Born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1922, Joe O'Donnell enlisted in the Marines shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Having acquired his photography skills while working for the Johnstown Tribune, Joe was assigned the job of Marine Corps combat photographer.
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In 1945, while stationed in the South Pacific aboard the USS Thomas Jefferson, Joe learned that two bombs of horrendous power had been dropped on Japan and that the war would most likely come to a swift end.
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For Joe however, the end of the war was only just the beginning.
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For the next six months O'Donnell traveled all over Japan while documenting the devastation brought upon by the Allied force's firebombs and ultimately, by the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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Knowing he was witnessing something historically important, Joe developed duplicate images of the bombs' wrath. The first sets were sent back to the United States via Pearl Harbor, the duplicates he kept for himself.
After his honorable discharge in March of 1946, Joe locked the photographs inside his Marine Corps trunks - and that's where they stayed for the next fifty years. During the interim O'Donnell had a successful career working for the United States Information Agency where he photographed five Presidential administrations.
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During what should have been his golden years - and after a long and personal battle trying to repress what he had witnessed - Joe felt compelled to show the world what it was like in Post-atomic Japan.
O'Donnell enlarged over fifty of his photographs and created an exhibit to promote peace and the abolishment of all things nuclear. Until he opened the trunks, none of his photographs had ever been published by the government nor seen by the public eye.
The exhibit traveled extensively throughout Japan and Europe where it was widely accepted and lauded as "Tragic Art." In the United States however, the photographs weren't always welcomed, especially among fellow veterans. No stranger to controversy O'Donnell persisted that the atomic bombing of Japan was a crime against history and humanity and that without peace, our future would be futile and naught.
Joe O'Donnell died on the 9th of August, 2007, on the 62nd anniversary of the atomic bomb being dropped on Nagasaki.
Joe's memory and vision are being kept alive through his photographs, exhibits, his book and this website by his widow Kimiko Sakai of Nashville, Tennessee.
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