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Truth Behind Three War Photographs That Changed the World

Apr 24, 2018

The introduction of cameras revolutionised the way in which worldwide conflicts were played out and perceived by the general population. While wars have been documented through oral traditions, paintings and the written word for as long as humanity has existed, the introduction of the camera brought the devastation of war right to into the homes of those who had previously remained distanced to its realities.

Vietcong Execution 
The infamous image taken by Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams on the 1st of February 1989 captured the very moment a South Vietnamese police officer executed a Vietcong soldier with his hand gun. This image (which, if studied closely, shows the bullet leaving the soldier’s head) became a worldwide anti-war icon believed to exhibit the aggression of US supported troops on the local Vietnamese population.

Despite winning the 1969 Pulitzer Prize, Adams lived to regret capturing the image thanks to its misconstrued context; the pitied soldier had, on the second day of the infamous Tet Offensive, captained a Vietcong squadron into slaughtering dozens of unarmed, innocent civilians – and showed no remorse. Taken in support of the South Vietnamese resistance, the image was appropriated by American anti-war protestors and played a significant role in their fight for military withdrawal.

1914 Christmas Football
On the evening of the 24th December 1914, British soldiers trapped in damp and dirty trenches saw the faint flicker of light across No Mans Land in the direction of their enemies. They began to spot small fir trees lining the trenches, and heard the distinct sound of Christmas carols travelling over to their territory. While not universal across all of the front line, we know from WWI memoirs that certain locations experienced a period of reciprocal cease-fire across the Christmas holiday, with soldiers from either side emerging from their trenches to meet on No Mans Land.

The image of enemy soldiers engaging in a game of football captivated the world, provided visual WWI memoirs for those involved, and restored a sense of humanity to the dehumanised WWI soldiers. This was not the only activity undertaken during the brief cease-fire; soldiers were able to escape the squalid conditions of the trenches, finally bury their dead on No Mans Land, and exchange gifts with those on the other side of the war.

Commanders feared many would now question the purpose of the war and spawn a mutiny, but the events of Christmas 1914 simply provided WWI soldiers with a few days of humanity, before being once again forced to live a life of destruction and misery– live and let live.

Napalm Girl
Nick Ut, a Vietnamese photographer, captured the iconic image of the Napalm Girl in 1972 as she was fleeing from the bombing of her village by the South Vietnamese army. Once again, this image, taken for the Associated Press, won a Pulitzer Prize for its harrowing portrayal of the destruction caused by the Vietnamese War.

After he’d captured his iconic image, Ut was unable to ignore Kim Phuc’s cries for help – bundled in the back of an AP van, she was driven for more than an hour to the nearest hospital, where she remained for many months undergoing intensive treatment. After being exploited as a propaganda symbol by the Vietnamese communist government, she sought political asylum in Canada in 1992, where she still resides today.

More than 40 years after the distressing image captivated the world, Kim Phuc remains in contact with Nick Ut, and is undergoing laser treatment in Florida to improve the condition of her burnt skin.

Not only have these photographs left us with accessible legacies of past wars, they also played no small part in impacting home-front responses to wars. By encouraging protest or implying false victories, they had a noticeable effect on war-time policy – the camera became the smartest weapon.

FOUR SIGNIFICANT GAINS ACHIEVED BY WOMEN DURING WORLD WAR I

Apr 24, 2018

The events of World War I were dramatic, shocking and life changing for all involved. None more so than women, whose struggles were most notably evident in WWI diaries of those left behind on the home front to deal with the changing face of Great Britain– yet from the darkness, they were able to use the situation to garner significant social, political and personal changes.

A VOTE FOR SUCCESS 
In 1917, the Representation of Peoples Act passed through the House of Commons with a remarkable majority, 385 to 55. In the wake of the overthrowing of the centuries old Romanov nobility and monarchy in Russia, English politicians feared a similar socialist revolution may break out in post-war Britain. Thus, to quell rising frustrations over the age, gender and class laws that restricted enfranchisement, the Representation of Peoples Act granted voting rights to huge swathes of the British population – tripling the number of those who could vote. Allowing women to vote for the first time was in no short measure a result of the ongoing suffragette movement which had been gaining popularity during the war. However, while the age of male enfranchisement dropped from 30 to 21, female enfranchisement was only established at 30 years old. Additionally, women were required to either own their own property, have a university degree, or be married to a registered male. While there still remained disproportionately restrictive terms for women, by the end of 1918, the suffragettes had made an undeniable gain which resulted in females making up a huge 43% of the electorate.

TAKE A SEAT
Coinciding with the passing of the Representation of Peoples Act was the enactment of the Parliament Act of 1918; women over the age of 21 had the right to stand for elections to become a member of parliament. In the immediate wake of the new act, a substantial 17 women embraced their new opportunity and decided to stand for election. The first woman to successfully take her seat in parliament was Nancy Astor in the winter of 1919, and over the past 97 years a further 452 woman have successfully followed in her footsteps.

TRAINED AND READY
Parliament was not the only workplace that became more accepting of female employees as a result of World War I; due to both the increase in demand for wartime products and the reduction of available men who had previously been hired to make such objects, the employment of women in industrial jobs increased dramatically during the war. Overall, female employment rates jumped from 23.6% in 1914 to between 37.7% and 46.7%, with over 1-million women employed in some area of industrial munition production. While many of these jobs were temporary, they had provided British women an invaluable period to show their abilities in the work force, receive substantial skilled work training and secure their own finances – and the taste of freedom was not something they’d willingly forget.

