WWII in photos

Escaep

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Apparently it is a few weeks old but I just came across it, chronicles WWII in a lot of pictures I've never seen before.

Some of it is NSFW and disturbing so view at your own risk (but you have to click to see them anyway, none of them are incredibly disturbing).

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/ww2.html

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A new gallery is added every Sunday till October 30th.
 
What's with the babies in the canisters?
 
Awesome awesome awesome! I'm totally into WW2 stuff right now. I've always been fasinated watching all the documentrys, world at war, WW2 in colour, weather of war etc etc and recently started reading too. Nearly finished the voiced of D-day (great book btw) and got the voices of stalingrad and stalingrad in the post :)

So yea... Great find! Thanks!!
 
Wow...do you want me to fail my exams Escaep? Because I'm completely hooked on these now...seriously, though, thanks. These are fantastic.

I giggled at the babies in the canisters too. They look like little aliens or something.
 
It's like a cheesy advertisement you'd expect to see in a Fallout game; "Keep your children safe from radiation today!"
 
Do babies come with canisters? It would be great if they did.
 
Nah, I think those things would make babies rather difficult to deliver naturally...like bulldogs with their massive heads.

Would be handy though. Then you wouldn't have to listen to them/smell them/use yourself as a human shield to save them from radiation.
 
The last picture is amazing. How did the photographer captured the moment so clean?
 
Awesome stuff. Krynn posted a thread with a zip file of a couple hundred awesome WWII photos earlier this year... should be easy to find for those of you that missed it.
 
The "Baby Canisters" are baby gas masks. It was hard to get a functional gas mask baby sized so the best route was just put them in a pouch and pump that little compressor to deliver filtered air. I dunno if many were used but people had them.

Edit: These are pretty awesome pictures.
 
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A Japanese family returning home from a relocation center camp in Hunt, Idaho, found their home and garage vandalized with anti-Japanese graffiti and broken windows in Seattle, Washington, on May 10, 1945.


Ugh, ****ing disgusting.
 
Apparently it is a few weeks old but I just came across it, chronicles WWII in a lot of pictures I've never seen before.

Some of it is NSFW and disturbing so view at your own risk (but you have to click to see them anyway, none of them are incredibly disturbing).

<snip>
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<snip>

A new gallery is added every Sunday till October 30th.

I remember reading about this guy a few years ago, odd that I recognised the photo and remembered all the facts.

http://www.cracked.com/article_17019_5-real-life-soldiers-who-make-rambo-look-like-pussy.html
 
^ Amazing stuff. I'm always fascinated by what the Aussie and Kiwi soldiers were thinking about being send half the world away to some arid desert to fight to protect some supply lines to a country (Britain) most of them had never even visited. Talk about international geopolitics affecting the individual. How would they even find the motivation to fight? Most of them probably couldn't even understand what they were doing fighting in Egypt.
 
Thats how it was for most fighting men. They fought in countries that had nothing to do with their own. I mean, take Monte Cassino for instance. There were Aussies, Kiwis, Americans, Brits, Indians, Polish and even French soldiers fighting together in the middle of Italy.

Its kinda cool that I can actually name the vehicles in that third pic. Light Mk VI B tanks with, what I'm thinking is an A13 MkIII Cruiser CS tank, and Universal Carriers in back.
 
I've seen that picture before, and I'm pretty sure it had a different caption, saying they were practicing using the scope.
 
That seems even more unlikely, since it looks like the binocs guy is spotting their fire.
 
Could be shooting at balloons or something? Google reverse-image search seems to support the airplane theory though.
 
Why not use Google LenseView, where you can look through any optical device that is depicted in an image?
 
No they did do that a lot! Apparently it worked really well at taking down planes and it really started to shit the Germans up. Pretty crazy! But the russians came up a lot of crazy things like that!
 
No they did do that a lot! Apparently it worked really well at taking down planes and it really started to shit the Germans up. Pretty crazy! But the russians came up a lot of crazy things like that!

I know everybody used small arms to shoot down dive bombers, but I never saw/heard of a formation like that whose sole purpose is anti-aircraft fire. Especially with only bolt actions, and using scopes.
 
The last picture is amazing. How did the photographer captured the moment so clean?

What you cannot see is that he just stepped on someones head, and is about to get a bayonet up his jacksie :smoking:
 
^ Amazing stuff. I'm always fascinated by what the Aussie and Kiwi soldiers were thinking about being send half the world away to some arid desert to fight to protect some supply lines to a country (Britain) most of them had never even visited. Talk about international geopolitics affecting the individual. How would they even find the motivation to fight? Most of them probably couldn't even understand what they were doing fighting in Egypt.

I guess most of them thought that they were supporting a friend, they felt they could sit back and watch England do all the fighting without lifting a finger. I'm sure there were other that still felt that they were a little bit English (since Australia had only been a country for 30 something years back then) and others who wanted the pay or the adventure etc.. I'm sure it's no different to the people who go to Afghanistan today, the soldiers are generally the ones most against pulling out because they believe they are doing something good for the people who live there.
 
I know everybody used small arms to shoot down dive bombers, but I never saw/heard of a formation like that whose sole purpose is anti-aircraft fire. Especially with only bolt actions, and using scopes.

When I first read it I laughed but I guess everyone dived to the floor any rate so why not take a few potshots. I know for a fact that they did do this lying on the back and shooting upwards as I have read it in two different books but IMHO the image is more likely to be either A, Propaganda or B, Sniper training. There is no way there would be a massive group of snipers together like that.

