In two years of global warfare, America had yet to see almost any pictures of dead Americans.

Then, in September 1943, an issue of Life magazine arrived in people’s homes and at their corner newsstands. It forced them to confront a stark, full-page picture by George Strock that showed three American servicemen sprawled on Buna Beach in New Guinea; two face down, one supine; their lifelessness unmistakable even in a still photograph.

On the facing page, Life’s editors said they had been fighting since February to get a picture past government censors at the Office of War Information, headed by Elmer Davis.

“Well, this is the picture,” they declared. “And the reason we print it now is that, last week, President Roosevelt and Elmer Davis and the War Department decided that the American people ought to be able to see their own boys as they fall in battle; to come directly and without words into the presence of their own dead.”

The Washington Post, for one, celebrated the new policy. In an editorial on Sept. 11, it said:

An overdose of such photographs would be unhealthy. But in proper proportion they can help us to understand something of what has been sacrificed for the victories we have won. Against a tough and resourceful enemy, every gain entails a cost. To gloss over this grim fact is to blur our vision. If we are to behave as adults in meeting our civilian responsibilities, we must be treated as adults. This means simply that we must be given the truth without regard to fears about how we may react to it.

Having said that, however, The Post added that it could not “wholly avoid the suspicion that the government is now letting us see something of the grimmer side of war because it considers us overoptimistic.” So even then, the issue was far from being clearly resolved.

And 66 years later, the fundamental question — is it a vital public service or a betrayal of public trust to graphically depict wartime casualties among American troops? — has scarcely been settled. Witness the impassioned recent debate over a decision by The Associated Press to release a picture taken by Julie Jacobson of a mortally wounded marine in Afghanistan.

There was little debate, however, among some of the leading figures in photography whom Lens contacted recently.

“I think the A.P. was absolutely correct in this decision,” said Dirck Halstead, the editor and publisher of The Digital Journalist, who was United Press International’s photo bureau chief in Saigon in 1965 and 1966.

Don McCullin, who covered the war in Indochina for The Sunday Times of London, said, “She probably did the right thing because, otherwise, why is she there?”

“Nobody wants to take pictures like that, but the reason you’re there is to cover the story,” said David Hume Kennerly, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for his photography of the Vietnam War for U.P.I. “To me, it’s not even a gray area.”

John G. Morris, a former picture editor of The New York Times and The Washington Post, and the author of “Get the Picture,” said, “I emphatically agree with the thinking of the photographer, of the editors of Associated Press and of The New York Times that this photograph is publishable.”

Many readers objected, all the same. Besides the disturbing nature of Ms. Jacobson’s picture, and the fact that the A.P. distributed it against the wishes of the marine’s father (echoed emphatically by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates), what helped fuel the debate was the fact that such pictures have rarely been seen in recent years from Iraq and Afghanistan.

This was not the case during the Vietnam War.

“We were given carte blanche, and now that would be classified as unacceptable,” Mr. McCullin recalled. He photographed dying American soldiers, helped transport a wounded soldier in a stretcher off the battlefield in Hue and was himself injured in Cambodia. “I took exactly the same risks that they took,” he said.

Mr. Halstead had a similar recollection. “Vietnam was a total free-for-all,” he said.

“Our job was to be there to take photographs of whatever happened in front of us,” he said. “Our core mission was to record history. We had to file based on the merits of the picture. I always take the position that the end decision was taken by the newspaper or magazine to run a photo. We supplied the photographs and they decided what to publish.”

Mr. Halstead put his finger on a significant point: whether at Buna Beach or in Hue or Helmand Province, a photographer is more likely to catch the aftermath of an engagement than the heat of battle — during which plain survival becomes a high priority for noncombatants.

“In Vietnam, unfortunately, most of the soldiers that were hit were dead,” Mr. Halstead said. “I certainly photographed too many of those. All you have to do is look at Henri Huet’s photos. In all the cases, the soldiers are being helped by medics.

