“I cabled LIFE’s editors in August from Tokyo,” Duncan said, “and I told them I was heading back to Korea to try and get what I called ‘a wordless story’ that conveyed the message, simply, ‘This is war.’ Not long after that I was covering the fighting near the Naktong River, and I made the picture of Marines running past a dead enemy soldier, their fatigues absolutely soaked to the chest with mud and muck and god knows what else. Pictures bring back visceral memories, and Duncan recounted the circumstances around the making of some of his classic photos in a voice at once firm and touched with wonder at the immediacy of his own recall at the horrors and heroism he witnessed at the fact that he was there, recording it all. “Radio communication was knocked out by the rain that day,” Duncan told, the recollection still vivid more than six decades later, “and Fenton had to shout most of his orders and sent runners when shouting wouldn’t do. The Marines held the muddy, blasted, blood-drenched hill. If the Reds were to launch one more attack they would have to be stopped with bayonets and rifle butts.”īut that attack never came. His tattered Baker Company Marines had only those few rounds in their belts remaining. Of his photograph of a Marine captain near the Naktong River after an attack by North Korean troops as ammunition ran dangerously low and reinforcements were nowhere in sight Duncan had written in his 1951 book, This Is War!: “Ike Fenton, drenched and with the rain running in little droplets from his bearded chin, got the news. Several years before his death in 2018 at age 102, spoke with Duncan about his memories of the conflict - and his hope, in the end, that he might “show something of what a man endures when his country decides to go to war.” Here, presents a gallery of his celebrated pictures from America’s “Forgotten War.” He befriended and photographed people such as Picasso and Cartier-Bresson, and he produced the single greatest portfolio of pictures to emerge from the Korean War. He documented civil strife and wars in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and he captured extraordinary beauty in environments as disparate as the west of Ireland and the deserts of America’s Southwest. Marines after Pearl Harbor made some of the most indelible photos to come out of World War II and, 20 years later, Vietnam. 23, 1916, Duncan started taking pictures for newspapers in the 1930s joined the U.S. And certainly no photographers ever enjoyed a longer, more varied or more complete career than the Missouri native who became one of the indispensable photojournalists of the 20th century.īorn in Kansas City, Mo., on Jan. Few people have lived as long, as varied and as complete a life as David Douglas Duncan.
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