One of Horace Bristol's most iconic works and an image that has come to represent the heroism of soldiers during World War II is the masterful PBY Blister Gunner, Rescue at Rabaul. Bristol worked as one of five select photographers to document the war under Edward Steichen. While on a mission to bring back a downed Marine from Rabaul Harbor, Papua New Guinea, Bristol captured the moment in which a naked Marine mans a machine gun in the transparent dome on the fuselage of an airplane, the “blister”. In 2002, he told the story of the photograph during an interview with B&W Magazine,
…We got a call to pick up an airman who was down in the Bay. The Japanese were shooting at him from the island, and when they saw us they started shooting at us. The man who was shot down was temporarily blinded, so one of our crew stripped off his clothes and jumped in to bring him aboard. He couldn’t have swum very well wearing his boots and clothes. As soon as we could, we took off. We weren’t waiting around for anybody to put on formal clothes. We were being shot at and wanted to get the hell out of there. The naked man got back into his position at his gun in the blister of the plane.
