Page 80 – LIFE

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Photos From the Ruins

August 9, 2021November 3, 2014 by

One scene shared by all of the 20th century’s bloodiest conflicts might have been lifted straight from The Road Warrior, or a Beckett play: spectral landscape; buildings obliterated; blasted trees; lifeless wasteland. The photographs in this gallery, for instance—pictures that starkly reference every bleak, war-battered panorama from Gettysburg to Verdun to Stalingrad to Chosin Reservoir to Pork Chop Hill—were made in September, 1945, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

But far from chronicling the aftermath of a sustained, slogging campaign, these pictures—none of which were published in LIFE magazine—depict the devastation produced in a few historically violent seconds. Here, LIFE.com presents pictures from both cities taken in the weeks and months following the bombings that killed a combined 120,000 people outright, and tens of thousands more through injury and radiation sickness. Included, as well, are scans of typed memos from photographer Bernard Hoffman—quietly revelatory notes like the one he wrote on September 3, 1945, to LIFE’s long-time picture editor, Wilson Hicks:

We saw Hiroshima today or what little is left of it. We were so shocked with what we saw that most of us felt like weeping; not out of sympathy for the Japs but because we were revolted by this new and terrible form of destruction. Compared to Hiroshima, Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne are practically untouched . . . The sickly sweet smell of death is everywhere.

Below are excerpts from various issues of LIFE published after the war that convey the powerful, discordant reactions—relief, horror, pride, fear—that the bombings, and the long-sought victory over Japan, unleashed. Today, when America and Japan are, for the most part, staunch allies, trading partners and avid fans of one another’s goods, foods and popular culture, the words and sentiments below are a vivid reminder that the Second World War is a bloody and complicated piece of history.

“In the following waves [after the initial blast] people’s bodies were terribly squeezed, then their internal organs ruptured. Then the blast blew the broken bodies at 500 to 1,000 miles per hour through the flaming, rubble-filled air. Practically everybody within a radius of 6,500 feet was killed or seriously injured and all buildings crushed or disemboweled.” From the article “Atom Bomb Effects,” LIFE magazine, 3/11/1946

“Japan’s premier, Prince Higashi-Kuni . . . on September 5 paid despairing tribute to the atomic bomb: ‘This terrific weapon was likely to result in the obliteration of the Japanese people.’ The atomic bomb, he indicated, was the immediate inducement to surrender. . . .” From “What Ended the War,” LIFE magazine, 9/17/1945

“A crewman met us at the door, a big smile on his face. ‘The strike report is in,’ he said. ‘They dropped it on Nagasaki.’ The colonel was surprised. ‘That was the third target,’ he said. Inside the hut everybody was cheerful. The men felt Sweeney [Major Charles W. Sweeney, who commanded the B-29 bomber, Bockscar] would reach Okinawa from Nagasaki, or at least ditch in the sea near there and get picked up by a Navy rescue plane. We heard later that Sweeney reached Okinawa with ‘enough gas to fill a cigarette lighter.'” From “The Week the War Ended,” LIFE magazine, 7/17/1950, by reporter Robert Schwartz

“Japanese doctors said that those who had been killed by the blast itself died instantly. But presently, according to these doctors, those who had suffered only small burns found their appetite failing, their hair falling out, their gums bleeding. They developed temperatures of 104, vomited blood, and died. It was discovered that they had lost 86 percent of their white blood corpuscles. Last week the Japanese announced that the count of Hiroshima’s dead had risen to 125,000.” From the article “What Ended the War,” LIFE magazine, 9/17/1945

“I never heard an enlisted man in the 509th use the words ‘atom bomb’ or ‘atomic bomb’ or ‘A-bomb.’ Everyone in the squadron called it ‘The Gimmick.’ During the months of their secret work they had to have a name for the vague something that they were supposed to be working on, and when somebody referred to it as ‘The Gimmick’ that name stuck.” From the article, “The Week the War Ended,” LIFE magazine, 7/17/1950

“When the [Nagasaki] bomb went off, a flier on another mission 250 miles away saw a huge ball of fiery yellow erupt. Others, nearer at hand, saw a big mushroom of dust and smoke billow darkly up to 20,000 feet, and then the same detached floating head as at Hiroshima. Twelve hours later Nagasaki was a mass of flame, palled by acrid smoke, its pyre still visible to pilots 200 miles away. The bombers reported that black smoke had shot up like a tremendous, ugly waterspout. With grim satisfaction, [physicists] declared that the ‘improved’ second atomic bomb had already made the first one obsolete.” From the article, “War’s Ending,” LIFE magazine, 8/20/1945

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

Urakami Cathedral (Roman Catholic), Nagasaki, September, 1945.

