Provides personal narratives with accompanying photographs of men and women who had first-hand experience of the war effort either overseas or on the homefront.
Life magazine was only one of many American publications that fielded battlefront correspondents during World War II, but it boasted an uncommonly talented roster of writers and photographers, among them Theodore White, Robert Capa, and Margaret Bourke-White. Their images and reports brought home to American readers the horrors of that distant war, from George Strock's extraordinary photograph of dead American marines on a New Guinea beach to shocking views of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.
Life's editors also took pains to document the war at home, publishing stories about the contributions of women industrial workers to the war effort (in 1943, the magazine reported, 65 percent of American aircraft-production workers were women) and on the morale-building efforts of Hollywood stalwarts such as Carole Lombard and Bob Hope.
This selection of photographs and extended captions from the pages of Life and other contemporary publications gathers images that have become part of American iconography (such as the Associated Press's famed photograph of the Fighting Sullivans). More usefully, it also includes lesser-known work documenting injustices done to Japanese Americans and African Americans, the sufferings of the wounded, and the loneliness of separation, material overlooked by many other photographic histories of the war. --Gregory McNamee