WHO WEARS THE TROUSERS?
Given the possible dangers of handling explosives in a tightly pulled corset and an ankle length skirt, women exploited their wartime liberation as an opportunity to change the face of fashion. For the first time in British mainstream society, it became socially acceptable for women to wear trousers, and so the restrictive and impractical corsets were finally thrown to the side. Additionally, the previously idealised long hair became a thing of the past – the risk of an injury due to long hair when operating heavy machinery encouraged women to adopt what was previously an exclusively male style: short hair. This shorter style saw continual popularity through the following decades from the 20’s bootlegging bob to the swinging 60’s chop and on to today.

So in the face of struggle and misery, women cast aside their crochet work and WWI diaries to fight their own battle on the home front, achieving social, political and financial gains that are still evident in society today.

Drinking to Your Health: Medicinal Origins of Gin & Tonic

Apr 23, 2018

Nowadays, while alcohol consumption is widely socially acceptable, it would be a stretch to claim that your large Cosmopolitan was turning you into the archetype of health. Yet if we look back on past decades, including the 20th century, the ingestion of alcohol for medicinal purposes was a corner stone healthcare. So next time you fancy a taste of gin, bitters or even ‘HippocraticumVinum’, you might be able to claim you’re drinking to your health while impressing your friends with your new historical non-fiction trivia knowledge.

The recent discovery of wine jars buried inside an ancient Egyptian tomb, believed to have been constructed in around 3150BC, confirms the theory that the use of alcohol is nearly as old as humanity itself. While the founder of modern medicine, Hippocrates, dabbled in producing his own crude form of Vermouth for medicinal purposes, it wasn’t until 1095 onwards, once Christians had embarked on their worldwide crusade, that western knowledge of the medicinal benefits of alcohol began to develop. Scholars from the ancient Islamic Empire were the vanguard of Alchemy – with the word deriving from the Arabic term ‘Al-Kimiya’ – and made substantial developments within the realm of alcohol production and application due to their extensive knowledge of chemicals and natural science.

With alcohol harbouring fewer diseases and infections than any locally available water, the western world adopted Arabic alchemic knowledge and began to incorporate alcohol use into everyday medicine. Proof of the Christian Kingdom’s acceptance of alcohol use is evident in the prevalence of today’s well known brands, such as Benedictine and Chartreuse, of which were created in European monasteries in order to combat stomach aliments and other diseases.

The incorporation of alcohol into mainstream medicine was further encouraged by the expansion of European colonies, providing a ripe abundance of exotic herbs, spices and plants of which to produce new elixirs. These herbs would be placed in a jar of alcohol in order to extract and preserve their medicinal properties – forming some of our best loved spirits that are still consumed today.

Gin derives from the Flemish word ‘Genever’, a highly alcoholic medicinal concoction created by Sylvius De Bouve, a sixteenth century Dutch Physician. Believed to improve circulation and other ailments, the oils extracted from juniper berries had previously been employed during the plague, thus Genever became an increasingly popular drink for those facing new and exotic diseases across the European empires. For new world explorers, a bit of ‘Dutch Courage’ was the answer.

While Gin was believed to house medicinal properties, its other half, tonic, developed through similar means. In the 17th century, Spanish colonisers encountered the Quechua peoples of Peru and Bolivia utilising bark of the Cinchona tree to address a range of fevers and complaints. Suffering with exotic diseases, such as malaria, in their new found territories, the bark was quickly adopted into European medicine, forming what became widely known as ‘Jesuit’s Bark’. The active ingredient in the bark, quinine, was extracted from the bark in the early 19th century but was too bitter to ingest singularly. As a result, the powder was mixed with water and sugar to form what we now know as tonic water.

It was in colonial India where these two medicinal ingredients joined to form one of our country’s most loved cocktails. During the period of British Imperialism in India, starting in the late 18th century, colonisers suffered to survive its tropical climate and turned to quinine to protect them from malaria and other fevers. Due to the bitter taste, however, the quinine tonic water seemed to – unsurprisingly – wash down more smoothly when mixed with a shot of medicinal gin.

The final components of the beloved gin and tonic originate from the seas: limes and Angostura bitters. Due to the scarcity of fresh fruit on Navy boats, the lack of vitamin c in the nutritional intake of Britain’s Navy spawned a mandatory ration of limes into every sailor’s diet. The sailors discovered that the easiest way to incorporate these limes into their diet was, yet again, to wash it down with some beloved gin – it’s a win-win!

Yet the Navy’s love of medicinal drinks does not end there; when suffering with profusion of sea sick sailors, Navy doctors took to adopting the use of Angostura bitters. Developed by Dr Siegert, Surgeon General of Simon Bolivar’s army in Venezula, to cure stomach ailments, the bitters were quickly traded among soldiers, colonists and sailors. Similar to quinine and just as their name implies, Angostura bitters were unfavourably bitter to ingest. British sailors took to adding a single drop of bitters to some gin in order to smooth the consummation of their prescribed sea sickness cure – forming what we now know of today as ‘Pink Gin’.

A shot of gin, a drop of bitters, topped off with tonic water and a slice of lime and, over the centuries, physicians had formed the ultimate ailment-fighting concoction – the pleasant intoxication enjoyed by the patient being merely a side effect. Once declared by Winston Churchill as saving “more Englishmen’s lives, and minds, than all the doctors in the Empire”, gin and tonic has now made its way to become one of Britain’s top tipples.

To learn more about medicinal gin and other historical non-fiction, read Richard Petty’s The Boy Airman: An Absolute Stranger to Fear.