We have gone through the best of the Heckman-Cashion collection from the South East Pacific Theatre, and then one of the good ones of the Hitchcock-Cashion collection; North Weald in England.

Now, we start a series of photos from the Stockum-Cashion collection.  These are the ones which inspired this whole idea of Image du Jours in the first place.  I will tell you how I came to own these photos.  I could be very abbreviated with this but, as you know, I do not waste my time with short, sterile explanations; words are for telling stories.  These photos started sometime in the morning of perhaps 1945. From what I can gather, it could have been mid-April.

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During the previous night, neither he (one of the principals of our story) nor his comrades had slept because the enemy (the Americans) were so near that individual rifle fire could be heard. Tank shells had been falling throughout the afternoon before.

He and his friends knew there was little opposition between them and the advancing enemy, so they worked hurriedly through the afternoon and all night -- there was so much to do, and he would have wondered if it even mattered anymore.

Yet, he was a soldier and he would do as told. What fuel could be found was put in a few trucks and cars; old oil was poured on serviceable aircraft -- serviceable, if they had had pilots and fuel -- then they were set on fire. Some were burning with all the aluminum, rubber, hydraulic oil, and paint smells, and some which had been burning a while were starting to sag on warping landing gear and wing spars.

Sometime early on this day, perhaps at daybreak because they couldn't drive the vehicles with lights on, the call went out to load up the last of the soldiers who were burning papers in offices and the like.  He was one of the last to leave.

There were several families piled in the trucks and this was a burden the officers and soldiers had not expected. For several weeks, families of some of the personnel stationed there had come walking in looking for fathers, brothers, and husbands. They had walked many miles from towns no longer habitable.  He had no idea where they were going except they were going north and then wait for the inevitable.

It might had been while he ran for the last truck, or it might have been many miles down the road, but at some point he realized he had left his Leica sitting on a desk in the ready-room of the first hangar. He had set it down and had simply gone without it.   The thought of some well-fed, warm American soldier getting his fine German camera most likely made him feel worse -- if such a thing was possible.

Shortly after noon, an unimportant GI, Fred, carrying an M1 was looking for a place to get out of the wind and wandered into a hangar that still had some glass in the lower level.  He had been with a group of GIs advancing against light opposition for three days and when they could, they rode on the medium tanks they were supporting. The day before, they had stopped at the edge of this town and with binoculars saw Germans running across the air-field setting fire to aircraft.

The tank commander started lobbing shells on the air-field, aiming at nothing in particular. There were not any worth-while targets, anyway.

Now, Fred saw through the ready-room glass that there was a pile of ashes on the concrete floor, file drawers were pulled out, and through the dirt- and smoke-stained glass, he saw a virtually new Leica sitting in the middle of a desk -- out in the open where anyone could see it.  He thought (in imagined conversation with an absent German), 'Oh, come on now, you think I'm an idiot?'

But he and the tank crews were awaiting the arrival of some intelligence guys in a jeep and they were to be there the rest of the day. He had some time to kill so he thought he would see if he could get the booby-trapped Leica off the desk -- one way or another. (This was a game a lot of GIs played -- I have this on good faith from a couple of uncles who were with the 36th Division.)

He got a big sheet of paper, wrote "Booby Traps!!!!" and stuck it on a bulletin board at the door of the hangar. There were quite a few GIs milling around and he told them that he was "checking on something...move away from the hangar door."

He stared long and hard at the door and finally picked up a piece of wire from the hangar floor and gingerly looped it around the door knob. Then, from a safe place, crouching down and pulling his helmet down, he gave the wire a jerk.

Nothing.

He jerked on it some more.  Then he had to figure out a way of safely turning the knob -- he thought about it a while and decided, 'What the hell!' – so he picked up a part of an aircraft engine and threw it through one of the large glass windows.

He slipped through the window and spent the rest of the morning getting that Leica to slide on the desk top and finally to topple into a trash can in which he had put dirt and wads of paper.

He finally accepted the fact that some German left in a big hurry and he now was a lucky GI with a good Leica -- and it had film in it besides! Eight exposures had been taken. (He tripped one exposure by dropping an engine part tied to a piece of wire looped over a file cabinet -- it still didn't blow up.)  The GI took the camera outside and played tourist. Later, he got the film processed at a poorly equipped field station.

Long after he was back in the States, he still had not printed the roll of film and it was put away in a box -- until he mentioned to me in 1968. He wondered that since I operated a darkroom for processing spectrographic glass plates, would I like to make some prints of "some old war film"?

The film was in terrible condition with some of the outer exposures stuck together. These were the photos the original camera owner had taken.

I ended up putting the whole roll in water with a wetting agent and after the emulsion got soft for the first time in 24 years, I got most of it to release from the base of the opposing frames. The emulsion that separated from its base and stuck to the opposite frames, I had to soften it more and then remove it with Q-tips to make that frame printable.

It hurt my soul to see some of the emulsion come off the base in spite of everything I could do to save the frame. I was not a bad photo-technician -- nor an inexperienced one.

When the film was dry, I started printing the negatives. Fred had forgotten the name of where he had found the camera but he had used it until VE day. Somewhere along the line he sold it or lost it -- he didn't remember.

And where was all the other film he shot?  "Gee, I wish I had kept some of those boxes of photos and film.  I bet some would be pretty rare today, huh?"

In the orange light of my dark-room, I looked at the faces of German soldiers posing for the last time with their arms around shoulders of their comrades. They would soon be in no army. They would be among the many lost souls with blank faces on cratered roads going nowhere.

There were forced smiles on some but none of them looked young, though they struck youthful poses, their faces and hands were those of old men and their uniforms had never fit. The uniforms were most likely badly worn when issued to them. In death, they might look young again, having shed all stress and care.

Few of those first negatives had an image larger than 1/4" square on the 35-mm frame and in some cases there might be only three disjointed areas on a frame.

Something latent in the image was lost in that space-age dark-room and something important -- something that had been held in abeyance since 1945 escaped me...escaped Earth and time...never to be seen. The frames the German soldier had exposed were near the outside of the roll and they were lost but they had protected a simple GI's photos.

The GI had been doing what he was told and trying to entertain himself during the long hours of boredom -- boredom interrupted by moments when he feared that the last shot of the war might find him. The last shot might have found someone -- on either side.

Ken Cashion