World War II: Women’s Work - 50 Photos That Brought the War Home

Lest there be any doubt that World World II had (unintentionally) sparked a cultural shift, this photo of a female welder at a boat-and-sub-building yard was a clear signal that women were as comfortable brandishing a blowtorch as they were wielding a wet mop. Though many of them would be forced to abandon their jobs to make way for the men when the war ended, gender roles — as Americans had long-understood them — had forever shifted.

World War II: The Hour Nears - 50 Photos That Brought the War Home

LIFE photographer Frank Scherschel covered D-Day and Operation Overlord from well before the actual invasion to the Allied liberation of Paris months after the famous landings at Normandy. With this photo of GIs tramping in review across an English field, Scherschel managed to suggest the gigantic scale of the operation (160,000 Allied troops took part, making it the greatest air-land-and-sea invasion in military history) while at the same time humanizing it — putting viewers, as it were, on the ground as the long-planned invasion draws near.

World War II: Four Aces - 50 Photos That Brought the War Home

Members of the U.S. Army Air Corps’ legendary 99th Pursuit Squadron, the Tuskegee Airmen, receive instruction about wind currents from a lieutenant in 1942. The Tuskegee fliers — the nation’s first African American air squadron — served with courage and distinction in the segregated American military.

Vietnam: Yankee Papa - 50 Photos That Brought the War Home

Over the decades, while LIFE published dozens of photoessays by the 20th century’s greatest photographers, few combined the raw intensity and technical brilliance of Larry Burrows’ “One Ride With Yankee Papa 13” — widely seen as the single greatest photographic achievement to emerge from the war in Vietnam. In his breathtaking chronicle of a young helicopter crew fighting for their lives at the very moment America is ramping up its involvement in Southeast Asia, Burrows’ photoessay anticipated the scope and the dire, calamitous arc of the entire war in Vietnam. This picture of 21-year-old crew chief James Farley shouting to the pilot of the copter as it comes under fire and his comrades lie wounded, was the cover image of the April 16, 1965, issue of LIFE. America, the picture suggests, is in for a long, long fight.

Korea: Weather as Enemy - 50 Photos That Brought the War Home

United States Marines make their way through a small canyon they nicknamed “Nightmare Alley” during a retreat (or, as many call it, the “breakout”) from the Chosin Reservoir, December, 1950. This picture vividly illustrates what military men and women have always known, but civilians at home rarely even imagine: namely, that harsh weather can be as immediate and relentless an enemy as any flesh and blood foe. “It was 40 below zero during that retreat,” photographer David Douglas Duncan recalled. “And the wind coming down from Manchuria must have made it closer to 50 or 60 below. It was so damn cold that my film was brittle — it just snapped like a pretzel.”

World War II: Women in the Fight - 50 Photos That Brought the War Home

Marie Hansen’s striking 1942 striking photograph of Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps members, commonly known as WAACs, donning gas masks at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, illustrates enduring themes from the war: fear, courage, and — in an unsubtle message to the country as a whole — the power of unity in the face of an unknown threat. The WAACs were famously praised by General Douglas MacArthur, who called them “my best soldiers.”

Frank Scherschel: Photographer - Before and After D-Day

Frank Scherschel (1907-1981) was an award-winning staff photographer for LIFE magazine during World War II and well into the 1950s. His younger brother Joe was a LIFE photographer, as well. In addition to the Normandy invasion, Frank Scherschel photographed the war in the Pacific, the 1947 wedding of Princess Elizabeth, the 1956 Democratic National Convention, collective farming in Czechoslovakia, Sir Winston Churchill (many times), art collector Peggy Guggenheim, road racing at Le Mans, baseball, football, boxing, a beard-growing contest in Michigan, and countless other matters, both epic and forgotten. Above: Frank Scherschel in uniform during WWII.

Cheers - Before and After D-Day

A French couple shares cognac with an American tank crew after Allied forces liberated the area.

Coast of France, June 1944 - Before and After D-Day

House To House - Before and After D-Day

“We thought it was going to be murder but it wasn’t. To show you how easy it was, I ate my bar of chocolate. In every other operational trip, I sweated so much the chocolate they gave us melted in my breast pocket.” — Frank Scherschel describing his experiences photographing the Normandy invasion from the air, before he joined Allied troops heading inland. Above: GIs search ruined homes in western France after D-Day.