Young Harry’s Greenbelt editorials

In this glimpse of Harry’s life, he was volunteer editor of his city newspaper, for 10-12 years in the 1950s and ’60s. Named the Cooperator in 1937, Greenbelt, MD, residents changed its name to the News Review in 1954. After reading several editions he had saved in old boxes, I skimmed the online archives and chose additional editorials to share with you. They begin in 1950, when Harry was 29 years old, a year after his move to Greenbelt from Buffalo. They showcase his writing style and his views at the time, as well as local and national history. 






December 28, 1950 
“To The Infantry”

Harry, circa 1950

Drew Pearson is one of the most controversial of all columnists. He has thousands of warm admirers and thousands of bitter enemies. Most of his columns make a point of stepping hard on many toes – and the more prominent the toes, the better. However, one of his recent items is likely to be given near-unanimous approval. It discusses the bad financial deal the infantry soldier receives by comparison with his compatriots in other branches of military service.

Writes Mr. Pearson, “Under the current army pay system, the real heroes in the Korean war are drawing the least pay. They don’t even get a fair share of the glory when the publicity and medals are dished out.

“These unsung heroes are the infantrymen, who form the army’s battering ram, but who are not paid as much as the technical men and the pencil pushers behind the lines.” He goes on to say that the average monthly pay of a member of a rifle company is $135, as compared with $226 for an air force combat crewman and $172 for a submariner. Combat infantrymen once got a $10 a month bonus, but this is no longer given.

Moreover, according to Mr. Pearson, infantrymen are actually the poorest paid of all the troops in the army. Ordnance, signal corps, armored force, quartermaster, artillery and everyone else does better financially. And the ironical part of it is that all these other troops are basically, simply the infantry’s support. They exist for the sole purpose of aiding the infantry in its grim task of closing with and capturing or destroying the enemy. If the infantry fails to do that, the cause is always doomed.

Relatively little stress was placed on the infantry in the so-called New Army we heard so much about a year or so ago. This was to be pretty much the mechanized army, the push button army, in which almost everyone would be a technician of some kind. The Korean war changed that concept, and with a vengeance. It was infantry – the poor, bloody infantry of legend – that fought the delaying actions.

Infantry takes the beating in war. It suffered 70 per cent of the casualties in World War II, perhaps a higher percentage in Korea. Yet, Mr. Pearson says, In World War II it got only 11.6 percent of the medals. And as noted before, it is way down the line at the pay table.

It can be argued that mere money is a small recompense for asking a man to risk his life in war and, at best, live miserably. But it is the only recompense possible – no way exists to make the infantryman’s lot an easy, pleasant one. It is certainly a reasonable assumption that the footslogger with a rifle in his hands deserves a better break than he’s now getting.

No one who has never seen combat can possibly understand what it’s like. But, when we wake up with big heads on New Year morning, let’s stop for a moment and think – and pray – and give thanks to those brave men who are making our New Year celebrations possible. Let us remember the sobering figure of more than thirty thousand casualties. Let us join their loved ones in crying for them!

 

January 10, 1952 
“Leave of Absence”

(Did Harry take a break to help with his soon-to-be-born daughter?)

It is with considerable reluctance that I have offered my resignation as Editor of this newspaper, and even though that resignation was changed to a four month leave of absence it is still a severance of a relationship which I have enjoyed immensely.

The Cooperator to me represents a way of contributing to community living. It is an instrument which can be used to great advantage, particularly in an isolated location like Greenbelt, not only to keep everyone informed about matters of civic interest, but also to promote the community consciousness, to make friends out of neighbors.

Too many of us, today, are prone to forget or to ignore our obligations to each other. We are no longer savages who have gathered together behind a stone wall for our mutual protection. On the contrary, we are, presumably, civilized people who have recognized that community living offers many advantages which are otherwise inaccessible to us as individuals. And that very recognition imposes upon us all the obligation to contribute part of our talents and energies to our own mutual welfare. We simply cannot exist completely alone or detached from our neighbors; yet, many of us are trying to do just that.

It is a matter of deep concern to me that so few of us display any constructive interest in our community affairs. It is even more disturbing because so many who are shrinking from all contacts with community activities are so richly talented and so capable of making significant contributions. The spectacle of a city council election with only six candidates, or a GCS membership meeting with less than a quorum in attendance, is both saddening and humiliating.

Now, particularly because it is the beginning of a new year, may be a good time to take stock – to measure the benefits which accrue to us by virtue of our community life as against the contributions which we are making in return. Perhaps, as a result of such stock-taking, many will find it possible to devote more time to participating in our community’s activities. There are so many varied fields of interest in Greenbelt, so many organizations actively engaged in furthering the common welfare, and all of them eager to welcome and absorb new talent. Surely we can, each of us, pursue an activity to his liking.

