Could You Pass A Military Test?

Teenagers of today live in a very score-based culture partially thanks to testing in World War II. Contrary to popular belief, the military didn't take anyone who would willingly sacrifice their life for the country. There were many classifications and tests to filter out any soldiers with mental and/or physical disabilities. These include Selective Service Acts which divided men into categories from 1 to 4, 1 being the best fit for war and 4 being the least. There was also the ninety division decision which narrowed down the division numbers from over 200 to 90. Along with these qualifications, the AGCT (Army General Classification) and the NGCT (Navy General Classification Test) were used to determine the intelligence of men and their mental capabilities. The AGCT and NGCT were replacements for the standardized military testing of WWI called the Army Alpha and Beta Intelligence Tests.

AGCT
Standardized testing today remains controversial, whether tests like the SAT and ACT are actually a true measure of intelligence is still debatable. This debate can be traced back to the AGCT as well. Psychologists in the military personnel during WWII believed that the tests don't actually measure intelligence but only served as an index to measure the mental capabilities at the time of the test. Hence, because all test takers were given equal time, opportunity, and incentive, the test was only a measure of "general learning ability." The AGCT had subtests such as Vocabulary, Arithmetic, and Block-Counting. Based on the test scores, the Army and Marine Corps assigned recruits to military jobs. "Rapid learners" were assigned to Army Grade I and "slow learners" were assigned to Army Grade V. In total, about 12 million recruits were tested with the AGCT and in 1943, only 6.4% scored high enough to be qualified for Army Grade I.

NGCT

The NGCT was used by the Navy to assign recruits to military jobs as well. During WWII, about 3 million sailors were tested using the NGCT. This test is similar to the AGCT was used more specifically by the navy for qualifying sailors. 

Can you pass?

The following questions are from the Army Alpha and Beta Intelligence Tests from WWI:

A company advanced 6 miles and retreated 2 miles. How far was it then from its first position?

1. A dealer bought some mules for $1,200. He sold them for $1,500, making $50 on each mule. How many mules were there?
2. Thermometers are useful because
1. They regulate temperature
2. They tell us how warm it is
3. They contain mercury
3. A machine gun is more deadly than a rifle, because it

1. Was invented more recently
2. Fires more rapidly
3. Can be used with less training

Answers:
1. 4 miles
2.6 mules
3.B
4.B


For more sample tests: http://official-asvab.com/armysamples_res.htm


Our generation has WWI and WWII to thank for the standardized testing that we go through today. However, it is interesting to see that the motive behind testing is far more different now than it was then. During times of conscription, the tests were merely a tool to measure intelligence so that draftees could sacrifice their life for the country. Now, it is a lot more complicated, SATs and ACTs are usually taken to inform or even impress colleges about a student's abilities. Thus, the SAT and ACT is not exactly the same as AGCT and NGCT although the idea behind them are similar. Soldiers then were taking tests so they could fight for the future and in some way, that could be said for students today to some extent as well.



Sources:

http://official-asvab.com/history_res.htm 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_General_Classification_Test

