Behind the picture
Some images are so much of their time that, as years pass, they acquire an air of genuine authority — about an event, a person, a place — and even, perhaps, of inevitability. This is what it was like, these pictures tell us. This is what happened. This is the moment. This must be remembered.
Of the indispensable photographs taken during the Second World War, Margaret Bourke-White’s image of survivors at Buchenwald in April 1945 — “staring out at their Allied rescuers,” as LIFE magazine put it, “like so many living corpses” — remains among the most haunting. The faces of the men, young and old, staring from behind the wire, “barely able to believe that they would be delivered from a Nazi camp where the only deliverance had been death,” attest with an awful eloquence to the depths of human depravity and, maybe even more powerfully, to the measureless lineaments of human endurance.
What few people recall about Bourke-White’s survivors-at-the-wire image, however, is that it did not even appear in LIFE until 15 years after it was made, when it was published alongside other photographic touchstones in the magazine’s December 26, 1960, special double-issue, “25 Years of LIFE.”
Pictures from Buchenwald, Belsen and other camps that LIFE did publish — made when Bourke-White and her colleagues accompanied Gen. George Patton’s Third Army on its legendary march through a collapsing Germany in the spring of 1945 — were among the very first that documented for a disbelieving American public the wholly murderous nature of the camps. (At the end of this gallery, see how the original story on the liberation of the camps appeared in the May 7, 1945, issue of LIFE, when the magazine published a series of brutal photographs by Bourke-White, William Vandivert and other LIFE staffers.)
LIFE photographer Margaret Bourke-White
Here, on the anniversary of the April 11, 1945, liberation of Buchenwald, LIFE.com presents a series of Bourke-White photographs, the majority of which never ran in the magazine, from that notorious camp located a mere five miles outside the ancient, picturesque town of Weimar, Germany. Her justifiably iconic picture of men at the Buchenwald fence suggests the horrors made manifest by the Nazi push for a “final solution”: the Bourke-White photographs here, on the other hand, do not suggest, or hint at, the Third Reich’s horrors; instead, they force the Holocaust’s nightmares into the unblinking light.
In Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly — her devastating 1946 memoir, subtitled “A Report on the Collapse of Hitler’s ‘Thousand Years’” — Bourke-White recalls the ghastly landscape that confronted the Allied troops who liberated Buchenwald, and her own tortured response to what she, the troops from the Third Army and her journalist peers witnessed and recorded there:
There was an air of unreality about that April day in Weimar, a feeling to which I found myself stubbornly clinging. I kept telling myself that I would believe the indescribably horrible sight in the courtyard before me only when I had a chance to look at my own photographs. Using the camera was almost a relief; it interposed a slight barrier between myself and the white horror in front of me.
This whiteness had the fragile translucence of snow, and I wished that under the bright April sun which shone from a clean blue sky it would all simply melt away. I longed for it to disappear, because while it was there I was reminded that men actually had done this thing — men with arms and legs and eyes and hearts not so very unlike our own. And it made me ashamed to be a member of the human race.
The several hundred other spectators who filed through the Buchenwald courtyard on that sunny April afternoon were equally unwilling to admit association with the human beings who had perpetrated these horrors. But their reluctance had a certain tinge of self-interest; for these were the citizens of Weimar, eager to plead their ignorance of the outrages.
In one of the signal moments of his long career and, indeed, of the entire war, an enraged General Patton refused to recognize that the Weimar citizens’ ignorance might be genuine — or, if it was genuine, that it was somehow, in any moral sense, pardonable. With Olympian wrath, Patton ordered the townspeople to bear witness to what their countrymen had done, and what they themselves had allowed to be done, in their name.
Margaret Bourke-White’s pictures of these terribly ordinary men and women — appalled, frightened, ashamed amid the endless evidence of the terrors that their compatriots had long unleashed — Bourke-White’s pictures remain among the most unsettling she, or any photographer, ever made. Long before the political theorist Hannah Arendt introduced her notion of the “banality of evil” to the world in her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Margaret Bourke-White had already captured its face, for all time, in her photographs of “good Germans” forced to confront their own complicity in an unfathomably barbarous age.
— Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com
LIFE Behind the Picture: Skull on a Tank, Guadalcanal, 1942 | Houston Style Magazine
Severed head of a Japanese soldier, propped up on a disabled tank, Guadalcanal, 1942.
Style News Wire
In February 1943, LIFE magazine published a series of photographs from Guadalcanal — the largest of the Solomon Islands and the site of the Allies’ first, pivotal offensive in the Pacific during World War II.
One of those pictures, made by a 25-year-old LIFE photographer named Ralph Morse, instantly struck a nerve with the magazine’s millions of readers. Seven decades later, it remains one of the most unsettling images to emerge from any war. Morse’s picture (the first in this gallery) of a severed Japanese soldier’s head impaled on a tank captures more graphically and immediately than volumes of words ever could the relentless and often casual barbarity of war.
Here, 70 years after the start of that critical campaign, LIFE.com presents not only Morse’s memories of how he made that photograph but also other pictures from Guadalcanal, photos that ran in LIFE and many more (by Morse and two other staffers, the brothers Joe and Frank Scherschel) that were never published in the magazine.
The caption that accompanied Morse’s disquieting photo in the Feb. 1, 1943, issue of LIFE read, “A Japanese soldier’s skull is propped up on a burned-out Jap [sic] tank by U.S. troops. Fire destroyed the rest of the corpse.”
