Foreign Rights

This captivating text discusses how images of one of the American army’s most bitter Pacific War victories had an enormous influence upon public opinion. At the end of 1943, after two years of distant and relatively painless battle for the United States, the American people were struck with terror by the violent footage shot during the Battle of Tarawa. This was the first real carnage suffered by the boys since entering the war, and it was also the first time that a military camera crew had filmed combat… and corpses. Cyril Azouvi gathers the memories of Norman Hatch, a Marine Corps veteran who went to Tarawa armed with a camera. He recounts the battle and the impact that those images had upon the public’s opinion, who, up until then, had held on to the preposterous idea that war could be clean.