Colorizing these historical photos can really mess with your mind. That “straight into the camera stare” makes this look like a still from Inglourious Basterds. In reality, it’s American troops preparing Nazi Major General Anton Dostler for execution after he was found guilty of war crimes. Dostler was the commander of German 75th Army Corps when he ordered and oversaw the execution of 15 US Army soldiers in Italy on March 26th, 1944. Dostler’s well-deserved sentence was death; he was (fittingly!) executed by a 12-man firing squad on December 1st, 1945.
June 6th, 1944: D-Day. The Normandy landings begin with this eery shot from inside one of the amphibious landing craft carrying troops from the 16th Infantry Regiment, U.S. 1st Division. Landing on Omaha Beach, the men waded ashore as part of the (as we all know, successful) Allied military campaign to free France. Seeing this in color from the perspective of the men heading straight into the jaws of death makes it all pretty real, doesn’t it?
King George V at Buckingham Palace in 1914, shortly before the outbreak of World War I, a conflict in which the rule of two of his cousins, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, fell. While King George ruled for a respectable 26 years, he is the grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II, the longest reigning British monarch in history. So while we’ve never seen her in a hat quite that fabulous, she wins!