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Photo That Was Hard to Get Published, but Even Harder to Get

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One of the most significant war photographs in American history is routinely taken for granted.

That’s not to say that the photo â€" of three dead American soldiers sprawled on a New Guinea beach early in World War II â€" isn’t appreciated. The death this month of A. B. C. Whipple was a reminder of its enduring importance. After a 34-year career as an editor and writer at Time Inc., Mr. Whipple considered one of his proudest achievements to have been his role in challenging the Pentagon’s censorship of that photo in 1943.

But that’s usually where the story of George A. Strock’s photo begins and ends: with the effort by Life magazine to publish it. At the time, military censors routinely refused such requests, partly for fear that Americans would be demoralized if they had any graphic understanding of the human price being paid in the war. As the story goes, the issue of printing Mr. Strock’s photo went all the way to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who lifted the ban with the canny understanding that such graphic images might actually steel American resolve

What is lost in this telling is that Mr. Strock was nearly killed at least twice during his assignment on New Guinea in late 1942 and early 1943, as he recorded a critically important and very hard-won Allied victory. “When I took pictures, I wanted to bring the viewer into the scene,” Mr. Strock told an interviewer, Charles Wood of Los Angeles, shortly before his death in 1977 at age 66.

To do that, he had to put himself in harm’s way. Not every photojournalist would take such risks. “Two photographers left after their first taste of fire,” Mr. Strock told Wilson Hicks, Life’s picture editor, in a letter from New Guinea, “and as far as I know they are still going.”

Mr. Strock grew up in Los Angeles. At John C. Fremont High School, he studied photojournalism in a groundbreaking course taught by Clarence A. Bach. Mr. Strock was a crime and sports photographer at The Los Angeles Times before joining Life magazine in 1940, where he worked until 1944.

His brief turn was eventful enough, however.

In the winter of 1942-43, Mr. Strock was assigned to a crucible in the war for control of the Pacific. Japanese forces had established beachheads on the northern coast of Papua New Guinea, including the villages of Buna and Gona, and were poised to advance on Port Moresby to the south, placing them dangerously close to Australia. Control of this port was vital to both sides.

After weeks of fighting, American and Australian forces began to close in on Buna village in late November. A correspondent for The New York Times, F. Tillman Durdin, reported that the Japanese “seemed determined to make a desperate attempt to retain their southernmost foothold in New Guinea or sell their lives dearly in losing it.” As it turned out, they did both.

Mr. Strock attested personally to the defenders’ ferocity in a story told to Mr. Wood. He used a derogatory term that is all but inescapable in such contemporary accounts from the American side:

I knew he was dead, laying in a pill-box, all black-faced â€" no question that he was dead. I took a picture to illustrate how in the pill-box they had palm logs covered with dirt, and the Japs were buried down there. No way to get them out except with a flame thrower.

I took a picture of this guy. I put the camera carefully down on a mound of dirt. Gave it a time exposure. Took my time; there was no hurry. Got the camera and cranked the film past. Got up again. Got 10 feet away. There was firing right behind me. I turned around. “What are you shooting at” I asked one of the officers. “The bastard sat up and was blinking his eyes,” he said.

And it was this very guy that I had photographed. He had a hand-grenade in his hand. I didn’t notice, but the picture showed that he had it. He sat up and was going to clobber me, and the officer shot him.

Nothing was easy at Buna, as Mr. Strock made clear in his Dec. 17 letter to Mr. Hicks. “Must admit that it’s tough work as well as being somewhat dangerous,” he said, “but I have the feeling that nothing will happen to me and so far I’m right. Our clothes were wet for a week, it rains almost every nite. Shoes have been soaked and there is very little chance to take them off because of a possibility of a nite raid. We sleep in a helmet; this way we keep the head dry.”

He once tried to take a bath, Mr. Strock told his boss, but the groundwater smelled too much like dead bodies.

Moisture was a formidable enemy, as was the heat. On a caption sheet stamped “Passed Military Censor G.H.Q.” and “Passed by Publicity Censorship (Operational),” Mr. Strock had to explain that two rolls of film were blistered. “I couldn’t help this,” he wrote. “As a matter of fact, it was fortunate that I got anything at all.”

Sometimes, luck was with him, as he told Mr. Hicks. Mr. Strock wrote that he went along with some soldier who raided a Japanese hospital supply dump one day and found some film there that fit his camera. “Got swell pix of the whole thing.” He ran out of film again, but said Japanese soldiers were all around, “so I couldn’t very well go out after more film.”

Luck was never more with him than when he was leaving New Guinea, clutching the pictures he had taken under his arm. “He almost lost them, and his life, too, when the plane in which he made the first leg of the homeward trip climbed into a tree on the takeoff from Port Moresby,” Time’s in-house “F.Y.I.” newsletter reported on March 3, 1943.

Once the wood and debris were cleared from engine No. 4, the heavily loaded plane was able to take off successfully. Mr. Strock may have thought at that moment that all the fighting was behind him.

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