Carl Mydans photographed the war across the globe
On the night of Feb. 3, 1945, Life magazine photographer Carl Mydans accompanied soldiers from the 2nd Squadron of the 8th Cavalry Regiment as they liberated the Santo Tomas internment camp in Manila, home to more than 3,700 prisoners.
He described the scene in a lengthy piece that ran in the Feb. 19 issue of Life.
I tripped once, recovered myself and pushed into an hysterical mob of internees waving, shouting, screaming, some weeping. … I could not say anything, the din was so terrific. Hand just felt me, pressed me, and voices cried, “Thank God you are here.” “It’s been so long.”
Crowds pressed in on me so closely that I could not move and then suddenly the crowd picked me up, 40-pound camera kit and all, and passed me from hand to hand overhead.
I was helpless, nor was I able to talk above the din. Then I was put down and a stern voice rang above all the others. “You are an American soldier? Put the light on yourself so we can see.” I turned the flashlight on myself and said, “I’m Carl Mydans.”
For a moment, no one said anything. Then a woman’s voice came, “Carl Mydans. My God! It’s Carl Mydans,” and Betty Wilborne broke through the crowd and through her arms around my neck and cried.
I was pushed through the crowds to the stairs in the main lobby with shouts of “speech” and for a moment I was unable to talk. I mumbled something about I never knew how good it could feel to be back here in Santo Tomas.
Mydans knew Santo Tomas, and some of its remaining residents knew Mydans, because he and his wife Shelley had spent nine months interned there in 1942. Returning with American troops to liberate the camp was perhaps the highlight of the six years Mydans spent covering World War II around the globe.
Born May 20, 1907 in Medford, Massachusetts, Mydans studied journalism at Boston University and picked up photography while he was a student. He went to work for American Banker in New York in 1931 and began shooting with a 35mm Contax, occasionally selling his photos to newspapers and magazines.
His first full-time photography job was with the Resettlement Administration, later renamed the Farm Security Administration, documenting life during the Great Depression alongside the likes of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans.
He joined the staff of Life just before its debut issue in November 1936 and would remain with the magazine through its entire 36-year run as a weekly. During those early years at Life, he met Shelley Smith, a researcher for the publication. Exactly eight years his junior — she was born May 20, 1915 in Palo Alto, California, where her father was a journalism professor at Stanford — she soon fell for Carl and the pair married in June 1938.
After the war began the following fall, Mydans began an overseas odyssey that would take him around the world for nearly the duration of the conflict. He initially shipped out to Europe, covering life in wartime Britain and France and Russia’s invasion of Finland from September 1939 through June 1940.
He then headed to the Pacific, spending a month with the U.S. Navy in the fall of 1940. Carl and Shelley headed to the Far East, where they worked as a team on features about China and Singapore in 1941. Late that fall, the pair began working on a story about defense preparations in the Philippines being led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Carl’s photos and Shelley’s words were dispatched on the last flight out of Manila after Japan attacked on Dec. 8, 1941 and appeared in Life’s Dec. 22 issue.
MacArthur declared Manila an open city on Dec. 26, pulling U.S. forces out of the area. On Jan. 2, 1942, the Japanese took control of Manila. Three days later, Carl and Shelley Mydans were sent to Santo Tomas along with a handful of remaining war correspondents and hundreds of others from Allied and neutral nations.
The Mydans and some other prisoners were moved to a camp near Shanghai in September 1942. About a year later, they were set free as part of a prisoner exchange program and began an arduous journey home, first via a Japanese ship to Goa in what was then called Portuguese India, then on to New York on a six-week journey aboard the Gripsholm.
The venerable ocean liner docked in Jersey City on Dec. 1, 1943 with more than 1,400 passengers aboard, most of them Americans being repatriated. Carl Mydans told a Boston Globe reporter upon arrival that his weight dropped from 150 pounds to 123 during his internment, though like many of the other passengers he had gained some back on the voyage home.
Two months later, Carl Mydans was back in an internment camp — by choice. He spent a week living at the Tule Lake Segregation Center in California, involuntary home to 18,000 Japanese Americans, for a photo story that appeared in the March 20, 1944 Life.
Before long, Mydans went back to the war, this time in Italy. There, the photographer had several brushes with death in a matter of days after the liberation of Rome.
The one that made the papers back home occurred June 11, as he rode in a captured German car with Will Lang of Time and a U.S. Army war artist, Lt. Rudolf von Ripper, near the capital. Lang, who was driving, began to feel dizzy and stopped the car, opening the door and staggering out. He found von Ripper in a similar state and Mydans unconscious. Mydans had to be revived via CPR and spent the night in a Naples hospital. An investigation found exhaust fumes were filtering into the car, but it was unclear whether that was accidental or a deliberate German ploy.
Mydans also covered the Allied invasion of Southern France in August before returning to the Pacific, where he would famously photograph MacArthur wading ashore in Luzon in January 1945. Mydans had a longstanding relationship with the general that would continue through the Korean War, and he was on hand for many of the key moments in the closing months of World War II, most notably his photographs aboard the USS Missouri as the Japanese signed surrender documents to end the war.
Shelley Smith Mydans published her first novel, The Open City, in 1945, and would write two more. She and Carl lived in Tokyo after the war, as he headed up the Time-Life bureau there before covering the conflict in Korea. He continued to travel the world covering stories for Life through 1972. You can see a gallery of some of his work here.
The Mydans eventually settled in Westchester County, New York, where Shelley died in 2002 at age 86. On Aug. 16, 2004, Carl passed away there at age 97.