Services for Saipan Dead, a New Haven news-photo sheet of 7 July 1944

Illustrated Current News No. 4814, dated 7 July 1944 and published in New Haven, Connecticut, shows Marines carrying flag-draped biers on a troop transport while a Navy chaplain reads the burial service. The caption says troops on Saipan had suffered three times the casualties of Tarawa (NAID 515382).

The photograph

Content note: the photograph shows the flag-covered bodies of Marines at a burial service.

Marines in camouflage helmets stand on the deck of a troop transport. Some of them carry biers, each draped with a flag. A Navy chaplain reads the service. The sheet pairs the news photograph with a masthead and a caption, and it came from a private picture service that published on a fixed schedule.

ILLUSTRATED CURRENT NEWS

Published Monday, Wednesday and Friday by
Illustrated Current News, Inc., New Haven, Conn.

Subscription Annually, $20.80

July 7, 1944—No. 4814

SERVICES FOR SAIPAN DEAD

A Navy chaplain reads burial services for Marines who died on Saipan before they were sent to rest at sea from this
troop transport. Buddies of the dead Leathernecks act as pall-bearers. Troops on Saipan have suffered three times the
casualties of Tarawa to date.

News Note: Americans Win Capital of Saipan Isle.

A private picture service

Illustrated Current News, Inc. was a New Haven company, and the sheet states its own terms: three issues a week, a yearly subscription of $20.80, and second-class mailing entry at the New Haven post office from April 1931. No federal agency is named. The National Archives keeps this issue among its World War II posters in Record Group 44, and the archive's rights line records it as public domain. The archive lists the purpose as commemoration and the audience as the domestic public.

Showing the dead

Transfer is the archive's tag, and it calls the fit faint. The flags and the rite carry the nation's meaning onto the men being buried. Any burial photograph does that.

What stands out is that the sheet shows the dead at all, with a casualty comparison in the caption. The Roosevelt administration essay cites George Roeder's finding that photographs of dead Americans were kept out of print until September 1943, when Roosevelt approved their release. This issue is dated ten months later. A citizen looking at it in July 1944 saw the kind of picture the government had once kept out of print, with a caption saying the losses on Saipan were heavier than at Tarawa.

That is the press doing the job a self-governing people needs from it. A public asked to support a war is entitled to see what it costs. The sheet also reports a gain, the capture of Saipan's capital, in the same caption block. It sets the loss and the progress side by side and leaves the reader to weigh them.

An Army poster of the same year built its appeal to war workers on an atrocity headline: "Stay on the Job Until Every Murdering Jap Is Wiped Out!"