But then again perhaps they where just in the right place at the right time.

I am a little sad though that there are not more images of the aftermath, it would be interesting to see underground bunkers which where used as field hospitals or more arial shots of the city or the PoW camps where 100k Germans died of cold, starvation and disease.
 
Never been interested in WW2 but these photos are amazing. Some photos from Funland too, nice.
 
Its worth spending some time reading into WW2 even if you think you are not interested. Its just incredible the amount of stuff that happened and the millions of people involved. There was a lot more to it then just fighting that's for sure! Its its srs interesting stuff, its incredible to think that all of these millions of people all had their own story, all of which are incredible. From refugees, soilders, spys, generals, children, factory workers, sailors, airmen, doctors and nurses. Even just the massiving logistical challenges! The Melberry harbour is a great example and even the fact they managed to keep the hole D-Day landings secrete for so long!

Like its pretty much impossible to Imagen that over 3 MILLION people died in Stalingrad in 5 months!

I could natter about it all day its just incredible
 
More http://waralbum***/tag/сталинград/

Should work!
 
The most shocking thing on the Eastern Front, for me, wasn't Stalingrad, but Leningrad. A seige that lasted 872 days, from September 1941 to January 1944. The effect on people in the city was absolutely abhorrent. With only one route to import supplies (a river crossing) the transports were being constantly attacked, and there were months where civilians were being fed 125 grams of "food" (the quality of the food was so bad that, while 125 grams of bread should provide ~250 calories, it actually provided far less because it was made of 50-60% sawdust) per day. It was so bad that cannibalism wasn't uncommon, and there are stories of people's families disappearing, all except for one surprisingly healthy looking member.

Here's a small excerpt from the Wikipedia page.
The 872 days of the siege caused unparalleled famine in the Leningrad region through disruption of utilities, water, energy and food supplies. This resulted in the deaths of up to 1,500,000 soldiers and civilians and the evacuation of 1,400,000 more, mainly women and children, many of whom died during evacuation due to starvation and bombardment.

Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery alone in Leningrad holds half a million civilian victims of the siege. Economic destruction and human losses in Leningrad on both sides exceeded those of the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Moscow, or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The siege of Leningrad is the most lethal siege in world history, and some historians speak of the siege operations in terms of genocide, as a "racially motivated starvation policy" that became an integral part of the unprecedented German war of extermination against populations of the Soviet Union generally.

Civilians in the city suffered from extreme starvation, especially in the winter of 1941–1942. For example, from November 1941 – February 1942 the only food available to the citizen was 125 grams of bread, of which 50–60% consisted of sawdust and other inedible admixtures, and distributed through ration cards. For about two weeks at the beginning of January 1942, even this food was available only for workers and military personnel. In conditions of extreme temperatures (down to -30 °C) and city transport being out of service, even a distance of a few kilometers to a food distributing kiosk created an insurmountable obstacle for many citizens. In January–February 1942, about 700–1,000[citation needed] citizens died every day, most of them from hunger. People often died on the streets, and citizens soon became accustomed to the sight of death.

Reports of cannibalism appeared in the winter of 1941–1942, after all birds, rats and pets had been eaten by survivors. Hungry gangs attacked and ate defenceless people. Leningrad police even formed a special unit to combat cannibalism.


The diary of Tanya Savicheva, a girl of 11, her notes about starvation and deaths of her grandmother, then uncle, then mother, then brother, the last record saying "Only Tanya is left." She died of progressive dystrophy shortly after the siege. Her diary was shown at the Nuremberg trials.
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Zhenya died on Dec. 28th at 12:00 P.M. 1941
Grandma died on Jan. 25th 3:00 P.M. 1942
Leka died on March 5th at 5:00 A.M. 1942
Uncle Vasya died on Apr. 13th at 2:00 after midnight 1942
Uncle Lesha on May 10th at 4:00 P.M. 1942
Mother on May 13th at 7:30 A.M. 1942
Savichevs died.
Everyone died.
Only Tanya is left.
 
Its insain, I didn't realise the siege was quiet that long! To some extent I guess Stalingrad is "more popular" for histroy tellers as it was the turning point of the war. The red army bosses would of kepted this hole thing underwraps wile making a big fuss of their victory against all the odds against the 6th army at Stalingrad. It was their first major loss too, it just showed that the Nazi war machine was not invincible having been destroyed by their own blitzkrieg style tactics.

Its interesting reading about what happened to the 100k German prisoners after the war all the "death marches" through the steep's at -40 below! Only around 5k or so even made it back home to Germany.

Leningrad Casualties + Losses
Red Army:[6]
1,017,881 killed, captured or missing
2,418,185 wounded and sick
Civilians:[6]
642,000 during the siege, 400,000 at evacuations

Stalingrad losses
Germany
est. 750,000 killed, missing or wounded
91,000 captured
900 aircraft (including 274 transports and 165 bombers used as transports)
1,500 tanks
6,000 artillery pieces[1]:122–123
Total: 841,000 casualties

Red Army
478,741 killed or missing
650,878 wounded and sick
40,000 civilians dead
4,341 tanks
15,728 guns and mortars
2,769 combat aircraft [7]
Total: 1,129,619 casualties

Its hard to know what figures to trust though with stalingrad losses as so many places seem to give a different number!
 
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