In the photograph, the young soldier looks past the camera lens. Blood stains his face from shrapnel wounds. Grenades hang from his belt, his rifle is beside him. He is leaning against sandbags, but appears somehow coiled for action, resting but not at ease, his expression enigmatic, as if he had just witnessed something barely believable for the first time.
His company had just made a fighting retreat, under mortar attack from Chinese forces, from a patrol near Hill 166 west of the Jamestown Line in Korea, near the present day border between North and South. Two Canadians were killed, and two dozen injured.
It was the early morning of June 23, 1952, and as he waited for medical aid at this field clinic, Pte. Heath Bowness Matthews originally of Alberton, P.E.I., a signaller with Charles Company, 1st Battalion, The Royal Canadian Regiment, was becoming an iconic figure in Canadian history.
The photographer looking at him, Sgt. Paul Tomelin of Alberta, had arrived in Korea with the 25 Canadian Public Relations Unit as an experienced chronicler of war, with battleground experience in the Second World War in Europe, where he was also a stretcher bearer.
Tomelin had been assigned to this patrol, but could not use a flash at night, so he photographed tracer fire during the fight, then waited near the aid post for casualties. He noticed Matthews and raised his camera, starting to focus on the seam of his shirt, to ensure he was also focused on those eyes. He would later recall Matthews showed an expression of disgust, as if about to turn away from the intrusion. Tomelin gestured, asked him to please stay, and squeezed the shutter.
“And the strange part of it is, that normally a picture as important as that one seemed to be, I would take a second one. But somehow or another I felt that it was there. And it was there,” Tomelin said, according to a first-person account in the Canadian Encyclopedia.
Tomelin would later write in the Ottawa Citizen: “Based on my research of published war photographs, I claim this is the only face of war photograph of its kind that expresses the soldier’s feeling of awe, bewilderment, confusion, despair, exhaustion, fear and gratitude for having survived.”
Both photographer and subject are dead, and both lived to old age, but their public legacy is this image that unites them and “captures something both timeless and awful,” said Timothy Sayle, a historian of international relations at the University of Toronto. “These photos capture something that resonates with us,” he said.
Today, 75 years after the Korean War began on June 25, 1950, with invasion of the South by the North, then quickly spiralled into a stalemated proxy war by United Nations allies against communist expansion, the photograph stands as a photojournalistic masterpiece, on a level with the raising of the American flag at Iwo Jima in 1945 or the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square on Victory over Japan Day.
Like those famous photos, it is not without a little controversy of its own over the circumstances of its taking, and over the degree to which a photographer observes or creates his scenes (Tomelin asked Matthews to stay put, so it is in that sense a posed portrait), even about who the subject is (that last controversy is now settled; it is Matthews). But like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, this photograph titled The Face of War and preserved in the Library and Archives Canada, also has a rare capacity to evoke deep meaning in the Canadian psyche, and to somehow convey a universal human experience of war. This young man could have been anyone.
Unlike the other iconic war photos from the Great War and the Second World War, however, this photograph is an icon of a conflict that is overshadowed in Canadian remembrance, even sometimes forgotten, lacking both the apocalyptic grandeur of the world wars and the proximity of Afghanistan in national Canadian memory.
Korea was an ideological war, an episode of the Cold War. Freed from Japanese colonization after the Second World War, Korea was divided between the Soviet Union and the United States. No one on the United Nations side that Canada joined was fighting to liberate North Korea. This was a proxy war against communist influence. Negotiations to end it began almost as soon as the fighting started. There was no satisfying victory, just a stalemate that continues more or less to this day. Andrew Burtch, the post-1945 historian at the Canadian War Museum points out that it was first nicknamed the Forgotten War in the popular press in 1951, before it even ended.
By the winter of 1952, a few months before this image was taken, the back and forth of the early dynamic fighting was largely settled, Burtch said. The North’s initial offensive had been turned back. The pushback had been pushed back in its turn by China, supporting the North. The battlegrounds had become fixed into static defence lines along hills separated by no man’s land in the valleys. It had become, Burtch said, “a war of patrols.”
The Chinese were seasoned fighters, skilled in ambush tactics, and many patrols ended in disaster and fighting withdrawals for the United Nations side, as in the case of Matthews’ patrol, in which Cpl. P.J. Nolan and Pte. W.F. Luxton were killed in action, according to the unit’s contemporaneous war diary, provided by Burtch.
The Canadians who fought were a new generation of soldiers, many of them too young to have fought in the Second World War, including Matthews who enlisted for Korea at age 18, but old enough to be inspired by the cultural appreciation of those who did.
It was also a new era of wartime news photography, said Jonathan F. Vance, who teaches Canadian military history, its commemoration and social memory at Western University. People had become used to seeing powerful images on newspaper front pages, and many of the military controls put in place about what could be shown were developed in the Second World War, mindful of photography’s power to shape public opinion.
