Page 126 – LIFE

American Atrocity: Remembering My Lai

January 17, 2020March 13, 2013 by

Through the centuries, whether combatants have fought with spears or cutting-edge drones, one aspect of warfare has never changed: innocents die. In the 20th century alone millions tens of millions of civilians were killed and continue to be killed and maimed in global, regional and civil wars.

Most of these victims are “collateral damage”: men, women and children who die as the result of military errors. But some civilians are killed by design—murdered, often after being raped or tortured. For Americans of a certain age, the My Lai (pronounced “me lie”) atrocity not only remains a grisly emblem of other war crimes that have been committed by some of “our boys” through the years, but in a very real sense marked the end of a certain willful American innocence about the fluid, shadowy line that separates good and evil in war zones.

The chilling facts about My Lai itself are widely known, but some details bear repeating. On March 16, 1968, hundreds (various estimates range between 347 and 504) of elderly people, women, children and infants were murdered by more than 20 members of “Charlie” Company, United States’ 1st Battalion 20th Infantry Regiment. Some of the women were raped before being killed. After this mass slaughter, only one man, Second Lt. William Calley, was convicted of any crime. (He was found guilty in March 1971 of the premeditated murder of 22 Vietnamese civilians, but served just three-and-a-half years under house arrest at Fort Benning, Georgia.)

Incredibly, the world at large might have never learned about the death and torture visited by American troops upon the villagers at My Lai had it not been for an Army photographer named Ron Haeberle. Following Charlie Company’s 3rd platoon into the tiny hamlet, and expecting to document a battle between American and Viet Cong fighters, Haeberle instead ended up chronicling (with his own camera, not his Army-issue camera) a scene of unspeakable carnage.

More than a year later, when he returned to his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, he shared some of the pictures from the massacre with the city’s newspaper, the Plain-Dealer, which published them in late November, 1969. A few weeks later, in its Dec. 5, 1969, issue, LIFE magazine published a series of Haeberle’s photos and the full story (as much as was then known) of what happened halfway around the world the previous March.

Decades after American troops unleashed hell in that village in Vietnam, LIFE.com remembers by republishing the story as it ran in LIFE, 20 months later.

Nothing will ever keep innocent men, women and children from being killed in the midst of war. Nothing will ever keep warriors from acts of savagery and, just as often, feats of unimaginable bravery. (Three American troops in the village that day tried to stop their comrades from committing rape and murder, and fought to protect the wounded. Back in the states after news broke about My Lai, the three were initially denounced as traitors. Later, the Army lauded them for their heroism.)

Nothing will bring back the dead. But decades after the gunfire has ceased and the terrified cries of the innocent have faded, we can still bear witness. And so we do.

Vietnamese villagers, including children, huddle in terror moments before being killed by American troops at My Lai, Vietnam, March 16, 1968.

Ronald S. Haeberle The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

December 5, 1969 issue of LIFE Magazine

The Charm of Michael Caine: Rare Photos, 1966

January 17, 2020March 13, 2013 by

In October 1966, in a lengthy profile of a young English actor on the rise, LIFE magazine took a stab at describing what would in time be recognized not only as one of the most extraordinary instruments in all of movies, but a pop-culture touchstone ripe for loving parodies: Michael Caine’s voice.

“When Michael Caine talks about himself,” the magazine told its readers, “his voice is soft and couched in an accent that Englishmen call ‘London,’ a nondescript Cockney derivative with the harsh edges honed off and the aspirates intact.” That’s pretty good, especially the part about the aspirates, and with a little bit of effort most of us can easily conjure the sound of that “nondescript Cockney” in our heads or, in all likelihood, the sound of people gleefully impersonating the octogenarian movie star.

But when LIFE published its 1966 feature on Caine (born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite in the Rotherhithe district of London on March 14, 1933), the actor was far from the two-time Oscar-winning screen legend he was eventually to become. He had starred in two movies that had put him on the map, as it were, and got him noticed outside of England as a spy in The Ipcress File (1965) and as a Cockney Casanova in the classic British film, Alfie (1966) but the titles that would put him on the path to legend status were still years away. Those movies, like The Italian Job, Get Carter, Sleuth, Educating Rita, Hannah and Her Sisters, Cider House Rules, Little Voice, The Quiet American and most recently the films of Christoper Nolan such as Inception and his Batman movies, have shown Caine to be as versatile an actor as one is ever likely to see.

