Cathryn Prince to Speak at October Club Meeting

Next Meeting: Tuesday October 15, 2013 
The next meeting will be Tuesday October 15, 2013, as usual at the Millburn Library commencing at 7 p.m.

Cathryn J. Prince will present a lecture based on her recently published book

Death in the Baltic. Ms. Prince tells in stunning detail the story of the worst maritime disaster of World War II, when more than 9,000 German civilians drowned. This tragic loss went unreported. In January 1945 the outcome of the war had been determined. Germany was in free fall as the Russians closed in from the east. More than 10,000 women, children, sick and elderly pack aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff, a former cruise ship. Soon after leaving port three Soviet torpedoes strike it, inflicting catastrophic damage and throwing passengers into the frozen waters of the Baltic. Drawing on interviews with survivors as well as letters and diaries Ms. Prince reconstructs this forgotten moment in history. Her book has already received rave reviews. 

Ms. Prince is the author of A Professor, a President, and a Meteor: The Birth of American Science, for which she won the Connecticut Press Club's 2011 Book Award for non-fiction. She is a former correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor in Switzerland and in New York, where she covered the United Nations.  Learn more about Ms. Prince here »

Dues for the Upcoming Year 
Membership Dues are $25.00 a year (September 2013 to August 2014) for a single membership and $30.00 for an entire family. Accordingly, we ask all members to pay their dues now. Please send a check to John J. McLaughlin 10 Farmstead Road Short Hills, NJ 07078 or pay at the next meeting. Please, if possible pay by check to assist our bookkeeping.

Holiday Dinner - Save the Date 
Mark your calendar. This year our Holiday Dinner will be at Mayfair Farms, West Orange, NJ. The date is Tuesday, December 17, 2013. Cocktails 6:30. Details will be given in later announcements.

Who Will Do the Cooking?

 Melissa Ziobro launched the Club's first meeting of 2013-14 with a look at the human experience of gender integration in the nation's army.  The large audience responded warmly to Ms. Ziobro's tales of the women who broke the gender barrier to become WACs.  Although women had served to support  the military as both nurses in the Civil War and telephone / telegraph operators during World War I, they weren't considered as anything but support personnel, whose efforts were over when the conflict was.  As Ms. Ziobro explained, the "hello" girls who valiantly "manned" the phones during World War I, weren't awarded veteran status until 1978.  The excerpts from the congressional record, including the quote about who would do the cooking, reflected the concerns society had about the role of women in the military.  Apparently army commanders had no such concerns, eagerly supporting the creation of the Women's Army Corps so that women could fill non-combat jobs.

The presentation prompted many questions from the audience, including some concerning numbers and statistics.  In an e-mail, Ms. Ziobro provided the following sources that should help answer those questions:

• Women In Military Service For America Memorial Foundation, Inc. - Concise source of statistics on women in the military
• U.S. Army Women's Museum - Women in the Army Comparative Statistics by War    
• The Women's Army Corps by Mattie E. Treadwell - the entire book is available on line.  If you scroll down a few pages, the entire table of contents is interactive and allows you to click directly to your particular area of interest.

September Lecture

Our next lecture will be on Tuesday, September 17, 7 p.m. at the Millburn Library. Melissa Ziobro will present a lecture based on her published article "The Women's Army Corps and Gender Integration of the U.S. Army during WWII" as published in On Point, the Journal of Army History. 

Melissa has earned a Masters Degree In United States History and is an instructor at Monmouth University. She serves on the executive council of Brookdale Community College Center for World War II Studies. She previously served as command historian at the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Life Cycle Management Command, Fort Monmouth, N.J.

Tonight's Lecture Is Cancelled (June 13, 2013)

The Lecture for tonight is cancelled due to the severe weather predicted for this evening.  The lecture will be rescheduled.

June Meeting to be Held on Thursday

PLEASE NOTE: Due to a scheduling conflict, the next meeting of the NJ World War II Book Club will be on THURSDAY June 13, 7 p.m., as usual  at the Millburn Library.

Our speaker will be Barbara Boyer. Barbara is currently a teacher at South Plainfield High School. A summa cum laude graduate of Rider University,  Barbara Boyer holds a Master's Degree in Spanish Linguistics from Penn State and a second Master's Degree from Kean University.

Barbara has a keen interest in Asian history and in the summer of 2012 she traveled to China on a scholarship to study Chinese history. The focus was on China and Japan during World War II. Barbara's presentation will focus on a little known but  profoundly disturbing book by Peter Williams and David Wallace,  Unit 731 Japan's Secret Biological Warfare in World War II.

During World War II Japanese scientists, with full knowledge and approval of their superiors,  secretly carried on a series of cruel and painful  medical experiments on prisoners of war, such as  injecting them with deadly bacteria, subjecting them to oxygen deprivation, submersing them in freezing water,  operating on them without anesthesia and much more, all in an effort to determine the outside limits of human endurance.   Thousands died from these callous experiments, yet the persons responsible were never punished after the war. Barbara will tell of of the secret agreement made between those responsible for these inhuman acts of torture and the Allies, and the reasons for the suppression of this story of man's inhumanity to man, and its legacy.

This is the last lecture of the season; we will resume our series in September.

David Ulbrich to Speak at May Meeting

David J. Ulbrich received his doctorate in history from Temple University in 2007.  The Naval Institute Press recently published his first book, Preparing for Victory: Thomas Holcomb and the Making of the Marine Corps, 1936-1943. This book won the 2012 General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Prize for the outstanding book on Marine Corps history, and it also received an honorable mention for the 2012 Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature.

Ulbrich has served as historical consultant and on-air segment host for the award-winning Echoes of War: Stories from the Big Red One television documentary and as co-director of the Cantigny First Division Oral History Project. Both these projects were funded by the McCormick Foundation. 

Ulbrich has lectured at the National World War II Museum, Army War College, Naval War College, Temple University, Delaware Military Heritage and Education Center, and Brookdale Community College’s Center for the Study of World War II.  He is currently command historian at the U.S. Army Engineer School at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, and senior instructor in Masters in Military History online program at Norwich University. Apart from his duties with the Army, Ulbrich is completing the manuscripts for two co-authored textbooks: Ways of War: American Military History from the Colonial Period to the 21stCentury; and Amphibious Warfare: An Interpretative History.

David Stroebel at Next Meeting

David G. Stroebel, in his first book, The Cannon King's Daughter, tells the fascinating story of how Alfred Krupp, head of the  powerful Krupp Dynasty, managed to suppress the very existence of his rebellious daughter Engelbertha, shipped her to America, and "wiped the records of her birth" from German documents and Church records. William Manchester, in his Pulitzer Prize winning book missed this critical fact. Stroebel's dislosure of Engelbertha is likely to have some interesting consequences when German scholars and historians hear the full story. Stroebel will also tell us about the history of the Krupp Dynasty and the part it played in both World War I and World War II.

The lecture will be videotaped and sent to Germany where we are informed some German scholars eagerly await it.