World War II

On December 7, 1941 the Japanese military launched a surprise attack on the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor. The attack killed 2,403 service members and wounded 1,178 more, and sank or destroyed six U.S. ships.

Japanese torpedo bombers flew just 50 feet above the water as they fired at the U.S. ships in the harbor, while other planes strafed the decks with bullets and dropped bombs.

A sailor stands among wrecked airplanes at Ford Island Naval Air Station as he watches the explosion of the USS Shaw.

Smoke rises from the burning buildings on Ford Island, Pearl Harbor.

A sailor runs for cover past flaming wreckage hit by dive bombers that had already blasted Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field at the Kaneohe Bay Naval Station.

Smoke pouring from sinking battleship USS California (center); capsized bulk of USS Oklahoma visible (at right).

The USS Arizona explodes after a Japanese attack.

Blasted into a pile of junk by the Japanese in the sneak raid of December 7, the battleship USS Arizona lies in the mud at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Three of the dread naught’s guns, at left, project from an almost completely submerged turret. The control tower leans over at a perilous angle.

A cork life preserver with a white canvas cover from battleship USS Arizona after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Japanese forces trained for about a year to prepare for the attack. The Japanese attack force—which included six aircraft carriers and 420 planes—sailed from Hitokappu Bay in the Kurile Islands, on a 3,500-mile voyage to a staging area 230 miles off the Hawaiian island of Oahu.

This December 7 file image shows an aerial view of battleships in the U.S. Pacific Fleet consumed by the flames at Pearl Harbor after 360 Japanese warplanes made a massive surprise attack.

A damaged B-17C Flying Fortress bomber sits on the tarmac near Hangar Number 5 at Hickam Field, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

In a flooded dry dock, the destroyer Cassin lies partly submerged and leaning against another destroyer, the Downes. The battleship Pennsylvania, shown in the rear, remained relatively undamaged.

Two servicemen sit on the wreckage of a bomber, surrounded by dirt and sandbags, on Hickam Field after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, Hawaii.

The wreckage of a Japanese torpedo plane shot down during the surprise attack on December 7 being salvaged from the bottom of Pearl Harbor, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, January 7, 1942.

Military personnel pay their respects beside the mass grave of 15 officers and others killed in the bombing attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. A U.S. flag is draped over the coffins.

May 1942: Enlisted men of the Naval Air Station at Kaneohe, Hawaii, place leis on the graves of their comrades killed in the December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Graves were dug along the shore of the Pacific Ocean. Ulupa’U Crater at the Marine Corps Base Kaneohe can be seen in the background.

A woman operating a hand drill while working on a “Vengeance” dive bomber, in Nashville, Tennessee.

A woman works on an airplane motor at the North American Aviation, Inc., plant in Inglewood, California.

A woman worker tightens the cowling for one of the motors of a B-25 bomber being assembled in the engine department of the Inglewood plant.

A group of women, with no previous industrial experience, are reconditioning used spark plugs in a converted Buick plant to produce airplane engines in Melrose Park, Illinois, 1942.

Two women workers are shown capping and inspecting tubing which goes into the manufacture of the “Vengeance” (A-31) dive bomber made at Vultee’s Nashville division, Tennessee.

A riveter sitting on huge piece of machinery during WWII, perfectly illustrating the Rosie the Riveter-type, at Lockheed Aircraft Corp.

Women workers at the Douglas Aircraft Company install fixtures and assemblies to a tail fuselage section of a B-17F bomber, better known as the “Flying Fortress.”

Women at work on C-47 Douglas cargo transport at the Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, California

A group of Black women welders kneel in coveralls and hold tools as they prepare to work on SS ‘George Washington Carver,’ Richmond, California, 1943.

Marcella Hart, mother of three children, works as a wiper at the at the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad roundhouse in Clinton, Iowa. She wears the iconic red bandana in “Rosie the Riveter” fashion.

A woman prepares for jobs in the Army or in industry in a camouflage class at New York University.

Irma Lee McElroy, formerly an office worker, took a position at the Naval Air Base in Corpus Christi, Texas during the war. Here she is seen painting the American insignia on airplane wings.

Mary Saverick stitches harnesses at the Pioneer Parachute Company Mills, in Manchester, Connecticut.

Eloise J. Ellis was appointed by civil service to be senior supervisor in the Assembly and Repairs Department at the Naval Air Base in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Two Navy wives, Eva Herzberg and Elve Burnham, entered war work after their husbands joined the service. In a Glenview, Illinois, they assemble bands for blood transfusion bottles at Baxter Laboratories.

