Daniel McGovern, 96, who as a combat photographer filmed the aftermath of the atomic bomb detonations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, died Dec. 14 at his home in Laguna Woods, Calif., his family said.
Within weeks after the bombs were dropped in August 1945, he was assigned to take photographs of the devastation. His pictures and color film footage taken over nine months have been used in history books, newspaper articles, television shows and movies.
In 1943, Mr. McGovern was stationed in Chelveston, England, from where he flew missions as a cameraman. He survived two plane crashes.
In 1998, when the World War II movie “Saving Private Ryan” was released, Mr. McGovern said in an interview, “Combat men don’t like to talk about what they did. … You relive it in your sleep. You go through recollections of pulling bodies out of airplanes–an experience you never forget.”
But he also said at that time that his children and grandchildren had urged him to speak about what he witnessed and that he began to believe that “reliving it helps–[it] gets it out of the system.”
Mr. McGovern, who rose to the rank of an Air Force lieutenant colonel, and several of his colleagues founded the International Combat Camera Association to give credit to the cameramen and women who risk their lives to shoot combat footage. After the war he wrote, directed and produced classified films on nuclear weapons testing and development at Lookout Mountain, a secret government film lab.
