Click on a photo to enlarge it.
Click on an enlarged photo to go to the next one…

Note on the photos: Joel took more than 500 photographs during his service time in WWII. Most of these negatives sat forgotten in a drawer for nearly 60 years! Below are all Joel’s WWII photos, un-retouched and in no particular order. Many of these photos are used in the website; they have been cropped, color balanced and otherwise edited to bring the most out of the negatives.
Joel used a Zeiss Ikonta medium-format folding camera for most of the photos. He did not carry a camera for the nine months he served in combat in New Guinea. At one point he found a Zeiss Tengor camera in the backpack of a dead Japanese officer, and took several exposures with this camera, which can be seen in the website.
There are another grouping of photos, mostly of Japanese soldiers, which Joel removed from the bodies of dead Japanese in the course of his assigned C.I.C. duties. They are all marked with a “Passed by US Army Examiner” ink stamp on the rear. Joel was able to recover many of these photos after C.I.C. had seen them, and he saved them along with the many other souvenirs and artifacts that can be seen on this site.
There are other photos included in the website which I collected over the several years I spent researching this project. For the most part I have no idea of the origin of these photos, and am not intentionally violating any copyrights in the use of them here.
(For inquiries or comments regarding any of the photos used herein, please contact the webmaster of this site.) (All photos below copyright © 2012 by Joel Kovitz and Paul Daiter AKA Paul Data)