Other Wars of the 20Th Century: Stories Told Through Postage Stamps

By Christopher B. Yardley

What is the stamp designer wanting to say – has perception of the event changed with time? Is the image a ‘mirror’, reflecting what we already know or is it a ‘lens’ – requiring we think further?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Nov 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781982295950

Christopher B. Yardley

Christopher Yardley is a life-long stamp collector with an interest in military history shown within stamp images.

Book preview

Copyright © 2022 Christopher B. Yardley PhD.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Balboa Press

A Division of Hay House

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.balboapress.com.au

AU TFN: 1 800 844 925 (Toll Free inside Australia)

AU Local: 0283 107 086 ([phone] from outside Australia)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-9822-9594-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-9595-0 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 11/25/2022

Keywords :

Human conflict

Military history

Military history on postage stamps

Social history on postage stamps

The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

The Arab- Israeli Conflicts from 1948

The Korean War 1950-1953

The Vietnam War 1955-1975

The Cold War 1947-1991

The Afghanistan War from 1979

The Falklands War 1982

The Gulf War 1990-1991.

Front cover image : North Korea 1975 : A single stamp from the set of eight images entitled The 30th anniversary of the Korean Workers’ Party.

Back cover image : (Still celebrating, still aggressive Nation Building under the Kim Regime) North Korea 2020 : Military Parade for the 75th Anniversary of North Korea.

101996.png

Preface

The devil’s in the detail, they say. And as far as the miniscule art form of stamp design is concerned, this couldn’t be more true. The amount of contemplation and concentration involved in creating such a diminutive image is sizeable. Every pixel counts, every micro-millimetre needs to do its bit.

But of course, a stamp can only say so much. It’s an impression, a small window to people and stories and celebrations, a cue to find out more.

By presenting (these) diverse subjects in summary and in detail, we hope to give you a fresh perspective. After all, our stamps may be small, but their scope and ambition are enormous (Editorial (2010), The big picture, Royal Mail Year Book).

image1.jpg

This is the third reference I shall publish to complement previous studies.

A Great War Study – the Centenary commemorative postage stamps 2014-2018, (2019), Canberra, Cannava House Publications. ISBN 9780648667100.

The Second World War representing world conflict on postage stamps (2022), Balboa Press.

Volume One : ISBN 978-1-9822-9297-3 / e-ISBN : 978-1-9822-9298-0.

Volume Two : ISBN 978-1-9822-9299-7 / e-ISBN : 978-1-9822-9300-0.

Introduction

The message that the stamp designer depicts in his stamp design reflects the history of the event as perceived on the date of the design. That same event, when viewed over time may have changed making the media a living reflection of that history.

As with most stamp collectors I have watched the dramatic decrease in the amount of mail distributed by the world’s post offices since the 1990s because of the Internet phenomena. With the acceptance of QR code I can envisage the day when the postage stamp containing an appropriate message becomes very rare indeed.

I argue that this will be a valuable medium lost.

To date to overcome the loss in revenues post offices have responded by increasing the number of stamp issues they release at higher prices. This has been compounded, in my mind by the four main stamp agencies who provide postal services to their client country postal administrations.

As the hobby of stamp collecting has evolved the collector, and the support industry behind it has suggested that the keen collector wants to acquire complete sets of stamps including any different format that is available – an unused (mint) stamp, a used example, the same design printed by a different printer, printing anomalies, single copies or the stamps published in miniature sheets including a number of different value pre-paid mail service fees.

The humble postage stamp

A postage stamp is no more than the pre-payment of a service fee to a postal authority for the movement of an article from one place to another. The different service fees correspond to the authorities published tariff of charges that generally reflect the weight, speed of delivery and destination of the item being submitted for posting. Classically the stamp must have been publicly available over a country’s post office counters for six months and sold at the face-value, the service fee, shown on the stamp. Before the stamp / service fee token is affixed to an article to be posted and delivered it is known as a ‘mint’ stamp. When the token, affixed to the article to be carried, is accepted the post office cancels it with a postmark signifying the stamp has been used.

