| Lieutenant Wayne Miller (September 19, 1918 – May 22, 2013) relaxes in his quarters on the USS Ticonderoga (CV-14). Miller was just out of college when he joined the Navy in late 1941. He had reported to the Bureau of Aeronautics as a brand-new ensign in early 1942, shortly after completing officer indoctrination school. Miller became part of Commander Edward Steichen’s (March 27, 1879 – March 25, 1973) Naval Aviation Photographic Unit. Lieutenant Wayne Miller, a budding photographer who was already working at the Bureau of Aeronautics when Steichen got his commission, put the unit together, and it grew the most during the war under Steichen’s direction. On USS Saratoga (CV-3) for the Rabaul raids in October 1943, Photographer’s Mate 1st Class Paul T. Barnett asked Miller to trade places with him in Saratoga’s Air Group Commanding Officer, United States Navy Commander Henry H. Caldwell’s (October 3, 1905 – March 22, 1985) TBM Avenger. Barnett was killed in action, his camera recording the last shot of a Mitsubishi A6M 0 fighter closing in. Miller later photographed the devastation at Hiroshima. Miller was among the 1st Western photographers to document the destruction. He later said, “Another war scene. I didn’t suffer any great impact, saying, ‘Oh, my God.’ Nothing like that. The place had been bombed, destroyed. I had seen other things not unlike that. As I understand it, this atomic bomb was kind of like a large incendiary bomb. It didn’t dig a hole in the ground; it just exploded above the ground, blowing things apart and burning everything up. Well, Tokyo and Yokohama suffered equal, maybe comparable damage, and I understand that there may have been an even greater loss of life in Tokyo than there was in Hiroshima during the war. So you’re dealing with destruction, which is hard to comprehend. Hiroshima didn’t stand out. Anyway, I didn’t react to it. [The flies] could be blood, but I think it’s just flies. It was September 1, and the air was humid. It was a great fly season. You can see this older woman lying there, and somebody has brought her a letter of some sort. I think somebody’s even interpreted some of those words on there. So she’s just lying alone, and I have no idea how they got there or what it was about.” United States Navy Lieutenant Miller went ashore to document the occupation troops taking control of Japanese facilities. Defying orders, he and a civilian correspondent from Time magazine caught a train in an attempt to get to Hiroshima to document the atomic-bomb damage. In every town he passed on his way south, Miller saw soldiers waiting for trains and made many images of these Japanese warriors trying to make their way home. “I was not prepared for the horrors we saw in Hiroshima,” Miller recalled. “The devastation was the ultimate denial of sanity and not something I will ever forget.” Making his way back to Tokyo, Miller located and photographed many former American Prisoners of War before September 12, when Miller left Tokyo Harbor, bound for Saipan. – In 1947, Steichen became the curator of photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, a position he held until 1962. During this period, he and 1 of his Navy group, Wayne Miller, created photography’s greatest exhibit, The Family of Man, which consisted of 503 photographs from 68 nations that expressed the humanity that unites all the peoples of the world. The recipient of 2 Guggenheim Fellowships in 1946-1948, he photographed for LIFE Magazine, Magnum Photos, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Miller and Steichen would remain friends until the elder man died in the early 1970s. | |
| Image Filename | wwii2268.jpg |
| Image Size | 907.35 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 2367 x 2459 |
| Photographer | Wayne Miller |
| Photographer Title | United States Navy |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | January 1, 1944 |
| Location | |
| City | |
| State or Province | |
| Country | Pacific Ocean |
| Archive | National Archives and Records Administration |
| Record Number | NWDNS-80-G-468286 |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
Author of the World War II Multimedia Database