Bernard Hoffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Nagasaki, September, 1945.

Bernard Hoffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hiroshima streetcar, September, 1945.

J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Nagasaki, Japan, September 1945.

Bernard Hoffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A photo album, pieces of pottery, a pair of scissors – shards of life strewn on the ground in Nagasaki, 1945.

Bernard Hoffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

From notes by LIFE’s Bernard Hoffman to the magazine’s long-time picture editor, Wilson Hicks, in New York, September 1945.

Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hiroshima, 1945.

Bernard Hoffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Nagasaki, 1945, a few months after an American B-29 dropped an atomic bomb, codenamed “Fat Man,” on the city.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The landscape around Urakami Cathedral, Nagasaki, September, 1945.

Bernard Hoffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

From notes by LIFE’s Bernard Hoffman to the magazine’s long-time picture editor, Wilson Hicks, in New York, September 1945.

Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A neighborhood reduced to rubble by an atomic bomb blast, Hiroshima, 1945.

Bernard Hoffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A bust in front of a destroyed cathedral two miles from the atomic bomb detonation site, Nagasaki, Japan, 1945.

Bernard Hoffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hiroshima, 1945, two months after the August 6 bombing.

Bernard Hoffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Nagasaki, 1945.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Two women paid respects at a ruined cemetery, Nagasaki, 1945.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hiroshima, September, 1945.

J.R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Manson Family’s California Hovels: Scenes From the Bottomless Pit

January 24, 2022November 2, 2014 by

The Manson Family murders have assumed a near-mythic quality in the 45 years since Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten and others slaughtered seven people — Sharon Tate; Jay Sebring; Wojciech Frykowski; Abigail Folger; Steven Parent; Leno and Rosemary LaBianca — in the summer of 1969. The sickening, vicious nature of the killings terrified and riveted a nation already convulsed by the violence and cultural upheaval of the late Sixites, while the seemingly random nature of the crimes spoke to a near-primal, universal fear: marauders invading one’s home and wreaking mortal havoc.

Manson himself, convicted of murder via conspiracy (although it was never proved in court that he, personally, killed any of the victims), remains locked up in a California prison, a creature who crawled out from the dark underbelly of the 1960s, unleashed hell, was finally brought to justice and will die behind bars.

But before Manson’s “brood of nubile flower children,” as LIFE magazine put it, set out on their appalling rampage, they plotted, dreamed and — in their own bestial way — lived their lives in places of desolate squalor, soaking up their leader’s toxic fantasy of racial holy war. In Manson’s vision, the Family would rule over a post-apocalyptic America — after riding out the apocalypse itself in a secret city, “the bottomless pit,” beneath Death Valley.

In his own insular, mad vernacular, the killing spree that Manson hoped would be blamed on black militants — sparking the race war that he himself had long prophesied — was known as “Helter Skelter.”

Here, 45 years after the August 1969 murders of Sharon Tate (director Roman Polanski’s wife, who was eight months pregnant); celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring; actor and writer Wojciech Frykowski: coffee heiress Abigail Folger; 18-year-old Steven Parent; and the LaBiancas — LIFE.com presents pictures of the two ranches where the Family spent its final months before and after its campaign of terror.

The Spahn and Barker ranches, isolated dots on the map east of L.A., served as base camps for the Family; and it was at Barker that Manson was finally found and caught by authorities (on suspicion of auto theft, of all things) in October 1969 — inside a 12 x 16-inch cupboard beneath a sink where he had stuffed himself in an attempt to hide. Not long after, as cops began pulling the threads of evidence together, connecting Family members and Manson himself with the murders that cast a bleak light on the worst excesses of the Sixties, the cheap, sordid Manson myth was born.