http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/tuddenham1948.pdf

http://en.copian.ca/library/research/adlitus/page25.htm

Hitler

Born in Austria in 1889, Adolf Hitler grew up to become one of the most powerful, and brutal leaders of the world. When he was 15 (sophomore year) he failed and was asked to repeat the grade but decided to drop out of school instead. Three years later he moved to Vienna to pursue his art interests, yet was rejected from both art school he applied to, which is the time he first became interested in politics. During the first world war he became a corporal, and earned many awards for his bravery, one of which was the Iron Cross first class. In 1918 he had an eye injury from a gas attack which led to depression and uncertainty for his future. He like Obama was a well known and enjoyable speaker, and often spoke to the German workers party about the injustices that came to Germany as a result of the Treaty of Versailles. Rising quickly, due to his speaking abilities, by 1921 he was the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party, or the Nazi party. Two years later he had risen the number of members to 56,000, however he would not jain a significant number of members until the world depression hit. In hopes to force the Bavarian government to work with the Nazis, he staged the Nazi Beer Hall Putsch, which led to his arrest. While in jail he wrote a book of his ideas and how he would organize his party once released from prison. The book was called "Mein Kampf," or in english, "My struggle." In the election of 1932 he became runner up, however was appointed chancellor due to his popularity amongst the people. He used his power to eliminate competitive ideas and appoint nazi's to office positions. One Hindenburg, the man who beat him for president was found dead, Hitler's power was secure. Once president he immediately started preparing for war. In 1936 he invaded the Rhineland, and annexed Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia, and the West was ok with this due to the Munich Agreement. He made an alliance with Russia and Italy in 1939, then proceeded to invade Poland, starting world war 2. A year later he took Denmark Norway and France, and he then tried to invade Russia with Operation Barbarossa, which was a huge mistake because his soldiers were not prepared for the Russian winter and cold. He committed suicide in 1945 and Germany surrendered shortly after.


http://www.history.co.uk/biographies/adolf-hitler
http://www.biography.com/people/adolf-hitler-9340144
http://secondworldwar.co.uk/index.php/biography-of-adolf-hitler/48-hitler-biography-part-1

Stopwatch industrialism

Fredrick Winslow Taylor was born in 1856 in Philladelphia. He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy where he was at the top of his class. He passed the Harvard entrance exam, but couldn't go because the night studying that he did ruined his eyesight. Taylor learned a trade and worked for a while as a skilled laborer, and then left for the Midvale Steel Company, where he worked his way up from machinist to clerk.

At Midvale, Taylor introduced the concept of a time study. The goal of the time study is to see what time the workers were wasting, so that any inefficiencies could be improved upon. By doing this, Taylor made labor cheaper, as he was getting workers to produce more product in the same amount of time. The workers resented the prospect that their labor would be made cheaper because it meant that they would effectively be paid less per product. Because of this, laborers often resisted the changes that Taylor asked for in the workplace.

Taylor retains his relevance long after he dies in 1915. To the average industrial worker, Taylor signifies the beginning of the degradation of work. Taylor sought to separate mental and physical work, introducing the principles of scientific management. For the average Joe on the shop floor, it means that rather than one machinist making several choices and taking a product from start to finish, several machinists make minor cuts and adjustments over and over again.

While the effects of Taylorism are still felt today, it can be argued that they were the most relevant during World War 2. The degradation of labor, despite its adverse effects on the workingman's mindset, increased production so greatly that it allowed the US to outproduce all other belligerents during the war.


Sources:
britannica.com
economist.com
marxists.org
Labor and Monopoly Capital - Harry Braverman
The picture is from Wikipedia

Dwight D. Eisenhower

 He was born in Texas in 1890, but grew up in Kansas in a poor family of 7 kids. In 1915 he graduated from the US Military Academy in New York. A year later he was married with 2 sons. He graduated first in his class at the Command and General Staff College in Kanas, and was a military aide to General John Pershing, and Douglas MacArthur. He returned from being stationed in the Philippines right after the German invasion of Poland and was appointed as a Brigadier General. After the attack on pearl harbor he was called to D.C. to become a planning officer and headed Operation Torch in Africa, and the invasion of Sicily. In 1943 he became supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, as well as a full general, and headed the invasion of Nazi Europe. He rise very fast and in 1945 became the chief of staff for the U.S. army. 3 years later he became the president of NYC's columbia university, yet was short lived as he in 1950 was asked to command NATO forces in Europe. Two years later with the war in Korea hurting President Truman's popularity, republicans asked Eisenhower to run for president. He became the 34th president of the United States in 1953. Nicknamed Ike (from his childhood,) his campaign catch phrase was "I like Ike." He remained in office until 1961, when John F Kennedy replaced him.


http://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/dwight-d-eisenhower
http://militaryhistory.about.com/od/WorldWarIILeaders/p/World-War-Ii-General-Dwight-D-Eisenhower-A-Military-Profile.htm

For Science

“But when you come right down to it the reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer, in a 1945 speech to Los Alamos scientists¹

Every year, the United States spends over $100 billion on funding research and development, funding everything from satellites to wind farms to the F35 fighter jet. But once upon a time, government subsidies for science were virtually unheard of, as researchers were forced to rely on the goodwill of wealthy donors and corporate sponsors.² As FDR moved America away from Laissez-Faire and into WWII, his administration realized that scientific development would be critical to an Allied victory. The necessities of war would lead to unprecedented scientific breakthroughs that shape today’s world.

