With the surrender of Japan in World War II, the Korean peninsula, occupied by the Japanese since 1910, was divided at the 38th Parallel:the north occupied by the Soviets and the south by the Americans. The prevailing tension exploded when North Korean troops invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950. The Americans, with the approval of the UN, led an army of allies to drive out the North Koreans.
On September 4, 1950, the American photojournalist David Douglas Duncan , who had already covered the Battle of Okinawa and the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri , joined the 5th Marine Regiment to cover the Korean War. The photos of him became the silent witness of that contest. The following year, he published the book This is War! , a book of images taken in the Korean War whose proceeds went to the widows and children of Marines killed in the conflict. Years later, one of his photographs - the earlier image of troops walking up a mountain pass - was used on a 22-cent postage stamp issue to honor soldiers who fought in the Korean War: Veterans Korea . It doesn't take much looking to see that the stamp image has a "small » tweak:removed the dead that appear lying on the ground. Duncan was the first to criticize that hypocritical photohop effect for wanting to sell a war without deaths .
