Chinese communists had entered the Korean War, all hell was breaking loose north of the 38th parallel, General Douglas MacArthur had closed North Korea to the press, and photographer David Douglas Duncan was stuck in New York.
After covering the first days of the war and the Inchon landings in September 1950, he was determined to get to the front. He called Headquarters, Fleet Marine Force Pacific, in Hawaii, to find that everyone was in Korea. Finally, he got through to Marine Lieutenant General Lemuel Shepherd’s wife, Virginia, who knew him only from his Life magazine photographs. She was game, though: “Try to come here, and we’ll see what happens,” she said. “I’ll have a car waiting for you.”
Wheels began to turn. Navy Rear Admiral Fitzhugh Lee held a Tokyo-bound Pan American Clipper in Hawaii long enough for Duncan to get a special visa from the governor; a World War II squadronmate made room for him on an R5D headed for Hungnam, Korea; and a sympathetic airfield operations officer stuffed him into a small spotter plane flying in to Koto-Ri. For many, the photographs he subsequently made of Marines fighting their way down from the Chosin Reservoir as they brought out their dead and wounded have come to represent that forgotten war.
Duncan had photographed Admiral Lee on board the USS Essex (CV-9) en route to Hawaii in 1943. Major Bob Hoffman and Duncan had served together in Marine Photographic Reconnaissance Squadron (VMD)-254 on Bougainville in the South Pacific in 1943-44, where Duncan also met a young Navy lieutenant (junior grade) named Richard Milhous Nixon.
The pattern held true throughout his career: People he met and photographed along the way often popped up just when he needed a break. Many became life-long friends. He attributes his success to his “constantly faithful star . . . my lucky star,” but there is little doubt the star had some help from his penchant for sharing the hardships of life up front with the troops.
“It was another life, amigo, that’s for sure,” Duncan said in a recent interview. He is 88, silver-haired and soft-spoken, but he effortlessly recalled names from 60 years ago. Just as easily, he reeled off telephone numbers for his current editor at book publisher W. W. Norton. He does not miss a beat. He also does not use a computer or e-mail. He telephones to stay in touch with old friends like Ed Taylor, the Army Air Forces pilot who flew with Duncan strapped into a pod under the wing of his P-38 on Okinawa and who now lives in Texas. “His wife just died,” Duncan said. He kept up with Ike Fenton, the subject of one of his best-known Korean War photos, until Fenton’s death in 1998. He spoke of Alec Bodenweiser, whom he photographed with the 2d Battalion, 26th Marines, at Khe Sanh during the Vietnam War.
His war photographs have defined him for many as a combat photographer. Indeed, as his old squadronmate and friend Dick Seamon said recently in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings, Duncan “covered at least three large wars and every small one he could find.” When asked who the best war photographers were, Duncan responded laconically: “Which war?”
But, as Seamon went on to say, he will be remembered for a far broader canvas. The odyssey that began with a 39-cent camera—an 18th-birthday present from his sister Jean—led him from Mexico and the big-game fishing grounds off Peru to the battlefields of the 20th century: the struggles in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Japan, and China. He also captured the treasures of the Kremlin and Nikita Khrushchev and spent 17 years photographing Pablo Picasso at work and play in the south of France. Only Picasso’s death in 1973 ended their close friendship.
Duncan still comments on the administrative burdens associated with being a primary source on Picasso. He has box after box filled with folders of correspondence, requesting assistance. “I have no secretary. I do everything myself. I answer every letter [using an] old Brother electric typewriter, two fingers. Sheila [his wife, also an artist] keeps the house going.”
He has photographed the world’s powerful, but his most moving images remain those of the rank-and-file: Mexican fishermen casting nets; Fijian guerrillas battling the Japanese on Bougainville; Afghan and Berber shepherds with their flocks; U.S. Marines in Korea; the “soldiers of France” [as he calls the Auvergnats, Bretons, Alsatians . . . the Laotians, Annamese, Tonkinese . . . the Moroccans, Mauritanians, Algerians] who fought in the first Indochina War; U.S. Marines at Khe Sanh during the Vietnam War.
