Remembering the Dead, Differently
by Fred Ritchin
In the United States, publications that have memorialized mass casualties have mostly concentrated on soldiers. Now, with the pandemic, it is civilians as well.
LIFE Magazine July 5, 1943
The cover of the July 5, 1943 issue of Life magazine, entitled “America’s Combat Dead,” displayed a photograph of six men from a U.S. fighter squadron carrying a flag-draped coffin of a member of their unit in Tunisia, where the burial would take place. Inside, there was a list of the names, but no identifying photographs, of the 12,987 American soldiers who had already died during the first 18 months of World War II. “That is the list. These are the boys who have gone over the Big Hill,” the magazine’s editorial began.
Why did they die? The editorial assigns the magazine’s readers the task of finding meaning in their deaths, if meaning can be found: “So it matters a great deal what we say the purpose is, it makes all the difference in the world: indeed, it is for us to decide whether he died for the fulfillment of a purpose, like the boys of the American Revolution, or whether he died for the fulfillment of practically nothing, like the boys of World War I. The dead boys will become what we make them.” On the table of contents, just over the assertion of copyright, there is a statement in all capital letters that “All photos and texts concerning the armed forces have been reviewed and passed by a competent military or naval authority.”
During World War II, text was used to commemorate combat casualties before photographs could be published that depicted these soldiers who had been killed.
Two months later, in the September 20 issue, Life would publish for the first time a photograph of the bodies of dead American soldiers. The three men lay half-buried in the sand on Buna beach, New Guinea, their faces not visible. George Strock’s photograph had been made eight months earlier, in January of that year, when such photographs were still being censored by the US government, concerned as to how Americans at home would react. The decision to allow the publication of the Buna beach photo is said to have been made in large part out of a desire to rouse a US public that had been growing complacent about the far-away war.
Life explained the publication of the Buna beach photograph to its readers: “The reason is that words are never enough. The eye sees. The mind knows. The heart feels. But the words do not exist to make us see, or know, or feel what it is like, what actually happens. The words are never right.” And, as Liam Kennedy writes in his essay, “Picturing Conflict,” the publication of this photograph is credited with having driven up the sale of war bonds, while government surveys made after its publication showed Americans increasingly supportive of the appearance of such graphic imagery.
During World War II, text was used to commemorate combat casualties before photographs could be published that depicted these soldiers who had been killed.
LIFE Magazine June 27, 1969
During the Vietnam War it was a different situation. Many extraordinary, sardonic, viscerally upsetting images of the battlefield appeared throughout the world, published in both black-and-white and color, that were made by photographers who were not bound by any allegiance to governments. It was, however, when simpler, toned-down identity-style photographs were published on June 27, 1969, in Life magazine as “The Faces of the American Dead, One Week’s Toll,” the cover featuring a portrait of U.S. Army specialist William C. Gearing, Jr., that the magazine was judged by many to have changed its editorial stance and to have become anti-war. The magazine’s managing editor, Ralph Graves, later remarked that “in his remaining tenure as editor he had never run anything as important or powerful.”
Here, it was no longer the repetitive recitation of statistics concerning each week’s dead that was sufficient, but the requirement that each person killed must be looked at and recognized as a unique individual.
Interestingly, it was not the many photographs of the gore and horror of the battlefield, but the photographs collected from family members of the great majority of the 242 soldiers killed that week, each captioned with the individual soldier’s name, age, rank and hometown, that unsettled the country. The magazine’s staff explained their decision: “Yet in a time when the numbers of Americans killed in this war—36,000—though far less than the Vietnamese losses, have exceeded the dead in the Korean War, when the nation continues week after week to be numbed by a three-digit statistic which is translated to direct anguish in hundreds of homes all over the country, we must pause to look into the faces. More than we must know how many, we must know who. The faces of one week’s dead, unknown but to families and friends, are suddenly recognized by all in this gallery of young American eyes.”
Here, it was no longer the repetitive recitation of statistics concerning each week’s dead that was sufficient, but the requirement that each person killed must be looked at and recognized as a unique individual.
In an update of this idea, more recently the New York Times published an ongoing online visual database “Faces of the Dead” that showed identity-style photographs of American war casualties (it is now archived). Here one was able to click on one of thousands of pixel-like squares to call up an image of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq or Afghanistan; the thousands of dead were all contained within the same rectangle, all made to seem part of a single body. One was also able to search for the war dead by last name, hometown, or home state, allowing the reader to engage more independently with their deaths.
And, attracting millions of visitors each year, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. lists on a black granite wall the names of more than 58,000 American soldiers who were casualties of that conflict, but does not include their photographs. In a manner similar to Life’s “Faces of the American Dead,” publications such as Vanity Fair have commemorated the lives of many of those from the world of culture who died from AIDS, presenting a gallery of photographs captioned with each individual’s name, occupation and age.
New York Times, May 24 2020
On Sunday, May 24, the New York Times created a front-page memorial for those Americans who have died from COVID-19 as the number approached 100,000—more than the combat casualties suffered by the US in every conflict since the Korean War. Filling the front page of the print newspaper and continuing onto inside pages with the names of 1,000 of the dead, their age and hometown, and a short phrase describing something important about each individual’s life, the Times explained that it wanted “to represent the number in a way that conveyed both the vastness and the variety of lives lost” while realizing “there’s a little bit of a fatigue with the data” that is reported daily. (There is another version published online.) The headline that went across the top of the front page stated, “U.S. DEATHS NEAR 100,000, AN INCALCULABLE LOSS.”
The Times’ staff decided not to publish any photographs. Instead, the front page became, with its myriad of names, an image itself. Many have questioned that decision, some referencing Life’s 1969 issue commemorating the American dead during one week of the Vietnam War, asking why readers cannot see the faces of those who have been lost. There are many conceivable answers, including the difficulties involved in both securing and printing 1,000 photographs.
It also may be that for many the photograph, once viewed as a way to establish and affirm one’s own identity or someone else’s, no longer has that role.
But it seems that now, when nearly everything is contested, when facts seem to matter less and the motivations for every action can be grotesquely distorted by others, it may be more respectful to the dead to keep their images out of the general fray. It also may be that for many the photograph, once viewed as a way to establish and affirm one’s own identity or someone else’s, no longer has that role. Instead the photograph is increasingly seen as an image to be manipulated for a variety of reasons and, as a result, can no longer be trusted.
This then makes it increasingly difficult, given the deep and angry fractures in society, to use photographs to assert a large-scale communal loss. The prisms through which photographs are looked at can no longer be assumed to be largely those of openness and solidarity. This too is an enormous loss.
So that we, unable to view their faces, are left to imagine, grieving and forlorn, those whom we have lost.
And to recognize that in the Age of Image there may be less that can be seen.
– Fred Ritchin, May 28, 2020
COMPLETE CAPTIONS
LIFE Magazine July 5, 1943
Through a wheat field in Tunisia six men of a U.S. fighter squadron are carrying a flag-draped coffin containing the body of a member of their outfit. The brief funeral is over; soon the burial, far from home, will be finished.
(Hart Preston/Life Pictures)
LIFE Magazine July 5, 1943
In a field of Tunisian, wheat, chaplain Rice conducts funeral service for a U.S. Pilot. Friends bow their heads in prayer.
(Hart Preston/Life Pictures)
LIFE Magazine June 27, 1969
“The Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam. One week’s toll. “
Cover featuring a portrait of U.S. Army specialist William C. Gearing, Jr., one of 242 American servicemen killed in a single week of fighting during the Vietnam War.
(Life Pictures)