Morse, however — still remarkably spry at 95 — remembers it a bit differently. As anyone with even a passing knowledge of World War II knows, U.S. troops (and troops of every other country who fought in the long, brutal conflict) sometimes engaged in the sort of grisly behavior evinced in Morse’s photograph. But in the photographer’s recollections of that day, it seemed just as likely that the Japanese were the ones who placed the torched skull on that ruined tank as a gruesome trap for curious Americans.
“The Army had taken over from the Marines,” Morse tells LIFE.com, setting the scene on Guadalcanal in late 1942, “and I was traveling with a group of soldiers on patrol. In the forests on those islands, you had to walk in a single line. The brush was so damn thick that if you didn’t keep your eye on the shoes of the guy in front of you, you were lost. I think it was three or four days of solid walking, but we were fine.” A pause. Then, “We were all young,” he says, almost wonderingly.
For its part, LIFE described Guadalcanal’s terrain this way: “The jungle is a solid wall of vegetable growth, a hundred feet tall. There are huge palm leaves, elephant-ear leaves of the taro, ferns and jagged leaves of the banana trees all tangled together in a fantastic web. Near the ground are thousands of kinds of insects, praying mantises, ants and spiders … In such hot, damp weather mosquitoes live luxuriantly. Sometimes they imbed themselves so deeply in the soldiers’ flesh, they have to be cut out.”
“We came to a big opening on the beach,” Morse says, “and there was a tank with a skull on it, right near the turret. The sergeant leading the patrol looks at it and says, ‘Guys, that skull has been put there for a reason, and the Japanese have probably got mortar shells aimed right at this spot.’ A disgusting scene like that will always draw people in, and the idea, of course, was that any American troops who came along would obviously want to stop and take a look.
“‘Everybody stay away from there,’ the sergeant says, then he turns to me. ‘You,’ he says, ‘go take your picture if you have to, then get out, quick.’ So I went over, got my pictures and ran like hell back to where the patrol had stopped.”
Asked when he was able to see the photos he made on Guadalcanal, or in any of the other places he shot during the war, in the Pacific and across Europe, Morse laughs and says, “Not until a copy of the magazine arrived — months later, sometimes — or until after we went back to the States.”
Unbidden, he offers a revealing glimpse into the logistics of photographing in a war zone in the early 1940s, and the creative measures photographers invented in order to get the job done.
“Before flying to the Solomons, where the fighting was, you went to the PX in Honolulu,” Morse explains — the PX (or post exchange) being the retail store that operates on military bases all over the globe — “and you bought a big box, maybe a gross, of condoms. When you were out shooting in the jungle or on the beaches, you wrote your captions and dropped them into a condom with your undeveloped film, tied it in a knot and stuffed that in an envelope — and hoped everything would stay as waterproof as possible.
“Then, when you got to a place where there was a ship or a plane heading out, you’d send the film back to the States. It would always go straight to the censors in Washington first, of course, and then the stuff that was okay would be sent on to the magazine or newspaper or wherever. But because we didn’t see the developed film for weeks or months, we didn’t even know if our cameras were working! They could be broken, and we wouldn’t have any idea. We just kept shooting. I think I first saw that picture of the skull, for example, after I got malaria and the Army shipped me back home. I finally saw the photo at the LIFE offices in New York.”
One last point worth stressing: Ralph Morse was lucky even to be alive in late 1942, when he made that photo of the skull. A few months before, he had been aboard the heavy cruiser U.S.S. Vincennes when it was sunk by Japanese torpedoes during the Battle of Savo Island, not far from Guadalcanal. In John Loengard’s indispensable 1998 book, LIFE Photographers: What They Saw, Morse describes the action on the Vincennes:
Off Guadalcanal in 1942, at one o’clock in the morning … they sound general quarters. I roll out of bed and throw on my clothes, run out and get up on deck because we’re being pounded.
It’s jet black, but we’re throwing flares up, and boats are blowing up. It was like a movie set. People are taking over other people’s jobs, running like mad, and suddenly you find that you’re not working. You’re helping people, in between trying to take a picture. Pieces of the boat kept getting blown away, and you don’t get scratched, but the people you’re with are no longer there. We started to list over, the deck was so slippery with blood that it was like an ice skating rink. The captain gave orders to get the wounded into the water. Well, at that point you’re not taking pictures. You’re throwing wounded. You’re covered with blood. Guys are screaming, “Get me offa here! Get me offa here!” And you just do it. But it ends, and the battle’s over, the light went down.
Orders came to abandon ship. I went over the side with one of the ship’s photographers, and we were short one life preserver. We had five people and four life preservers. So we kept passing one around. You could float on your back for a while, and then, as we floated around, we met more and more groups. We used to play bridge, and two of my bridge partners floated by, so we spent the rest of the night floating by people asking if they played bridge — to keep from worrying about sharks. We were very lucky that night because there was all that blood in the water, but with all the depth charges being thrown I guess every shark in his right mind had got out of there. We were picked up around six hours later by destroyers.
Morse remained with LIFE, covering every imaginable type of story — from the Space Race to sports (he made the single most famous picture of Jackie Robinson) to Broadway — for the next 30 years, until the magazine finally folded as a weekly in 972.
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