The postal authorities fall neatly into two categories. Those who control their own processes and those that out-source their stamp production and marketing to an alternate supplier. The dominant company providing the highest level of support to postal authorities is The Inter-Governmental Philatelic Corporation, or IGPC that represents over 70 different countries in the design, production, and marketing of postage stamps. It also assists postal administrations with the running of their postal services. IGPC claim to produce nearly half of the different postage stamps issued each year but have been criticised for inappropriate and excessive issues.

It is the smaller, less established authorities who tend to seek help. The collecting public is protected from the latter as the world’s most established stamp-dealers and sales rooms concentrate upon the goods from the former group. The established dealers have guidelines to check the bona-fides of the postal authorities as described in the previous paragraph.

Postage stamps have existed since 1840. All countries issue stamps and many of them use stamps to publicise their culture or special occasions. Stamps are also issued on almost every subject you can think of. Military historical subjects are used, on average for 5% of a country’s stamp images. Authoritarian States issue a higher number of military and historical images as an element of their Nation-building as we shall see when we look at the stamps of North Korea.

A short discussion of the commercialization of state sovereignty

A postal system can run with a minimal variety of postage stamps, but nearly all jurisdictions print many. The jurisdictions use the opportunity to honour their own citizens, induce pride in country, promote the attractions of the locale to potential tourists, and make political propaganda points. In addition, domestic users of the postal system may be more inclined to use it rather than private alternatives, if they exist, depending on how attractive the stamps are. However, many countries sponsor the production and sale of stamps that are marketed to collectors outside the country and, indeed, never see the country of issue at all. Why not put Elvis on your postage stamps if it entices foreign collectors to buy your country’s postage stamps (and never make use of the local postal services)? Some historical episodes suggest corruption-related costs. In a study of corruption in the South Pacific, Larmour (1997) found a link between smallness and corruption in the trade in tokens of sovereignty, such as postage stamps, passports, and, in the case of Tuvalu, an Internet domain name. Larmour and Barcham (2005) note that in the 1970s in the Cook Islands the state agency charged with selling postage stamps to collectors became a slush fund for the government’s election campaigning.

Most of these stamps never reach the issuing country’s shores, and are designed, produced, and marketed by a foreign agency to stamp collectors around the world. The sale of postage stamps to collectors is an example of what Palan (2002) calls the commercialization of state sovereignty. Putting Elvis on one’s stamps seems to be a benign enough phenomenon, as do certain other acts of commercialization. The Pacific island nation of Tuvalu achieved some renown by selling the rights to use its Internet domain 684 Slemrod name (.tv), a deal that brings in about 15 percent of its GDP annually. This staggering number suggests that such commercialization can bring nontrivial, indeed quite substantial, per-capita benefits to small countries like Tuvalu (Slemrod and Wilson (2007).

Geographers, political scientists and historians have used stamps to study how states present themselves to their own residents and those beyond. Stamps represent visual products of a state’s identity.

Sources for the stamps I have reproduced in this book

I have used my own collection as much as I can. I choose to only collect, for the most part, stamps that have fulfilled their niche role and have been used to carry mail. The postal authority has officially cancelled these stamps with, hopefully, a circular date-stamp showing the entry point into the system and that date of posting. Occasionally this ‘spoils’ the image, but not often. I have chosen to use the sharpest image that I have when scanning my own stamps.

I have made extensive use of stamp catalogues to garner appropriate representations of battles / conflicts and confirm I am not missing any, where I can. Catalogues come in printed form and / or in digital form via the Internet.

On a world-wide basis four catalogues are used as ‘bibles’, these are :

1. Michel: Deutschland, Europa and Überseekatalog

2. Scott: Standard Postage Stamp Catalog

3. Stanley Gibbons: Stamps of the World

4. Yvert & Tellier: Catalogue de Timbres-Poste

Where necessary I have used the digital images of the Stampworld catalogue, the Postal Authorities own websites and commercial sales outlets, such as e-bay, to find the appropriate image I was looking for.