I believe that the Cooperator is an ideal medium to satisfy the creative urge in each of us, an ideal vehicle for self-expression. The Cooperator has behind it a long history of worthwhile and significant contributions to the community life. Indeed, I believe it to be one of the foremost factors in the transition of Greenbelt from a government housing project to a living, vibrant city. And I believe that it will continue to figure prominently in the growth and development of Greenbelt as it changes hands from government to private ownership. The Cooperator will, I am sure, continue to make itself heard in Greenbelt, with vigor and dignity, sometimes loudly, or bitterly, or quietly, or gently but always sincerely, and always honestly.

In this connection, I am particularly pleased with the choice of Bobby Solet as Managing Editor. She brings to the Cooperator a forceful and dynamic personality, the impact of which will soon be apparent on these pages. Withal, she is quiet, thoughtful and level-headed, and, I am sure, will attract many additional recruits to augment the small staff of the paper.

Those of our readers who have an inclination to work on their community newspaper would know that the opportunity is here and that they will be welcomed. It is a satisfying and rewarding experience, an experience for which I shall always be grateful.

Apparently Harry published Christmastime poems during the 1950s and '60s, in which he thanked the city folks for their work. (Click on photo to enlarge.) No surprise; an earlier post on this blog shows a sample of his similarly styled annual poems published throughout his government career, when he held the title of “Pentagon Poet Laureate”. (Anyone can skim the Greenbelt News Review archives at: http://www.greenbeltnewsreview.com/archives/ )

I’ll post more of Harry’s editorials next week.

Copyright 2017, Elaine Blackman

The aerospace industry’s role in World War II

Harry in 1997

I have memories from the 1990s of arriving at my parents’ house, and more times than not, finding my dad at the computer. Now I’m reading things he was probably working on when I interrupted.  

In the previous post on this blog, Harry recalled his personal role in an airplane factory, as a young man in the early 1940s. This week he gives the broader story of aircraft production. He wrote this article for the Aerospace Industries Association in 1994. 

The American aerospace industry came of age in World War II when it became the mainstay of America’s role as the great “arsenal of democracy.” Before the war, in September 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized it as a national asset when he called for the production of 10,000 aircraft a year. In May 1940, FDR upped the ante, calling for an annual production rate of 50,000 aircraft. The war actually began on Sept. 1, 1939, with the destruction of the Polish Air Force by Germany’s Luftwaffe. The war for the U.S. also began with an air strike when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, a “day that will live in infamy.” No war would ever be fought again without first seeking control of the air.     

It was General “Hap” Arnold’s vision that made FDR’s unprecedented goal possible. He saw the aircraft companies as prime contractors for a vitalized industry, able to subcontract with smaller companies, including the automobile companies, for components and subassemblies. William S. Knudsen, appointed by FDR to chair the National Defense Advisory Committee, which was responsible for military production, put General Arnold’s vision to work. He organized licensing arrangements so that production could be shared among several manufacturers in order to produce aircraft at the fastest possible pace.     

Governmental leaders may command, but it was up to the array of companies involved in the aerospace industry to respond and perform. They expanded at an unbelievable rate and the production of aircraft during the next few years represented an industrial miracle. Not to detract from the outstanding conduct of the war by our military services, World War II was a war of production, logistics and supplies. It was the genius of the aerospace industry, in many ways not generally known, that made the difference. Unlike the automobile industry, in which designs are frozen with only minor changes incorporated each year and major changes planned for a year or two in advance, aircraft production required a revolution in thinking. Design changes had to be constantly incorporated in the production program as wartime experience disclosed flaws and as the aeronautical engineers devised improvements. This innovative “flexible mass production” set a pattern for other industries.     

In Knudsen’s words, the U.S. “smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production ...” All told, the aerospace industry produced more than 296,000 aircraft of all types. By the end of the war in 1945, we were flying 26 different types of airplanes, none of which had existed six years earlier. In fact, the aircraft available at the beginning of the war were already as obsolete as the antiques of World War I. The air war was conducted almost entirely by planes that were built during the war. Some 50 major prime contractors were involved in this phenomenal production record, employing more than a million workers, with another 300,000 employed by subcontractors and two million more on related equipment.     

Progress in design and construction represented as great a miracle. Technology advanced with incredible speed, doubling and trebling the range and speed of fighters and bombers. The B-29, for example, was still on the drawing boards when the war began. The first production model was flown in July 1943. When the war ended two years later, more than 1,000 had been built in six new factories by four manufacturers.     

