Photograph by Carl Mydans.
MacArthur Returns 1945.
When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, it also invaded the Philippines, where Gen. Douglas MacArthur was based. When he arrived in Adelaide, MacArthur said to reporters, “I shall return.” In October 1944, Carl Mydans recorded MacArthur’s arrival at the beachhead, in Luzon.
Source: Life.com
Photograph by George Strock.
Dead on the Beach 1943.
When LIFE ran this stark, haunting photograph of a beach in Papua New Guinea on September 20, 1943, the magazine felt compelled to ask in an adjacent full-page editorial, “Why print this picture, anyway, of three American boys dead upon an alien shore?” Among the reasons: “words are never enough . . .
Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White.
Buchenwald 1945.
LIFE photographer Margaret Bourke-White was with Gen. George Patton’s troops when they liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp. Forty-three thousand people had been murdered there. Patton was so outraged he ordered his men to march German civilians through the camp so they could see with their own eyes what their nation had wrought.
Photograph by George Silk.
Hiroshima, Three Weeks After the Bomb, 1945.
Americans — and everyone — had heard of the bomb that “leveled” Hiroshima, but what did that mean? When the aerial photography was published, that question was answered.
Photograph by Leonard McCombe.
Clarence Hailey Long, 1949.
This is C.H. Long, a 39-year-old foreman at the JA ranch in the Texas panhandle, a place described as “320,000 acres of nothing much.” When the cowboy’s face and story appeared in LIFE in 1949, advertising exec Leo Burnett had an inspiration. The Marlboro Man based on Long boosted Marlboro to the top of the worldwide cigarette market.
Photograph by Ralph Morse.
Everything he did in his Brooklyn Dodgers uniform was electrifying, designed to keep the opposition off-balance, ill at ease, on the defensive. It was a mirror image to everything society was laying on him, every pitch, every game, every morning, every night, every day of his life.
Photograph by John Dominis.
Mexico City Olympics 1968
Sociologist Harry Edwards had been urging black athletes to boycott the Olympics to protest civil rights inequities in the U.S. The boycott didn’t happen, but Edwards struck a chord with many, including San Jose State teammates Tommie Smith and John Carlos. As the national anthem played, they held up their gloved fists. The runners were booted from the Games, but their gesture resonated.
Photograph by Larry Burrows.
South of the DMZ 1966
“The color photographs of tormented Vietnamese villagers and wounded American conscripts that Larry Burrows took and LIFE published, starting in 1962, certainly fortified the outcry against the American presence in Vietnam,” Susan Sontag wrote in her essay “Looking at War,” in the December 9, 2002, New Yorker. “Burrows was the first important photographer to do a whole war in color — another gain in verisimilitude and shock.”
One Week’s Dead May 28 June 3, 1969
By 1969, Americans were dying in Vietnam each week by the hundreds. Total losses had reached a staggering 36,000. To personalize the figures, LIFE ran the name, hometown and picture of each serviceman whom the Pentagon said was killed during the Memorial Day week.
