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Tuesday, September 24, 2024

Vintage Military - Part 63

Fort Sheridan part 3

Today we see some more Fort Sheridan photos.

Fort Sheridan was an Army base just north of Chicago.  During World War II, it was an induction and training center, processing over half a million inductees.

As part of an Army project to study different body types, some of these inductees were photographed nude.

These photos are sometimes confused with the Ivy League nude posture photos or the Navy pre-flight school nude photos at St. Mary's, but these photos are easily distinguished because each man stands on a base labeled "Ft. Sheridan".

A few dozen of these photos have been found (I have 36 of them), but the numbers on the base that each recruit stands on makes me wonder whether over 9000 inductees were photographed.

One of my readers noted that there was also a prisoner of war camp at Fort Sheridan, and he wondered if these might be German POWs.  It's possible, but most of the sources I've seen refer to these men as American Army inductees.

The photo above is the smallest and lowest-quality one in my collection of Ft. Sheridan photos.  (Click to see the size of the original.)  I have been unable to find a higher resolution copy of it.


Next time: more Fort Sheridan photos.

3 comments:

SickoRicko said...

So many fine asses.

Anonymous said...

So many soldier-recruits passed through Ft. Sheridan, but, to quote one of the captions, "Some of these inductees were photographed nude." Interesting. It causes me to wonder how the process worked: why were some soldiers asked to strip nude, while others were not.? Very thankful that a few of these nude photos survived and are now available for us to view.

Anonymous said...

First, we don't say it often enough but a big THANK YOU because you work posting these images is appreciated (not just these ones).
In terms of those images, having the year would be most interesting. In this series, most mean are (still) with foreskin which would point to earlier in the 20th century.

When you look at the estonian images, it is clearly separate photographs for each view, each featuring 2 persons. But here, there is an "assembly" of three poses into a single one. I wonder if this was done at the time the military developped them ( mask to only expose 1/3 of paper so that 3 separate images could be placed on 1 sheet) or whether they were printed on separate sheets, and the assembly into single is done in modern times.

It would seem to be that if solders need to be nude for their physical exam, it would be a no brainer to have them step in booth for 3 quick photos before he gets dressed again and would assume it was systematic for all those passing through THAT facility (Fort Sheridan) but doesn't mean all such facilities did it.