PhotosNormandie is a Flickr user who has posted thousands of old photos from World War II. I believe all of the photos are from the time around the invasion of Normandy, but I'm not sure of that. I added them as a friend a long while ago, and it's been neat to see these old pics show up in my contacts feed. It's like getting a bit of history mixed in with iPhone shots and pictures of people's kids. Some are mundane, some are really good, all of them seem to be released under a Creative Commons license, and all of them are captioned in French, so I have no clue what the photos are actually of.

Additionally, if you like those, check out this series of photos from Lost Films. Lost Films is run by a guy who looks for and develops old, found canisters of films. It's an amazingly fascinating look into people's lives.

The particular set I linked above appears to be from a US soldier who served in Italy. Assuming all the canisters were from the same person, then the photos show a (seemingly out-of-order) progression from basic training to service in Italy to possibly being wounded and shipped back to the states, possibly for a while, possibly for good.

I am not a WW2 historian by any stretch of the imagination. But based on my meager knowledge, I would say there is a chance the soldier was in the 82nd Airborne Division, since the images from basic training show some signs that the soldiers are paratroopers (until near the end of the war only paras were allowed to "blouse" their pants over their jump boots) and due to the other images being from Italy, where the 82nd jumped sometime in the war years pre-D-Day.

For further reading on European Theater paratroopers, I highly recommend David Kenyon Webster's Parachute Infantry. Webster, who viewers of the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers will remember from a later episode even if the producers did mangle his story to make it more palatable for audiences, is one of the more fascinating WW2 characters I have read about. Born to a wealthy and powerful New York family, he left Harvard, where he was studying English lit, in 1943 to enlist in the Army, specifically to become a paratrooper. This meant more rigorous training and more exposure to danger as paratroopers were dropped behind enemy lines (that's kinda the whole point of paratroopers).

Webster did it so that he could be just a normal grunt like the other men, and maybe write a book about it. He jumped at Utah Beach and during Market Garden and only narrowly missed being a part of the Battle of the Bulge. He never volunteered for anything and was a terrible shot. But he wrote a wonderful and honest account of his experiences and feelings which stands out as a great look into the mind of a soldier in war time.