By the end of the war, jet and rocket engines were bringing about another revolution in aerodynamics and airframe construction. Planes had to be built able to pass through the sound barrier and the thermal barrier. At the end of the 1940s, a whole new world of flight was taking place in the skies. The pace of change was so rapid that the plane that broke the sound barrier in 1947, the Bell X-1, was retired to the Smithsonian as an antique less than three years later.     

During the Korean War in the 1950s, the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Gulf War in the 1990s, with a few smaller military actions in between, the aerospace industry continued to provide the advanced weaponry of modern warfare, and much more besides. In fact, through the “Cold War” years, the aerospace industry was a major contributor to both the national security and the national economy, with aircraft sales overseas the largest single American export. American built aircraft filled the military and commercial fleets throughout the world. At the same time, the sciences of missilery and rocketry saw remarkable advances, as well as the techniques of development and construction as vehicles, engines, weapons and accessories became increasingly complex.     

In the 1960s, in addition to meeting the demands of the Vietnam War, the genius of the aerospace industry, in collaboration with the government, started the U.S. on the space program that culminated with the landing on the moon in 1969. Today, the demand for ever more sophisticated equipment for military use, for more and better equipment for commercial fleets, and for the continuing conquest of space, signals the vigor of the aerospace industry and the importance of its contribution to the national well-being.

Copyright 2016
Elaine Blackman

 

If planes interest you, check out the book Harry co-wrote in 1994:

Flights: American Aerospace ... Beginning to Future

How the press will cover the next war

Author Harry M. Zubkoff in the mid 1980s

The media was Harry’s professional domain. I discovered the following hard-copy article filed with the title in the graphic below, “How the Press will Cover the Next War.” Then I found a published version in International Combat Arms magazine with the title “The Media’s Role in Modern Warfare”, January 1987. Yes, the 1980s may seem ancient, but Harry makes several points I believe you’ll appreciate. And, you may find this piece entertaining.

In the late 1930s I saw a movie that recreated a period when the occult arts reigned in ancient Egypt. A beautiful princess had a crystal ball – more like a sunken bathtub in her living room – in which she could see anything and everything that was going on in any part of her world. She could, for example, focus on a scene in any town or village in her domain. She could, if she so desired, focus on a battle taking place a hundred or more miles away. And, if the spirit moved her, she could even tune into someone’s bedroom to see who was doing what to whom.

Now, some 4,000 years later, and about fifty years after that fantasy film, we have the capability to do just about the same thing – to see and hear anything going on in our world. The technology is here, the equipment is more or less in place, or at least available, and all we have to do is press a button, flip a switch, twist a dial, whatever.

With this kind of capability, the media, both print and broadcast, can cover events occurring anywhere, from the winter Olympics in Switzerland to a war in the Falklands. Right now, of course, the reporters and the video cameras have to be on the scene, and there may be a problem getting to where the action is, but the day is not far off when that may not be necessary. Cameras mounted on satellites and positioned in space so that any spot on Earth can be kept under constant surveillance, will be available to the media. Communications gear is already available so that the media no longer have to rely exclusively on military communications facilities and cooperation to transmit their stories back home from the war zone.

Given these capabilities, do you think it will ever again be possible to exercise the kind of censorship or controls over the media that existed during World War II? I doubt it. So how will the next war be reported? Fully, I think, though not necessarily accurately.

But let’s first define what we mean by war. If there is an all-out exchange of nuclear weapons in the future, the question of how it will be reported by the media is irrelevant. It will probably not be reported at all except, perhaps, by the sages or patriarchs gathered around the campfires that warm the remnants of the human race. In any case, no one will care. However, since we have avoided a nuclear war over the last four decades since World War II ended, and since our deterrence policy is still operative, it seems most unlikely that this kind of catastrophe will occur in the near term.

In all probability, therefore, if there is to be a war, it will be a conventional war, either a large scale World War II type of conflict or a smaller scale Vietnam or Afghanistan type of conflict, fought with so-called conventional weapons. In either case, the way in which it will be reported will undoubtedly be the same as that in which all of the recent conflicts in the world have been reported. That is, in the same old traditional ways that wars have been reported until now.

There are two major problems in reporting on a war: to obtain the information necessary for conveying some measure of understanding to the consumers; and to transmit that information. Until now, the information has largely been controlled by those who conduct the war – that is, the military spokesmen on the scene. Reporters have always had to rely almost entirely on those sources. Moreover, the reporters have had to rely almost entirely on the cooperation of the military to transmit their information.

