18 Brutal Photos from a Time Way before Cellphones

1.

A South Vietnamese soldier punches a captured Viet Cong guerrilla during an operation in Quahm Nam province in 1965

2.

A young private waits on the beach during the Marine landing at Da Nang, 1965

3.

Vice Mayor Dr. Ernst Kurt Lisso, his wife Renate Stephanie, in the chair, and his daughter Regina Lisso after committing suicide by cyanide to avoid capture by American troops on April 18, 1945

4.

Otto von Bismarck on his deathbed, 30 July 1898

5.

A CIA case officer is photographed at a dead drop location in Moscow, 1962

6.

In 2009, George W. Bush invited President-elect Obama and all former presidents for lunch

7.

A Red Cross nurse writing the last words of a dying British soldier in 1917

8.

Woman and children crouch in a muddy canal as they take cover from intense Viet Cong fire, 1966

9.

French Flamethrowers at Verdun, 1916

10.

A Serbian soldier sleeps beside his father who visited him in the trenches near Belgrade, 1914/15

11.

A French trench raider with a revolver and dagger in 1916

12.

A pigeon with a small camera attached. The trained birds were used experimentally by German citizen Julius Neubronner, before and during the war years, capturing aerial images when a timer mechanism clicked the shutter – WW1

13.

The aftermath of a skirmish during the Battle of Somme, 1916

14.

Halifax heavy bombers interior after bomb run, second world war

15.

France lost more soldiers between 1914 and 1918 than the USA in its whole history. 30% of the 18-35 years old French men died in WW1

16.

An American GI treats the wound of a very young German soldier. September 6, 1944

17.

Very rare photo of Russian priests blessing Red Army soldiers during WW2 (this practice was allowed by Stalin to raise wartime morale, after furious anti-Church policy of the 1930’s)…USSR, 1941-1943

18.

A Soviet soldier, a World War II veteran, is perhaps on his deathbed, reaching out to his past heroics.