On The Road To Persia

Curiosity is a curious thing. When I write historical articles I like have a really good sense of the place where the action happens. Thank goodness there are numerous tools to help me satisfy this curiosity. One of the best is good 'ol Google Earth.

While working on a piece about U.S. efforts to supply Russia with arms and materiel during World War II, through the so-called "Persian Corridor"  I came across a photograph of Army convoys traversing a switchback in the Zagros Mountains on the way from ports on the Persian Gulf to Tehran, Iran's capital.

 

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My curiosity piqued, I wondered where this place is - or was. The caption says the switchback was twenty-five miles north of Andimeshk, an army division point for both the road and rail routes.

Opening Google Earth, I flew off to Iran to look for the town in question. It turns out to be nearly due north of the Persian Gulf ports, about a third of the way to Tehran. Using the Path Tool, I followed the highway for 25 miles.

If the caption was right, the switchback should be somewhere near the end of the red line. Time to zoom in and follow the road with the cursor.

I drove and drove and drove, kilometer after kilometer. And found nothing. So I started further south, about 15 miles from town. Realizing that 70 years have passed since the switchback was used, and that the road's right-of-way could have changed dramatically, I slowed down to about an inch a minute.

Hold on. What's that? But it's only 20 miles from Andimeshk. Still, could this be my quarry?

It's a little hard to see, but at the Highway 37 marker a road diverges to the left, goes a couple hundred meters, makes a sharp turn to the right, goes several hundred meters more, makes another sharp turn to the left . . . and so on until it reaches the top. I compared the Google Earth image to the photo of the switchback, and everything lined up. Hooray!

As you can see, the new highway just makes a beeline over the same topography. As you can also see, this place was where the U.S. Army drove its heavily laden trucks back and forth across that same hill to get to their destination.

Happy Trails!

If this post was helpful or interesting to you, please let me know. I’m always looking for ways to improve the blog. 

Disclaimer: The description of web pages are accurate as of the date of the post. Like everything else in this digital world of ours, they can change in the blink of an eye.

Word Frequency In The New York Times

The New York Times has introduced a new feature that lets you check how many times a specific word or phrase has been used in the paper since a way back in 1851. Go here to check it out: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com.

It brings up a graph showing the frequency of your query. I was curious about The Times's use of the word "fraught", which seemed to be in a great many articles of late. So I typed "fraught" into the search and the output looked thus:

The results surprised me a bit. The year 2011 has the most uses by far, and will likely continue to outpace 2014.

Now, if I wanted to know which articles "fraught" appeared in I can click on the red dot there on the upper right. That brings up a list (with links) of 609 stories in which the word was used.

Useful and fun. Try it yourself. 'Til next time . . .

If this post was helpful or interesting to you, please let me know. I’m always looking for ways to improve the blog. 

Disclaimer: The description of web pages are accurate as of the date of the post. Like everything else in this digital world of ours, they can change in the blink of an eye.

Naval Academy Yearbooks

What did Samuel David Dealey do when he was a student at the U.S. Naval Academy in the late 1920's? Not much, it turns out. I know this because there is a digital collection of Annapolis yearbooks available online. Here is the link to the Nimitz Library Digital Collection. The actual yearbooks are hosted over on the Internet Archive.

The best way to access the yearbooks is through the Nimitz link. All issues from the first one, in 1894, through 1970 are available.

So what about our fellow, Sam Dealey? I wanted to find out more about this guy for an article I was writing for a military history magazine. Sam went on to be one of the ace submariner skippers of World War II, and one of the most decorated serviceman in American history. What was he like at Annapolis?

He graduated in 1930, and each graduate was given a write-up by his friends that sort of encapsulated how they viewed him and his personality.

Go the the landing page (link above) and then look for Browse All in the upper left. A list with all the yearbooks loads. Scroll down to 1930 and click on that. When the 1930 page opens click on the link next to the cover photo. This opens the book in the Internet Archive. Type Samuel Dealey (or whoever or whatever) into the search box and click Go and wait. In Sam's case, six bookmarks popup - only one of which is relevant to our project, his class listing on page 198.

 

Over there on the left is our guy. The listing includes his nicknames (only "Sam" stuck) and the activities he was involved in during his four years at the Academy. This information helped give me a broader picture of who Sam Dealey was. It was worth the effort.

The Nimitz Library has a wide range of archival collections available to researchers, and more and more are being digitized. I'd like to thank Dr. Jennifer Bryan, Head of Special Collections for helping me find this stuff.

If this post was helpful or interesting to you, please let me know. I’m always looking for ways to improve the blog. 

Disclaimer: The description of web pages are accurate as of the date of the post. Like everything else in this digital world of ours, they can change in the blink of an eye.

Using Photoshop to Improve PDF Image Files

Ever had a scan of a document that you can’t read because it’s either too light or too dark? I get that all the time in my research of military sources. It’s a real pain.

But wait! There may be a solution (or semi-solution, anyway). Photoshop to the rescue!

For a long time I’d wondered if a PDF can be opened in Photoshop with an eye on improving the image quality. Recently I had the opportunity to try it on some files of WWII submarine war patrol reports, and it worked pretty well.

Little background: When a U.S. submarine went out on a combat patrol in WWII the captain was responsible for turning in a detailed, day-by-day account of the voyage (which was often 6-8 weeks long). If he attacked an enemy ship he had to note all sorts of details, including the serial numbers of the torpedoes and how good the food was. A typical patrol report ran 40-60 pages. By the end of the war there were nearly 1600 of these on file. In the 1970’s the Navy began to microfilm this pile of paper, and they didn’t always do a very good job, resulting in page images that were dark or light and hence, sometimes nearly unreadable. Now all the microfilmed reports are available on line at: http://hnsa.org/doc/subreports.htm.

The PDF file I was working with, the five patrols made by USS Harder (SS257), was 325 pages long. That’s a big file, in terms of page quantity. And I only needed to improve four or five of those pages.

Here’s the technique:

Open the PDF in Photoshop. Up comes a window showing a thumbnail image of each page, with page numbers below the image.

Choose the pages you want to fix by clicking on the thumbnail. You can open as many as you want; just hold down the shift key and click. Click OK and the pages will load. The file bar will string each of the image names in descending order.

Click on the page you want to fix and it will open in the Photoshop window.

The screen shot shows a page that is almost too light to read legibly. 

How to fix (or at least improve - the easiest way is to go to IMAGE>ADJUSTMENTS>LEVELS. 

A window with three sliders will open. Black level is on the left, White on the right, Gray in the center. Make sure the “Preview” box is checked. Now, slide the sliders around and watch the changes to the document. Fiddle until you can’t get a better result. Click OK.

Image too dark? Same technique.

Caveat: you can almost always improve a page image, but it’s rare that you’ll be able make it look like it just came off the typewriter.

You can now crop the image, if you need to.

Then save the file under a different name (you can’t save a manipulated page back into your original PDF).

Here is the improved version:

Typically, I print these guys out because I like having hardcopy to read from when I’m writing my article (in this case for World War II magazine). But you can just as well read them off the screen.

If this post was helpful or interesting to you, please let me know. I’m always looking for ways to improve the blog. 

Disclaimer: The descriptions of web pages are accurate as of the date of the post. Like everything else in this digital world of ours, they can change in the blink of an eye.