Charles Manson, Barker Ranch

Vernon Merritt III Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Spahn Ranch, 1969

Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Barker Ranch

Vernon Merritt III Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Spahn Ranch

Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

George Spahn, Manson Family, 1969

Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Spahn Ranch, Manson Family

Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Spahn Ranch

Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Barker Ranch

Vernon Merritt III Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Bus on Barker Ranch, 1969

Vernon Merritt III Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Barker Ranch

Vernon Merritt III Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Barker Ranch 1969

Vernon Merritt III Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Barker Ranch, Charles Manson’s hiding place

Vernon Merritt III Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Barker Ranch 1969

Vernon Merritt III Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Manson Family, Spahn Ranch, 1969

Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE Goes to a School For Kid Geniuses, 1948

January 16, 2020November 1, 2014 by

Americans are on a never-ending quest for the best way to educate their children, trying different approaches to teaching, and sometimes different kinds of schools. Seven decades ago, LIFE visited what might be called a genius school at Hunter College—a school filled 450 apparently well-adjusted, engaged kids from ages three to 11, who just happened to enjoy IQs averaging around 150. (Post-graduate students, by comparison, generally fall in the 120-130 range.)

As LIFE noted in a March 1948 feature on the school:

The school they go to is P.S. 600, part of New York’s public-school system and the only institution in the U.S. devoted entirely to the teaching and study of gifted children. It is held in a wing of the college’s main building, in whose long corridors the bright little kids from 3 to 11 years old like to stop off for between-class chats.
Offhand, young geniuses would seem to present no immediate problems because they are usually bigger, healthier and even happier than average children. However, an educational problem exists simply because they are too bright for their age. If they are promoted rapidly through school on the basis of their studies they will end up as social misfits, unable to enjoy the society of children their own age. On the other hand, if they are held back with their own age group, their quick minds are apt to stagnate.
Hunter children know they are smart, but they are more humble than cocky about their intelligence. . . . Although their interest are advanced, their plans for the future have a refreshing normality. There is a 9-year-old who wants to be a fur trapper, an 8-year-old who wants to be a babysitter and a 7-year-old who wants to be president of the Coca-Cola Company.

Here, LIFE.com presents photos from the feature in the magazine, as well as pictures that never ran in LIFE.

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

Sandy, 7, lectured the science club on the behavior of neutrons in uranium. The diagram was left by the previous lecturer, a chemist.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A public “genius school” for 3-to-11-year-olds at New York’s Hunter College, 1948.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Genius school, 1948.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A study of time was made by 6-year-olds. Addressing the class, Lucy (standing, left) told what she found out in the library about old-fashioned candle clocks, and her remarks were copied on the blackboard with other students’ observations. The students were critical of each other’s work.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Building with blocks, instead of aimlessly stacking them, four-year-olds worked together to construct an apartment building with doormen, tenants and a garage.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Genius school, 1948.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Roy spun a yarn for his friends.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Roy spun a yarn for friends.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Playing chess, David (wearing glasses) moved a piece for Lennie. Both are seven and a half. David learned the game from his father, then he taught Lennie how to play.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Directing the orchestra, a 10-year-old girl received a lesson in conducting from the teacher. Students also had a choral society. Three-year-olds had rhythm bands.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Genius school, 1948.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ralph, 11, planned to become a doctor.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In a class in practical conversation in French for nine-year-olds, a waiter asked gentleman to approve the wine, as the lady consulted the French menu.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This hairdo was designed by two five-year-olds, Joan (left) and Florence. They also liked to make candy and cookies in the school’s miniature kitchen.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Genius school, 1948.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Five-year-old Johnny, who taught himself to read, took from the library The Ring of the Nibelung. The library also included simpler books like the Bobbsey Twins.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In a hallway of New York’s Hunter College, two three-year-olds stopped to talk. The little girl carried a poster inviting students to see the latest block exhibit.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe: Rare Early Photos, 1950

January 16, 2020November 1, 2014 by

Few stars of the 1950s were so compelling, so singular, that they came to define the era in which they lived and in which they created their most enduring work. Marilyn Monroe was one of those stars.

