In 1936 Jesse Owens arrived in Berlin to compete for the United States in the Summer Olympics. Adolf Hitler was using the games to show the world a resurgent Nazi Germany. Nazi propaganda promoted concepts of "Aryan racial superiority" and depicted ethnic …
Maoris of 'C' Company, 28th Maori Battalion of the 2nd New Zealand Division perform the 'Haka' (ancestral war dance) for the visit of King George II of Greece, his wife the Queen, his cousin Prince Peter and Major General Freyberg. The location was at an a…
This bomb landed on a side road off Drury Lane blasting several buildings, including the office of the Daily Herald. Known as the Flying bomb, Buzz bomb or Doodlebug, V-1 was the first modern guided missile used in wartime and the forerunner of today's cru…
Adolph Hitler put Field Marshall Rommel in charge of the French Atlantic wall and the defense of Europe from an Allies cross-channel invasion in 1944. Rommel arrived, looked over the situation, and immediately ordered a tremendous upgrading of the forti…
These photographs show tUB 110, a German submarine that was sunk and risen in 1918. We can see the control room in the submarine, including the manhole to the periscope well, hand wheels for pressure gear, valve wheels for flooding and blowing, and air pre…
Vlasik’s off-the-record photos of Stalin caused a sensation in the early 1960s when an enterprising Soviet journalist spirited some out, selling them to newspapers and magazines worldwide. This photo shows how human this “monster” was, like Hitler with his…
Many wartime photos of dramatic explosions, especially those with action like this one, are in fact staged after the fact. Maybe this one was as well. It may also be from a postwar film. Cameras were not light and handy like today, typically had slow ex…
After the German 2nd Panzer Division captured Athens, they raised the Nazi German flag above the Acropolis as a sign of victory. This flag, the symbol of Greece's occupation, would be taken down one month later in one of the first acts of the Greek Resista…
The hospital is running a drill to make sure that they can implement the procedures for poison gas and in this case, the nurses are testing out infant gas masks. This gas mask was for children up to two years old and the design covered the whole of the …
These soldiers are part of the Russian Fifth Army of World War One. They are preparing a chemical attack against the German positions in Ilukste area (modern Latvia). Chlorine gas was first introduced on the battlefield by the German Army in 1915. It wa…
The Me 264 was designed from the beginning as part of the “Amerika Bomber” project. Its goal was to be able to carry a small load to the United States but also to support U-boat operations far into the Atlantic. The Amerika Bomber was a project to obtai…
The gun players are WH Murphy and his assistant, of the Protective Garment Corporation of New York. By 1923, the Protective Garment Corporation of New York manufactured a lightweight vest for police use and they held a live demonstration in DC. The live…
The immobility of the trench warfare characterizing the First World War led to a need for a device that would protect soldiers from enemy fire and could help them move on the extremely irregular terrain of battlefields. Apart from a few exceptional case…
When the people of the town of Hastings awoke one morning to see one of the Kaiser’s U-boats on their beach, it caused some shock. Thousands of visitors flocked to see the beached submarine. The Admiralty allowed the town clerk to charge a fee for people t…
An American tank crew stands beside Bernard Herzog - an American citizen who lived in the Philippines - after his liberation from the Santo Tomas internment camp run by the Japanese in the old University of Santo Tomas campus, Manila. As you can see, he is…
Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was cheerful and without a care when he first met photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. In a close-up image, the Third Reich politician was caught off guard smiling at the League of Nations meeting in Geneva in September…
When Winston Churchill entered the Royal Military College (Sandhurst) few could foresee that he would become one of Great Britain’s greatest war leaders. He tried three times before passing the entrance exam; he applied to be trained for the cavalry rat…
The photograph is taken during a battle of Saipan that claimed the lives of 22,000 Japanese civilians – many by suicide – and nearly all 30,000 Japanese troops on the island. Of the 71,000 American troops who landed on Saipan, 3,426 perished, while more th…
Within days of taking power, the Nazis called for Germany to boycott all Jewish businesses. This surprised many people as they had not expected the Nazis to act on their anti-Jewish ideas. This is the start of years of anti-Jewish propaganda. Nazi propa…
In May 1910, European royalty gathered in London for the funeral of King Edward VII. Among the mourners were nine reigning kings, who were photographed together in what very well may be the only photograph of nine reigning kings ever taken. Of the nine sov…