know What You Know About a Photo?

A question I get all the time is how do you know what I know about a particular photo. Unlike many other sites, I strive to find out where, when, who, why and how a photo was taken. Almost all the photos on my site are missing all of that info, but a lot of them, and soon most of them, will have critical detail in more than one area.

Researching photos is very interesting to me. It's a piece of someone's history. I've seen men cry over getting a photo they thought never existed or never saw before. I've seen photos contridict the established history. Annotating them helps preserve them for the future.

As I said below, I work with several photo archives to research the photo. Once I decide it's something I want to annotate, I look at the caption in the National Archives or the Naval Historical Center or the anonymous donor archive and start from there. Often, too often, someone captioned the photo 60 years ago and their caption is wrong, either inaccurate in facts or time or place. That's where I go to work.

First, I look at the photo. If it's a plane, a ship or tank, I count the propellers, or the stacks, or the bogie wheels. If it's a person, I lok at the uniform. If it's a place, I look for distinctive landmarks.

I can often figure out a lot from those details. A search online will help narrow the time and place down, sometime sto the exact day.

Sometimes those details confuse even the experts, and the photo has to go to someone else who might of seen it before or might know someone who knows its history.

Or it might go to the veterans groups. The knowledge these men possess, even 60 years later, is extraordinary. They can tell you the names and hometowns of everyone in a particular photos as if it was taken yesterday. It's quite amazing.

In the enxt few entries, we'll look at some photos, before captioning and after, and see how the process of captioning changed over the past six years.

05/30/06 In the Beginning....

I can’t believe it’s been six years since I started this site. Only since November 2005 have I actively tried to update it. As it’s seventh anniversary approaches, I thought I would provide a little background on how the site came to be.

At Fordham University Lincoln Center in the Fall of 1996, I met with the Head of Department, Prof. Barry Goldberg, to discuss my undergraduate history degree curriculum. The final requirement was a 30-page written thesis. Prof. Goldberg, knowing that I had extensive experience in multimedia, wanted to get the department up on the web. He suggested that I make a website about World War II.

I was transferred from Prof. Goldberg to Prof. Michael Marmé for advising, and he agreed to supervise the first part of the undergraduate thesis on the Pacific. I didn’t really worry about the undergraduate thesis as I had a lot to do on various classes, plus my day job was something more than a full time – like two and a half full time – job.

So in Fall 1999, three years after Prof. Goldberg suggested I make a website, I began to gather materials for the project. I spent a lot of time with the National Archives, pulling photos relevant to World War II. In the Pacific. I captioned them using Adobe Photoshop, usually with the information present at the time the photo was found online in the National Archives. (Lately I’m finding that that information is often inaccurate.) Soon I had annotated over 500 photos. The site went live in the spring of 2000, first with only photos, then essays were added by May 2000.  Prof. Marmé was a great resource, and I think I blew his mind with the sheer volume of the project. A 30-page thesis turned into 50+ essays, many more than one page long. The Bibliography linked back to the New York Public Library, and other links all around the Internet provided a lot of more detailed information. Madacy Video agreed to let me use their video clips if I provided a link back to their website.

As I worked on the Pacific War, I realized I wanted to create a larger, more comprehensive site on the European War. Because of the size of that theatre, with its western and eastern fronts, I would have to double the size - initially over 900 photos and 100 essays – and draw from many more resources. For the European War I was able to secure the assistance of Prof. Edward Bristow. Prof. Bristow at first didn’t understand the project, as he had no experience with the web and the materials for editing were delivered on paper, which he preferred but lacked the interface of the web that visitors to the site would experience. Once he was able to see the site online, he could better imagine how the European version would come together.

Captioning the photos was both the most difficult and the most rewarding part. Some photos would go very quickly, easily captioned in a few minutes. Some take hours or days, and cannot be identified even with the help of many other interested historians and webmasters. Some are captioned only to be correctly identified years later with the help of people involved.

When the first complete version was posted in Dec. 2000, I had 1856 photos, 100 video clips, and 132 essays. Not bad for slightly more than a year’s worth of work.

Bibliography From Amazon.com

 

 

 

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