Iconic Photos

This poetically named W. Eugune Smith photo has very little romance to it. Taken as US Marine Demolition Team Basting out a cave on Hill 382, Iwo Jima, 1945, the photo, LIFE magazine which portrayed a cropped version on its April issue wrote, not only “captures an instant of violence with an almost dreamlike clarity, but also silently reminded the American public that, after four long years of a war fought halfway around the world, American troops still faced (and administered) daily, relentless destruction”. 

Generals Montgomery and Patton shake hands. The laughing faces of the two man can be deceiving–two heroes of the WWII didn’t get along very well at all. Two massives egos and two different opinions of how to defeat the germans meant they were always arguing. Montgomery was pompous, Patton reckless–this prevented both men from leading the Allied Land Invasion of Europe.

They turned natural rivalry into deadly competition to see who would or could get to Berlin first. In Sicily, both recklessly pushed their man to get of Massena first (After two weeks of fighting, Monty arrived just two hours after Patton relieved the city). On their push towards Berlin, Monty complained that he had been fighting harder than Patton whereas Patton complained that Montgomery’s 21st Army group got priority on the supplies. Both overlooked the fact that Monty was leading the main thrust (although both thought each other’s army was doing main thrust).

Actress Marlene Dietrich autographs the cast on the leg of Tec 4 Earl E. McFarland at a United States hospital in Belgium, where she has been entertaining the GIs.” Tuttle, November 24, 1944.

When the World War II was declared, the German actress Marlene Dietrich was in Hollywood. She was asked by the Nazis to return to Germany but she refused and instead became a US citizen. One of the first celebrities to raise war bonds, she also travelled tirelessly to entertain the troops on the front lines from Algeria to Germany (She followed George Patton into Germany). She sang, showed magic tricks and told raunchy jokes in cafeterias. An anti-Nazi, she recorded various records in German for American OSS. 

For her efforts during the war, Dietrich was received various honors including the Legion of Honor (France) and Medal of Freedom (US). 

1945. The rare family photograph of the American generals: (seated left to right) William H. Simpson, George S. Patton, Jr., Carl Spaatz, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, Courtney H. Hodges, and Leonard T. Gerow; (standing l. to r.) Ralph F. Stearley, Hoyt S. Vandenberg, Walter Bedell Smith, Otto P. Weyland, and Richard E. Nugent.

Austria Emperor Karl at the funeral of the late Emperor Franz Joseph in November 1916. Between the Emperor and his Empress, Zita of Bourbon-Parma, is Crown Prince Otto, who is still the head of the Hapsburg family. 

Emperor Franz Joseph died during the First World War, after ruling Austria-Hungary for 68 years–the third longest reign in European History. He left the conduct of the war strictly to his military officials, although by the time of his death, he believed the war was unwinnable and the break-up of his empire likely. Issuing war orders until the night before he died, Franz Joseph died in the Schönbrunn Palace, aged 86, singing “Gott erhalte, Gott beschütze, Unsern Kaiser” (“God Save the Emperor”). However, two years later, after defeat in World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy would be dissolved.

In 1872, a monumental excavation force was put together by Heinrich Schliemann to excavated Troy. Using 150 workmen (on average), Schliemann (with his rail engineer on the rock) was able to displace great quantities of debris (over 250,000 cubic meters in three years). An army of 6 horse carts, 10 handcarts mounted upon a rail line and 88 wheelbarrows was assembled by his railroad engineer to achieve this feat.

–From Dorpfeld, W. 1902: “Troja und Ilion.” Athens: Beck & Barth.

Heinrich Schliemann is one of archeology’s titans–an adventurer, a dreamer, a cad and a first-class liar, he excavated both Troy and Mycene.

For six months between January and July 1919, Paris was the center of the world–men and women from around the world converged on Paris to shape the peace. Center stage, for the first time in history, was an American president, Woodrow Wilson. David Lloyd George, the gregarious and wily British prime minister, brought Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes. Lawrence of Arabia joined the Arab delegation. Ho Chi Minh, a kitchen assistant at the Ritz, submitted a petition for an independent Vietnam.

