Shooting scenes of war

Jace Radke

Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2000 | 11:15 a.m.

On the web

A list of members in the International Combat Association and a gallery of photos can be accessed at www.combatcamera.org

During World War II Jerry Cole did a lot of shooting from B-17 bombers, even logging time in the ball turrets located under the midsection of the massive flying fortresses.

As a combat photographer, Cole, then an Air Force staff sergeant, was only shooting film, but he felt the explosions of shells and saw planes blown apart on bombing runs over Germany in 1944 and 1945.

"Sometimes you'd look out a side port on one of the planes and see puffs of black smoke all over," Cole said. "We called that walking on flak. You couldn't hear yourself think because of the four big engines on the bombers, and most of the time you had your oxygen mask on. It was very exciting, but when you look back I guess it was a little crazy."

Cole and other warfare photographers did some looking back at the first annual convention of the International Combat Camera Association at the Luxor hotel-casino this week.

The organization has about 350 members worldwide, who shot still and motion pictures of the experiences of World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and other conflicts. The group boasts members from as far away as Australia, Germany, Russia and North Korea, and about 100 members attended the convention.

Retired Air Force Capt. Don Kader of San Diego was on hand with many of the photos he shot during a tour of duty in Korea from 1951 to 1953.

Like Cole, Kader says he didn't have much time to think about the danger he was in while he worked at capturing history.

"I was only 26 years old, and we all felt kind of immortal when we were really just immoral," Kader said. "I do remember one time where I was going to go up in this bomber, but the pilot told me they were going to hit a place that had already been bombed and I wouldn't get any good footage. That plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan. I might have gotten some good footage, but no one would have seen it."

Kader shot photos from the air and on the ground with the troops, and also helped write documentaries about the Korean War.

It wasn't all dodging bullets and near-death experiences for the photographers, said Cole, who now lives in Oxnard, Calif. Cole photographed James Cagney when he visited with American bomber crews at an airbase in Germany, and his most famous photo of a squadron of B-17s flying over a background of vapor trails was featured in Time magazine.

Cole even found himself on a photo assignment involving the then-top secret Project Aphrodite. It was later revealed that the project was an attempt to use older B-17s as guided missiles by loading them with explosives. The pilots would get the plane in the air and set the autopilot before bailing out over England, and then the planes would be flown by radio signals from a second aircraft.

The project was not a success, and one of the planes exploded and killed the two pilots aboard, one of whom was Navy Lt. Joseph Kennedy, older brother to President John F. Kennedy.

Cole was called upon to photograph the crater left by another of the downed Project Aphrodite planes in Germany.

"They knew I had a 16 millimeter camera that I had taken from the wing of a shot-down plane for a souvenir, and I thought they wanted to court martial me for that," Cole said. "It turns out that it was the only motion picture camera around, and they needed footage of this impact crater. They didn't ever say what it was, or why they wanted footage, but it was the biggest crater I've ever seen. It had to be a quarter-mile across."

Military brass took the camera and the film as soon as Cole returned, telling him only that the explanations he wanted were classified.

"About eight years ago I was telling the story to a customer in a photo shop I owned in California, and he dug up the military records," Cole said. "It was listed there, and I finally knew what that top secret crater I shot was from."