War brings censorship.  Countries naturally want to protect their citizens from the horrors of war.  To keep the public happy during World War II, the government and military made decisions to censor most of the pictures sent back from the war zones.  These pictures mainly featured the dead, the badly wounded and the soldiers who became mentally ill because of the fighting.  Also included in this category were pictures of accidents caused by American or Allied forces; only photographs of battle action were wanted to publish in the newspapers and magazines.  If the government and military really wanted to be truthful with the American public then they would not have censored as much as they had in the beginning and would have shown how the war was really being fought.  I believe that the government should have published battlefield pictures throughout the war, maybe printing a few at a time so no one would be overwhelmed.  

When the war first began for America with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the photographs and movies of the action were kept to a minimum.  American forces won few victories at first and the government did not want the morale of the public to go down by showing them pictures of their dead soldiers; so they showed pictures of wounded, smiling soldiers carted off to hospitals, or maybe some dead soldiers, but nothing really awful, and usually looking very peaceful.  The photographs taken at Pearl Harbor, the reason that so many men and women enlisted in the armed services, were not even shown to the public until over a year after the attack.  "An Office of War Information (OWI) memo warned that the public was getting the impression that ‘soldiers fight, that some of them get hurt and ride smiling in aerial ambulances, but that none of them get badly shot or spill any blood'" (10).  As the war dragged on, the military began to realize that this was right, and that maybe they should begin to show the pictures stored in their so-called "Chamber of Horrors" where all photographs kept from the public eye were stored. 

According to Newsweek in May of 1943, the showing of the more graphic photos of men in war was to "harden home-front morale" (11).  Around this time, 1943, American and Allied forces were turning the tide of the war: controlling all of North Africa, countering the U-boat threat in the Atlantic, negotiating in Italy, and advancing in the Pacific.  Also, around this time, the percentage of Americans who believed that the news they were receiving was being ‘sugar coated' to make the situation look better than it was went up to 39 percent.  To prepare the citizens for the coming casualties as servicemen were shipped home, the War Department decided to review over 200 photographs from their "Chamber of Horrors" and allowed dozens to be released.  Many of these photos showed intact bodies, the military not yet allowing the full blown pain and agony of the battlefields to be shown.  However, there were pictures of paratroopers "sprawled like discarded rag dolls" (12) and "a close-up view of the leg of a soldier whose foot had been shot away" (12).  An example of censorship in a motion picture was portrayed in Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, in which the main character, Ted, receives a leg wound resulting in the leg being amputated.  You did not see the extent of the wound, only the grimaces of pain and then the doctors at the end of the bed amputating while seeing only their faces.  I think that while the military was making great strides with their censorship, they still had a ways to go until the American population received the truth about the war. 

Roeder said it all when he stated that, "The longer the war went on, the more futile it seemed to suppress harsh pictures" (15).  More men were being killed, especially around the D-Day invasion in France in 1944.  Roeder also said that over two-thirds of all Americans killed in World War II died between 1944 and 1945, providing many death pictures that the public now wanted to see for various reasons.  Pictures of slain servicemen were printed onto propaganda posters for war bonds and in the war plants all over the United States.  Everyone believed that these posters would reach the people more than the usual propaganda; that they "are the strongest appeal and make the people so mad they dig down deep" (14).  This was when the "visual silence" was, for the most part, no longer silent.  Photographs were being published that showed pools of blood under men, men with severed limbs, soldiers who had frozen to death, and were beginning to print pictures that suggested the mental toll on soldiers, and other previously censored photos.  This is what should have been show throughout the war instead of Americans being treated as children not able to handle war. 

World War II began and ended with the censorship of photographs.  In the beginning it was all photos of dead, suffering, or mutilated servicemen being withheld; and it ended with more suffering being shown with the only censoring being some retouching to parts of bodies that were too shocking to be seen.  However, the government did not change their minds about showing these pictures because they really wanted the public to know what was going on.  They realized that they could use these images in their propaganda to buy war bonds among other advertisements.  I think that the government should have published all, or at least most, of the pictures throughout the whole war.  Depending on the point of view taken, the war could have ended sooner because the American public would have become so disenchanted that they demanded the military send their soldiers home, or these images could have fired up the entire nation even more than it already was.  While the public did not see everything that happened, many photos were still censored until after the war, the number of photos published that were not censored showed a change in how war was reported, seen, and portrayed.  This war set the precedent for war photos, only censoring the worst, and allowing the public to view all others.  In future wars the photos would be shown almost as soon as they were taken with hardly any censoring effort at all because the public learned from the first two world wars to demand the truth of what was happening, no more sugar coating.