This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

At their best, photos capture moments and places in time so succinctly that you just can't stop looking at them.

With the 70th anniversary of the Japanese raid of Pearl Harbor coming up, the images contained in The Tribune's "A Look Back" online gallery at http://bit.ly/tl27tS span nearly all of World War II and the men and women who served in that global war.

Jeremy Harmon, the paper's director of photography, curated the photos, all courtesy of The Associated Press. The photographers were careful to get names, ranks and hometowns, but it cannot be known who came home and who didn't.

This isn't combat photography. In most of the images, it's just soldiers — our fathers and grandfathers — doing what they did in the course of a day.

In one, Capt. Boyd B. White of Brigham City poses in the cockpit of a Marauder bomber named Son-of-Satan and bedecked with a baby Uncle Sam and symbols of missions completed. At the time, White was a veteran of 37 missions out of England, with his comrades not far behind in the count.

That White survived so many raids is an anomaly; about 16,000 U.S. airmen were lost in those raids, and hundreds of thousands of people died in bombings in mainland Europe and the British Isles.

There's Capt. Devlin B. Avery, of Salt Lake City, dated Aug. 4, 1942, after a sweep over northern France with Britain's Royal Air Force. In North Africa, Pfc. Clyde Braithwaite of Spanish Fork is caught having lunch in his unit's bivouac.

In New Delhi, India, Staff Sgt. Gilbert R. Langdon of Salt Lake City passes out rations — beer, soap, cigars, cigarettes and tomato juice. The soldiers, by the way, were entitled to one pack of smokes a day. No word on now many cigars.

In Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, Pfc. Eric Ericksen of Richfield strings communications line on a palm tree. Two soldiers stand guard, one with a rifle and wearing only a helmet, boots and shorts in the stifling heat.

There's also a puppy perched on a pile of bombs. Prop Wash, a 3-month-old cocker spaniel, was the mascot of Capt. Robert Hinckley Jr. of Ogden. Photographed in 1944 at a Liberator bomber base in England, Prop Wash has his own goggles, parachute and oxygen mask.

Then there's the band in the South Pacific, which the caption describes as a "probing jive" band, with Salt Lake's Pfc. Ben A. Cuatto on the accordion.

In April 1942, then-Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle launched the first raid on Tokyo from the deck of the carrier USS Hornet. As it happens, Robert Shaffer of Holladay was a Marine gunnery officer on that ship and vividly remembers that raid and his service in the Pacific until the Japanese surrender in 1945.

In one photo in the gallery, Capt. Chase J. Neilsen of Hyrum, a Doolittle flier, is pictured in Shanghai in February 1946, looking at boxes containing the ashes of four of his crew. All were captured by the Japanese; three were executed and the fourth died in prison.

Small as it is, the gallery illuminates the breadth and length of the four-year war that ended in the Pacific when the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. In Europe, the Normandy invasion preceded the Allied march to Berlin, which fell to the Russians a few months earlier.

At the war's end, most men and women in uniform happily went home. Now, we're seeing the return of nearly all U.S. troops from Iraq and, in time, from Afghanistan.

One day, we'll look at old photographs from those bitter conflicts, and remember, as we do today, the men and women who did this nation's hardest work.

Peg McEntee is a news columnist. Reach her at pegmcentee@sltrib.com and facebook.com/pegmcentee.