Memories of a World at War

"You had the same fears as the GIs, but you had to think about the picture. My camera was my shield, and I didn't even think about the idea that a bullet might hit me."

On May 10, 1945, Pfc. Paul Ison from the Sixth Marine Division charges forward through Japanese machine-gun fire on a barren piece of land the Marines called "Death Valley." Leathernecks lost 125 men in eight hours of sustained fighting on Okinawa.

"INDEED, IF THERE WERE no correspondents or photographers who went to war, what would the folks at home know?" asks former CBS anchorman (and wire service reporter) Walter Cronkite. "What would the mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and wives know of the heroism, the suffering, the brave deeds, the crippling challenges if [journalists] didn't tell them and take images of those moments? What would future generations know? The dramatic, sobering, and often inspiring pictures ... are evidence enough that times of war need to be recorded and remembered."

The Associated Press highlights some of its most famous photographs of World War II, as well as rarely viewed images from its archives, in a poignant exhibition currently traveling the country. It is a spectrum of 126 photos (chosen from over 100,000) from all theaters of war and the home front, from Joe Rosenthal's classic Pulitzer Prize-winning Iwo Jima flag raising in 1945 to scores of pictures not seen in decades.

Almost 200 reporters and photographers fanned out around the globe to cover the Second World War for the Associated Press. Some 68 journalists were killed during World War II, five from AR Seven other AP staffers won Pulitzers.

"You had the same fears as the GIs, but you had to think about the picture," recalls retired AP photojournalist Max Desfor, who covered the battle of Okinawa and Japan's surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri, and later won a Pulitzer Prize during the Korean War. "My camera was my shield, and I didn't even think about the idea that a bullet might hit me."

"Our objective," explains Chuck Zoeller, director of the AP Photo Library and curator of the exhibit, "was to bring back ... the immense scope as well as the individual tragedy and challenge of World War II. We wanted to create a photographic record that allows a younger generation to better understand the sacrifices made by men, women, and children in all the nations touched by the conflict. It's all here--from the GIs at the Battle of the Bulge to the Marines in Okinawa, from Germans invading the Soviet Union with horse-drawn wagons to soldiers praying before the landing at Normandy."

The photos are "personal history relived" for those who fought the actual battles, and, for millions of others, the war was "part of their lives," according to former Sen. Bob Dole (R.-Kans.), a veteran who was severely wounded in Italy in 1945. "For ... the postwar generations, who know the war only as distant history, these images will serve as the record of a shared and shaping era in our nation's history."

In the exhibit, familiar scenes of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, along with the British and U.S. troops hitting the Normandy beaches on D-Day and marching through newly liberated Paris are juxtaposed with images sure to evoke strong memories from older Americans. There are photographs of Axis leaders Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini at the peak of their Fascist power; British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in unmistakable silhouette; actor James Stewart being inducted into the military; Nazi SS troops herding defiant Jews after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943; and Russian women laying flowers at the feet of four dead GIs who helped liberate them from a slave labor camp.

Despite censorship that delayed the release of pictures and restricted caption information, the wartime cameras recorded dramatic closeups of power and pathos, the leaders and the lost. Pres. Franklin Roosevelt, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, and Churchill sit for a group portrait at Tehran. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth clamber through London bomb rubble. U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur wades ashore in the Philippines, in Cherbourg, France, Army Capt. Earl Topley gazes at a German soldier sitting dead in a doorway. Killed Japanese soldiers lie half-buried in sand on a Guadalcanal beach; deceased Marines sprawl in the volcanic ash of Iwo Jima.

"Memories of World War II, Photographs from the Archives of the Associated Press," developed and managed by Smith Kramer Fine Art Services, Kansas City, Mo., is on view at the National D-Day Museum, New Orleans, through May 8. A book by the same name also has been published. After its New Orleans stay. the exhibition can be seen at the National Heritage Museum. Lexington, Mass.

(May 28-Aug. 7), Ogunquit (Me.) Museum of American Art (Aug. 28-Oct. 23), J. Wayne Stark Gallery, College Station, Tex. (Nov. 13-Jan. 8, 2006), Tifton (Ga.) Museum of Art and Heritage (Jan. 29, 2006-March 26, 2006), Grout Museum of History and Science, Waterloo, Ia. (April 16, 2006-June 11, 2006), History Museum of East Otter Tail County, Perham, Minn. (July 2, 2006-Aug. 27, 2006), Muskegon (Mich.) Museum of Art (Feb. 18, 2007-April 15, 2007), Bergstrom-Mahler Museum, Neenah, Wisc. (May 6, 2007-July 1, 2007), Columbus (Ga.) Museum (July 22, 2007-Dec. 9, 2007), and Fort Wayne (Ind.) Museum of Art (Jan. 12, 2008-March 9, 2008).

COPYRIGHT 2005 Society for the Advancement of Education
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group