On June 6, 1944, more than 156,000 American, British and Canadian troops stormed 50 miles of Normandy’s fiercely defended beaches in northern France.

Allied leaders Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill knew from the start of the war that a massive invasion of mainland Europe would be critical.

Since Operation Overlord was launched from England, the U.S. military had to ship 7 million tons of supplies to the staging area, including 450,000 tons of ammunition.

The D-Day invasion began in the pre-dawn hours of June 6 with thousands of paratroopers landing inland on the Utah and Sword beaches in an attempt to cut off exits and destroy bridges to slow Nazi reinforcements.

U.S. Army infantry men approaching Omaha Beach, Normandy, France on June 6, 1944. The first waves of American fighters were cut down in droves by German machine gun fire.

At Omaha Beach, U.S. forces persisted through the day-long slog, pushing forward to a fortified seawall and then up steep bluffs to take out the Nazi artillery posts by nightfall.

Anticipating an Allied invasion along the French coast, German forces had completed construction of the “Atlantic Wall,” a 2,400-mile line of bunkers, landmines and beach and water obstacles.

Shown are massive landings at Omaha Beach after it was secured by U.S. troops. Barrage balloons keep watch overhead for German aircraft while scores of ships unload men and materials.

Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime set up networks of concentration camps before and during World War II to carry out a plan of genocide. Hitler’s “final solution” called for the eradication of Jewish people and other “undesirables,” including homosexuals, Roma and people with disabilities. The children pictured here were held at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Survivors at the Wobbelin concentration camp in northern Germany were found by the U.S. Ninth Army in May 1945. Here, one man breaks out in tears when he finds he is not leaving with the first group to the hospital.

Survivors at Buchenwald concentration camp are shown in their barracks after liberation by the Allies in April 1945. Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize-winning author, is on the second bunk from the bottom, seventh from the left.

Fifteen-year-old Ivan Dudnik was brought to Auschwitz from his home in the Oryol region of Russia by the Nazis. While being rescued, he had reportedly gone insane after witnessing mass horrors.

Allied troops are shown in May 1945 discovering Holocaust victims in a railroad car that did not arrive at its final destination.

A total of 6 million lives were lost as a result of the Holocaust. Here, a pile of human bones and skulls is seen in 1944 at the Majdanek concentration camp in the outskirts of Lublin, Poland. 

A body is seen in a crematory oven in the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany in April 1945.

Auschwitz camp, as seen in April 2015. Nearly 1.3 million people were deported to the camp and more than 1.1 million perished.

Prosthetic legs and crutches are a part of a permanent exhibition in the Auschwitz Museum.

A pile of footwear are also a part of the Auschwitz Museum.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942 calling for the internment of Japanese-Americans after the attacks on Pearl Harbor. The Mochida family, pictured here, were some of the 117,000 people that would be forced into prison camps scattered throughout the country by that June.

This Oakland, California grocery was owned by a Japanese-American and graduate of the University of California. The day after the Pearl Harbor attacks he put up his ‘I Am An American’ sign to prove his patriotism. Soon afterward, the government shut down the shop and forced the owner to a prison camp.

Accommodations for Japanese-Americans at the Santa Anita “reception center,” Los Angeles County, California. April 1942.

The first group of 82 Japanese Americans arrive at the Manzanar “War Relocation Center” carrying their belongings in suitcases and bags, Owens Valley, California, in March 21, 1942. Manzanar was one of the first 10 prison camps opened in the United States, and its peak population, before it was closed in November 1945, was over 10,000 people.

Children of the Weill public school, from the so-called international settlement, are shown in a flag pledge ceremony in April of 1942. Those of Japanese ancestry were soon moved to War Relocation Authority centers.

A young Japanese American girl standing with her doll, waiting to travel with her parents to Owens Valley, during the forced removal of Japanese Americans under the U.S. Army war emergency order, in Los Angeles, California, April 1942.

The last Redondo Beach residents of Japanese ancestry were forcibly moved out by truck to relocation camps.

Crowds seen waiting for registration at Reception Centers in Santa Anita, California, April 1942.

Japanese Americans were incarcerated in crowded conditions at Santa Anita.

