In this image, St Paul’s Cathedral is dramatically illuminated on the night of VE Day, 8 May 1945, which marked the end of the Second World War in Europe. Sir Christopher Wren’s masterpiece in central London had survived the war…
In this dramatic photograph – taken on 30 April 1975, 50 years ago this spring – a North Vietnamese tank is pictured at the climactic moment, as it smashes through the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon. The fall…
This image shows the remains of a horse excavated recently from a trench at Mont-Saint-Jean Farm in Waterloo, Belgium. The farm was the site of a field hospital for the Duke of Wellington’s troops in the aftermath of the battle…
This image shows a huge crowd of German soldiers captured by British forces during the Battle of Amiens on 27 August 1918, less than three months before Armistice Day. Taken at the town of Abbeville, well behind the frontline, the…
In this image, a diver surveys one of the five cannon found during an archaeological exploration in Dry Tortugas National Park, off the south-west coast of Florida. The cannon played a crucial role in confirming that a nearby wreck, first…
In this image, the newly constructed glass noses of several dozen A-20 ‘Havoc’ bombers shimmer under the factory lights at the Douglas Aircraft Company’s production plant in Long Beach, California. The picture was taken in October 1942 by Alfred Palmer,…
More than 200 radar stations were dotted throughout Britain during the Second World War, although very few survive intact today. A number of these were Chain Home Low, or CHL stations, so named because they could detect enemy aircraft flying…
This image was taken outside the air-raid shelter in the garden of Roland Penrose’s house in Downshire Hill, Hampstead, north London, at the height of the Blitz in 1941. Penrose was a Surrealist artist by trade, but also worked as…
Christmas at the front was about making do. Here, for instance, British soldiers have gathered in a shell hole around a makeshift table. Some are sitting on the ground, others on what appears to be rolled-up sheets of wire.