At the height of the Great War, as many as 12,000 still photographs were taken every day, and each shot—whether taken by an official military photographer of the Signal Corps or by a private photographer with a government permit—had to pass the censorship standards set by the newly created Committee on Public Information (CPI). Photographs of the war dead were prohibited, as were images of military formations, war matériel, and ports of embarkation. War dead ruined morale, the CPI reasoned, and the photos of military operations contained information that could be strategically valuable to the enemy.
It is in this context of censorship and morale-boosting that the image “Beware of the One-Armed Soldier,” featured in the wartime journal Carry On: A Magazine on the Reconstruction of Disabled Soldiers and Sailors, must be analyzed. Whereas pictures of the war dead were considered dangerous, this image of two obviously maimed soldiers flaunting their war-torn bodies in the center of the frame was thought to boost morale and bolster pro-war sentiments.
The photograph is carefully staged, so that the fleshy, disfigured stumps of the two amputee soldiers are concealed beneath crisply pressed uniforms: order brought to wartime disorder. The physicians and rehabilitation specialists who orchestrated this shot chose to feature two highly functioning disabled soldiers (as opposed to the wheelchair-bound onlookers seen in the background). Despite their missing limbs, these soldiers had “overcome” their injuries to the point of being able to fight once again in what was then considered the manliest of all martial arts: hand-to-hand combat. The physicians in charge of Carry On intended the photograph to be inspirational to other disabled soldiers and their families. But more importantly, they wanted to convince the wider medical profession and military officials that rehabilitative medical care (a new specialty at the time) was an essential component of warfare. As the photo demonstrates, rehabilitation medicine promised to minimize, and even erase, the human cost of war.
Footnotes
Linker B. Beware of the One-armed Soldier. Public Books. http://www.publicbooks.org. Reprinted with permission.
- © 2013 American Physical Therapy Association
