How to Host the Olympic Games on a Shoestring Budget

As the countdown for the Paris Summer Olympics has begun and the excitement for the international extravaganza of athletic prowess mounts, few will now remember a past games that had a rather more frugal approach to the sporting proceedings. Compared to the multi-millions spent on the current games the 1948 London Olympics was the make-do-and-mend…

Proud WWII Pilots Modelling their Personalised Flight Jackets

They all had them; the standard A-2 flight jacket that every soldier was issued during the war, but I could never really imagine these tough, battle-worn guys sitting around, designing and doodling their own customised bombers. While some were clearly made professionally and some were homemade while killing time in between the action, here’s a fantastic collection of photographs from…

The Artful Spy who Stopped Hitler from Emptying the Louvre

At first glance she looks like just another bookish art historian in matronly 1940s garb – a most unlikely superhero. But Rose Antonia Maria Valland was a lone female spy who, during WW2, tirelessly and valiantly put her life on the line for the love of art, saving scores of looted works of art during Nazi…

Meet the Hollywood Bombshell Who Invented the Basis for Modern WIFI

If this beautiful Hollywood starlet looks a little bored or unimpressed while posing in her rather ridiculous glitzy get-up, it’s because she probably was; her mind elsewhere– for instance, oh say … masterminding the breakthrough technology that would bring us the basis for modern-day WiFi and Bluetooth. Hedy Lamarr was voted the most desirable pin-up girl during World War…

We went on a Picnic in a Parisian Nazi Bunker

I‘ve been on some adventures in my lifetime, but none of them ended with a candlelit banquet in an abandoned Nazi bunker. And it is with great pleasure that I finally get to share this surreal experience with you. The idea began with the proposal of a picnic with a few friends, somewhere a little…

Unsung Heroes of WWII: The All-Female WASP Squad

Where there’s a will, there’s a way — but for pilot Jacqueline Cochrane, there had to be even more. “To live without risk, for me,” she said, “would be tantamount to death.” One of the biggest risks of her career was pioneering the US organisation, WASPS (Women Airforce Service Pilots). In the heat of WWII,…

Parisian Woman with Baguette: A Short Story Challenge

It’s amazing to see how our minds can wander in different ways; how imaginations can wander from a single picture. We recently proposed a new challenge for our readers to become the storyteller, prompted by a historical found photograph with very little information about its author, or the subject in the frame. An unknown woman is…

The Fake Rooftop Towns of World War II

They were devised by Hollywood set designers, assembled like stage props and “inhabited” by actors, but entertainment was far from the agenda. Photographed taking a sunny stroll down a seemingly suburban avenue called Synthetic Street, these ladies are actually on the rooftop of the B17 Bomber factory in Seattle Washington in 1941, camouflaged by nearly 26 acres of suburban American…

How to Bury an Entire Museum

When German forces took Athens in April 1941, they expected to find thousands of centuries-old artifacts in the National Archaeological Museum, Greece’s largest museum. Instead, the neo-classical building was totally empty, besides the archaeologists and guardians still on duty. Officers asked them where the relics were hidden and “they answered enigmatically that antiquities are where everybody…

If Superheroes had been there…

What if we did have superheros? What if they had been there to help us (or turn on us) when the world most needed superheroes to stamp out the villains of the real world? What may have been just a fleeting thought for us has become an artistic fantasy for Indonesian illustrator Agan Harahap. Merging…