Spurred by a letter from physicists Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard that warned of the possibility of a German atomic bomb, in 1940 the National Defense Committee on Research (NDRC) was born.³ The NDRC was headed by Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Institution and former dean of engineering at MIT. A close confidant of Roosevelt, Bush led the NDRC with unquestioned authority. Once, when some of his staff went to Bush to resign, Bush told them: 

“One does not resign in time of war. You chaps get the hell out of here and get back to work, and I'll look into it.”⁴

They got the hell out of there and got back to work.

In June 1941, Roosevelt further emphasized federal funding for science with Executive Order 8807, establishing the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) with Bush at its head. By the end of the war, the OSRD would have spent $450 million on technology for American and Allied troops.⁵

One major NDRC/OSRD breakthrough was the creation of portable airborne radar. Soon after the fall of France and in the midst of Luftwaffe air raids, British scientists brought a small briefcase to America. Known as the Tizard Mission, the scientists brought to America some of Britain’s greatest technological secrets, among them the designs for the cavity magnetron, a vacuum tube that generates radar microwaves that was small enough to fit on aircraft. MIT’s Radiation Laboratory, created by the NDRC, perfected the technology, and allowed its implementation in allied aircraft.⁶

Soon after the Tizard Mission, British scientists made another critical breakthrough. The MAUD Committee, set up by the British to study the possibility of developing a nuclear weapon, found in spring 1940 that sufficient amounts of uranium-235 could be used to create a nuclear weapon.⁷ Fearing that the Nazis would create an atomic weapon first, the MAUD Committee forwarded their findings to the Americans. In reality, Hitler’s quest for a bomb was doomed from the start by an exodus of scientists from Nazi Germany and Hitler’s scorn for “Jewish physics.”⁸ Nontheless, American development of a nuclear weapon was placed under the OSRD in December 1941. When control was given to General Leslie Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1942, the Manhattan Project was born.⁹ The rest is history.

Scientific research did not end with the war. Far from it. In 1950, President Truman created the National Science Foundation, sustaining science through both peace and war. Today, nearly a quarter of funding for research conducted by universities comes from the NSF, funding the heart of American science as we know it.¹⁰

¹http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/ManhattanProject/OppyFarewell.shtml

²http://www.bu.edu/research/articles/funding-for-scientific-research/  

³https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Events/1939-1942/einstein_letter.htm 

⁴http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/bush-vannevar.pdf 

⁵https://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/trs/trsosrd.html 

⁶http://news.mit.edu/2015/how-tizard-mission-paved-way-for-MIT-research-1123 

⁷https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Events/1939-1942/maud.htm 

⁸http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/10/opinion/editorial-observer-still-a-mystery-nazi-germany-s-atomic-bomb-failure.html 

