November 2014 - Page 3 of 6

World War II in Color: The Italian Campaign and the Road to Rome

January 16, 2020November 16, 2014 by

Ask a dozen military historians to name the single most pivotal battle or campaign of World War II the one operation that saw the war’s momentum irrevocably swing from the Axis to the Allied powers and you’ll get a dozen answers. Did the pendulum shift as early as the Battle of Britain? At Midway? During the liberation of Paris? Kursk? The Battle of the Bulge? Stalingrad? A definitive answer is impossible.

But one campaign that everyone agrees was a significant turning point in the Allied effort was launched in July 1943. Before dawn on July 10 of that year, 150,000 American and British troops along with Canadian, Free French and other Allies, and 3,000 ships, 600 tanks and 4,000 aircraft made for the southern shores of the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea: the storied, 10,000-square-mile land of Sicily. Within six weeks, the Allies had pushed Axis troops (primarily Germans) out of Sicily and were poised for the invasion of mainland Italy and one of the most arduous 20 months of the entire war: the long, often brutal Italian Campaign.

Tens of thousands of troops, on both sides, were killed or listed as missing, while hundreds of thousands more were wounded. And, of course as in most every major campaign of the war hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed, while countless more were wounded, raped, left homeless and otherwise traumatized.

Here, LIFE.com presents a series of both rare and classic color pictures made throughout the Italian Campaign by the great Carl Mydans.

Finally, it’s worth noting that, within weeks of the start of the invasion of Sicily, the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who had ruled Italy for more than two decades, was booted from power and arrested. “Il Duce” subsequently escaped, with German help, and was then on the run or in hiding without cease for almost two years. He was captured by Italian partisans in late April 1945, summarily executed, and along with his mistress and several other Fascists literally hanged by his heels, in public, for all to see.

In early May 1945, the war in Europe ended.

American jeeps traveled through a bombed-out town during the drive towards Rome, World War II.

Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American armor moved up the Appian Way during the drive towards Rome.

Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American soldiers marched up the Appian Way during the drive towards Rome in World War II.

Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Italians watched American armor pass during the drive towards Rome along the Appian Way, World War II.

Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A column of American medical vehicles during the drive towards Rome, World War II.

Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American soldiers rested in a courtyard during the drive towards Rome, World War II.

Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American troops stood in front of a bombed-out building during the drive towards Rome, WWII.

Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ruins of the town of Monte Cassino, a result of massive Allied bombing during an attempt to dislodge German troops occupying the city, 1944.

Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ruins in the Rapido Valley, 1944.

Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A German graveyard along the Esperia Road, photographed during the Allied drive towards Rome, World War II.

Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Troops in the Liri Valley, on the road to Rome, Italian Campaign, 1944.

Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

An American soldier tried to spot German positions during the Allied drive towards Rome, 1944.

Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Liri Valley, on the road to Rome, 1944.

Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American troops camped by the roadside during the drive towards Rome, 1944.

Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

An American soldier slept on a pile of rocks during the drive towards Rome, 1944.

Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Liri Valley, on the road to Rome, 1944.

Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

In the Rapido Valley, 1944.

Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American troops rested in a field during the drive towards Rome, 1944.

Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

An American soldier took a meal break during the drive towards Rome, 1944.

Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American troops looked over German armor destroyed during the drive towards Rome, 1944.

Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Italian Campaign, World War II, 1944.

Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

British and South African soldiers held up a Nazi trophy flag while combat engineers on bulldozers cleared a path through the debris of a bombed-out city, Italian Campaign, World War II.

Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Remembering ‘The Few’: Photos of the Young Pilots Who Saved England

January 16, 2020November 14, 2014 by

“The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”—Winston Churchill addressing the House of Commons, Aug. 20, 1940

Of the countless memorable phrases uttered by the indomitable British Prime Minister during the war years, Winston Churchill’s tribute to and celebration of “The Few,” as the airmen of the Royal Air Force have ever since been affectionately known, endures as among his most moving and most heartfelt. (That not all of the pilots were, in fact, British—there were Poles, Czechs, Americans, Canadians, Irish, New Zealanders and others, as well—that fact hardly dilutes the power of the sentiment, or the intensity of Churchill’s and England’s gratitude to those fliers.)

In 1940’s pivotal, four-month Battle of Britain, thousands of these (mostly young) pilots held off fighters from the mighty German Luftwaffe, quite literally saving the Sceptered Isle from defeat at the hands of the Third Reich and proving to a skeptical world that the Nazi military juggernaut was neither inevitable nor invincible.

