OSS CBI Photobook 19, Town and Country

 The encampment outside Hsian/Xian, and the city itself, continue as the subjects of the photos.

Below, we see the carbine in some detail, as well as the rifle strap, here and here, which made it to Marilla and is now in the Trove.

 

Who is the soldier below? Do his descendants have this picture of their own Mom and Dad, or grandparents?

 

 

Visual depth is provided by the figures walking along this receding, curving road. What's that blob in the middle, on the side of the road?

Enlarged on-screen, it looks for all the world like a snopek, a pile of grain sheaves stacked so as to make rain sluice off instead of soaking in.

 

Grain and rain, like those fluffy clouds in the sky, are the same the world over and through time. We have considered snopki before now, on G&C.  Here is a Polish painting from 1893.

 

 

 

The Drum Tower, in Hsian/Xian, shows up once more. Enlarged, we can see that the photographer must be sitting in the back of a Jeep that has the windshield turned down flat.

 

 

That little kid shows up again, tending to his business, but this time we see more figures in the background.  Enlarged, the double doors on the building in the background show pretty clearly.

This grain is barley, I'd say, from the way the seed head, heavy with seed, curves down a little, and also shows, even in the blurry background of the photo below, the suggestion of the famous barley "beard."

Botanical illustration does help.

        

"Barley or millet" were the crops north of the Yangtze, reported MMB. Millet does look quite different:

On the next page, things get serious, with photos relating to the drop in Hsinhsiang described in Chapter 2 of MMB.

 

 

 

OSS CBI Photobook 18

We took the book apart in order to scan the pages. Now it is clear that the paper on which the prints were pasted has become fragile over the decades, so that when the scanning job is done we will probably not rebind it. Do not worry overmuch: I am putting each page into a plastic sleeve with a page-number label fixed to the plastic.

 

Page 18 scan, top half:

 

 

 

 

Zoom in, below, to see the window details of the eatery at #329.  "In Bounds United States Armed Forces."

 

So is this one of the "workhorse" DC-3s mentioned in MMB, Chapter 2?

 

 

 

 

Photobook page 18 scan, bottom half:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Dopp Kit sitting on the end of the bench is one of bajillions issued to GIs in WWII. The name comes from Charles Doppelt who in 1919 patented the design.

A Dopp employee and nephew to Charles Doppelt, Jerome Harris, worked for the company for decades, eventually driving innovations himself. An interview with his son includes discussion of the WWII experience in Europe of Jerome Harris.

Found while looking, and failing to find, an image of Charles Doppelt or his Chicago factory, the image below, which is pretty famous. If an attribution is to be found, I would like to have it. No Dopp kit is in sight, but there has to have been one to hold that nice shaving brush. I also like the gas-can table de toilette.

 Next post, we return to Chapter 2 of OSS Special Operations in China.