15 Actual Stories Behind Famous Historical War Photos

This is both a rare photograph of the USS New Ironsides - the Union's only seagoing ironclad warship used in the entire Civil War - and the first known photograph of a combat engagement. 

The photo shows the Union warship attacking two Confederate-held forts, Sumter and Moultrie, in the Charleston, SC, harbor. Local photographers Haas & Peale photographed the historic battle from a nearby beach, also capturing the small crowd of amazed onlookers witnessing the battle.

The photo wasn't famous until over a century after it was taken, when author Bob Zeller discovered the photo negatives in the Library of Congress and printed them in a 2005 book. 

This photograph captures one of the many strange realities created when the American Civil War began. It was taken after the Battle of Williamsburg in 1862 and shows two former classmates of the West Point military academy now on opposite sides of the war.  

The soldier on the right is a young George Armstrong Custer, then a lieutenant. He recognized his former classmate, Confederate Army Capt. John "Gimlet" Lea, among the wounded, and ensured his safe treatment. Custer would later perish in the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn, when the Sioux Nation routed a Union Army cavalry regiment under his command. 

This photo was taken by Henry William Elson, a Mathew Brady associate who published this and many other photos in a 1912 collection called The Civil War Through the Camera: Hundreds of Vivid Photographs Actually Taken in Civil War Times, Together with Elson's New History.

The earliest war photography was limited by the technology of the time, but it still produced some of the medium's most lasting images. British photographer Roger Fenton documented the Crimean War between Britain and Russia, lugging heavy camera equipment across the warzone. Fenton couldn't photograph the action of the war, just its aftermath. 

This 1855 photo shows an area lined with fired cannonballs. The British had nicknamed it "the valley of the shadow of death," since the area was lost and retaken many times during the war. 

Fenton was one of the first war photographers to create the future market for journals and newspapers to purchase photography. Earlier, they had relied on sketches of battlefields drawn by artists, which could be turned into engravings. 

The Civil War was the deadliest in American history, and its bloodiest battle occurred in 1862. In the one-day Battle of Antietam, there were 23,000 combined Union and Confederate casualties, with 3,600 slain. Two weeks later, President Lincoln visited the site of the battlefield to observe the carnage and pay his respects to the casualties on both sides. 

In the photo, General John McClernand stands to Lincoln's left. McClernand was an Illinois congressman and early political rival of Lincoln's, whom Lincoln convinced to join the Union Army. On Lincoln's right is Allan Pinkerton, who founded the controversial Pinkerton detective agency in 1850. During the war, Pinkerton served as Lincoln's unofficial head of the Secret Service and military intelligence minister. His mistakes in this role helped prolong the war.  

This photograph was one of more than 25 taken by photographer Alexander Gardner that day. Gardner was an employee of famed Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, and was eventually given a regular assignment on the staff of General George McClellan, under the honorary rank of captain. 

As Iraqi forces retreated from Kuwait following the international peacekeeping coalition's 1991 invasion, dictator Saddam Hussein ordered the destruction of the Kuwaiti oil fields. Overall, 650 oil wells were burned and nearly 75 more were damaged, causing fires that would burn for 10 months. 

This photo was taken by the United States Air Force and shows a flight of F-16A, F-15C, and F-15E fighter jets patrolling above Kuwait as the oil fields burn. It shows a small fraction of the ecological and human rights disaster that marked the end of the Gulf War. 

Newspapers covered many aspects of WWII, at home and overseas. Omaha World-Herald photographer Earle L. Bunker was the co-winner of the 1944 Pulitzer Prize for his photo, "Homecoming," which shows a soldier's return home to his family after a long tour of combat duty. 

In 1943, Bunker waited 24 hours at a train station in Villisca, IA, to take this photo of Lt. Col. Robert Moore's return home to his family. Moore had received the Distinguished Service Cross while fighting in North Africa. When this was taken, he hadn't been home in 16 months.

1944's other Pulitzer Prize co-winner, "Tarawa Island," focused on the overseas aspect of the war. The gruesome photo by Associated Press photographer Frank Filan showed a captured enemy position after the battle of Tarawa Island - one of many island battles fought between Japan and the Allied nations during WWII.