Here, LIFE.com offers charming, revealing portraits of The Few by photographer William Vandivert. (Most of these photos did not originally appear in LIFE magazine.)

As LIFE put it to its readers the following spring, when the magazine ran some of Vandivert’s pictures in the March 21, 1941, issue:

England’s most important young men today are the several thousand youth who fly the Hurricane and Spitfire fighters in the Battle of Britain. They undoubtedly saved England last fall from Nazi invasion. Hitler must knock them all out of the air over Britain before he dares to invade England this spring.

[In these pictures] LIFE takes you to an actual airfield of the RAF’s Fighter Command during the airblitz last fall. Here you see new kind of battle action what goes on on the ground at a fighter station while the fate of a nation is being fought out in the clouds.

These young British fliers, unlike their German opponents, are elaborately modest. There is little or no brag and swagger about them and they fight the Germans with a sort of casual perfection that is the envy of every other air force in the world. Their job calls for a fit young man of great calm and great optimism, preferably not in love. Very few of these young fighter pilots are married. Their ages range around 23. It takes moral self-confidence and concentration to kill early, often and quickly, without a sense of guilt.

Close to 3,000 RAF fliers took to the skies in the Battle of Britain. More than 500 were killed; around 80 percent of those lost were Britons. The chances of The Few ever being forgotten by the nation they helped save? Zero.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Battle of Britain, RAF Fighter Command airfield, 1940.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Flying Officer Albert Gerald Lewis, a top ace of the RAF. The South African, pictured here at 22, shot down at least 28 Luftwaffe fighters—including, on one memorable day, six in a six-hour span.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene during the Battle of Britain, RAF Fighter Command airfield, 1940.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Three armorers, called ‘plumbers,’ reloaded Hurricane’s eight machine guns with ammunition belts. Each gun got 300 bullets, enough to last through 15 seconds of firing which comes is brief bursts. Each plane needed twelve ground men to keep it up.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene during the Battle of Britain, RAF Fighter Command airfield, 1940.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Royal Air Force ace Albert Gerald Lewis climbed out of his plane after an air battle above England, 1940.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Between flights, a member of the ground crew sat in the shade of his plane’s wing. See the emergency starter apparatus was at his feet, already hooked up, and four little holes in front edge of wing. Through these holes, four of plane’s eight machine guns could fire in unison.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A pilot rested between flights.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pilots at rest between flights.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Waiting for action, pilots lounged in lifebelts. The adjutant at far right answered telephone calls from headquarters. The intelligence officer beside him took reports from the pilots.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Two pilots (Flying Officer Albert Gerald Lewis on right, unidentified flyer at left), between flights.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene during the Battle of Britain, RAF Fighter Command airfield, 1940.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pilots and aircrew members scrambled to their planes during the Battle of Britain, 1940.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Northern Lights: Vintage Color Photos of Nature’s Great Light Show

February 25, 2020November 13, 2014 by

“Of all the pageantry of the atmosphere,” LIFE noted in a June 1953 issue, “the most awesome and, as man has often thought, most fearful, are the auroras the ghostly streamers of colored light that appear on certain nights, usually in spring and fall, and spread upward from the horizon to the zenith, sometimes projected in shifting rays like searchlight beams, sometimes diffused in shimmering veils and curtains, sometimes dancing and pulsating like the flames of some unutterable cosmic fire.”

Here, decades later, LIFE.com pays homage to those “ghostly streamers” with a series of pictures made by J.R. Eyerman (called “Jay Eyerman” in that long-ago issue of the magazine) in northern Canada. In fact, Eyerman, who entered the University of Washington when he was 15 to study engineering, made these photos using a technique he himself devised.

In the 1957 book, LIFE Photographers: Their Careers and Favorite Pictures, author Stanley Rayfield notes that “Eyerman’s technical innovations have helped push back the frontiers of photography. He perfected an electric eye mechanism to trip the shutters of nine cameras to make pictures of an atomic blast; devised a special camera for taking pictures 3600 feet beneath the surface of the ocean; successfully ‘speeded up’ color film to make previously impossible color pictures of the shimmering, changing forms and patterns of the aurora borealis.”

The results, both technically and aesthetically, are glorious.

(Note: We’ve included a few of Eyerman’s black and white shots of the northern lights in this gallery, as we feel there’s something starkly beautiful about those pictures, too.)

—Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

The aurora borealis, a.k.a., the northern lights, northern Canada, 1953.

J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

J.R. Eyerman on assignment in Canada, kept his camera operable in the freezing cold while photographing the northern lights in 1953.