And then there are the duds. Anyone who has acted in more than 100 movies is, of course, going to have some bombs on his hands. But in Sir Michael’s case, calling more than a few of his titles godawful is putting it mildly. The Island. Jaws: The Revenge. Blame It on Rio, for chrissake. These are movies that most actors would probably disown if they could. But to Caine’s credit, he has always been completely upfront about why he makes so many movies, even if some of them are abominations. He does it, he says, because of the money—which is often very, very good—and because it’s his job. As the son of a father who worked in a fish market and mother who worked as a house cleaner, Caine never believed there was any shame in being poor, but he sure as hell would rather be rich. And if occasionally working in a movie he knew was going to be rubbish helped pay the bills, well, that’s what people worked for. His job just happened to allow him the luxury of traveling the world and hanging out with attractive women.

Here, LIFE.com celebrates Michael Caine with a series of previously unpublished photos from 1966, made by LIFE’s Bill Ray. Of Caine himself who at the time was divorced from his first wife, Patricia Haines (1932 – 1977) but had not yet married the woman to whom he’s still married today, the former model Shakira Baksh. Ray recalled that “there is a very fine line between being lazy and being laid back, and Caine knew exactly were that line was. He worked all the time but never broke a sweat. He always knew his lines, but was in no hurry to blurt them out. If things broke down on the set, he was happy in his trailer listening to The Four Tops or grabbing a nap. He was simply made for the movie business.”

As for the women—the many women—who happened to be in the vicinity of Caine during the assignment, Ray remembered that Caine “seemed to be a magnet, without ever lifting a finger. And that was another part of the laid-back thing. He seemed to have perfected a way to make things look easy, and so things became easy.

“That sort of magic,” Ray continues, “would have been much easier to take if Caine had been half as good looking as, say, another young Cockney, like Terence Stamp. He wasn’t. But charming, fun, and easy to be around and work with, he definitely was.”

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

Michael Caine in Los Angeles in 1966.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Michael Caine with an unidentified woman in Los Angeles in 1966.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Michael Caine with an unidentified friend in Los Angeles in 1966.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Michael Caine in Los Angeles in 1966.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Michael Caine lifted girlfriend Natalie Wood off the ground, 1966.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Wood, Michael Caine and an unidentified man and woman in Los Angeles in 1966.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Michael Caine read an article about himself, Los Angeles, 1966.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Michael Caine and Shirley MacLaine on the set of the 1966 heist movie Gambit

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Michael Caine in Los Angeles in 1966.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Michael Caine laughing, Los Angeles, 1966.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Michael Caine and an unidentified man in a car in Los Angeles in 1966.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Michael Caine dances with friends, including the actress Sally Kellerman, in Los Angeles in 1966.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Michael Caine with friends, including the actress Sally Kellerman (on his left), in Los Angeles in 1966.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Michael Caine in Los Angeles in 1966.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Michael Caine with an unidentified woman in Los Angeles in 1966.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Photographer Spotlight: Andreas Feininger

November 3, 2020March 12, 2013 by

If one had to choose a single photographer whose work would serve as a visual biography of New York City in its postwar Golden Age when Gotham became, in a sense, the capital of the world, the name Andreas Feininger would have to be in the mix. Paris-born, raised in Germany and, for a time, a cabinet-maker and architect trained in the Bauhaus, Feininger’s pictures of New York in the 1940s and ’50s helped define, for all time, not merely how a great 20th century city looked, but how it imagined itself and its place in the world. With its traffic-jammed streets, gritty waterfronts, iconic bridges and inimitable skyline, the city assumed the character of a vast, vibrant landscape.

Individual New Yorkers, meanwhile, were often an afterthought: it was form, pattern and, perhaps above all else, scale that Feininger sought. Human beings might have built this thrilling, sprawling, purposeful urban panorama, but their presence in Feininger’s pictures was not necessary; their handiwork would suffice. (In fact, in his single most famous portrait of a person, his 1955 photo of the young photographer Dennis Stock, Feininger obscures or, more accurately, replaces the human face with the clean, mechanistic contours of a camera.)