If reporters felt that on occasion their sources were not sufficiently forthcoming in providing information, they have been known to fabricate information – or, at least, to speculate to the extent that they might as well have been fabricating. That’s SOP, more or less.

Some of them, the more enterprising ones, will try to seek out some other than “official” sources. They might go out into the field with combat units, where they can experience firsthand a “small slice” of the war themselves. This may produce some human interest stories and even, perhaps, help convey a partial sense of reality to the viewer or reader. It cannot, however, by itself, convey an understanding of how this one small unit action fits into the overall strategy in the conduct of the war, or even to the tactics used in carrying out that strategy. Nor can it accurately reflect the overall progress in the larger war in achieving our military objectives. In short, the best it can do is describe a small action which may or may not be inconsequential.

Other reporters may congregate around the bar in the hotel where they are all being housed, passing along to each other any tidbits of gossip or rumor making the rounds on any given day. Then, each night, they will dutifully file their stories in time to meet their deadlines, with the maximum number of words needed to fill a column and the minimum amount of information needed to qualify as a news story.

With the technological developments becoming available, however, they will no longer have to rely so exclusively on the military, either for the information itself or for the means to transmit it. And, since the information will be available to their editors, too, the reporters may well be forced to greater objectivity and honesty in the quality of their reports. In fact, the day may come when it will not even be necessary to send reporters out to the scene of the action. They may be able to view the action in the relative comfort of their home offices and write their stories at their own desks.

But let’s not look at the future; let’s look at the recent past. There has already been a technological revolution over the last few years in the art of news gathering, with the advent of portable video cameras and satellite ground stations that can transmit news and pictures in real time. As a result, the networks now devote more than twice as much time to the coverage of foreign news, directly from location, as they did five years ago, and three or four times as much as they did ten years ago.

Unfortunately, just as the media have learned to use the increasingly sophisticated technology to transmit the news, so have others learned to use it to manipulate the news – and the media as well. I don’t want to belabor the point – that’s another story that deserves extensive discussion by itself – but there is a real question as to whether the press has mastered the new technology as an instrument for disseminating the news or whether it has become a captive of the new technology as an instrument for manipulating the news.

Now let’s consider another aspect of the reporter’s dilemma. In the past, in our wars if not in all wars, almost all a reporter’s information has been obtained from only one side – our side. Information obtained from the other side, the enemy’s side, if available at all, has invariably been suspect. Indeed, all our previous experience indicates that the “enemy” has been exceedingly clever in using the media to advance his own views and perspectives. The result is propaganda which obscures the truth of any situation and also casts doubt on the veracity of our own spokesmen.

For that matter, even factually accurate reports do not necessarily convey the truth about a situation. When a television camera focuses upon a riot – say in Saigon, or in any city, for that matter – it actually obscures the fact that the rest of the city is going about its business normally and peacefully, which is a strong indication that the riot may well have been staged for the camera.

Whenever I look at television news reports, I am reminded of what W.C. Fields said the first time he met Mae West. He looked her over carefully from head to foot with that inimitable scowl on his face. “There is less here,” he said, “than meets the eye.”

Another problem confronting the media is the dwindling proportion of reporters who have any military experience or who will be able to understand the complexities of modern warfare. Military policies, strategies, doctrine and tactics are subjects of professional study, not easily or quickly absorbed by newcomers to the field. Even experienced reporters, used to covering all kinds of news stories and adapting to all kinds of breaking news events, would have considerable difficulty in understanding and reporting on a war in a way that would make it comprehensible to the audience at home. Of course, that won’t stop them from trying. The media will undoubtedly send droves of young, inexperienced reporters to “cover” the next war, all of them eager to don the glamorous mantle of “war correspondent” – and all of them willing to learn on the job. And the media will no doubt print thousands upon thousands of words of copy, with little or no regard to how much they all add to or detract from the public’s understanding of the true nature of the conflict.

In my view, the media would do well to seek out some retired professional military personnel who can write – there are many such – and whose background of knowledge and experience could add immeasurably to the quality of their reports. After all, don’t the networks constantly seek out retired professional athletes to provide knowledgeable commentary on sports events? Is not the adequate coverage of a war at least as important as the coverage of football games?

In any case, the manner in which news events are covered today, and the manner in which they will be covered in the near-term future, is changing because the technology is changing. It is impossible to predict with any degree of confidence all the ramifications attending these changes, or to predict what the ultimate impact will be on public perceptions or public opinion. But one thing is for sure – the public’s demand for news is insatiable and the media will do their best to satisfy that demand. Even if they’re only partially successful, the mere fact that our press is free to try is a cause for some celebration.

Copyright 2016
Elaine Blackman