The censored tales and images of horror surfaced after the war was over and helped to fuel the 1930s isolationist wave. By the opening salvos of World War II, the glorying in war and the artless enthusiasm for the coverage of it were irrevocably in the past.
During World War II, few soldiers and journalists reveled in the gratuitous gallantry remarkable during the Spanish-American War, few demonstrated the naive enthusiasm of World War I, but many still exhibited an unabashed patriotism.
World War II was ”The Good War.” It was the war that needed to be fought. And it was no coincidence that the most famous photograph of the war featured the Stars and Stripes waving over the Pacific island battleground of Iwo Jima. Americans, together with their allies, clung to powerful symbols of family, home and country to help focus their reasons for fighting.
Yet the media and the military had gained in sophistication since the previous world conflict. Both agreed that the release of more candid photographs would inspire the public to greater work and sacrifice. By focusing on individual soldiers, on scenes of heroism, on moments of compassion, and even on images of death, photographers tried to reaffirm and repossess the democratic ideals of the country.
During the succeeding wars, in Korea and Vietnam, the photography of combat came to be an exposure of America`s and Americans` limitations. During World War II, the photography of Americans at war remained an affirmation of what was possible.
Photographer Carl Mydans told a story about one late afternoon in 1951,
”when the sun jumped behind the snow-covered ridges of the Korean mountains.” Mydans watched a procession of figures through his camera`s viewfinder, the figures silhouetted against the failing light. They carried a wounded soldier to a medic`s tent.
Mydans followed them there, where a Turkish doctor looked at his patient. ”Wrapped from head to foot in rough bandages and bits of stuffing from a Korean coverlet was a mound that moved. As the bundle was slipped onto a litter, the doctor rose and faced the mountains.
”Pointing toward the darkening horizon, he turned to me and shouted:
`History?` In exasperation he searched for other English words, but they would not come. `History,` he shouted again and then stood jerking his fist into the air, looking wordlessly toward the purple twilight.”
In earlier wars the epitaph would not have been so sardonic; it would have been ”Glory!” or ”Sacrifice!” or ”Freedom!” But by the Korean War, too many wars had happened too frequently for men to be taken in by gasps of emotion and calls of idealism. By Korea, men recognized that death was not glorious, that sacrifice could be to little purpose, that freedom was rarely purchased with corpses.
Only five years after the Holocaust, and five years after the atomic bomb that argued modern conflict was unthinkable, the Korean War erupted. Magazines and newspapers scrambled to cover the war, with the result that there were more correspondents per square mile on the Korean front than in any previous conflict.
Yet few of the journalists who covered the conflict hoped-as had many during World War II-that their words and photographs could prevent future wars. Korea put the lie to that dream. Instead, the photographers came simply to document the war so that those at home could see it and so that history would remember it. Yet, ironically perhaps, that effort at straight documentation led to public outcry.
”The impersonality of modern war has become stupendous, grotesque,”
said photographer Margaret Bourke-White. ”What are one`s responsibilities? I can only think in terms of my own field, how a photographer tries to help-by building up the pictorial files of history for the world to see. Just one inch in the long mile.”
No longer did correspondents feel that their responsibility was unequivocally to support the war effort. By the Korean War, the previous American consensus forged by the Depression, the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt, and the attack on Pearl Harbor had disintegrated. As a result, the photographs of battle did not necessarily operate in the government`s or military`s interest.
Prompted by these pictures in the news, Americans, for the first time, were encouraged to challenge the conduct of a war. For the first time, Americans saw not only gallantry and martyred heroes but also waste and unwarranted suffering.
Vietnam was the war the world watched on television, as well as in the pages of magazines and newspapers. It was the war in living color, the war in which Americans at home witnessed the trials of their own-but also those of the enemy and civilians.
During World War II and the Korean War, the press celebrated the American democratic cause by reaching down to embrace the common GI. But in Vietnam, the media enlarged the fight for democracy to include Vietnamese civilians. Images of a mother or father carrying a dead or dying child became classic:
the Vietnam Pieta. Photographers continued to emphasize close-up portraits of the troops, but they searched as well for the context in which those soldiers stood.
They taught the world about the effects of war on an entire society. Nudged by the increasingly greater prerogatives granted by past wars, journalists operated with no official censorship. They began to investigate the American war effort by seriously portraying its impact on another country and people.
The media continued to believe in the ”American cause” and in U.S. policy, but many began to object to the implementation of that policy.
Many in the press came to believe that by establishing American control of the war, by condoning the killing of civilians, and by lying to the public, U.S. policymakers had abandoned their own democratic principles-and, in addition, were losing the war.
The journalists were not alone in their beliefs. By the time the media had started to question American policy in Southeast Asia, so, too, had members of other U.S. institutions.
But the pictures in the media have always remained the most vivid signal to public emotions. The images from Vietnam-drawing on the public`s deepest wells of justice, outrage and compassion-continue to overwhelm other commentary on Vietnam. During that Southeast Asian conflict, Americans at home witnessed an unexpurgated version of war. And as a result, policymakers still quarrel as to the influence of that version. Americans continue to question what kind of war effort a democratic society, with free and modern media, can sustain.
War photographers don`t fool themselves that changed attitudes toward war will come overnight. But they believe that if you show people the truth they will act to improve themselves and the world.