Duncan graduated from the University of Miami in 1938 with majors in zoology and Spanish. But a $250 prize from Kodak’s 1937 National Snapshot Contest and the “shirt-sleeve editors”—men like Cal Eby of The Kansas City Star and Harry Cooling of The Baltimore Sun who found room in their skimpy budgets to buy his early photographs—convinced him he had a future as a photographer. He has never forgotten that Eby got him a front page in The Star, then called Wilson Hicks, who had moved from The Star to Life. “I hit the jackpot,” Duncan wrote. “One full page!” By 1940, National Geographic Magazine had bought a Duncan picture essay on big-game fishing in the Humboldt Current off Peru. The world of photojournalism seemed to lie before him, but his generation had to delay its dreams.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he was photographing Central America for Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs, part of an effort to improve U.S. relations in that region. When he finally got back to Washington, National Geographic contacts helped him get a job with the U.S. Marine Corps.
After training at Quantico, he became the photo officer with Marine aircraft group (MAG)-23 on Oahu with little to do. Then, up popped Marine Lieutenant Colonel Al Kreiser, the naval attaché in Guatemala City when Duncan had volunteered to photograph the Guatemalan coast as part of an effort to locate Nazi U-boats. “I was a civilian but I was trying to help out. It was an incredible relationship . . . nothing to do with the Rockefeller stuff. There was literally no one [U.S.] in Central America at the time, just consul generals. The only embassy was up in Mexico City. I just walked in the door and volunteered.” He also had made another friend—in this case, one who got him a transfer to VMD-254, then flying PB4Y-1 Liberators in the South Pacific.
“My training was not really aerial photography, using those great big cameras in the bomb bay, and so I was able to switch to SCAT [South Pacific Combat Air Transport Command].” Colonel Al Koonce, the commander, cut orders that enabled Duncan to photograph SCAT operations “from New Zealand and Australia in the south, to wherever the war was in the north.” Still administratively attached to VMD-254, essentially he had acquired a license to steal.
When he learned that SCAT was dropping supplies to Fijian guerrillas (1st Battalion, Fiji Infantry Regiment) operating behind Japanese lines on Bougainville, he headed for the action—and met a future President of the United States. “On Bougainville, there was a Piper Cub outfit [at Torokina] flying supplies to Ibu, which was in the center of the island under the volcano called Bagana. The base officer at Torokina for the Piper Cubs was Dick Nixon, a lieutenant (j.g.) in the Navy. He had about four planes flying artillery-spotting missions and supplying Ibu for the Fijians. One of his Marine pilots flew me in.”
Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Upton, commanding the Fijian battalion, allowed him to stay. What began as a one-time photo shoot turned into something else when the Japanese counterattacked. “[They] drove us off the top of the mountain. It took five days and four nights to get out of the place and back to the coast. Landing craft took us back to Torokina and that’s where Nixon made the shot [a photo of Duncan with his carbine].”
In a letter to the squadron’s skipper, Upton described Duncan’s role in an engagement near Sisivie: “When the enemy finally attacked, 2/Lieut Duncan proceeded with the advanced elements and was in the thick of the fight. . . . [H]e was by chance the first officer I encountered and he was able to give me a clear picture of the situation. From then on he acted on my invitation as assistant-adjutant . . . and was of the utmost help. On the long march back over the Crown Prince range [he] rendered many services and I cannot speak too highly of him both as an official photographer and an honorary member of my Battalion staff.”
Looking at the pictures Duncan had taken during his time with the Fijians, it could have been yesterday. “He was six-feet four,” he said of a Fijian trooper he had photographed fixing his bayonet, and “could carry his rifle in one hand and a telephone pole in the other.” Considering the subject of the picture, this did not seem like hyperbole.
The SCAT orders got him to Sydney, Australia, where he spent a month at the The Sydney Sun, developing film and making prints. He mailed the Fijian prints to Upton, who sent him the regimental patch, reminding him it was “worn as a square” and saying how proud the regiment would be if he wore it. Duncan had it sewed on his Marine greens.
“Their campaign would never become famous,” he wrote later, “but Colonel Upton and his guerrillas had planted the seed of a legend of black ghosts in the Solomon Islands.” The legend grew as it was retold, but “no one could ever tell the story better than simply the way it was up at Ibu with the Fijian guerrillas.” Although he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross later in the war, the patch seems to mean more to him than any of his decorations.
His squadron rotated back to the United States in December 1944; by early April 1945, he was back in the Pacific, still free to travel and shoot whatever he chose. On Okinawa, he photographed Marine Corsairs rocketing enemy positions while strapped into a pod under the port wing of a P-38 Lightning flown by his future old friend, Major Ed Taylor. The streamlined pod, with a Plexiglas nose, was designed to evacuate high-priority wounded, and Taylor thought it might give Duncan an unusual vantage point. “It wasn’t claustrophobic so much as too hot; there was no ventilation. I lost about 11 pounds in 45 minutes.” Could he have bailed out? “In principle, yes. We had established hand signals. I had a parachute, and I could pull a pin to open the pod, but I would have had to wiggle my way back out . . . and we were always so low—almost always under 1,000 feet.” That sounded like long odds.