When is a stamp NOT a stamp?

I have mentioned above that four independent stamp agencies, plus a few other organisations, on contract take care of the designing, manufacturing, issuing, marketing and selling of postage stamps on behalf of a country’s postal administration. In this study we shall come across the activities of :

The Inter-Governmental Philatelic Corporation (IGPC) of New York,

Impressor SA based in Syens, Switzerland,

Unicover Corporation of Wyoming, USA and

Stamperija Limited of Vilnius, Lithuania.

These companies have a style that is their own and recognisable to a collector. For each subject selected to provide the excuse to print a set of stamps they will generally issue four stamps, (within a miniature sheet) and a higher value stamp also within a miniature sheet. The subjects offered are those that the design-agency believes will sell the most copies. These pseudo-stamps look like stamps and are available to the collector, not necessarily from the country’s post offices but commercially, and not necessarily for the implied service-fee. However :

The Universal Postal Union (UPU) in 2016 published a revised Philatelic Code of Ethics for the use of UPU members when issuing and supplying postage stamps and other philatelic products.

According to it when choosing themes and other design elements the issuing postal authorities shall not produce postage stamps or philatelic products that are intended to exploit customers. In other words issuing postal authorities shall not produce any abusive issues.

(www.fitphitalelicphilately.org/2020/TCNewsNo29 September2020)

There are not many examples of ‘abusive’ issues in this study although I have used a few; the post 2007 issues of Tuvalu and Grenada that commemorate events from the Vietnam War, for example. To my mind these images show how the war was conducted 40 years previously as seen looking back at significant events.

Sending mail

All postal authorities are confronted with a diminishing market.¹

The Internet has reduced the sending of mail by as much as 80%. Automation of the post office means that the clerk will more readily print a label to show the service fee to be paid for carriage of an article rather than tear a stamp from a printed sheet. Very little of the posted mail I receive these days has a stamp on the envelope.

85% of all stamps sold are to collectors.

The clerk in today’s post office is not interested in selling a single stamp and the product, remembering that it is the collector who is buying, is made available in many attractive formats. Many of these formats show the context of the issue to attract the casual buyer, souvenir hunter. The clerk has been encouraged to sell multiple stamps via stamp booklets, prestige stamp booklets and or within miniature sheets where the service fees cover the same or multiple service options.

Contents

Although I have given dates for the conflicts my study extends to the present day, where appropriate, to reflect how history sees the events or maybe because the government wants to revive previous successes as nation building / encouragement. Not only does the perception of what happened change with time it also reflects my stamp collecting philosophy. I seek to complete my collection to have one of everything, and its varieties for the countries of my interest.

In my previous work I have shown the stamp image and its title (raison d’être) without comment. During my flirtation with academia, I held focus-group discussions to determine whether the viewers of postage stamps saw a consistent message from a single design. They did not. Perception and analysis is a most personal thing. Unique to the person’s experience and background.

However, I am going to address each chapter contents here as to how I see the overall messages that are told. If my reader does not want to know my reaction, I’d say please skip this section – yours is the analysis that matters to you.

I have also previously sub-divided postal images as being a mirror of reality – I’d say 95% of all images – or a lens though which the designer is looking for a personal reaction from the viewer – in that brief few seconds in the life of a mail envelope available to attract attention – and reaction.

I list a few ‘lens’ that I recognise :

An image that defines national aspirations / updates of national aspirations,

national unity, bonding, participative activity, and recognition of patriotism.

Whereas the ‘mirror’ will mostly memorialise, recognise and laud or lament previous well-known events.

Chapter One : The Spanish Civil War.

Stamps and postage stamps were items of consistency during the turmoil. Not just for post but as declarations of which side one supported, this added a layer of security within each faction – and was a prompt to ignore items marked with the oppositions’ notices.

I have been advised whilst seeking postal stamps of Spain during the war that there does not exist