Of course, no one who worked on staff for LIFE as Feininger did for almost two decades—and 340 assignments—from 1943 until 1962, could be defined by a single topic.

Fascinated from the time he was a young boy in Germany by the natural world, Feininger made beautiful pictures of the skeletons and bones of animals, snakes and birds, investing them with an austere power that the creatures perhaps lacked when alive and covered with flesh, fur, feathers or scales. His 1956 picture of Niagara Falls in winter, with two small human forms silhouetted against a scene, might have been lifted from the last Ice Age, while one of his most famous and most frequently reproduced photographs—Route 66 in 1947 Arizona—somehow manages to reference, in a single frame, the allure of the open road, the confluence of the man-made and natural worlds and the myth of the inexhaustible American West.

The author of more than 30 books including at least one acknowledged classic, the autobiography Andreas Feininger: Photographer (1966) Feininger’s photographs were shown in solo and group shows in places as diverse as the Museum of Natural History, the International Center of Photography, MoMa, the Whitney, the Metropolitan, the Smithsonian and in smaller galleries and exhibitions around the world. A retrospective of his six-decade career, featuring 80 of his own favorite black-and-white pictures from 1928 through 1988, toured Europe in the late 1990s.

Andreas Feininger died in Manhattan in February 1999, at the age of 92.

Photographer Dennis Stock held a camera in front of his face, 1955.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A crescent moon rises between Manhattan skyscrapers, 1946.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Crowds filled Coney Island’s beaches on the Fourth of July, Brooklyn, New York, 1949.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

This slinky-like light pattern in the blackness of a moonlit sky was produced by a time-exposure of the light-tipped rotor blades of a helicopter as it took off, 1949.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Air Force training, 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Training for chemical warfare, Maryland, 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Route 66 in Arizona, 1947.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

This view of midtown Manhattan, looking straight down 42nd Street, was taken with the aid of a 40-inch Dallmeyer telephoto lens two miles away, from New Jersey, 1946.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sculptor Ruth Vodicka altered the shoulder of her statue of William Tell, 1956.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Studying black widow spiders, 1943.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A macro close-up of a millipede, 1950.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A forest of wells, rigs and derricks crowded the Signal Hill oil fields in Long Beach, Calif., 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Pouring ingots at an Illinois steel plant, 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A laboratory scene showed how television works, with the image of a girl being focused through a lens onto a sensitive plate as an electron beam (its path shown by glowing gases) scanned it, 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

This image of a skeleton of a four-foot-long gaboon viper showed its 160 pairs of movable ribs, 1952.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Skeletal structure of a bird, 1951.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Niagara Falls in winter, 1956.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Statue of Liberty during a World War II blackout, 1942.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Doctor’s head mirror, 1955.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The view from a lodge at Lake Louise, looking up at Victoria Glacier, Canada, 1946.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

‘Spanish Village’: W. Eugene Smith’s Landmark Photo Essay

January 30, 2022March 10, 2013 by

Originally published in the April 9, 1951, issue of LIFE magazine, W. Eugene Smith‘s photo essay, “Spanish Village,” has been lauded for more than six decades as the most moving photographic portrait ever made of daily life in rural Spain during the rule of dictator Francisco Franco. But, as the years have passed, the most chilling image from the piece the closed, hard faces of three members of Franco’s feared Guardia Civil has been exalted to a point where the essays’ other masterful, evocative pictures have been largely forgotten.

For countless people around the world, including photography buffs who really ought to know better, Smith’s Guardia Civil photograph is the “Spanish Village” essay.

Here, LIFE.com presents “Spanish Village” in its entirety. Even as the faces in the essay’s most famous picture evince the cruelty and arrogance often assumed by small men granted great power over others, other photographs illuminate the timeless rhythms of a small, isolated Spanish town of the last century, about which LIFE wrote: “It lives in ancient poverty and faith.”

In the 1951 article that accompanied Smith’s pictures, the magazine told its readers:

The village of Deleitosa, a place of about 2,300 peasant people, sits on the high, dry, western Spanish tableland called Estramadura, about halfway between Madrid and the border of Portugal. Its name means “delightful,” which it no longer is, and its origins are obscure, though they may go back a thousand years to Spain’s Moorish period. In any event it is very old and LIFE photographer Eugene Smith, wandering off the main road into the village, found that its ways had advanced little since medieval times.