From her earliest days as an actress until late in her career when she had, against her will, been cast in the public eye as Hollywood’s ultimate Sex Goddess, Marilyn posed for LIFE magazine’s photographers. Here, LIFE.com presents a gallery of pictures—none of which ran in the magazine—by LIFE’s Ed Clark, a Tennessean with a profound talent for capturing the essence of people, both famous and obscure. His pictures of Marilyn offer a rare glimpse into the early days of an eventual pop-culture icon’s career, when a young actress was blissfully unaware of what the coming years would bring and was, it seems, just happy to be in “the industry” and getting noticed.

[Buy the LIFE book, Remembering Marilyn]

In a 1999 interview with Digital Journalist, Clark described how, in 1950, he received a call from a friend at 20th Century Fox about “a hot tomato” the studio had just signed: one Marilyn Monroe.

“She was almost unknown then, so I was able to spend a lot of time shooting her,” Clark recalled. After all, it was still early in her career, and she’d only just begun to gain attention: Three months before this shoot, she appeared as a crooked lawyer’s girlfriend in The Asphalt Jungle; two months later, she had a small role as an aspiring starlet in All About Eve.

“We’d go out to Griffith Park [in Los Angeles] and she’d read poetry. I sent several rolls to LIFE in New York, but they wired back, ‘Who the hell is Marilyn Monroe?'” (Three years later, Marilyn appeared on the cover of LIFE in a now-famous Clark photo, posing with her Gentlemen Prefer Blondes co-star, Jane Russell.)

Why LIFE never published the gold mine of photos seen in this gallery after Marilyn became a bona fide superstar, however, remains a mystery. The only clue: a brief note about the shoot in the LIFE archives, addressed to LIFE’s photo editor, indicating that “this take was over-developed and poorly printed.”

Whatever the reason, one thing remains perfectly clear: at 24 years old, in 1950, Marilyn Monroe was already something special.

Marilyn Monroe, 24, in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1950.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe, 24, in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1950.

Ed ClarkLife Pictures/Shutterstock

Georgia O’Keeffe: Invincible

November 15, 2020October 30, 2014 by

Few major American artists have been as productive, for so long, in so many media, as Georgia O’Keeffe was during her extraordinary career. From her early, accomplished drawings which caught the eye of her future husband, Alfred Steiglitz, in 1916 through her firm studies of urban life and architecture in the 1920s and well into her gorgeous later works inspired by the natural beauty of New Mexico, O’Keeffe forged a unique, solitary path through the landscape of modern art.

Born during the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee (1887), the span of O’Keeffe’s life (she died in 1986, at 98, in New Mexico) seemingly encompassed not mere decades, but ages: the invention of the airplane, two world wars, the Cold War, the Space Race and the introduction of the personal computer. So much of her work the huge flowers; the sun-bleached skulls; the brilliant, near-abstract nature studies; the sensuous pottery is so distinctive that categorizing her, or placing her in one school or another, is impossible.

If any artist ever followed her own vision, no matter where it took her, it was O’Keeffe.

Here, LIFE.com looks at a single photograph John Loengard‘s astonishing 1967 portrait of the artist as an old woman that somehow manages to suggest, in one frame, Georgia O’Keeffe’s willful isolation, her breathtaking self-possession and her singular place in the American consciousness.

Loengard’s unforgettable picture made on the roof of O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch home in northern New Mexico is far more than just a study, or a sketch, of a formidable figure. Framed against the sky and desert, seated before a chimney that feels, in its simplicity, almost totemic, the black-clad O’Keeffe seems carved into the photograph, as much a part of the severe Western landscape as the rocks, sand and sagebrush that surrounded her. She might have been sitting there for an hour, or for a thousand years.

Of the many, many fine and not infrequently iconic portraits that LIFE magazine published through the years, Loengard’s picture of O’Keeffe is one of the very greatest.

In a March 1968 cover story on O’Keeffe (Loengard’s rooftop portrait graced the issue’s cover), LIFE devoted more than a dozen pages to the artist, hoping to illuminate for its readers what the magazine called “the interlocking of her life and art”:

Light edges over the darkened cliffs. Through the sage a woman walks silently, a stick in her hand to ward off snakes. She scans the mists in the far-off mountains. She picks up a stone and smooths it, touches the twisted branch of a piñon tree, toes a patch of lichen. Two smoke-toned chows watch and sniff, then jounce knowingly after their mistress. Another day has begun for Georgia O’Keeffe.

