Subject: WWII-L Digest - 29 May 1993 to 30 May 1993

From: Automatic digest processor <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 31 May 1993 00:00:10 -0400

There are 6 messages totalling 252 lines in this issue.

Topics of the day:

  1. TRV: DIFFICULTY WITH THE BRITS
  2. GEN: WAYS OF LOOKING AT WWII (2)
  3. ADMIN: Re: WWII-L Digest - 28 May 1993 to 29 May 1993 (2)
  4. Da Big Online T'ing.

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Date:    Sat, 29 May 1993 10:07:07 BST
From:    Richard Kirby <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: TRV: DIFFICULTY WITH THE BRITS

>  Oslo, May 28.  Given the gloomy stuff I have uploaded, I thought
>I would try to lighten things with a bit of a puzzle.
>my requests, save one.  I found the ideal grounds for a drill field.
>The town clerk (pronouned town clark), a powerful guy, politely
>guided me to the local football field.  While nowhere nearly as

 Considering the advantage that I have being British, I will make a wild guess
at the Village Cricket green - usually situated in the middle of the village.
I can just imagine the Town Clerk getting upset at the thought of army boots
trampling all over the crease!

Richard.

ps I'm just about to go on holiday in the states, so I could do with the ten
sliver dollars :-)

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Date:    Sun, 30 May 1993 09:02:18 +0200
From:    JOHN AUSLAND <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: GEN: WAYS OF LOOKING AT WWII

  Oslo, May 30.  Larry, the picture is getting clearer.  I can see
the difficulty of having much structure when people have such diverse
interests.
  I also see that I misunderstood what you have in mind with the FAQ,
having thought it would be a list of questions.  I now understand
that you have in mind a database.
  Having been working with the six volumes of the Army Green Books
related to the central European campaign, I would have been very
happy to have them on CD-ROM.  Anything you can do to make all the
paper on the war more readily available must be encouraged.
  When working with the 4th Division material in the National Archives,
I could not help but think how nice it would have been to have it
on CD-ROM.  Since the office at Suitland, last year at least, did
not even have fax, I hate to think how long it will take them to get
around to CD-ROM.  (Happily, they do have copying machines and a
cooperative staff.)
  What is still not clear to me is exactly what help you hope to
get from users of this list.
  Regards, John Ausland

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Date:    Sun, 30 May 1993 07:10:14 EST
From:    Larry Jewell <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: GEN: WAYS OF LOOKING AT WWII

>
>   Oslo, May 30.  Larry, the picture is getting clearer.  I can see
> the difficulty of having much structure when people have such diverse
> interests.

  WWII was a vast conflict and various aspects are interesting to various
people.  The list shows this by the responses we give to a request for
information or an interesting posting which provokes diverse replies.

>   I also see that I misunderstood what you have in mind with the FAQ,
> having thought it would be a list of questions.  I now understand
> that you have in mind a database.

  "FAQ" was a poor choice for a name, but it implied the basic mission
of the project, but the thing will be on a scale with the war and thus
will grow from same seeds into a huge endeavour.

>   Having been working with the six volumes of the Army Green Books
> related to the central European campaign, I would have been very
> happy to have them on CD-ROM.  Anything you can do to make all the
> paper on the war more readily available must be encouraged.

  I'm doing selected sections from some of the volumes, usually a chapter
at a time.  I have the first two chapters concerning Axis preparations for
Allied invasion of Western Europe on disk, except that some fool has ripped
pages out of both chapters to have the "pretty pictures."  I'm also
preparing the basic command documents (broad strategic directives) for
Japan and the U.S. & Allies for 1942-43.

>   When working with the 4th Division material in the National Archives,
> I could not help but think how nice it would have been to have it
> on CD-ROM.  Since the office at Suitland, last year at least, did
> not even have fax, I hate to think how long it will take them to get
> around to CD-ROM.  (Happily, they do have copying machines and a
> cooperative staff.)

  With the technology avialable today they could produce a six hundred
page volume a week if they put five good people on it.  i'm exterpolating
from my own output with a cheap handscanner.  There are companies that
convert old corporate records to CD-ROM at a pennies per page fee in
operation today.  The Library of Congress is converting 28,000,000 volumes,
which may take a while :-).

>   What is still not clear to me is exactly what help you hope to
> get from users of this list.

   Anything, or nothing.  Jack Mckillop's USAAF chronology is a contribution,
as is the USN Chronology Team's efforts.  Bill Thacker's 50YA articles are
the basic framework for a time-line of the war.  I'm suggesting that if
anyone has a part of the war they are really interested in, and have it
on disk or would put it on disk, that they share it with the world.  Each
of you reading this are sitting in front of most miraculous communication
medium.  I get up in the morning and check for mail from Norway and Australia
as well as all points between. I can thumb through the cardfiles in libraries
I will never have the chance to visit in person, and each time I seem to
find a bit more inspiration and information for myself.

   I recently sent more than ten megabytes of files on the Vietnam war to
"Byrd" and, when processed, they will be available to anyone who can reach
the system.  I didn't create these files, I just had them on disk for my
own reading.  If I had kept them here, myself, my lady, and a small circle
of friends would have seen them, and few other people would have had the
chance.  Now they are accessible to more than 12,000,000 users of Internet/
Bitnet and where will they go from there?  Who will download them and pass
them along to students, friends, and "local" systems?  I tossed a pebble
and got a tsunami.