The day the second atomic bomb detonated, over Nagasaki, Duncan was in a Marine bombing squadron (VMB)-611 PBJ (Mitchell B-25) over Mindanao in the Philippine Islands, photographing one of the most bizarre incidents of the war. A Japanese officer voluntarily led a bombing raid on his own headquarters. “I’m in the waist of a B-25 within three feet of him and stretching my focus from him to infinity as he talks to the crew through a translator,” he said. “I know his name exactly, but I’ve never revealed it—never.”
True to form, Duncan’s old friend, Commodore Fitzhugh Lee, got him a ringside seat on top of a 5-inch gun mount on the USS Missouri (BB-63) for the surrender ceremonies that finally ended the war.
When Duncan got back to the United States, Wilson Hicks, then Life’s executive editor, hired him and sent him to Iran, where the Soviets were threatening the Abadan oil fields. Things simmered down, and Duncan was off to southern Iran to photograph the semi-annual migration of the Qashqai nomads. “Horses, donkeys, camels, huntsmen, mothers with infants or lambkins in their arms . . . following the sun and the new-born grass,” he wrote, in what started a life-long fascination with the hard-rock, arid spaces of Asia and North Africa, especially Afghanistan and Morocco.
He got his first Life cover on 4 November 1946 with a photograph of a bronzed Palestinian trooper in the British Camel Corps of peacekeepers. All of it is there: the curved, bejeweled dagger; the look in the trooper’s eyes; the moustache with the upswept tips; the strong hand gripping the camel’s halter shank; the desert sky.
Duncan was in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946, when Jewish terrorists of the Irgun blew up British headquarters at the King David Hotel. Later, he was caught in the middle of an Irgun attempt to rob the Ottoman Bank in Haifa. “I had the first interview with Menachem Begin of the Irgun after they dynamited the King David Hotel. I was there when they robbed the Ottoman Bank in Jaffa [Haifa]. I would have been killed, but I was burned dark as mahogany, dressed in khaki. The gunner in the back seat of the car probably thought I was a Sabra, a young guy from a kibbutz. He jumped the machine gun right over me,” he said. “Arabs versus Jews,” he wrote at the time. “Oh, troubled Promised Land! Every time I start out the door something blows up.” Led blindfolded to the interview with Begin, Duncan photographed “a rough map of their Israel—Mediterranean to the Euphrates.” As Jewish settlers continued to flood into Palestine, he summed it up for the photo-essay that ran with the cover shot: “Arabs so secure in the isolation of their Biblical era they know not what is happening. . . .” When the photo-essay was published, Duncan was stunned that Life’s editors in New York had emphasized the Jewish side of the issue at the expense of the Palestinians. He wrote to Hicks, expressing his dismay that such a story bore his by-line. Hicks’s reply noted, according to Duncan, that “The Jewish pictures were . . . finer. . . . Arthur Koestler was on the best-seller list [with his novel Thieves in the Night about Jewish settlements in Palestine in the late 1930s] . . . Jewish news has received much bigger play here than Arab.” After contemplating resignation, Duncan decided to stay. But he did get their attention.
He did his own darkroom work whenever possible—”everything, every negative, every print . . . everything.” Inevitably, talk turned to the D-Day photography of Bob Capa, much of it lost during such processing. “It’s incredible,” Duncan said. “The first shot of D-Day on Omaha Beach and the lasting shot of the whole war. Capa. That’s why it so infuriates me when these sons-of-bitches try to attack the reputation of Bob Capa . . . his Spanish soldier falling shot, you know.” Does he have any doubts about the authenticity of the photograph of the Spanish Civil War Loyalist militiaman whom Capa photographed just as he was hit?
“No question. First, the photograph; second, the man. Never, never, never, never. I get so irritated with these bastards who try to blacken the reputation of a real man.”
Capa had been in Europe and Duncan in the Pacific, so the two did not meet until after the war. “We were in the Park Hotel in Istanbul. He was writing his autobiography, Slightly Out of Focus [published in 1947]. He said: ‘Go see Picasso some time, David. You’d like each other.’ I thought that would be like going off to Mars.” Nevertheless, Capa had planted a seed, and Duncan wanted to be ready with a gift when the time came.
