American Miscellaneous

That's lower Manhattan in the distance, the Financial District, Wall Street and all that.
The Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges are to the right.

USS Franklin (CV/CVA/CVS-13, AVT-8), nicknamed "Big Ben," was one of 24 Essex-class aircraft carriers built during World War II for the United States Navy, and the fifth US Navy ship to bear the name. Commissioned in January 1944, she served in several campaigns in the Pacific War, earning four battle stars. She was badly damaged by a Japanese air attack in March 1945, with the loss of over 800 of her crew, becoming the most heavily damaged United States aircraft carrier to survive the war. Movie footage of the actual attack was included in the 1949 film Task Force starring Gary Cooper.

The keel of Franklin was laid down on 7 December 1942 in Shipway 11, the first anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and she was launched by the Newport News Shipbuilding Company, in Virginia, on 14 October 1943, sponsored by Lieutenant Commander Mildred H. McAfee, an American naval officer who was the Director of the WAVES. The warship was named in honor of the founding father Benjamin Franklin and for the previous warships that had been named for him; it was not named for the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, that was fought during the American Civil War, as is sometimes erroneously reported, although a footnote in The Franklin Comes Home does attribute the naming to the Battle of Franklin. (Franklin, Tennessee was also named after Benjamin Franklin.) Franklin was commissioned on 31 January 1944, with Captain James M. Shoemaker in command.
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USS Franklin (CV-13) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

The U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Franklin (CV-13) in the Elizabeth River, off Norfolk, Virginia (USA), 21 February 1944.

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Within a year of the USA joining WW2, the army’s forces had leased “almost all of the 332 resort hotels” in Miami Beach.
Down you see the lobby of the then Hotel Evans (953 Collins Ave) who was converted into an office space for US Army, Miami, 1942.
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I heard that Lucky Strike changed it's packaging during the war to support "the war effort so I thought I would do some research.
Well it turns out it was just capitalism at its finest.

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From Snopes.com:

Claim: Lucky Strike cigarettes changed from a green package to a white one during the 1940s in order to aid the war effort.

FALSE

The center of the ‘bullseye’ logo on Lucky Strike cigarettes is red now, but it wasn’t always so. Although the general look of the packaging hasn’t changed, the center dot used to be green. Why was it changed to red you ask? Well from what I hear it was changed during WWII. You see, just like many other things, paint was being used for the war effort, green being at a premium to paint tanks, for soldiers uniforms, and practically everything else. So Lucky Strike changed the color from green to red because green was in such short supply, and it remains that way to this day.

Origins: “Lucky Strike Green Has Gone to War!” barked one of the most famous ad campaigns of the 1940s. With a clean white pack replacing the original green one, and its block lettering and cryptic legend “L.S./M.F.T. — Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco” imitating Morse code, Luckies increased its sales 40 percent. They announced that the copper-based green paint they supposedly had been using in their labels was being saved for the war effort, but Luckies’ real impetus was profit and something new: “modern” design.

Studies had shown women (who were then taking up smoking in appreciable numbers) didn’t like the green package, and it was also becoming increasingly less popular with men. The decision to redesign the product’s look was simply a business choice and would have been made war or no war. The overseas conflict merely presented Lucky Strike with an unparalleled marketing opportunity to tie its redesign to the war effort, thus allowing them to reap the benefits of feigned patriotism.

Though the term hadn’t been invented yet, this was spin doctoring at its finest. If Lucky Strikes “went to war,” it was with Camel and Chesterfield, the two other major brands of that era who were looking to grab and hold market share.

This was not the first time Lucky Strike’s advertising sailed close to the wind. In 1917 Lucky Strike packs began to appear with “It’s toasted” emblazoned on the packaging. That all cigarette tobacco was “toasted” didn’t faze Lucky one bit — by announcing its toastedness as if it were something that set this brand apart from all others, the company reaped image benefits with consumers akin to those garnered by cereal companies of the 1990s who labeled their products “fat free” (thus implying competitors’ brands were just swimming in grease).

Despite what is now remembered about this brand, the bullseye on the package was always red — what changed was the color of the pack itself.

Barbara “more bull than aye” Mikkelson
 
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The future president Richard Nixon (1913/1994) was stationed in the Solomon Islands during the war. He became such a card master, when he returned from his service, he brought home thousands of dollars in winnings—enough cash to help fund his first run for political office.
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Waiting the enemy. Aboard the USS Enterprise (CV-6), the gunners, shield their eyes from the sun as they scan the skies for kamikazes. Behind the USS Franklin (CV-13), left, and USS Belleau Wood (CVL-24) knocked after being hit by kamikaze aircraft, Oct 30, 1944.
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The Liberty ship SS Robert Rowan explodes after being attacked by a German bomber Ju-88 off the coast of Gela, Sicily on July 11, 1943. All 421 men on board safely evacuated the ship and were picked up by PT boats and transferred to nearby destroyers.
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Actor Spencer Tracy (1900/1967) is presented with a model submarine while visiting with officers and crew of the USS Icefish (SS-367) on May 16, 1944.
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This photograph was taken in the mess hall of the crews' quarters at the Navy Barracks, adjacent to Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company (Wisconsin). The Icefish, one of twenty-eight submarines built by Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company, had been launched Febr 20, 1944 and would be commissioned June 10, 1944. The crew was stationed in Manitowoc for training. Richard W. Peterson, Commander of the Icefish, had met Tracy in California and invited him to visit in Manitowoc.
The USS Icefish received four battle stars for WW2 service.
 
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