Many Deleitosans have never seen a railroad because the nearest one is 25 miles away. Mail comes in by burro. The nearest telephone is 12 miles away in another town. Deleitosa’s water system still consists of the sort of aqueducts and open wells from which villagers have drawn water for centuries . . . and the streets smell strongly of the villagers’ donkeys and pigs.

[A] small movie theater, which shows some American films, sits among the sprinkling of little shops near the main square. But the village scene is dominated now as always by the high, brown structure of the 16th century church, the center of society in Catholic Deleitosa. And the lives of the villagers are dominated as always by the bare and brutal problems of subsistence. For Deleitosa, barren of history, unfavored by nature, reduced by wars, lives in poverty a poverty shared by nearly all and relieved only by the seasonal work of the soil, and the faith that sustains most Deleitosans from the hour of First Communion until the simple funeral that marks one’s end.

Spanish Village, LIFE magazine

W. Eugene Smith Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Spanish Village, LIFE magaz

W. Eugene Smith Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Bigotry in the USA: Photos From a Ku Klux Klan Initiation

November 2, 2020March 5, 2013 by

When it comes to extremist groups in America, the longest-lived and most readily identifiable remains the Ku Klux Klan, which has been operating at varying degrees of influence and strength for close to 150 years. Hundreds of Klan groups are actively working and recruiting in the U.S. The KKK’s fortunes as a cultural and political force have waxed and waned over the decades, with Klan membership peaking in the 1920s, during the era of the “Second Klan.” (The First Klan, in the post-Civil War South, lasted from 1865 to 1874; the Second Klan from 1915 until about 1944; and the Third from roughly the end of WWII until today.) The Klan claimed literally millions of members at the height of the Second Klan era.

In May 1946, LIFE magazine ran a series of remarkable pictures from a Klan initiation in Georgia, at the start of the Third Klan era. Titled “The Ku Klux Klan Tries a Comeback,” the article noted that the KKK pledged initiates “in a mystic pageant on Georgia’s Stone Mountain.” The language that accompanied photographer Ed Clark’s pictures, meanwhile, made clear that, as newsworthy as the story of this particular initiation might have been, LIFE’s editors would have considered the figures in their white robes and hoods to be rather laughable if their rhetoric and arcane, pseudo-mystic shenanigans weren’t so unsettling.

On the evening of May 9 at 8 p.m. a mob of fully grown men solemnly paraded up to a wide plateau of Stone Mountain outside Atlanta, Ga., and got down on their knees on the ground before 100 white-sheeted and hooded Atlantans. In the eerie light of a half-moon and a fiery cross they stumbled in lockstep up to a great stone altar and knelt there in the dirt while the “Grand Dragon” went through the mumbo jumbo of initiating them into the Ku Klux Klan. Then one new member was selected from the mob and ceremoniously “knighted” into the organization in behalf of all the rest of his fellow bigots.
This was the first big public initiation into the Klan since the end of World War II. It was put on at a carefully calculated time. The anti-Negro, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-foreign, anti-union, anti-democratic Ku Klux Klan was coming out of wartime hiding just at the time when the CIO and the A.F. of L. were starting simultaneous campaigns to organize the South. . . . But it is doubtful that the Klan can become as frighteningly strong as it was in 1919. One indication of the Klan’s impotence was its lack of effect on Negroes, who were once frightened and cowed by the white-robed members. More than 24,000 Negroes have already registered for next July’s primaries in the Atlanta vicinity alone, where the Stone Mountain ritual was held.

As mentioned in one of the captions in this gallery, the Stone Mountain ceremony was put off several times during the preceding year because of wartime sheet shortages. Or at least that’s what LIFE reported at the time.

The magazine also made a point of characterizing the garb and actions of members at Klan meetings (images 10 through 15) as both creepy and pathetic. “Childish ritual and secretiveness,” the magazine noted, “have always been the great attractions for the kind of people who make good Klansmen.”