A friend in Afghanistan saw Duncan’s watchband, set with coins from the time of Alexander the Great (a gift from the Qashqai), and gave him something from the same era, “a carnelian, a kind of agate, with the image of a rooster carved into it. I thought that it looked like a Picasso.” Later, in New Delhi, he visited Cook & Shelby, jewelers to maharajahs and viceroys, who were “friends of mine. I gravitate toward jewelers. I said, ‘Let’s make a ring for Pablo Picasso. I don’t know him, but maybe sometime I will.’ [They made] a monstrous thing of heavy gold . . . grotesque! I came back to Rome, went to Bulgari. ‘Look, I made a big mistake. Let’s make it into another ring—a simple ring. [Inscribe] inside Picasso-Duncan.’”
In Turkey, Duncan photographed cavalryman “Black Avni” Mizrak reviewing his troopers as they rode past in the snow, “high among the icy forests and rills of a land that has seen nine invasions come from the east. . . . a universal picture of adventure and romance,” that became the cover of Photo Nomad.
On the eve of the Korean War, he was in Tokyo doing a story on Japanese art. “What was great about Life magazine was Henry Luce [its founder and editor-in-chief]. The great cultural stories in Life had nothing to do with selling magazines. That’s the kind of man he was.” But Duncan seemed drawn to covering human conflict.
A photograph of General MacArthur in Korea brought back memories of a missed photograph and of the great Life photographer Carl Mydans and his wife Shelley, interned in the Philippines by the Japanese. Just before MacArthur landed at Suwon to meet with South Korean President Syngman Rhee, the airstrip came under attack. “Talk about missed photographs! A Piper Cub flew in, some [North Korean] Yaks started strafing, and this elderly man jumped out of the Cub and went down to the rice paddies. I didn’t photograph him. It was Syngman Rhee.”
After the Yaks left, MacArthur flew in, and Duncan took the picture. He was an old friend of Mydans, whom MacArthur had known in the Philippines, and they spoke briefly. (Duncan remembered that it was Mydans’s 97th birthday and took a few minutes to call and leave a greeting; sadly, Mydans passed away on 16 August.)
Along the Naktong River, he photographed Captain Ike Fenton, a Marine company commander “with some problems” [and a thousand-yard stare] and Corporal Leonard Hayworth, “a machine-gunner with no ammunition.” Life turned the story around literally overnight and rushed the issue to Korea. Days later, Duncan photographed the young machine-gunner from Deerpath, Indiana, looking at the essay in the magazine. The next morning, Hayworth, who “looked like Errol Flynn playing a Marine Corps machine-gunner,” was killed by a sniper shot.
Coming down from the Chosin Reservoir in December, he recorded in haunting photos the travail of Marines putting one foot in front of the other, following trucks bearing their dead. All the shots were black-and-white, because he considers color misleading in battle. “If you’re in combat and a guy gets hit and is bleeding badly, but is not fatally hit, the blood will attract the eye. The guy next to him may have a concussion and be about to die and that’s where the picture is.”
What about his subjects? “You can’t imagine how close they are to me,” he said. He got up to find the last letter Fenton had written him and marveled at the Marine’s good humor in the face of a quadruple bypass, a brush with prostate cancer, and a stroke: “I thank the good Lord that the stroke was not real severe,” wrote Fenton, “my speech is almost back to par. I am playing golf, so what more can a fellow ask for?”
While the Korean War occupied the Americans in northern Asia, there was another war going on in French Indochina. “I went there first in ’51,” he said. “I was with the [Foreign] Legion a lot up in the north. The French loved Indochina, the Americans hated it. We have a very strange feeling for other countries.” Had war made him a fatalist? “I don’t think about it much . . . I just go my own way. I have certain convictions and that’s the way it is.”
He photographed a Berber soldier from a colonial regiment atop his bunker praying toward Mecca “across the tops of mountain ranges disappearing into the haze of the Northwest . . . the infinity of communist China.” He caught the look in the eyes of General Raoul Salan taking his last salute after being relieved and recorded the courtyard of French General Headquarters in Hanoi, bare and deserted in the early-afternoon stillness, baking under the sun.
“I was writing ‘. . . Indochina all but lost’ for Life. It was the fall of 1953, nine months before Dien Bien Phu [the outpost fell in May 1954]. After the story was published, I was persona non grata in France for months.” The essay also drew fire from Henry Luce, who met with Duncan in Rome and told him he considered the story “defeatist.” Recalled Duncan, “What made Luce so mad was that I said that the French effort was not matching the American input.” Duncan offered to resign, but Luce said that was not what he wanted. The next day, Luce speculated that the “shock value” of the story might have some benefit and turned the conversation to Duncan’s upcoming vacation.
