Somewhere in South Korea, September 1951: The original caption of this image — captured by an unknown U.S. Air Force photographer and published in the Pacific Stars and Stripes Sept. 11, 1951 — read “En route to Japan from Korea aboard an evacuation transport, a Republic of Korea nurse, injured herself, aids in the care of a wounded ROK soldier.”

Even though we do not know exactly when and where the image was taken, the accompanying article notes the the flight was part of the air evacuations of United Nations wounded by the 315th Air Division (Combat Cargo) aircraft of the Fair East Air Forces. Many of the news photo prints in our archives do not have exact date and place information included and information is gathered through notes from the photo department scribbled on the back of the print, articles the image ran with and independent research into the subject matter.

Although we prioritize the preservation and scanning of our own material, given their historic importance we made an exception for the images in our collection of the Korean War taken by these military photographers. Few of our own images from that war survived as all pre-1964 Stars and Stripes Pacific negatives and slides were unwittingly destroyed by poor temporary storage in 1963. The prints created by Stars and Stripes Pacific’s photo department to run in the print newspaper are the only images left of Stripes’ news photography from those early decades.

Pictured here is a scan of the original 1951 print created by Stars and Stripes Pacific’s photo department. The red marks indicate the crop lines. Only the part of the image to the right of the red stripe would appear in the newspaper.

In this month of the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement, we share some of these historic images with you.

Looking for Stars and Stripes’ coverage of the Korean War? Subscribe to Stars and Stripes’ historic newspaper archive! We have digitized our 1948-1999 European and Pacific editions, as well as several of our WWII editions and made them available online through https://starsandstripes.newspaperarchive.com/

related stories

• From the archives, 1951: Mercy Lift — Air evacuation is a continuous operation