Q&A with Stephen Dando-Collins

 

 

Stephen Dando-Collins is the author of the new book The Buna Shots: The Amazing Story Behind Two Photographs That Changed the Course of World War Two. His many other books include Caligula: The Mad Emperor of Rome. He lives in Tasmania, Australia.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Buna Shots?

 

A: I first became interested in the war in New Guinea in the late 1990s, when the daughter of a war correspondent who’d served there gave me a book he’d written about the campaign.

 

I didn’t begin to think about writing this book until 2011, when I was visiting the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. I was there to locate the name, on the wall of honor, of a great-uncle of mine who had died fighting in World War One.

 

Standing in front of the section containing my great-uncle’s name were four men from Papua New Guinea, descendants of the so-called “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels,” thousands of young Papuan men who had voluntarily worked as carriers, helping the American and Australian service personnel who fought the invading Imperial Japanese Army. These Papuans kindly allowed my wife to take a photo of them – it’s in the book.

 

Remarking on the coincidence, I set my thoughts to researching a book about the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels and the 1942-43 Battle of Buna-Gona – said to be the battle with the highest casualty rate of any World War II conflict.

 

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: The Buna Shots involved 11 years of research. Ten years in, I began three years of writing the manuscript, all the while working on my latest books on ancient Roman, Greek and Persian history, having just received a three-book contract for them from my American publishers.

 

My starting point was the photograph that appears on the front of The Buna Shots, George Silk’s shot of blinded Australian soldier George “Dick” Whittington being helped along a track near Buna in PNG by Papuan carrier Raphael Oimbari.

 

I subsequently looked into American Life magazine photographer George Strock’s Buna Beach shot of three dead American soldiers – called by Time magazine in 2014 “The photograph that won World War Two.”

 

Both photographers were on record speaking about the circumstances of the taking of their photos, and both wrote contextual notes about all their shots. After the war, George Silk in particular was interviewed several times about his by then famous photo.

 

I consulted numerous books, war diaries, etc., about the war in New Guinea. In addition, I was able to comb countless newspaper and magazine reports about the campaign, written by war correspondents on the spot, often the same day that action took place.

While the war correspondents’ reports were not always 100 percent accurate, they were always revealing, often about the correspondents and photographers, and were always more accurate and factual than the official communiqués released by General Douglas MacArthur’s GHQ.

 

I came to realize these two pictures by Silk and Strock had been taken with a few miles of each other, within six days of each other. But, at first, I had no idea the fates of the two pictures, and their photographers, had been inextricably linked. When I discovered those links, I knew I had a heck of a story unfolding before me, about truth in war.

 

The deeper I delved, the more I discovered concerted efforts in both Australia and the US to hide the brutal truth about this war from the people at home, to hide the fact that the enemy was no pushover and was killing thousands of our boys in desperate fighting.

 

I also discovered that US President Franklin D. Roosevelt believed the American people had the right to know the truth, while Australia’s prime minister John Curtin set out to keep the Australian people in the dark, clamping down on wartime censorship of the Australian media just as Roosevelt was easing censorship in the United States.

 

Q: What do you think these particular photographs say about World War II photography?

 

A: For all the wartime photos of things being blown up, the physical carnage of war, the mass death and destruction, it is the human element that makes great war pictures stand out. Both Silk’s photo and Strock’s photo tug at the heartstrings, making us pause, drawing us in.

 

Silk took his shot quickly, without even looking into his viewfinder. Strock took his time with his photo, composing it for best visual effect. The end results were the same. Both pictures freeze a moment in time, and are, to this day, absolutely arresting.

 

Q: What do you see as the legacy of George Silk and George Strock today?

 

A: Silk was insanely brave, walking into battle alongside troops armed only with a camera. There would be few if any photographers today who took the risks he took.

 

While Silk was a driven personality and certainly didn’t let anyone else horn in on his territory, Strock was hugely generous, pushing for Silk’s photo to be published by Life, recommending numerous talented school friends to work at Life as combat photographers.

 

In a cut-throat world where it was and is dog eat photographic dog, Strock was pretty unique and an example to us all of helping our colleagues.

 

The one thing the two men both had in common was their determination to do everything they could to get their important banned photos published. They never gave up.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I have three different new historical books at different stages, which is pretty normal for me. They range across ancient and 19th century history.

 

There is one particular book on a surprising aspect of Roman history – about eight of Rome’s most famous writers who all lived in the same era, and who chose to remain silent when they could have spoken out against tyranny –a book that I have researched and am keen to write.

 

Alas, my New York literary agents can’t find an interested publisher at present. That will no doubt change, one day.

 

In the end, time, and publishers, will determine what is published next. With The Buna Shots being my 48th book, my wife, Louise, and I have agreed that we should have some sort of celebration for book number 50. But which book that ends up being, I have no idea.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: We are currently talking to filmmakers about a potential TV documentary based around the book, and possibly also a movie. It’s certainly a very visual story, and, as one reviewer has said, it reads like a high octane thriller. So, you never know, it may just end up on the screen one day.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Stephen Dando-Collins.