J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Wood: Portraits of a Legend

December 7, 2019November 11, 2014 by

Born Natalia Nikolaevna Zacharenko in San Francisco at the height of the Great Depression, Natalie Wood (“Natasha” to close friends) was one of those rare stars who combined old-school glamor, powerhouse talent and smoldering sex appeal. Her death by drowning off the California coast when she was just 43 remains one of Hollywood’s enduring mysteries, and the source of unending rumors, investigations and speculation.

Here, LIFE.com presents a selection of photographs made by Bill Ray in 1963 a time in the 25-year-old Wood’s career when she had made the leap from actress to genuine movie star and, more importantly, to formidable Hollywood player. Many of the photos in this gallery were not originally published in LIFE, but appear in Ray’s book, My Life in Photography.

For Ray, the most striking memory of the several weeks that he spent with Wood and her showbiz cohorts is, unsurprisingly, Wood herself or, more specifically, her singular beauty.

“She was divine,” Ray told LIFE.com. “Really. She was divine to look at, and to photograph. She had that wonderful face, a great body, those amazing eyes just a beautiful young woman, and a lot of fun to be around.”

For the Dec. 20, 1963, issue of LIFE that focused wholly on the movies, Ray scored the choice, high-profile feature on Wood, which was the only piece in the issue that was devoted to a single actor or actress. “This was big stuff,” he says today of the assignment. “You know, back then photographers were never part of the meetings where these sort of assignment decisions were made, so to get the call for something of this magnitude I was thrilled.”

Thrilled, but hardly cowed or overawed. After all, by the time the Natalie Wood shoot came his way, Ray was a seasoned professional, having covered JFK, Elvis Presley, John Wayne and other huge names and famous faces. What comes through in many of his photographs is the sense that here was a photographer who genuinely enjoyed his work, while his subject was a strong young woman who had been in the public eye for so long that having her every move documented was hardly anything new.

As LIFE reminded its readers in that special year-end double issue back in 1963, Natalie Wood was about as self-aware and self-confident an actress as one was likely to meet:

Natalie Wood was in a crowd watching a movie being filmed 21 years ago when the director asked her do a bit: drop an ice cream cone and cry. Then and there, 4-year-old Natalie showed she was born to be a star: she wept so convincingly that the movies hired her and ever since they have been thankful for the foresight. . . . [Movies] still cannot get along without the glamor that stars bring. And Natalie, the biggest young star around, now holds Hollywood in her hand. Her latest performance in her 35th film, ‘Love With a Proper Stranger,’ may win her an Oscar. [She did earn an Academy Award nomination for the role, but Patricia Neal took home the Oscar for her work in ‘Hud.’] Natalie has talent which she uses brilliantly, temperament which she can control, and a dark fresh loveliness that glows from the screen. All this earns her a million dollars a year, along with something that means even more to her the power and the glory that stardom brings.

“Natalie Wood,” observed a prominent Hollywood director, … “has a stranglehold on every young leading-lady part in town. If a role calls for a woman between 15 and 30, you automatically think of her.”

This is exactly what Natalie has worked 21 years to get. She has battled producers and top studio heads with unyielding ferocity to win the roles she wants. Today, before she will do a picture, she demands and gets total approval of script, director, leading man, all actors, everybody clear down to make-up and wardrobe people.

One last detail that Bill Ray recalls about his time with Natalie Wood, however, casts something of a pall across his otherwise sunny memories. At some point during those several weeks, he joined Wood and a number of other people on a boat ride to Catalina Island (see slide 16 in the gallery) the same island off the California coast near which Wood would drown in the fall of 1981. When Ray heard about her death, he was stunned: not only because he had always liked her and remembered the time he spent with her with such fondness, but because he had been struck during that boat ride in 1963 by how uncharacteristically out of sorts she seemed.

“It was obvious to me,” Ray told LIFE.com, “that Natalie did not like being out on the water at all. When I heard that she’d drowned, in basically the same place where we’d been all those years before, I wasn’t just sad although that was part of it. I was also very, very surprised.”

Five decades later, the mystery of Natalie Wood’s death endures. Bill Ray’s pictures, meanwhile, shed a clear, poignant light on a time when the star’s already impressive career felt boundless, and her life charmed. The future, it seemed then, was hers for the taking.

—story by Ben Cosgrove

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Wood was playing a game. Friends named something, she acted it out. Here is ‘slightly sensuous.'”

