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WWII Iwo Jima press photos


Bob Hudson
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I have a general thread (at http://www.usmilitariaforum.com/forums/ind...showtopic=32675 ) showing examples of the more than 380 WWII press photos I picked up this week. These are photos shipped to newspapers, mostly from overseas and mostly from the Pacific war. The majority are "radio telephotos" which is method using fax-like technology to send pictures over shortwave radio. It doesn't show up as much on the scanned and reduced-sized images shown here, but the photos usually have visible lines because of they actually were scanned by the radio telephoto machines for transmission.

 

These images represent what the people back home saw of the war in their daily paper and because these photos were sent from the warzone by radio, these would have been the first images to show up in the papers (as opposed to images from film that had been flown from the frontlines to the states which could take several days). The captions were printed on the photo paper for the radio-telephotos.

 

Two of these images show Marines KIA on Iwo, but no faces are seen and I would guess that was probably the rule for published photos of the battlefront casualties.

iwoland1.jpg

Iwoland1cap.jpg

 

iwofourth.jpg

 

iwosmith.jpg

Iwosmithcap.jpg

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There are three photos of medics and nurses, including one in which a doctor is called a "Marine" and considering what he was doing at the time, he was more Marine than Navy, one of the first Navy flight nurse to arrive on Iwo and one the first Marines evacuated by air from Iwo.

 

iwodoc.jpg

iwodoccap.jpg

 

iwonurse.jpg

Iwonursecap.jpg

 

iwoevac.jpg

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The reason taking this otherwise useless island in the first place was for the airfield and there is one photo taken after that was secured for us by US fighters and bombers:

 

iwobomber.jpg

 

iwomap.jpg

 

And this how the back of most of the photos are marked:

 

acmeback.jpg

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iwonurse.jpg

Iwonursecap.jpg

 

I decided to do a Google search and see if I could verify that photo's caption about her being the first Navy flight nurse to fly into Iwo: well it's true and that was also the first time a flight nurse landed in any combat zone, so it is considered quite an historical event and the Navy even sent along a photographer to document it. I found that here story is told in some detail in the book "Women at War By James E. Wise, Scott Baron" which you can find online at http://tinyurl.com/NurseJane

nursejane.jpg

 

Again the full story is at http://tinyurl.com/NurseJane

 

Both the telephoto caption and the book spell her maiden name wrong: it is Kendeigh, and her first name was Jane, not Janet as written in the telephoto caption. She died in San Diego

 

The Navy's website for the history of Naval medicine has a whole section devoted to her: http://navyhistory.med.navy.mil/Exhibits/G...eigh_index.html

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Charlie Flick

Very interesting stuff, Jim. I had seen a few of those pics before but some were new to me.

 

That photo of Lt. [Doctor] Rogers was great. The whole blood having come all the way from LA to Iwo was quite a feat of transportation and medical technology.

 

It was also interesting to me that Lt. Rogers was carrying a .45 pistol. Without wanting to seem to hyper technical, didn't the Geneva Convention prohibit medical personnel from carrying weapons? (Believe me, if I had been him on Iwo Jima I would have been carrying two pistols, a Garand, a BAR a flamethrower....)

 

Great post. Thanks for letting us see this history.

 

Regards,

Charlie Flick

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Very interesting stuff, Jim. I had seen a few of those pics before but some were new to me.

 

That photo of Lt. [Doctor] Rogers was great. The whole blood having come all the way from LA to Iwo was quite a feat of transportation and medical technology.

 

It was also interesting to me that Lt. Rogers was carrying a .45 pistol. Without wanting to seem to hyper technical, didn't the Geneva Convention prohibit medical personnel from carrying weapons? (Believe me, if I had been him on Iwo Jima I would have been carrying two pistols, a Garand, a BAR a flamethrower....)

 

Great post. Thanks for letting us see this history.

 

Regards,

Charlie Flick

 

Charlie, my uncle was a corpsman with the 21st Marines/3rd Division on Guam, he always carried a .45 and a carbine as the Japanese had little regard for medics or the Geneva Convention. This is also why you almost never see a red cross armband worn in the Pacific. Mark

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Charlie Flick
Charlie, my uncle was a corpsman with the 21st Marines/3rd Division on Guam, he always carried a .45 and a carbine as the Japanese had little regard for medics or the Geneva Convention. This is also why you almost never see a red cross armband worn in the Pacific. Mark

 

Gotcha! Thanks, Mark, for the explanation. That makes sense now.

 

Charlie Flick

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craig_pickrall

Charlie, as a follow on concerning the armed medics: my father was a medic on Okinawa. He carried a carbine. I'm pretty sure it wasn't issue but one he had picked up. I also have a Japanese belly flag. One of those that had messages from family and friends written on it. The carbine he carried made 3 holes in the flag but due to the way it was folded and worn it actually made multiple holes. In all of his personal photos of the unit I have never seen any arm bands or helmet markings to indicate medical personnel. The ambulance has normal medical markings however.