Risa and Yasubei Hirano pose with their son George (left) while holding a photograph of their other son, U.S. serviceman Shigera Hirano. The Hiranos were held at the Colorado River camp. Shigera served in the U.S. Army in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team while his family was incarcerated.

An American soldier guarding a crowd of Japanese American prisoners at an prisoner camp at Manzanar, California in 1944.

Japanese American prisoners at the Gila River Relocation Center greet First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Dillon S Myer, director of the War Relocation Authority, on a tour of inspection in Rivers, Arizona.

An atomic bomb, codenamed “Little Boy,” was dropped over Hiroshima Japan on August 6, 1945. The bomb, which detonated with an energy of around 15 kilotons of TNT, was the first nuclear weapon deployed in wartime.

The crew of the Boeing B-29 bomber, Enola Gay, which made the flight over Hiroshima to drop the first atomic bomb. Left to right kneeling; Staff Sergeant George R. Caron; Sergeant Joe Stiborik; Staff Sergeant Wyatt E. Duzenbury; Private first class Richard H. Nelson; Sergeant Robert H. Shurard. Left to right standing; Major Thomas W. Ferebee, Group Bombardier; Major Theodore Van Kirk, Navigator; Colonel Paul W. Tibbetts, 509th Group Commander and Pilot; Captain Robert A. Lewis, Airplane Commander.

A view of the atomic bomb as it is hoisted into the bay of the Enola Gay on the North Field of Tinian airbase, North Marianas Islands, early August, 1945.

Hiroshima in ruins after the dropping of the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945. The circle indicates the target of the bomb. The bomb directly killed an estimated 80,000 people. By the end of the year, injury and radiation brought the total number of deaths to between 90,000 and 166,000.

The plutonium bomb, nicknamed “Fat Man,” is shown in transport. It would be the second nuclear bomb dropped by U.S. forces in World War II.

An Allied correspondent stands in rubble on September 7, 1945, looking to the ruins of a cinema after the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima.

Children in Hiroshima, Japan are shown wearing masks to combat the odor of death after the city was destroyed two months earlier.

Survivors hospitalized in Hiroshima show their bodies covered with keloids caused by the atomic bomb.

An estimated 45-60 million people lost their lives and millions more were injured in World War II. Here, Private Sam Macchia from NYC returns home, wounded in both legs, to his elated family.

A parish priest waves a newspaper with news of Germany’s unconditional surrender to pupils of a Roman Catholic parochial school in Chicago.

Merchant Marine Bill Eckert wildy impersonates Hitler as a reveler playfully chokes him amidst a crowd in Times Square during a massive V-E Day celebration.

Young people in a car celebrate victory in Europe at the end of World War II, in Baltimore, Maryland, May 8, 1945.

People crowd on top of a van during a V-E Day celebration in London.

Patients at England’s Horley Military Hospital, all severely wounded in France and Italy, celebrate V-E Day with nursing staff.

U.S. war veterans returning home from Europe, on a converted troop ship.

Wall Street is jammed as Financial District workers celebrate the reported end of the war in Europe.

Wounded veteran Arthur Moore looks up as he watches the ticker tape rain down from New York buildings.

Private B. Potts of the Middlesex Regiment makes a “V” sign from the porthole of the hospital ship “Atlantis” as he arrives home from World War II with an injury.

A British soldier arrives home to a happy wife and son after serving in World War II.

Sailors and Washington, D.C. residents dance the conga in Lafayette Park, waiting for President Truman to announce the surrender of Japan in World War II.

Soldiers hug while being lifted onto the shoulders of a crowd on VJ Day, in Newark, New Jersey, August 18, 1945.

U.S. servicemen in the sick bay of the S.S. Casablanca smile and point to a newspaper on August 15, 1945 with the headline “JAPS QUIT!” after the Japanese surrender in World War II.

An apartment house on 107th Street in New York City is decorated for celebration at the end of World War II (V-J Day).

A V-J Day rally in New York City’s Little Italy on September 2, 1945. Local residents set fire to a heap of crates to celebrate the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II.

Joyous American soldiers and WACS fresh from bed parade through the London night celebrating V-J Day and the end of WWII.

A women jumps into the arms of a soldier upon his return from World War II, New York, NY, 1945.

An American soldier with lipstick on his face after V-J day celebrations.

Soldiers celebrating victory over Japan in Honolulu, Hawaii, August 15, 1945.

The 42nd Regiment arrive back home to Hawaii on July 2, 1946. They are greeted by cheering friends and loved ones throwing leis.