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

The woman who guided Natalie to stardom was her mother, the Russian-born Mrs. Maria Gurdin (center). Stern and shrewd, she scrutinized scripts, haggled over fees, snd dressed her child in prim clothes when competitors wore sexy ones.

© Bill Ray

Wood played billiards with actor Tony Curtis, 1963.

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Wood got a piggyback ride from producer Arthur Loew, Jr., who stopped when Paul Newman invited them to go go-cart racing, 1963.

© Bill Ray

Gowned in satin, bathed by spots, fussed over by attendants, Wood glowed with the glamor pf a Hollywood star.

© Bill Ray

Wood, a shrewd businesswoman, enjoyed presiding over her high-powered cabinet.

© Bill Ray

Wood’s big brown-black eyes grew larger with delight seeing costumes sketched by Edith Head for `Sex and the Single Girl’.

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Tina Turner: Unpublished Photos of the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll

May 24, 2023November 10, 2014 by

David Bowie probably came closest to summing up Tina Turner’s fiery, un-sum-up-able persona when he famously said, after joining her onstage in Birmingham, England, during the final concert of her 1985 British tour: “Standing up there next to her was the hottest place in the universe.”

Turner died Wednesday, May 24, 2023 at age 83 at her home near Zurich, Switzerland. Here LIFE.com presents a handful of rare photos taken in 1970 by Gjon Mili. The exact date of the shoot? Unknown. The location? Probably Las Vegas. The show’s set list? Unknown. The identity of the guy gazing back at Mili’s camera in the last picture in this gallery? A mystery.

But one thing these pictures do manage to impart is confirmation that, when Tina Turner took the stage—no matter where that stage was, and no matter how large or how small the crowd might be—there was no simply no restraining her talent and soulfulness.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com.

Tina Turner, 1970.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tina Turner and band, 1970.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tina Turner, 1970.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

JFK Assassination: John and Jackie Kennedy in Texas, Nov. 22, 1963

January 16, 2020November 8, 2014 by

“Now in the sunny freshness of a Texas morning,” LIFE magazine wrote in its Nov. 29, 1963, issue, alongside the first photo in this gallery, “with roses in her arms and a luminous smile on her lips, Jacqueline Kennedy still had one hour to share the buoyant surge of life with the man at her side.”

It was a wonderful hour [LIFE wrote, just a week after JFK’s assassination]. Vibrant with confidence, crinkle-eyed with an all-embracing smile, John F. Kennedy swept his wife with him into the exuberance of the throng at Dallas’ Love Field. This was an act in which Jack Kennedy was superbly human. Responding to the warmth his own genuine warmth evoked in others, he met his welcomers joyously, hand to hand and heart to heart. For him this was all fun as well as politics. For his shy wife, surmounting the grief of her infant son’s recent death, this mingling demanded a grace and gallantry she would soon need again.

Then the cavalcade, fragrantly laden with roses for everyone, started into town. Eight miles on the way, in a sixth-floor window, the assassin waited. All the roses, like those abandoned in Vice President Johnson’ car [last slide in this gallery], were left to wilt. They would be long faded before a stunned nation would fully comprehend its sorrow.

Here, LIFE.com presents photos by Art Rickerby most of which never ran in LIFE made in the hours before, as well as the moments immediately after, the killing that shocked the world.

Buy the LIFE book, The Day Kennedy Died

John and Jackie Kennedy at Love Field in Dallas, Texas, on Nov. 22, 1963.

Art Rickerby Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John and Jackie Kennedy at Love Field in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.

Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Lyndon Johnson with Jackie and John Kennedy in Forth Worth on the morning of Nov. 22, 1963, just hours before JFK’s assassination.

Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

JFK in Fort Worth, Nov. 22, 1963

Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

President John Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson and others at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast in Fort Worth, Texas, Nov. 22, 1963.

Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

President John Kennedy in Fort Worth, Texas, Nov. 22, 1963, shortly before flying to Dallas.

Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

President John Kennedy delivers a brief speech outside the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, Nov. 22, 1963, shortly before flying to Dallas.

Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

President John Kennedy greeted admirers in Fort Worth, Texas, Nov. 22, 1963, shortly before flying to Dallas.

Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The scene at Dealey Plaza in Dallas in the moments after John Kennedy was shot, Nov. 22, 1963.

Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Outside Parkland Memorial Hospital, Dallas, Texas, Nov. 22, 1963, where JFK was pronounced dead at 1 p.m. in the afternoon, half an hour after being shot.

Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s car at Parkland Memorial Hospital, Dallas, Nov. 22, 1963.

Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

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