Soon ideals and prejudices formed. The Russians were invited nominally but when their new Bolshevic Government chose to not participate, the Allies were much relieved. Millions were taken from their Ottoman and German colonial masters and given over to the French and British. The United States was offered a Mandate over the Kurds but refused it as Wilson did not want to get involved in middle east colonialism. The West did not want to accept Japan’s proposed “racial equality clause” so it instead decided to give Japan a slice of Chinese territory. 

In sessions, they discussed what seems eerily similar to our present-day issues: the problems of Kosovo, of the Kurds, of a homeland for the Jews, as well as Henry Cabot Lodge and Republican proposal to form a “League of Democracies”. 

Above, Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd-George leave the Trianon Palace, Versailles.  

The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles, five years to the day after Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Prince Franz Ferdinand. The delegates gathered round a horseshoe-shaped table in front of which “like a guillotine,” as Harold Nicolson noted in his diary – was the table for the signatures. Mueller and Bell, the ashen-faced German delegates, signed the Treaty at 12:03 precisely, anxious to finish their ordeal. As other delegates formed a queue to sign, a thunderous gun salute boomed outside and in the distance the cheering of the Parisian crowd could be heard. With the signing completed, Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau of France declared “La seance est levee,” and the German delegates, according to Nicolson, were “conducted like prisoners from the dock, their eyes still fixed upon some distant point of the horizon.”

The treaty consisted 440 separate articles, most of them beginning with the words “Germany renounces.” Germany was required to surrender Alsace-Lorraine and her colonies and pay reparations amounting to 33 billion dollars. The Saarland was placed under the supervision of the League of Nations, to be controlled and exploited by France for fifteen years, and German territory west of the Rhine was demilitarized. A Polish state was established and given most of Posen, Upper Silesia, and a corridor to the Baltic, separating East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Danzig became a free city. The German army was to consist of not more than 100,000 officers and men and the General Staff and air force were abolished. The manufacturing and use of tanks, planes, submarines and poison gas was forbidden.

The most controversial part of the treaty was Article 231, the so-called “war guilt” clause which stated that: “The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed on them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.”

The Treaty of Versailles satisfied few, except the rulers of the succession states of Eastern Europe. It was too harsh for the British, too soft for the French, and not idealistic enough for the Americans. The Germans rejected the entire concept of a dictated peace which underlay the peace conference.

In 1947, Henri Cartier-Bresson strolled into William Faulkner’s garden at Oxford, Mississippi and snapped the picture of the author. That one line can easily summarize the picture, but the effortless image, however, wants to say more. William Faulkner’s left hand was clutching his extended right arm. Behind are Faulkner’s two dogs, one of them stretching in the opposite direction–it was the decisive moment. 

As Frank Van Riper noted in HCB’s Washington Post obituary, “Cartier-Bresson made the picture just as one of the terriers stretched, creating an incredible visual tension between the author’s outstretched arm and, at exactly the same angle, the outstretched terrier. The picture works wonderfully because of it.” 

Henri Cartier-Bresson took many portrait pictures during his life, but his wife, Martine Franck accompanied him to just one — probably atypical — portrait session. It was that of the poet Ezra Pound in Venice in 1971, a year before his death at 87.

“There was a tremendous, heavy silence,” recalled Ms. Franck, herself a photographer. “Pound didn’t say a word. He just seemed to condemn the world with his eyes. We were there for about 20 minutes. I stayed to one side. I huddled in a corner. Henri took seven pictures.”

What Pound felt is impossible to know. Years earlier, he had been interned for mental illness, and in 1960, he lapsed into long periods of depressive silence and stopped writing. And yet, in the image selected by Cartier-Bresson, Pound’s wild hair, burning eyes and tense hands seem to speak volumes about an old man raging against the dying of the light.

In 1980, Queen Elizabeth II made history by becoming the first British monarch to make a state visit to the Vatican.* Since the Vatican prohibits any non-Catholic women from wearing anything except black, Her Majesty was dressed in a long black taffeta gown. The pope welcomed the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at the door of his private library.

Thus met two greatest non-elected statesmen of 20th century. In 1982, John Paul would be welcomed by Her Majesty at Buckingham Palace during a historic visit to Great Britain. [However, it was made clear this would not be a state visit but one "to the Roman Catholic community in Great Britain"].  The Queen visited the Vatican again in 2000 to mark the 20th anniversary of their first meeting.

*She meet Pope Pius XII as a princess and Pope John XXIII on a state visit to Italy.