PHOTOGRAPHY, WORLD WAR II

During World War II most photographers were "engaged"—they fervently believed in America and in the American cause. Many of the photographers of the war came out of the 1930s tradition of social documentary photography. Documenting soldiers in war was an expansion of the photographers' prewar project of documenting the people of the United States. It was a continuing attempt to reaffirm the nation's democratic ideals and cultural values. During the succeeding wars in Korea and Vietnam, photography was used to challenge American policies and question the nation's values. During World War II, the photography of Americans at war was still an affirmation of the United States as the land of the free, the shining city on a hill, the last best hope for civilization.

military photography

As a war on five continents, seven seas, and a dozen fronts, World War II posed entirely new problems of personnel, expense, transportation, and communication. Yet, unlike during the First World War, single photographs could be transmitted across oceans by radio and across continents by wire. Long-range airplanes could rapidly deliver rolls of film and thousands of prints. Large-format Speed Graphic cameras that took 4 x 5 inch negatives became supplemented with smaller 2 ¼ x 2 ¼ Rolleiflex cameras and the even smaller and faster 35mm cameras with telephoto lenses. The challenge amid all this innovation became how to organize the picture-taking so that all the fronts would be covered and all publications would have access to the images.

As in World War I, the army, the navy, the Marines and the Coast Guard each assigned military combat correspondents and photographers to their operations. Most military photography was taken for official reasons. If the still pictures sent back to the United States helped to win the battle for public opinion at home, photographs taken for military purposes helped to win the war at the fronts; it is estimated, for example, that between 80 and 90 percent of all the Allied information about the enemy came from aerial photography taken by U.S. airmen. The navy combat photography group also had a deservedly excellent reputation for its coverage of the war—a direct result of the fact that Edward Steichen, the former chief of the army's photographic section in World War I and subsequently the director of photography for the Museum of Modern Art, headed the naval aviation's photographic unit.

Although the coverage of the army air forces and the navy operations was highly touted, the majority of the military photographers who covered combat were in the Signal Corps. Signal Corps companies consisted of seventy-five men: twenty were still photographers, thirty were motion picture cameramen, twenty were darkroom technicians, two were film recorders, and three were maintenance men. Signal Corps units accompanied U.S. troops from the beginning of U.S. operations abroad, but they did not have a major presence until later in the war. When the American soldiers first landed in Algeria, for example, a sergeant and a private were the only combat photographers with the operation. By 1944, 100 combat photographers covered the Normandy D-Day invasion.

Some of the Signal Corps photography units were assigned to combat areas, others to communications zones. Those photographers stationed in forward areas received two sorts of orders: a general assignment to cover an operation (such as an assault on an island or a town), and a specific assignment (such as to record the effect of enemy tank-destroyer fire on friendly tanks). The photographs these units produced were put to many uses: tactical, for immediate use in the theaters; strategic, for use in planning; training, for the instruction of troops; morale, for the support of troops and civilians at home; public relations, for the media in the United States and abroad; intelligence, for reconnaissance; technical, for the improvement of equipment; historical, for future study; and legal, for war crimes trials.

Over the course of the war, military combat photographers supplied over half a million still pictures to

the U.S. and British media. Daily official communiqués and a package of photographs were issued from the several theaters and made available to the press.

civilian photography

Immediately after Pearl Harbor, the War and Navy Departments (soon to be joined by the army) set down strict guidelines under which pictures could be made. One key regulation was that all civilian pictures had to be equally available to all. Therefore all civilian coverage had to operate on a basis of pooled staff. The original participants in the pool were the three chief American picture-gathering agencies—the Associated Press (AP), Acme Newspictures, and International News Photos—and Life magazine. Through the pool participants and the various services they supplied, all the daily and weekly newspapers across the United States had access to the photographs.

While the army or navy picked up the bill for transportation and usually billeted and fed the photographers when they were at the front, the pool members paid the salary and expenses of their own representatives. The four pool members spent approximately $400,000 per year for their war pictures.

A year after the inauguration of the Still Photographic War Pool, there were twenty-eight pool photographers in the various theaters. Full-time photographers who had already been on foreign assignment before the war constituted its nucleus. The number of photographers in each theater from the member agencies was subject to mutual agreement. When new assignments opened up, photographers were supplied from each organization by rotation, although Life did put more photographers (twenty-one) in the field than the other pool members. Five Life photographers were wounded in action, two were torpedoed, one was imprisoned, and a dozen contracted malaria. All told, thirty-seven print and photographic correspondents were killed in the course of the war, 112 were wounded, and fifty were interned in prisoner-of-war camps. The casualty rate for civilian correspondents was four times greater than it was for American soldiers.

censorship

General Dwight Eisenhower wrote in a memorandum in the days before the Normandy cross-channel invasion: "Correspondents have a job in war as essential as the military personnel… . fundamentally, public opinion wins wars." With that understanding, U.S. government and military officials had from the outset of the conflict actively managed the distribution of the news. Both willingly and grudgingly, the press acquiesced not only in an official censorship but to the government and military's flooding of the news channels with handouts, communiqués, and military photographs.

At the start of the war, the formal censorship mirrored that of the previous world war: publications could publish photographs of the enemy or even the Allied dead, but not of American boys. Even photographs of destruction to "things" American were looked at askance and released with caution. Censors banned images that portrayed the American military in an unfavorable light, such as those that showed troops openly consorting with prostitutes. In addition, photographs documenting African-American participation in the military were suppressed on a number of occasions.

Then, almost two years into the war, President Franklin Roosevelt and the War Department reversed the regulations. The antiseptic version of the war that had been coming home offered few reasons for the level of sacrifice the American public was being asked to make. By 1943 there remained considerable discord on the homefront, marked by business-labor tensions, including several strikes; by opposition to higher taxation; and by significant patronage of the black market to circumvent rationing. Roosevelt understood that there was a need for those at home to see the casualties. So the new guidelines put in place in September 1943 allowed photographs of American soldiers bleeding, dying, and dead—although censors continued to make sure that the dead or grievously injured could not be identified (no faces were shown, and names on uniforms and division patches, for example, were retouched out). The images that pictured American soldiers bleeding or dead were packaged with captions and text so that the public at home was jarred into a realization that its ideals had to be fought for.

The new candor inspired Americans. The liberalized censorship found that a balance could be made between a modest disclosure of what was happening on the front-lines and the homefront's support for the war. But such a balance was not discovered during the succeeding conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. Perhaps the Second World War had drained Americans of their ability to muster up the financial, logistical, emotional, and moral commitment they had called together. Or perhaps World War II really was, in some defensible way, a "good" war—and so the casualties, however many and however graphically depicted, seemed justified.

Susan Moeller

See also:Propaganda, War; Visual Arts, World War I.