It is a military tradition full of problems. For example, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima and The Falling Soldier from the Spanish Civil War have long been suspected of being staged. Raising a Flag Over the Reichstag, depicting Russian soldiers in Berlin in 1945, was similarly exploited for Soviet propaganda, with its journalistic details obscured, such as the identity of the soldiers. A Canadian Battalion Go Over the Top, depicting soldiers climbing from a trench in 1916, was widely published as a real battle but was in fact an earlier training exercise. At least Wait for Me, Daddy, the famous 1940 image of soldiers deploying from British Columbia with a little boy running after his father, is more or less what it appears to be. For the rest, reliability sometimes stands in inverse proportion to fame.
“A lot of most famous war photos are not what we once thought they were,” said Vance. “I think they were done for propaganda purposes in mind, so if they weren’t perfect in the first instance, they had to be made perfect.”
But the Matthews portrait was different. “It was simply a record of an individual at a time,” Vance said. “It’s not propaganda because I’m not sure what it would be propaganda in favour of.”
Curiously, the effect is almost to render him anonymous, and the scene timeless and placeless. The subject has no identifying kit, no badges or shoulder stripes. It would take an especially keen eye to read any information in his grenades or rifle. He could be anyone. Vance said that is its strength.
It also admits of different readings. The most common is something like the shell shock of the Great War or the “thousand yard stare” of Vietnam, the physical manifestation of psychological trauma in dark, heavy, almost unseeing eyes.
“But also, if you come at it differently, you see a guy exhausted after a job well done,” Vance said. “You don’t know if the battle went well or poorly, what side won, what was behind the fight. It’s a personal visceral glimpse at war but it’s essentially value neutral.”
“You can read anything into it that you want, which is its power. There’s no fixed meaning,” Vance said.
“It’s got that Mona Lisa quality where you don’t quite know what he is thinking,” said Burtch.
When it was published in newspapers across North America, the photo quickly became famous as “The Face of War.” A Montreal Star story on July 4, 1952, for example, ran the caption: “Blood, grime and bone-deep weariness etch the face of Pte. Heath Matthews, 19, of 2315 Hingston Avenue, in this picture taken after he completed a combat patrol in Korea with the 1st Battalion Royal Canadian Regiment. Pte. Matthews, son of Mrs. Maude Matthews, was reported wounded June 24. His injuries were not believed serious.”
Many years later, in 1994, a Korean War exhibit at the Canadian War Museum would bring to light the minor controversy over the soldier’s identity.
Pte. Herbert Norris of Kingston, Ont., was also a signaller in Charles Company in Korea, and had been giving talks about the war and identifying himself as subject of The Face of War. This came to wide attention through media coverage of the exhibit, including the museum’s presentation of a framed print to Norris at a gala. Faced with a growing scandal, the museum looked more closely into it, and based on evidence from archives, police facial recognition experts, and the confirmation of both Tomelin and the person who processed the film, concluded they had made a mistake. The Face of War was Matthews.
It left Norris feeling disrespected, he would later tell the Kingston Whig-Standard. He was not the only Korea veteran to feel this way. Even during the war, when U.S. President Harry Truman called it a “police action,” rather than a war that had not been formally declared, many veterans of Korea felt their contributions were inadequately respected.
“That really stuck in the craw of a lot of veterans to hear it characterized that way,” Burtch said.
Korea was an unpopular war, and Sayle said it was a main reason the Democrats lost the 1952 U.S. election. It was especially worrying to Canada, though in a slightly different way, Sayle said.
The Korean War was “exceptionally significant” in international relations, Sayle said. It transformed European security. It led to the deployment of Canadian and American forces in Europe with NATO, anticipating conflict with the Soviet Union.
“The actual continental commitment begins because of the attack in Korea,” Sayle said.
So Canadians were alarmed to see American forces bombing defenceless villages in Korea, and came to wonder whether they would also fight that way if hot war came again to Europe. The concern reached the cabinet level, and Sayle shared a declassified message from Canada’s minister of national defence to his American counterparts, warning of the “magnificent ammunition” for enemy propaganda and the risk to military morale posed by using heavy artillery and large bombers against villages; by naming missions things like “Operation Killer;” and by using racist slurs for South Koreans, the same ones that would later be notorious among American soldiers in Vietnam.
There is a valid argument to be made that Canada was fighting to protect South Korea, Sayle said, but the way the conflict played out “robs the war of any satisfying heroic narrative, especially because it ends in armistice rather than true peace. There’s no closure for the public. There’s no celebration, no Victory in Korea day,” Sayle said.
Over the following years, as Korea slipped from immediate memory into modern history, there was another shooting war in Southeast Asia that coloured its remembrance. Korea was in that sense “in the shadow of Vietnam,” Sayle said.
In the 1980s and 1990s, when there was an “explosion of memory” of the Second World War, as Sayle puts it, this sharpened the contrast with Korea, leaving its veterans sometimes overlooked, out of the Remembrance Day spotlight.
“Just because of the historical nature and context I think we can understand why it was forgotten, but that doesn’t excuse the forgetting of these veterans and their experiences,” Sayle said. As this photo illustrates and reminds, any individual soldier’s experience of war is “indivisible,” Sayle said.
Seventy-five years since the forgotten war began, this photo is still able to convey that experience, and to imprint it in the Canadian memory.
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