A Ku Klux Klan initiation ritual in Georgia, May 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Grand Dragon of the Fulton County, Ga., Ku Klux Klan, an Atlanta doctor named Samuel Green, was surrounded by his assistants, May 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A Ku Klux Klan initiation ritual in Georgia, May 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

New Klan members marched in lock step up to the Klan’s big altar on Stone Mountain in Georgia, 1946. The Klan exultingly announced they had initiated 600 new members in one night; observers’ best guesses were lower, between 150 and 200.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Klan initiates (including some Atlanta policemen) knelt before the local Grand Dragon during a ritual in Georgia, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

White-sheeted Ku Klux Klan members stood by a burning cross, May 1946. This Stone Mountain, Ga., ceremony was put off many times, Klansmen allegedly said, because of wartime sheet shortages during WWII.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Klan initiates (including some Atlanta policemen) stood before a burning cross during a ritual in Georgia, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A Ku Klux Klan member demonstrated ritualistic aspects of a KKK meeting, Georgia, May 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The scene at a Ku Klux Klan initiation ritual in Georgia, May 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Klan members with KKK regalia, Georgia, May 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Certified Statement for Annual Registration of a Corporation for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc., Fulton County, Ga., 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Grand Dragon of the Fulton County, Ga., Ku Klux Klan, Dr. Samuel Green, May 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

‘Drama of Life Before Birth’: Lennart Nilsson’s Landmark 1965 Photo Essay

December 6, 2022March 4, 2013 by

In the five decades since Lennart Nilsson’s portrait of an 18-week-old human fetus appeared on the cover of the April 30, 1965, issue of LIFE along with other, equally jaw-dropping pictures across multiple pages inside the magazine the debate about when life begins and who, ultimately, wields control of a woman’s body, both before and after birth, has only intensified. Religious, ethical, legal and medical arguments swirl around the issues of conception, contraception and abortion, and few political “hot button” issues are more radioactive than that of (put in the simplest and, perhaps, the most incendiary possible terms) the “right to choose” versus a “right to life.”

In 1965, however, the central question gripping most everyone who saw Nilsson’s pictures was the far more prosaic, and readily answerable, “How on earth did he do that?”

As LIFE told its readers when Nilsson’s pictures first appeared in the magazine’s pages:

“Ten years ago, a Swedish photographer named Lennart Nilsson told us that he was going to photograph in color the stages of human reproduction from fertilization to just before birth. It was impossible for us not to express a degree of skepticism about his chances of success, but this was lost on Nilsson. He simply said, ‘When I’ve finished the story, I’ll bring it to you.’ Lennart kept his promise. He flew into New York from Stockholm and brought us the strangely beautiful and scientifically unique color essay in this issue.”

What most people don’t recall or, more likely, never knew about Nilsson’s achievement is that, in fact, many of the embryos pictured in the photo essay “had been surgically removed,” as LIFE told its readers, “for a variety of medical reasons.”

In other words, while Nilsson (and Karl Storz in Germany and Jungners Optiska in Stockholm, who manufactured special macro-lenses and wide-angled special optics to Nilsson’s specs) revolutionized photography with mind-expanding devices and techniques for in utero photography, it’s worth recalling that not all of the embryos or fetuses seen in that groundbreaking 1965 LIFE article lived very long beyond the moment that Nilsson made their portraits. Doomed to a mortal end, they gained a kind of immortality through a photographer’s inspired vision and tenacious pursuit of what so many, for so long, deemed the impossible.

Of the pictures themselves, and the years and years spent designing, experimenting with and ultimately putting to use the radical equipment that allowed the world to see what it had never before witnessed, Nilsson once told an interviewer (in a revealing Q&A published on his own site):

The first job I did for [LIFE] on an exclusive basis was when Dag Hammarskjöld was elected UN Secretary General in 1953. I traveled to New York with him and photographed the newly installed Secretary General in his office in the 38th floor in the UN Building. I had my first embryo pictures along with me on that trip. “Unbelievable!” they said at LIFE. I thought so, too! But I didn’t know anything about the development of the fetus and had to learn from scratch. But they were incredibly enthusiastic at LIFE and twelve years later, in 1965, they published their big story on human reproduction.

Today, so many years after Nilsson’s at-once exalting and humbling pictures of “the drama of life before birth” first mesmerized and astounded millions of people all over the globe, the photos he made and those he continues to make, in his 90s remain among the most thrilling amalgams of art and science the world has ever seen.

[Visit LennartNilsson.com to see more of Nilsson’s astonishing photography, across a variety of subjects]

Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com