Censorship and Images of Modern War: America in World War II

Abstract

On January 11 of this year John Bradley died. A Navy pharmacist mate second class during World II, he was serving in central Pacific when, on February 23, 1945, he joined with five Marines to raise American flag atop Iwo Jima's Mt. Suribachi. Memorialized by Joe Rosenthal's camera, this moment became most memorable image of American participation in this incredibly destructive war. George H. Roeder, Jr., a professor of Liberal Arts at School of Art Institute of Chicago, includes this photograph among 121 in his too ambitiously titled book, The Censored War: American Experience During World II. Roeder focuses as much on what images were (and have largely remained) hidden from view as on what Americans saw of and about war. His commentary on this particularly well-known photograph serves as a good introduction to book. The photograph, according to Roeder, works on several levels. Presenting the war as a collective effort that nonetheless allows recognition of individual achievement, it also linked work of war with activities on a mobilized home front by exclusion of disturbing reminders of war's destructiveness and its similarity to familiar images of barn raisings (p. 80). Clearly written prose, nicely understated nuances. This a short book-less than a hundred pages of text-with a prologue, four chapters, and an epilogue. Each chapter followed by a Visual Essay designed to extend as well as illustrate ideas presented in text (p. 5). This structure, while unusual, imparts a cumulative power to images, which would have been significantly reduced had they been interspersed throughout text. The Censored War, Roeder writes, is about what Americans saw during World II, why they saw it, and how it affected way they perceived world then and later (p. 2). The book's greatest contribution are four extraordinary visual essays titled Playing Death Card, Moving Pictures, War as Monologue, and