⁹http://www.britannica.com/event/Manhattan-Project

¹⁰http://www.nsf.gov/about/ 

Music and World War II

Throughout history, music has always been a vital human expression, as telling of a time period as any newspaper article.The music that originated in America before, during, and after World War II became the "popular music" of the world, and is still heard today. Music was used for a variety of reasons during the war, including propaganda, entertainment, inspiration, and recuperation. World War II was the first war to take place during the time of the radio, and millions of people across the world had access to the same kinds of music.
The music produced in the 1930's and 40's reflected events that were going on during the time. For example, in 1939, isolationist songs such as "Let Them Keep it Over There" were produced, but so were anti-isolationist songs, such as "Arms for the Love of America".
After America entered the war, patriotic songs were produced by the dozen. "God Bless America" was written by Irving Berlin in World War I, but was later revised and used in World War II. Easier to sing than the national anthem, the song is still an immense hit today. During the war, artists such as Cole Porter("Anything Goes"), Glenn Miller ("Moonlight Serenade"), and Frank Sinatra were thrown into national attention.
The role of musicians in the United States were different than the roles of those in the Axis or Allied powers. They were in high demand from the federal government and the military, as well as from the citizens. Therefore, music composed during the 1940s was different than music from any other time period, as it emphasized making the listener feel like he or she was in the midst of the war itself.
The desires of the people of the United States were remarkably identical to the desires of the government. The government could count on popular music reflecting the same war desires they had. Music was a reflection of the desires of the nation as well as a binding agent, drawing every person in.
Although America in World War II is most known for its massive outpouring of weapons as the arsenal of democracy, there was a deluge of popular, wartime music. This music would transform the spirit of the war and be a powerful remnant of the 1940's.

Sources:
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/world-war-ii/essays/forties-and-music-world-war-ii
http://users.dickinson.edu/~history/product/garrity/section2.html
http://www.popmatters.com/feature/172535-sounds-of-war/P1/

Enigmatic Cryptography of World War 2

World War II saw many mathematical advances that enabled the proliferation of mechanical cryptography, or codes. Nearly every nation had its own code or cipher that other combatants would attempt to break in order to access military communication. Cryptography is sometimes called the forerunner of computer science because of the related fields that it encompasses.

Before World War II, most codes were primitive. Egyptian, Roman, and Greek rulers used codes to send messages; a famous early method was the Caesar shift cipher, where all the letters in a message would be shifted up or down the alphabet by an agreed upon number, then shifted back by the receiver.

As early as at the beginning of the war, Polish agents broke Germany's first Enigma code, which was created by a machine.

The British were early to understand the potency of codebreaking and set up the ULTRA program, which had help from the knowledge that Poland's crytographers had gleaned from the first Enigma engine. By recruiting young mathematicians, the Ultra program cracked a few German codes, once crucially in April 1940 before D-day. However, the Ultra program was still limited, and many times, like at the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes forest, could only perform guesswork of military movements based on the allocation of resources. The Allies also learned that, even when Germany's intentions could be deciphered, often there was not enough military strength to stop the Wehrmacht.

In North Africa, codebreakers were more successful, finding out the number of Rommel's tanks, among other things. Additionally, captured German ships, like the submarine U-110, sometimes carried complete Enigma machines that allowed the Allies to completely crack German codes, giving them the edge in the Battle of the Atlantic. However, this was just one in a pattern; German commanders would frequently change codes while Ultra tried to keep up.

In the Pacific theater, the Japanese military used a system called "Purple", which was a machine that had two typewriters, capable of 70 trillion different combinations. Eventually, American intelligence agents noticed the pattern of three divisions per month where the key, which changed every day, was repeated, allowing them to break the codes.

In the end, most codes were partially or completely broken, sometimes without the targeted government realizing. One code, however, remained unbroken; the Navajo language, which was broadcast between soldiers of the Navajo Native American tribe, proved too complex to break.

Sources:
Weilin Tan, Joohyung Ha, Young Soo Kim, Martina Canevari, "WWII cryptography and its relationship to the discipline “computer science” ," UC Berkeley, http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i103/su09/slides/projects/WWII-cryptography.pdf
Tony M. Damico, 2009, "A Brief History of Cryptography," Student Pulse, http://www.studentpulse.com/articles/41/a-brief-history-of-cryptography
History Net: Where History Comes Alive - World & US History Online, 6-12-2006, "World War II: Ultra," http://www.historynet.com/world-war-ii-ultra-the-misunderstood-allied-secret-weapon.htm
Alberto-Perez, 3-22-2013, "How the U.S. Cracked Japan's 'Purple Encryption Machine' at the Dawn of World War II," io9, http://io9.gizmodo.com/how-the-u-s-cracked-japans-purple-encryption-machine-458385664