23. The Saipan Stare Marine
Towards the close of the 1944 Battle of Saipan, photographer W. Eugene Smith snapped a photo of a US Marine rifleman that captured the weariness and wariness of combat as few photos have before or since. The image appeared in LIFE Magazine, and subsequently became famous as ‘The Saipan Stare’. Unfortunately, a controversy about the identity of the photo’s subject erupted decades later, when a Santa Fe bar owner claimed that it was of his father, Angelo Klonis.
The son believed that his father had been an OSS operative and that the photo was taken in Europe, not Saipan. The claims were initially taken at face value, but subsequent research debunked them. According to wartime records, Klonis was not an OSS operative, but a cook whose unit’s baptism of fire occurred in France, two days after the iconic photograph was taken on the opposite side of the globe in Saipan. So who was the subject of the iconic photo?
