Three archers, Japan, 1860s.
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The men are practitioners of Kyudo, Japanese Zen archery. Their outfits and the way they hold their second arrows (Ya) between their fourth and fifth fingers give this away. The target is most likely 28m away from the men, since they are shooting outdoors at what appears to be a makeshift range. Traditionally,...
French Artillery crew during the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1871, France
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The Franco-Prussian war is left out of nearly every history textbook or timeline of important European events, but in my opinion, was probably the most crucial event in the formation of 20th Century European history. The war itself was extremely short, only about 6 months,...
A Soviet AT crew, Battle of Kursk, July 1943, Russia.
After the devastating loss at Stalingrad in late 1942/early 1943, German High Command looked towards slicing into the salient around Kursk, during Operation Citadel. The Germans ammassed nearly 800,000 men, as well as most of their remaining panzer divisions and aircraft on the Eastern Front for...
Three British soldiers stare down down at a dead German during the battle of Passchendaele, ca. September/October 1917
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The conditions surrounding Passchendaele were about as close to hell as you could get. Weeks of flooding and constant artillery bombardment turned the area into an uprooted quagmire, with no-mans-land resembling a murky lake, and...
A Mongolian woman reaches out from the porthole of a crate in which she is imprisoned, 1913.
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This photo was taken in July 1913 by French photographer Albert Kahn. Albert Kahn was a millionaire banker who pioneered color photography using the process invented by the Lumière brothers. During his trip through exotic countries, Albert Kahn visited...
Scarfaces of the SS -- There are plenty of German officers and soldiers pictured with facial scars. The lot of them are not even from being wounded on the battlefield, but from German academic dueling called Mensur. Mensur is basically a hardcore version of fencing with other differences, the main factor being there is no full facial protection,...
c. 1932. A Mongolian archer.
Edit: a few of you have pointed this man out as a Manchurian archer. So here is a little snippet article regarding the above image from manchuarchery.org. There's also some cool archery analysis at the end. ----- The Mongolian bow as we know it today is a fairly recent invention. At one of the...
Simo Häyhä - "The White Death"
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Häyhä's count of 542 kills is an all-time record for a sniper in any conflict and was achieved in only 98 days of the 'Winter War.
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The Winter War erupted in 1939 with the Soviet invasion of Finland, and the mild-looking Simo was called into service.
Despite...
This photo was taken around 1868 by British-Italian photographer, Felice Beato, one of the first people to take photographs in East Asia and one of the very first war photographers.
The Samurai - 'those who serve' - were the military nobility class which emerged from Japan's provinces and rose to control the country in the 12th century. The Samurai...
"Konzentration vor dem Abschuß des Pfeils" photo by Friedrich Seidenstücker (1930). In 1930 the Bund Deutscher Mädel (German League of Girls) was formed as the female branch of the Hitler Youth movement. There were two general age groups: the Jungmädel, from ten to fourteen years of age, and the older girls from fifteen to twenty-one years of age....
