The Morthouse

obitoftheday:

Obit of the Day: He Brought the Dead to LIFE

A.B.C. “Cal” Whipple was a Pentagon correspondent forLIFE magazine during World War II. In February 1943, a photo was submitted by George Stock that showed the bodies of three American servicemen littering Buna Beach on New Guinea. They were shot during a Japanese ambush of the beach.

Mr. Whipple recognized the power of the photograph and pushed his editors to print the photo. At the time, and dating back to World War I, the U.S. had strict censorship of images showing dead servicemen. 

It took seven months of discussions with President Roosevelt’s administration but it was published in September 1943. President Roosevelt finally decided to allow the publication of the photo because he felt Americans were becoming complacent about the loss of life among U.S. soldiers. 

Cal Whipple, who became an editor for Time-Life Books, died at the age of 94 on March 17, 2013.

Sources: Greenwichtime.com and LIFE Photos

(Image is copyright George Strock/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images via the LIFE Photos.)

None can narrate that strife in the pines,
A seal is on it — Sabaean lore!
Obscure as the wood, the entangled rhyme
But hints at the maze of war —
Vivid glimpses or livid through peopled gloom,
And fires which creep and char —
A riddle of death, of which the slain
Sole solvers are.

—Herman Melville, “The Armies of the Wilderness” 

Image: Skulls remaining on the field and trees destroyed at the Battle of the Wilderness, 1864, Virginia. Source: Wikipedia.

life:

April 30, 1945: Hitler commits suicide.

In the spring of 1945, LIFE’s William Vandivert was one of the first photographers to document the ruins of Berlin and the burned-out bunker beneath the city where Hitler and Eva Braun spent their final hours.

In his typed notes to his editors in New York, Vandivert described in detail what he saw. For example, of the sixth slide in this gallery he wrote:

“Pix of [correspondents] looking at sofa where Hitler and Eva shot themselves. Note bloodstains on arm of soaf [sic] where Eva bled. She was seated at far end … Hitler sat in middle and fell forward, did not bleed on sofa. This is in Hitler’s sitting room.”

Remarkable stuff — but, it turns out, only about half right. Historians are now quite certain that Braun actually committed suicide by biting a cyanide capsule, rather than by gunshot — meaning that the blood stains on the couch might well be Hitler’s, and not Eva Braun’s, after all.

Read more here.

Leipzig Suicides. Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White, 1945. Source: LIFE Photo Archive, hosted by Google.

Leipzig City Council deputy mayor Dr. Lisso, member of Nazi party since 1932, lying dead while seated at his Town Hall desk, a suicide from cyanide, along with his wife and daughter, as American soldiers enter the city at the end of WWII.

Carl Mydans: Two Russian infantrymen frozen to death in their foxhole. Finland, 1940. Source: LIFE Photo Archive, hosted by Google.

legrandcirque:

Michael Rougier, The body of a 22 year old Marine Corporal struck by Red Chinese mortar, the last American to die before the Korean War truce was signed, South Korea, July 1953.

glassseyes:

Note reads - “My beloved son Carl taken from me on April 1, 1865, at age 18, killed at Dinwiddie. Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

source - Library of Congress

Have missing Civil War sailors in your family tree? The Monitor National Marine Sanctuary is looking for your help identifying these two fellas:

These are facial reconstructions from skeletons found in the wreck of the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor, which sank in 1862.

I heard about this on NPR. Listen to the story. There are so many interesting things about this, including the fact that they were able to recover any remains at all from a 150-year-old shipwreck, including some soft tissue.

Top image: Crewmen of the USS Monitor pictured in July 1862. Library of Congress, via NPR.
Bottom two images: Louisiana State University, via NPR.

thedevilsguard:

nachtmahr

The body of a German soldier hung in Koenigsberg for looting. The board reads “Those who loot will be executed”. February 1945.

(via timetravelteam)

thedevilsguard:

Under the direction of an American soldier, German civilians from Gardelegen carry wooden crosses to the site where they were ordered to bury the bodies of concentration camp prisoners killed by the SS in a barn just outside the town.

(via timetravelteam)

Margaret Bourke-White, Leipzig Suicides, April 1945. Source: LIFE Photo Archive, hosted by Google.

Leipzig City Council deputy mayor Dr. Lisso, member of Nazi party since 1932, lying dead while seated at his Town Hall desk, a suicide from cyanide, along with his wife and daughter, as American soldiers enter the city at the end of WWII.

More than 7,000 suicides were reported in Berlin alone in 1945, though the actual number of suicides that year in the city is thought to be much greater. From Wikipedia:

When it became apparent that the Nazis were about to lose the war, Germany’s leaders (including Goebbels and Hitler) spoke publicly in favour of suicide as an option. Hitler declared on 30 August 1944 during a military briefing, “It’s only (the fraction) of a second. Then one is redeemed of everything and finds tranquility and eternal peace.” In contrast to Imperial Japan, the Nazis refused to surrender and continued to fight on, led by Hitler’s vision of only two possible outcomes: victory or destruction.

The Life article (from the May 14, 1945 issue) is available here.  See also: Suicide in Nazi Germany on Google Books. By Christian Goesche, Oxford University Press, 2009.

judaizers:

the nameless dies in dixie

(via savage-america)

The lid of a mess-tin and the rib-bones of a Russian soldier photographed at Leipäsuo in the Karelian Isthmus in March 1942. Apparently the incident involved a Russian infiltrator behind Finnish lines, and the victim was an Ingrian colleague. The photograph was captioned incorrectly in the print paper as being from 1943, but even in March 1942 Leipäsuo was very much in Finnish hands. In the early phase of the Continuation War, and during the Winter War, it was commonplace for large groups of Red Army infantry and armoured columns to be surrounded and effectively starved to death or wiped out by Finnish units more adept at moving in the terrain. Incidents of cannibalism were not that uncommon.

(via the-midnight-gallery)

criminalwisdom:

Finnish soldiers displaying the skins of Soviet soldiers who were allegedly eaten by their own troops at Maaselkä, on the strand of lake Seesjärv during the Continuation War on the 15th of December in 1942. Original caption: “An enemy recon patrol that was cut out of food supplies had butchered a few members of their own patrol group, and had eaten most of them.”

(Source: criminalwisdom)