He snuck 300 negatives out of Japan in a box marked “photography paper: do not expose to light” so they wouldn’t be confiscated by the military, he recalled in a memoir published by American Heritage magazine. (His widow, Sakai, holds the negatives of these pictures, and his son, Tyge O’Donnell, has contact sheets.)
Yet the images from those months in Japan were so gut-wrenching that when O’Donnell returned home, he stuffed the negs in a trunk and tried to forget about them.
Forty years later when the devoutly religious O’Donnell was attending a Catholic retreat in Kentucky, he saw a nun’s sculpture depicting the suffering from the atomic bombs. That sculpture is what moved him to drag out the photos and begin publicly condemning nuclear weapons, he said in later interviews.
The result was a book: Japan 1945: A U.S. Marine’s Photographs from Ground Zero (Vanderbilt University Press, 2005). It brought images to light many Americans had never before seen.
“The people I met, the suffering I witnessed, and the scenes of incredible devastation taken by my camera caused me to question every belief I had previously held about my so-called enemies,” O’Donnell wrote in the preface to his book. “I left Japan with the nightmare images etched on my negatives and in my heart.”
In 1994, when the Smithsonian Institution wanted to create an exhibit coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the atomic end of World War II, it planned to use some of O’Donnell’s images in an exhibit near the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.
But veterans’ groups launched a massive protest, saying the photos and other elements of the exhibit lent too much sympathy to Japan without focusing enough on its war aggression. The Smithsonian backed down, canceling the exhibit. O’Donnell’s work never appeared in the museum.
The photographer never got over the incident, recalls his wife.
“He went to the Smithsonian and kicked the Enola Gay,” Sakai says. “Twice.”
O’Donnell, she says, didn’t care what other people thought of his actions, if he believed he was doing the right thing.
But at about the same time as the Enola Gay controversy, with his place in history secured by his war photos, Joe O’Donnell took credit for another photo that wasn’t his – 13 years before the current debacle and a half a world away.
On September 9, 1994, the Mainichi Daily News, Japan’s oldest newspaper, published an article about a correction that had run in The Asahi Shimbun, a competitor:
“The Asahi Shimbun newspaper said Friday it erroneously credited a photograph of Hiroshima shortly after its atomic bombing as a newly found aerial shot taken by a U.S. war photographer. Asahi officials said the national daily will publish a correction and apology in its Saturday morning editions. …
“The report in the July 31 morning editions … said the photo was taken by Joe O'Donnell of Tennessee around September 1945, and that he discovered it nearly 50 years later at the U.S. National Archives.
