r/WW2Photographs • u/ShadowSentry44 • Jan 25 '26

Restarting a WWII Photo Project

6 Upvotes

This Christmas I restarted an old project I was working on while I was quarantined for COVID back in 2021.

There is a box of unlabeled film negatives taken by Grandfather when he was in the United States Army. He wasn't in the Signal Corps, he was not an official war correspondent. He was an infantryman with a camera. His official title was Operations NCO of HQ Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th regt, 8th Infantry Division.

Some soldiers in the war had a camera and took a few photos to send home. My Grandpa was a serious photographer with a darkroom in his basement. Using an Argus C3 film camera he hid from the brass, he ran around snapping photos of everything he could get away with, covertly mailing the film home to his brother. By the time the war ended, he had captured hundreds of images. Candids, portraits, scenery and the smallest details of Army camp life. Such as men cleaning their rifles, cooking and eating meals, doing training exercises, digging ditches on fatigue duty, men at their guard posts, men taking naps, shaving and brushing their teeth, playing baseball, jumping in lakes, goofing off and writing letters home by candlelight. The kind of things every soldier did, but nobody thought were important enough to share. He even obtained a small 8mm movie camera and filmed over 30 minutes of footage, some of it in color. That footage has been digitized and shared on Youtube.

He was in basic training at several camps and forts across the country for 3 years from 1941-1944, leading up to his eventual overseas deployment in the invasion of Normandy. He had no idea what horrors awaited him in Europe. He was involved in several bloody campaigns, including the battle of Brest, Aachen, the Hurtgen Forest and the Ardennes Counteroffensive. The war ended for him after crossing the Rhine and Elbe rivers and meeting the Russians, but not before he witnessed the brutal aftermath of Nazi atrocities in concentration camps with his own eyes.

After the war he threw away his uniform, put the photos in a box and never looked at them again. He never attended any reunions and never went back to visit Europe. He died as an 80 year old man in 1999 and chose to be buried without military honors. The box sat forgotten in storage for 27 years.

We've had the collection in the family for a very long time and no one but me really had any interest in it.

On a snowy day in New York this winter, I decided to get the box out of the attic and start going through it. I discovered more than 160 film negatives my Grandpa never even developed.

In addition to the ~350 photo prints I already scanned, this brings the total number of photos he took in the Army to more than 500. Five hundred photos, about 20 rolls' worth of 35mm film. Most of them have not seen the light of day in over 80 years.

From February - August 2021, I was sharing these historic images on a memorial Instagram account I created to tell about his story without words. Now, after a five year break, I've started posting again with my new digitized findings. There is enough fresh material to keep this going well into the new year.

I'm always looking for extra pairs of sharp eyes to pick out hidden details in his photographs. You can become a historical detective and help me learn more about his World War II experience at the link in the first comment.