Overview

According to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. """"The Second World War was documented on a huge scale by thousands of photographers and artists who created millions of pictures."""" Photographic companies, designated as the Signal Corps, with their squads dispersed to different battles, had the daunting task of supplying photo documentation of the war. It's not an exaggeration to say the Signal Corps' cameramen risked their lives to record the battles and other activities during WWII. The first photographs of the D-day landing were taken by Signal Corps photographers (already on the beach) and delivered by carrier pigeons to command headquarters in England. One such Army Signal Corps photographer was Frank Kessler. whose photographs presented here in Kilroy Was There follow the U.S. Army's progress from the invasion of France on D-day to the surrender of Germany on May 8, 1945. Included are combat scenes, the capture of German snipers and other troops, casualties on both sides, the liberation of Paris, the execution of spies, public humiliation of collaborators, the liberation of allied POWs and concentration camps, joyful French civilians and dejected German civilians.

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9780873388078

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With his camera Kessler was out there on the killing fields alongside the rest of us. . . . Kessler had a remarkable talent for making significant the ordinary images of war. With a snapshot of a U.S. Army medic lighting a cigarette for a bloody German soldier, he tells us how opposing troops came to see one another. . . . He shows us soldiers sitting on the muddy bank of a little stream trying to take a bath. He shows us Sherman tanks burning, young men dying, young men dead. Like no other photographs I've seen, Kessler's capture the ugliness, wreckage, cold, and misery of war.

Author Information

Tony Hillerman, an Edgar Award-winning novelist, is author of the Jim Chee Mystery series, which has earned him the Navajo people's appreciation as 'special friend to the Dineh'. He lives in New Mexico

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