After spending more than five years in a North Vietnamese camp, Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm is reunited with his family at Travis AFB, on March 13, 1973. Burst of Joy is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by Associated Press photographer Slava “Sal” Veder…
Her name is Lam Thi Dep (Dep means beautiful in Vietnamese), the picture was taken in 1972 at Soc Trang Province by Vietnamese journalist Minh Truong. "You could find women like her almost everywhere during the war", said the photographer. "She was only 24…
By September 1942, a brutal hand-to-hand battle was being waged inside Stalingrad. As they fought from house to house and street to street, the Germans found that all of the tactical advantages they had possessed in fighting across the steppes were lost in…
These photos were taken between May and December 1944, and they show the officers and guards of Auschwitz relaxing and enjoying themselves — as countless people were being murdered and cremated at the nearby death camp. In some of the photos, SS officers c…
Seen here is an aerial black and white photo of the famous Cologne Cathedral during World War II. The cathedral suffered fourteen hits by aerial bombs during the war. It did not collapse but stood tall in an otherwise flattened city. The twin spires are…
These photographs show SUB 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…
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…
At a ceremony in Dearborn, Michigan, Henry Ford is presented with the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle on his 75th birthday. Henry Ford was the first American recipient of this order, an honor created in 1937 by Adolf Hitler. This wa…
Albert Einstein, whose theories exploded and reshaped our ideas of how the universe works, died on April 18, 1955, of heart failure. He was 76. His funeral and cremation were intensely private affairs, and only one photographer managed to capture the ev…