“The reason is that words are never enough. The eye sees. The mind knows. The heart feels. But the words do not exist to make us see, or know, or feel what it is like, what actually happens. The words are never right.”

- Life magazine, September 20, 1943, explained the editors’ motive in publishing a disturbingly graphic picture of three American GIs who had been gunned down on a beach in New Guinea. It was the first image of dead American servicemen that American civilians had been allowed to see in the twenty-one months since Pearl Harbor.