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I've posted the press photos of Okinawa on one of my personal websites at http://homepage.mac.com/bobhudsoncom/Press...otoAlbum48.html and it has one of those photos showing US Marines doing something that must have shocked the hell out of any Japanese who saw it happening in a combat zone: providing medical care to a wounded enemy:

 

 

okiwoundjap.jpg

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Very interesting pictures - thanks for posting these and the others.

 

I interviewed a former PT boat crewman, who was then transferred to a crash rescue boat. Duirng our interview he cried when we talked about Iwo. He said for two weeks all his boat did was pick-up the bodies of young Marines, "17 and 18 year olds who would never experience life," and that there were so many bodies, his crew "stacked them up like cordwood on the deck of the boat." Very emotional interview.

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Very interesting pictures - thanks for posting these and the others.

 

As a former newspaper editor I often wonder how many of these photos actually ever made it into the newspapers? These are all photos that passed through the censors in order to get transmitted back to the States, but I would imagine that many if not most editors never would have used the photos of US casualties but would instead have used the ones showing dead enemy or US troops in command of the situation.

 

The photos I have been showing were picked to be saved by one man: Clinton McKinnon, publisher of the Journal, a San Diego newspaper. McKinnon started the newspaper at the beginning of 1944 and normally you did not start new newspapers during WWII because of paper shortages, but San Diego's dominant newspapers were the soundly-Republican Union and Tribune. McKinnon used some sleight of hand and connections within the Roosevelt administration to circumvent the rules and get his newsprint and FDR's New Deal got a voice in San Diego. Time Magazine once described McKinnon as: "a jockey-sized little fireball with unruly black hair and bounding energy."

 

He saved the war photos in original envelopes used to send them to the newspaper by overnight mail. Many of the photos show dead and wounded from both sides, men pinned down on the beach and medical personnel. He also saved a ton of photos of the 1945 multi-national conference for the signing of the United Nations Charter in San Francisco plus many photos the politicians behind the war, all kept in this envelope:

 

env_persons.jpg

 

Really this not a random selection of war photos, but something selected by one man who had access to hundreds if not thousands of such photos and for some reason thought these ones told the part of the story he wanted to see remembered.

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Well then, we owe a big thanks to Mr. McKinnon for saving these and to you for posting them. As a writer and amateur photographer myself, I have enjoyed seeing these images.

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Charlie Flick
Charlie, as a follow on concerning the armed medics: my father was a medic on Okinawa. He carried a carbine. I'm pretty sure it wasn't issue but one he had picked up. I also have a Japanese belly flag. One of those that had messages from family and friends written on it. The carbine he carried made 3 holes in the flag but due to the way it was folded and worn it actually made multiple holes. In all of his personal photos of the unit I have never seen any arm bands or helmet markings to indicate medical personnel. The ambulance has normal medical markings however.

 

That is pretty interesting, Craig. The PTO was certainly a much different fight in many ways as compared to the ETO, and the medics sure had plenty on their hands in both theaters.

 

Regards,

Charlie

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Thanks for the Iwo pictures. When I figure out some tech isssues I'll post my uncles picture and three of his friends on Iwo and his citation for the Bronze Star with V from that battle. Iwo is in my soul.

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  • 4 years later...

Charlie, as a follow on concerning the armed medics: my father was a medic on Okinawa. He carried a carbine. I'm pretty sure it wasn't issue but one he had picked up.

 

Charlie, my uncle was a corpsman with the 21st Marines/3rd Division on Guam, he always carried a .45 and a carbine as the Japanese had little regard for medics or the Geneva Convention. This is also why you almost never see a red cross armband worn in the Pacific. Mark

 

In the PTO/CBI there were also armed nurses with shoulder holsters for pistols or revolvers. No wonder in view of Japanese mentality and barbarity.

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post-20589-0-13460700-1386618444.jpg

 

This is an incredible picture I have never seen before.

 

This is Yellow Beach II the Beach the 4th MarDiv landed. Very few pictures exists of this beach during the assault phase landing. Most pictures tend to be Green-Red beach and Blue beach.

 

I'm currently reading the after action reports on the battle and the two Two stripes on the side of the LVT are to denote what beach they are suppose to land on. The color of the stripe and how many stripes on the side of the LVT indicate what beach. In this case Yellow Beach Two as it has two stripes and the cans indicate a 4th MarDiv beach.

 

An incredible, historic and tragic photo!

 

LF

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Great photos thanks for posting....Bob-where did you do your newspapering?

 

Southern California - San Diego. Did radio news too in Los Angeles and San Diego.

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