Somewhere in South Korea, March 1951: The original caption of this image — captured by U.S. Army photographer D.C. Miller and published in the Pacific Stars and Stripes March 11, 1951 — read “Reach for the sky — This Chinese Red soldier is searched for concealed weapons by an infantryman of the 19th Infantry Regiment, 24th Division. Note the ragged quilted winter clothing worn by the captured Communist.”

Apart from images captured by our own staff photographers, Pacific Stars and Stripes’ archives also holds photo prints of images published in our paper but taken by military photographers not assigned to Stars and Stripes.

Although we prioritize the preservation and scanning of our own material, given their historic importance we made an exception for the images in our collection of the Korean War taken by these military photographers. Few of our own images from that war survived as all pre-1964 Stars and Stripes Pacific negatives and slides were unwittingly destroyed by poor temporary storage in 1963. The prints created by Stars and Stripes Pacific’s photo department to run in the print newspaper are the only images left of Stripes’ news photography from those early decades.

In this month of the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement, we share some of these historic images with you.

Looking for Stars and Stripes’ coverage of the Korean War? Subscribe to Stars and Stripes’ historic newspaper archive! We have digitized our 1948-1999 European and Pacific editions, as well as several of our WWII editions and made them available online through https://starsandstripes.newspaperarchive.com/