Chimps Do the Darnedest Things - Photo Gallery. Sleepy Animals - Photo Gallery. Animals Driving Cars - Photo Gallery. Sweetest Little Lambs - Photo Gallery. Cutest Kittens - Photo Gallery. Two-Headed Animals! - Photo Gallery. 9/11: The 25 Most Powerful Photos - Photo Gallery. Explosions: Most Dramatic Photos - Photo Gallery. Surf Dogs - Photo Gallery. Saratoga: Horse Racing's Heart - Photo Gallery. Weird Science in Action - Photo Gallery. The Week's Best Photos: 7.15.11 - Photo Gallery.
Photos Gone Viral! - Photo Gallery. Mystery Extinctions - Photo Gallery. Upside-Down Planes - Photo Gallery. Marvelous Early Flying Machines - Photo Gallery. Surf's Up: Amazing Rides - Photo Gallery. Real Faces Behind Hacker Cases - Photo Gallery. Bear Attacks! - Photo Gallery. Coolest Owls - Photo Gallery. Majestic, Soaring Eagles - Photo Gallery. Beautiful Birds in Flight - Photo Gallery. Baby Tigers - Photo Gallery. Cutest Baby Tigers You've Ever Seen - Photo Gallery. Baby Animals Playing - Photo Gallery. Baby Animals with Mom - Photo Gallery.
Unlikely Animal Friends - Photo Gallery. WWII: The Pictures We Remember - Photo Gallery. No conflict in recorded history transformed the globe as thoroughly as World War II.
Cities were obliterated; national borders altered; revolutionary and, in some cases, fearsome military, medical, communication and transportation technology invented; and , of course, tens of millions were killed — the majority of them civilians. Simply put, the world of August 1945, when the war ended, bore little resemblance to that of September 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. During those six long, uncertain years, LIFE covered the war with more tenacity and focus than any other magazine on earth. Terrible Beauty: A-Bomb Tests - Photo Gallery. WWII: Allied Internees, Philippines - Photo Gallery. Never-Seen: Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Photo Gallery. One scene shared by all of the 20th century’s bloodiest conflicts might have been lifted straight from The Road Warrior, or a Beckett play: spectral landscape; buildings obliterated; blasted trees; lifeless wasteland.
The photographs in this gallery, for instance — pictures that starkly reference every bleak, war-battered panorama from Verdun to Iwo Jima to Chosin Reservoir to Pork Chop Hill — were made in September, 1945, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. But far from chronicling the aftermath of a sustained, slogging campaign, these images — none of which were published in LIFE magazine — depict the devastation produced in a few unspeakably violent seconds.
Here, LIFE.com presents pictures from both cities taken in the weeks and months following the bombings — bombings that killed a combined 120,000 people outright, and tens of thousands more through injury and radiation sickness. WWII: Children of War - Photo Gallery. WWII: Dogs of War - Photo Gallery. Rupert Murdoch: Making of a Mogul - Photo Gallery.