Rare WWII era color photos:
With her immaculately coiffured hair and red lipstick, she could easily pass for a Hollywood film star. But this glamorous young woman is in fact hard at work checking aircraft electronics having answered the call for female workers at the start of the Second World War. These rare color photographs released by the Library of Congress bring to life the era between the Great Depression and World War II, a period normally only seen only in black-and-white. Although the country had recovered from the economic slump many rural areas remained desperately poor. Elsewhere thousands of young men were being trained for action as America focused its industrial might on churning out the machines of war.
Dressed for action: A female aircraft worker at the Vega Aircraft Corporation in around 1940
A Mrs Virginia Davis rivets parts of an aircraft in this colour photograph. According to library records, Mrs Davies made arrangements for the care of her two children so she could join her husband at work in the Naval Air Base, Corpus Christi, Texas
Squalor: A photograph of a Chicago railway yard believed to have been taken in the late 1930s
Fix-up: An alternative view of the Chicago train yard shows workers making repairs to a line of old steam locomotives
Wheel of fire: A locomotive driver wheel is rebuilt at a workshop in Shopton, Iowa
Welder Mike Evans poses during a break at the rip tracks Proviso yard in Chicago
Rural: Jim Norris a homesteader from Pie Town, New Mexico pictured in October 1940 and day laborers picking cotton, near Clarksdale, Mississippi in November 1939
Farmworkers harvest corn in Pie Town, New Mexico
Toil: Day labourers working in cotton fields near Clarksdale, Mississippi in November 1939
A midday street scene in Lincoln, Nebraska
California's Shasta Dam on the Sacramento River nears completion (left) and a Smokestack in 1942
A sawmill belches out black smoke at the Greensboro Lumber Company in Greensboro, Georgia
Checks: An instructor goes through flight details with students in Meacham Field, Fort Worth, Texas
School children perform a concert in Pie Town, New Mexico in October 1940
Flight training: An ensign Noressey and Cadet Thenics go through a few final checks at the Naval Air Base in Corpus Christi, Texas
An instructor explains to pilots how to control their parachutes at Meacham field airfield in Fort Worth, Texas
A column of Sherman tanks and other military vehicles during an army practice in the early 1940s
Pit stop: A rural store sports period soft drink signs for 'Orange-Crush' and Royal Crown Cola