For the better part of three decades, this has been the ritual of one of the most distinguished pioneers of modern American art, a painter still vigorous in her 81st year. Ranging between her two homes in New Mexico an adobe “villa” in Abiquiu and a desert ranch to the north George O’Keeffe renews each day her passionate ties to the land. From these encounters has come a steady outpouring of paintings, many of them now classics in U.S. museums. Whether emphatically realistic or starkly abstract, fantasies of nature or landscapes of the mind, these works distill not only her experience but something of her strong, adventurous spirit.

TIME’s Richard Lacayo, meanwhile, had this to say about O’Keeffe on the occasion of a major 2009 show of her work at the Whitney in New York:

The Whitney’s colorful show puts aside the Georgia O’Keeffe we know best the Gray Lady of New Mexico to retrieve an O’Keeffe we ought to know better, the young woman who went fearlessly down the road of entirely abstract art in 1915, when it was a fresh idea with which only a few artists anywhere in the world were experimenting. Her taut vertical thunderbolts and giant crests of rainbow colors are like campaign banners being unfurled by an artist who has set herself and the art of painting entirely free.

Freedom from cliché, from stasis, from the expected and the tame has always been the aim and the spur of the greatest artists. In Loengard’s elemental portrait of a woman who long ago slipped the bonds of convention, that freedom is seen for what it truly is: sober, essential, invincible.

Georgia O’Keeffe photographed on the roof of her Ghost Ranch home in New Mexico, 1967.

John Loengard—The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

‘How a Wife Should Undress’: Dubious Advice From 1930s Strippers

November 2, 2020October 27, 2014 by

We’ve all met them: men and women who insist on claiming, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the world was a better, simpler, more civilized place “back then.” Exactly when “back then” might have been is, of course, always left a little unclear.

The fact is, not everything was better, simpler or more civilized for everyone back in the day. To take just one example of how things were hardly better or more civilized for a solid half of the adult population in America as recently as, say, 75 years ago, take a quick look at a feature from a 1937 issue of LIFE magazine. Now, we’re hardly prudes, and we always get a good laugh out of something as over-the-top as this series of pictures illustrating how a wife should (and should not!) undress for her husband.

At this point, we should state that LIFE.com believes that the entire phenomenon of the Allen Gilbert School of Undressing is an elaborate—and from a marketing standpoint quite brilliant—joke.

As LIFE informed its readers in its Feb. 17, 1937, issue:

Frankly as a social measure Allen Gilbert, who puts on shows for such topnotch burlesque houses as Manhattan’s Apollo and Philadelphia’s Schubert, is starting a School of Undressing in Manhattan this month. There wives, anxious to improve their marital manners, will learn the correct way to take off their clothes. Mr. Gilbert feels that many a marriage ends in divorce court because the wife grows sloppy and careless in the bedroom. “I am dedicating my school to the sanctity of the American home,” he says. The Gilbert faculty is recruited from the ranks of burlesque performers from all over. Already 48 wives who suspect there is something wrong with their disrobing methodology have signed up for the $30 Gilbert course of six lessons. From these they will learn how to make going to bed appear a thing of charm and pleasure rather than a routine chore.

Mr. Gilbert plans to put on a revue next spring entitled Sex Rears Its Ugly Head. It may be that this current lapse into pedagogy is partially motivated by the knowledge that advance publicity for the producer is not a bad thing.

Joke or no joke, hoax or no hoax, one thing is as true today as it was way back then: sex sells.

Professor Connie Fonzlau at the Allen Gilbert School of Undressing in New York demonstrated “the worst possible method of disrobing,” 1937.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

School of Undressing professor Connie Fonzlau demonstrated the “unpardonable sin” of “working on two sides at once,” 1937.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Burlesque star June St. Clair and Professor Connie Fonzlau demonstrated the right and wrong ways to disrobe.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Burlesque star June St. Clair and Professor Connie Fonzlau demonstrated the right and wrong ways to disrobe at the Allen Gilbert School of Undressing in New York, 1937.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Burlesque star June St. Clair demonstrated “how wives should undress in front of their husbands” during a class at the Allen Gilbert School of Undressing in New York, 1937.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock