10 9 / 2012
3 year old air-raid victim Eileen Dunne in the Great Ormond Street Hospital, September 1940. Photo by Cecil Beaton - one of the most famous of the war
28 11 / 2011
At an evacuation hospital near the Italian front lines, Marlene Dietrich sits on a piano while wounded troops gather around to listen to her sing, May 1944.
09 8 / 2011
In the mid-1930s, an Australian journalist visited Germany to report on the rise of fascism and interview Adolf Hitler. The atrocities she saw there, which included the public beating of Jews, forever changed the course of her young life. Nancy Wake, who died Sunday at age 98, would spend World War II fighting Nazism tooth and nail, saving thousands of Allied lives, winding up at the top of the Gestapo’s most-wanted list and ultimately receiving more decorations than any other servicewoman.
Wake made her way from Spain to Britain, where she convinced special agents to train her as a spy and guerilla operative. In April 1944 she parachuted into France to coordinate attacks on German troops and installations prior to the D-Day invasion, leading a band of 7,000 resistance fighters. In order to earn the esteem of the men under her command, she reportedly challenged them to drinking contests and would inevitably drink them under the table. But her fierceness alone may have won her enough respect: During the violent months preceding the liberation of Paris, Wake killed a German guard with a single karate chop to the neck, executed a women who had been spying for the Germans, shot her way out of roadblocks and biked 70 hours through perilous Nazi checkpoints to deliver radio codes for the Allies. (via)
08 4 / 2011
Vivien Leigh reciting/performing You Are Old Father William from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for Allied troops, 1943
08 4 / 2011
Vivien Leigh performing a burlesque called “Not So Scarlett” for British and Australian members of the RAF and WAAF and their families at a bomber station in England, 1943
12 3 / 2011
Larry being a good boyfriend by helping Viv with her yarn. Vivien Leigh knitted balaclava helmets for British troops in 1939 and 1940 while still in Hollywood. She sent them over as part of Bundles for Britain