   I guess I get excited about this kind of thing because I can reach out
and grab a document I need without getting up from my desk, without having
to hope the library has a copy, or hoping that it hasn't been mangled by
some moron.  I love to read the original orders to MacArthur to assume
command of the Southwest Pacific, to study the wording of the Japanese
strategic policy directives, and to watch as they try to correct the situation
as the Allies press harder.  (The wording suggests an incredible lack of
cooperation between the Army and Navy.)

    Bottom line:  If you have something of interest to yourself it will
probably be of interest to others.  If it can be freely shared, pass it
along.  If it can't, discribe it, paraphrase it, compile your own data from
all sources, but tell us what you've found and why you think it's important
to the subject.  Joe Barone's material on Italian naval matters is fascinating
to me, since I've had little chance to study the subject.  Tracking down
that information in a library would be a real "pain".  Now all I have
to do is enter "Italian Navy" and it pops up on my screen.

    No one is obligated to contribute anything.  It not a condition of
participation in the list and no "points" will be lost :-).  Some people
have too much going on to spend the time on this, but if you do have it,
pitch a bit into the pot.  A single brick isn't imposing, but a multi-
story building is and each brick plays its part in that structure.

    Now I've gone and rambled off again ;-(.  Oh, well, I hope I've
made myself clearer.

Larry J

>   Regards, John Ausland

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Date:    Sun, 30 May 1993 10:06:23 -0700
From:    Thomas Cardoza <[email-masked]>
Subject: ADMIN: Re: WWII-L Digest - 28 May 1993 to 29 May 1993

I thought I'd point out to people considering digesting their mail that
responding to individual mesages using some sort of "r" command is
difficult since , in pine at least, it replies to the whole digest!! Also,
I often get 40 messages with 1500 lines in a single digest, making it
difficult to selelct which messages to read immediaitely and which to put
on the back burner.  No complaints though.  I've enjoyed the list immensely.

TC

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Date:    Sun, 30 May 1993 12:50:41 EST
From:    Larry Jewell <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: ADMIN: Re: WWII-L Digest - 28 May 1993 to 29 May 1993

>
> I thought I'd point out to people considering digesting their mail that
> responding to individual mesages using some sort of "r" command is
> difficult since , in pine at least, it replies to the whole digest!! Also,
> I often get 40 messages with 1500 lines in a single digest, making it
> difficult to selelct which messages to read immediaitely and which to put
> on the back burner.  No complaints though.  I've enjoyed the list immensely.
>
> TC

Some trade-offs are inevitable and everyone will have to find what works
for them.  One nice thing about the digests in that I can save the postings
without a lot of "header" information, saving considerable space.  April';s
file was over 550k in digest format and could have been 40% or more larger
in "mailbox" format on my system.

Now if I had a place to store the accumulated digests so folks could down
load them at will (the logfiles do the same function, but UBVM has only
so much space to store them and they get purged rather quickly.)

Larry J

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Date:    Sun, 30 May 1993 14:28:26 EST
From:    Larry Jewell <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Da Big Online T'ing.

(copy to wwii-l>
>Besides wanting to be involved in the organization, administration and set up
>of a "free" system available to all educators and students who have (initially)
>Internet access (and I'll still donate the gopher server, though I'm all of a
>sudden beginning to wonder about the disk space :-), I can also work through
>the CAF and see if I can get foundation support for various likely expenses.
>Perhaps other organizations may come online someday which may be able to
>fund a dedicated computer and disk (and therefore long-term security about
>availability).

  When I said I was indifferent to space limitations, I was implying that
we can utilize the gopher system to the maximum by spreading the elements
of the "database" around the internet.  A gopher search will find the
data if the search criteria are correct.  If it does go on CD-ROM it
will be nice but it will be (possibly) some time before that happens.

  I personally would bless anyone who wanted to make it an academic project,
as long as the list as a whole got mention since we've produced a lot of
the material already.

  Even partial support for someone to coordinate the project and devote
some serious time to making sure that the essential files are included
would be nice to find.  I am NOT a professor, or even a graduate student
(I took a short, 20-year break between high school and college.)  Some
one with credentials who can give the project more academic credibility
than myself would be appreciated, but not crucial.

  Several people have written to thank me for the material I've put on
"byrd" and I always say the same thing; "I'm just relaying other peoples'
work."  I have no pride of authorship on this, and if I never mentioned
by name, it's no big deal since my mission is to provide a full "deck" of
information and pass it along once it's on disk.

   People, we have a war that spanned a planet, and it will be examined and
studied long after we're all gone.  What we can start here is a coherent
mass of data that scholars and students can convert into information and
maybe someday some one will learn enough about the "why and how" to make
it possible to "study war no more."

> One never knows...

  Amen and Insh' Allah (I hope I got that right?)
> --
> Robert J. Granvin                                    Southern Minnesota Wing
> [email-masked]                                       Confederate Air Force
>   You know you've made a gear-up landing when it takes full power to taxi.
>
Larry J

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End of WWII-L Digest - 29 May 1993 to 30 May 1993
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