Recently Google announced it had digitized and uploaded images from the LIFE magazine photo archive, many of which have never been published before.  At present Google says only 20 percent of LIFE's archive is online, but the end goal is to have 10 million images available. To do your own searches visit here.

Last week Soldier's Home took a look at the passing of Louis de Cazenave, one of France's two remaining WWI veterans.  Since then we've heard news of two more veterans dying as the final representatives from a fading era.

Erich Kaestner, said to be Germany's last surviving WWI veteran, is making headlines not so much for his death but for the amount of time it took to realize his significance. He died on January 1 at the age of 107, but it was not until recently that word got out he was Germany's last living link to the Great War.  As the BBC reports:

Reports in Die Welt daily and Der Spiegel magazine identified Kaestner as Germany's last World War I veteran, but verification of the claim was difficult as the country keeps no record of its war veterans.

In a country where the shame of the Nazi genocide and memories of two world war defeats still cast long shadows, both publications focused more on the German national psyche than the death itself.

"The German public was within a hair's breadth of never learning of the end of an era," wrote Der Spiegel, until someone updated his death notice on the internet encyclopaedia site, Wikipedia.

In its obituary for Kaestner, Die Welt noted: "The losers hide themselves in a state of self-pity and self denial that they happily try to mitigate by forgetting." 

"Any form of commemoration of military events is seen as problematic here," Chiari told Spiegel Online.

"Our veterans only take part in public ceremonies when they are invited abroad to join commemorative events with veterans from other countries. World War I is seen as part of a historical line that led to World War II. You can't equate the two but there is much debate about it."

It's been widely reported recently that movies dealing with veterans and the Iraq war are mostly  flopping at the box office. Peoples' opinions on the cause of this are varied, but a common line of thinking is that it's just too soon. Recently, however, I came across a movie from 1946 which astounded me in the accuracy and relevance of the veterans issues addressed.  The movie is called "The Best Years of Our Lives," and while it won the 1947 Oscar for best picture I'd never heard about it until my father mentioned the film at the Christmas dinner table.

If conventional wisdom within my own generation believes that many mainstream movies from that time period are sanitized and fail to address complex issues, "The Best Years of Our Lives" is an exception. The film traces the lives of three WWII veterans and their return to a small town and their families. One of the actors, Harold Russell, was a veteran himself and lost both hands while serving in the U.S. Army. 

While watching the movie I was struck how veterans of Iraq could easily replace these WWII-era characters. We see their apprehension as one-by-one a taxi drops the men off at their respective homes. None of the vets want to get out of the car, and face their families for the first time. The ensuing story line involves alcoholism, depression, joblessness, financial troubles, broken relationships, and opposition to the war. Even among their families and old friends the vets feel out of place, with images of their wartime experience always present. The plot is subtle and methodical. In portraying the assimilation of these vets back into civilian society, we see how they initially depend on each other, and how they eventually come to depend on their families as well.

An occasional series highlighting some of the most thoughtful and informative combat reporting throughout America's history at war.

Today's Best in War Reporting comes from the legendary combat correspondent Ernie Pyle at the Italian front in WWII.  With a simplicity of words and observations, Pyle manages to knock you over as he writes of the moments surrounding a young company commander's death.  In his words you can almost hear his own exhaustion as he holds back tears.  It begins:

AT THE FRONT LINES IN ITALY, January 10, 1944 - In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas...I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Capt. Waskow's body down. The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley below. Soldiers made shadows in the moonlight as they walked. Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules. They came lying belly-down across the wooden pack-saddles, their heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their stiffened legs sticking out awkwardly from the other side, bobbing up and down as the mule walked.

The narrative continues as Pyle evokes an almost bizarre scene as Capt. Waskow's body is removed from the mule and placed with the other bodies of U.S. soldiers.  The empathy with which Pyle treats this moment is a grim foreshadowing of his own future in the war.  Like Capt. Waskow, Pyle was loved universally by the troops; and like Capt. Waskow, Pyle would not make it home from the war alive.  He was killed the following April by sniper fire on one of the Japanese islands. 

As Capt. Waskow's men begin to pay their last respects, Pyle manages to convey how even their short remarks are far more emotional than they might seem on the surface.

One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, "God damn it." That's all he said, and then he walked away. Another one came. He said, "God damn it to hell anyway." He looked down for a few last moments, and then he turned and left.

Another man came; I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for all were bearded and grimy dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain's face, and then he spoke directly to him, as though he were alive. He said: "I'm sorry, old man."

Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said:

"I sure am sorry, sir."

But, of course, the soldiers (and Pyle) must get ready to continue fighting the next day.

After that the rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow of the low stone wall. We lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.

Witnessing the moments he described Pyle showed that at a moment when his own emotions may have dominated his thoughts, his ability to step back, observe, and convey never left his writing.

Today's post is the last in a three-part series of interviews with filmmaker Ken Burns.  His 15-hour documentary, "The War," looked at life on the battlefield and homefront during WWII. Excerpts: 

S.H.: What was it like living with the images of war for six years during the making of the film?

BURNS: It was very very tough. I mean we like to say, and it’s a dishonor to anyone within the sound of my voice who’s actually experienced combat, to say we used to have kind of our own minor versions of PTSD because we had to look at horrible footage. We looked at thousands of hours of footage to get our 15 hours of film. We looked at tens of thousands of still photographs, some of the most gruesome carnage.  And while our film is difficult to watch, and shows in an unmitigated, unmediated fashion the horror of war, nonetheless it isn’t the worst we’ve seen.  

We didn’t want to gratuitously shock anybody. There are difficult images, but we left the most difficult images of children, of women, of soldiers deeply maimed, guts spilling out on the battlefield, of the worst kind of depravity that takes place in war, out of our film. But we ourselves had to find out what it was like. And we’d often, many of us, recount the stories of in the editing process, the long solitary editing process, of going home at night and dreaming--finding ourselves not just filmmakers in the editing room trying to solve the problems of the Battle of Peleliu, for example, or the Battle of the Bulge, but finding ourselves in that battle.  [We were] realizing, ‘wait a second, we’re filmmakers without guns--why are we here?’ And waking up in cold sweats with nightmares, coming in hollow-eyed with sleep and finding out the editor, or producer across the table had felt the same thing, or something similar in a different battle.

It was very difficult, but what kept us going, and I don’t mean to play up any real difficulties--we had the luxury of being at home, none of us were called up to do the actual fighting that takes place--is that we were compelled along, carried along, buoyed by the stories that we had collected.  [From] the 40-odd people that we’d gotten to know intimately, people we’d said in our early boiler plate language paid lip service to the notion that these people would be like family members, somebody you might have had Thanksgiving with. By the end I can tell you that they do feel like family members. We lost Earl Burke. We lost Ray Leopold in the last few months.  And we all felt a great deal of sadness as if someone really close to us had died. With Ray Leopold, from Waterbury, I actually broke down and cried, as if it had been my own grandfather.

[Part 1] [Part 2]