“About nine months later,” Duncan remembers, “I was up in Germany doing a story on the Iron Curtain and I got a message from New York saying that things had cooled down and I could go back to Indochina. Maybe half a day later, I got another telegram saying, ‘Forget it. Capa’s in Tokyo and he’ll do it.’ Capa had said he would never cover another war, but this time he said, ‘I’ll do one more job.’ He stepped on a land mine and that was it. He was killed on my story.” [Capa died on 25 May 1954.]
Duncan met Picasso in 1956 near Cannes while en route to Morocco. A connection with the Mercedes racing team proved enough for his hotel manager to ring the house. “I said that I was friend of Capa, that he had been killed, and that I had a gift for Picasso that I wanted to leave at the gate. Directions to Villa La Californie followed. I was taken upstairs to find Picasso in the bathtub. I gave him the ring. He looked at the Carnelian rooster, turned it as he examined it, and said, ‘I wonder what kind of tool he used?’ I stayed for about two hours. As I turned to wave good-bye, he said ‘Es su casa’ [It’s your home].” At dinner, Sheila remarked that Picasso’s Rose Period Boy with a Pipe had just sold for $104.1 million, making it the most expensive painting on record.
Before Duncan reached Morocco, Life asked him if he could get into Egypt to cover an Egyptian-Soviet arms deal. At almost the same time, however, he finally decided to leave the magazine after a photo-essay he had shot in Afghanistan ran with someone else’s text. “I wasn’t satisfied with their answer, so I quit.”
Despite his differences with Life, Duncan continued to go on assignments for the magazine, including a trip back to Vietnam that resulted in several cover stories and the book War Without Heroes. He photographed the 26th Marines under siege at Khe Sanh in early 1968, and came back to publish a photojournalistic broadside entitled I Protest! In a scathing introduction to the photographs of Marines under fire at that fog-shrouded outpost near the Laotian border, he protested the tactics, the destruction, the war rhetoric, and the “body count,” which he figured was dreamed up by someone in Washington as a way to keep score in a war without victories.
“I went on the Today Show and just before the program started, they flashed the number of KIAs [killed in action] on the screen: 25,000. We went on the air. Silence. TV is never silent. They whispered, ‘You’re on.’ I said, ‘I’m a professional photographer. I’ve come back from Khe Sanh. I feel very deeply about it. I’ve just seen the casualty list up on the screen. I didn’t come here to sell my book. I came here to protest what’s going on out there.’ They didn’t say a word. They let me go on with a wide-open microphone.
“As I was going across town later, the taxi driver said: ‘You know, Duncan, I saw you on the Today Show. I was a wireman in World War II and you’ve caused a bit of a problem in my family. I don’t agree with you. We should be in Vietnam, but my wife has been praying for someone like you to come along. She’s very opposed to it. Good luck to you,’ he said as he dropped me off, ‘we’ll see how it turns out.’ He wouldn’t take any money. ‘Forget it,’ he said, ‘this trip’s on me.’ I’ve often wondered where he was as time went by. I was very proud of that book.
“I’d like to change it to Iraq today. It’s exactly the same thing.” Actually, he had misgivings about the U.S. presence in Iraq as early as the first Gulf War in 1991. “Wait a while, Mr. President,” he said were his thoughts at the time, and he had inscribed a copy of I Protest! to President George H. W. Bush. In the end he never sent it, out of concern for Sheila, whose brother is a life-long friend of the 41st President. But he did include it with the archival material he sent to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas.
In 2003, he was at the center in Austin, where he met First Lady Laura Bush. They chatted, and she continued her tour. Minutes later, having decided that enough water had gone under the bridge, he grabbed the inscribed copy from the archives and set off in search of the First Lady. After explaining his wife’s connection with the Bush family and receiving a warm response, he asked Mrs. Bush if she believed in fate. “I do,” she said. With that, he presented her with the inscribed book for her father-in-law.
One trusts that Sheila, too, believes in fate.
Up Front with the Troops
A former Naval History senior editor talks with David Douglas Duncan, one of the world’s best-known combat photographers, at his home near Mouans-Sartoux in France. Topics include Duncan’s World War II experiences with Fijian guerrillas on Bougainville. For being “in the thick of the fight” there, he was awarded the regimental patch, which he wears proudly on his left shoulder in the photo at right.
By Lieutenant Colonel Brendan Greeley, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired)