Photographing The Fallen

Photographing The Fallen

Saturday, 23 August 2008 12:43

The Bush administration has tried to censor photos of US war dead, but Americans need to see the Iraq war's Nicolaus Mills From the beginning of the Iraq war, the Bush administration and the military have done their best to stop photographers from taking pictures of American war dead. Their first big controversy arose in 2004 when the Seattle Times angered the Bush administration by publishing a front-page picture of flag-draped coffins in a cargo plane in Kuwait, and since then the Bush administration and the military have continued their anti-photo policy. Even the replacement of secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld with Robert Gates has not made a difference. The Bush administration has, if anything, let its worries about the presidential election heighten its anti-photo policies. This summer Gina Gray, the public affairs director at Arlington cemetery, was fired from her job for allowing the media access to Arlington burials when families of the fallen gave their permission for it, and in Iraq, Zoriah Miller, a freelance photographer who posted photos on the internet of Marines killed in a suicide attack, was barred from working in Marine Corps-controlled areas of the country. For a president caught in an unpopular war, the attempts at censorship are understandable, but what the Bush administration and the military really needs to do is take a page from the second world war's lessons in photographing the fallen. The differences between now and then are striking but not, as we might imagine, because the Roosevelt administration and second world war military leaders were always candid. For the first 21 months of the war, censors withheld all photographs of American dead. As George Roeder notes in his landmark study The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War II, Roosevelt's memory of visits to European combat zones while assistant secretary of the US navy in the first world war made him fearful of the harm graphic pictures of the dead could cause on the home front. But by 1943 Roosevelt's advisers were warning him of a different danger - home-front complacency about the war that stemmed from the public's underestimation of the toll it was taking on the military. The office of war information, headed by veteran radio commentator Elmer Davis, encouraged the president to authorise the publication of harsher pictures of the war in order to prepare for more casualties and to reduce civilian complaints over food and gas shortages. The advice produced a change in policy. By the fall of 1943, the US war department's bureau of public relations acted to release photos that it had previously withheld, and army chief of staff George Marshall urged his generals to have their photographic units send material that would portray the "the dangers, horrors and grimness of war". The big media breakthrough came in the September 20 1943, issue of Life, with the publication of George Strock's photo of three American soldiers lying dead on Buna Beach in New Guinea. By historical standards the brutality in Strock's photo was minimal. The three dead Americans it shows seem almost at peace. As they lie sprawled out in the sand, they give no indication of having painfully suffered. Timothy O'Sullivan's US civil war photo A Harvest of Death: Gettysburg, July, 1863 was far more graphic than Strock's. Life was, nonetheless, still sufficiently worried about its decision to publish Strock's photo that it paired it with an editorial that observed, "And the reason we print it now is that last week President Roosevelt and Elmer Davis and the war department decided that the American people ought to be able to see their own boys as they fall in battle: to come directly and without words into the presence of their own dead." Neither Life nor the Roosevelt administration ever had reason to regret their decisions. Surveys showed that by 1943 the public was prepared to deal with pictures of the war dead and that these pictures could even help make people more sympathetic to bond drives. In January 1944 George Marshall followed up his 1943 directive with a cable instructing his commanding generals to send onto Washington photos that reveal the war "as it is actually being fought, without the usual effort to eliminate the tragic aspects of battle". In a nation that was paying higher taxes, experiencing gas shortages and conducting scrap drives, such candour paid dividends. "War calls for sacrifice," President Roosevelt insisted. "That sacrifice will have to be expressed in terms of a lack of many of the things to which we all have become accustomed." With photos of Americans killed in battle now visible in newspapers and magazines, the Roosevelt administration could push even harder for sacrifice on the home front. The deaths of their citizen soldiers, Americans came to believe, needed to be made meaningful. Carrying on business as usual - as the United States has throughout the Iraq war - was not an option.