Books: Men in Combat

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THIS IS WAR!—David Douglas Duncan—Harper ($4.95).

LIFE Photographer David Douglas Duncan has shot the best and truest pictures of the Korean war. A Marine lieutenant in World War II, he did one tour of duty as a photographer in Korea, and was back in New York last winter when the news came in that the 1st Marine Division was cut off near the Changjin Reservoir. Duncan's point in pleading to go back to the Marines: no enemy outfit anywhere could smash a Marine division, and so the assignment was perfectly safe. He flew in to join the Marines, and was the only newsman to walk out with them in their bitter, fighting withdrawal to the sea.

In This Is War!, Duncan explains what he set out to do: "I wanted to show what war did to a man. I wanted to show something of the comradeship that binds men together when they are fighting a common peril ... I wanted to show something of the agony, the suffering, the terrible confusion, the heroism which is everyday currency among those men ... I wanted to tell a story of war, as war has always been for men through the ages."

No one who looks through This Is War!, with its vivid combat scenes and unforgettable warrior faces, can doubt that Duncan has succeeded magnificently. In these 150 pages of pictures, the bruising war of the foot soldier is fixed in a succession of moments that make captions superfluous (Duncan uses none). To capture such moments, Duncan had to become, in effect, a front-line soldier. Only in that way could he get close enough to photograph the grenade in flight, the finger squeezing the trigger, the first instant of surprised shock of the wounded.