“That is the heart of war coverage. There are few photographs of soldiers fighting. If there is hand-to-hand combat, chances are that you’re not taking pictures. In the course of war photography, you rarely see pictures of soldier fighting in close contact with the enemy like you see in the movies.”

A key difference between Mr. Strock’s photo and that taken by Ms. Jacobson last month was that the faces of the dead were obscured on the beach. The marine whom Ms. Jacobson photographed moments after he was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in a Taliban ambush was all too recognizable as Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard, 21, whose father implored the A.P. not to distribute the picture. Most readers of Lens who objected to the release of the photograph did so on that basis.

Ms. Jacobson’s photo was not, however, the first widely published picture of a mortally wounded, identifiable American serviceman.

A much earlier example was a photograph taken by Larry Burrows that served as the cover of Life magazine on Apr. 16, 1965. Mr. Burrows was following Lance Cpl. James C. Farley of the Marines, the crew chief of helicopter Yankee Papa 13. He was aboard the aircraft at Da Nang when the squadron was attacked by the Vietcong. Under fire, Lt. James E. Magel was mortally wounded. He can be seen in the pictures lying inert at the feet of Corporal Farley.

Mr. Burrows died over Laos six years later when the helicopter carrying him and three other photographers, Mr. Huet among them, was shot down. He was 44.

His son, Russell, was 22 at the time. He remembers that Lieutenant Magel’s mother reached out to his family in sympathy. “My mother received a letter from his mother which basically said that she’d cancelled her subscription to Life immediately and hadn’t looked at the magazine between that time and 1965,” Russell Burrows said. Then, in 1971, she’d inadvertently picked up a copy of Life at the hairdresser’s and learned that the man who photographed her dying son had himself been killed in the war.

The younger Mr. Burrows said he also received a message from Lieutenant Magel’s mother. “The point of her letter was to say that she was belatedly grateful for anything my father had been able to do to help her son in the last moments of his life,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to talk to her.”

Photographically what Mr. Burrows did try to do — as was his custom, his son said — was to obscure the lieutenant’s face somewhat. “He was trying to present the war in a way that it would reach people,” Russell Burrows said, “as opposed to a way that would so horrify them that they would shut down and not see the pictures.”

He did, however, want his pictures to have an impact. Mr. Burrows’s guiding philosophy was paraphrased by his son: “In the end, it comes across as a little trite but essentially it was that if he could show the interested and shock the uninterested into seeing something like the horrors of war, he’d done his job.”

That is not to say photographers and editors exercised no restraint. “We endeavored not to show anybody’s face,” Mr. Kennerly recalled. “It’s not like going to a car race, hoping there’s a wreck. I don’t know of any photographer who’s gone into combat hoping to see somebody get shot.”

Mr. Morris was Life’s London picture editor during World War II and said he had suppressed many photographs for reasons of taste. “Who wants to inflict pictures of headless corpses on readers?” he asked.

But he said he is generally an advocate of the unblinking depiction of combat and its consequences.

“As picture editor of The New York Times during the Vietnam War,” Mr. Morris said, “I argued for prominent usage of the pictures by the A.P.’s Eddie Adams of the execution of a Vietcong suspect, for the publication of the photo by the A.P.’s Nick Ut of a naked Cambodian girl running from napalm, of the picture by John Filo of the shooting of a student at Kent State by National Guardsmen.

“If those pictures helped turned the world against continuation of the Vietnam war I am glad,” he wrote in an e-mail message from Paris. “If Julie Jacobson’s picture awakens even a few more of our fellow citizens to the necessity of finding a non-military solution in Afghanistan, I shall be eternally grateful.”

That sort of sentiment, of course, is exactly what animates many critics of the press. Judging from comments to the Lens blog, a large number of readers believe that journalists who insist on depicting the “horrors of war” are, in fact, advocating a pacifist political agenda — with one eye on a Pulitzer.

“I would say that in my last trip in Afghanistan, in July, soldiers were markedly more hostile and suspicious towards me as a journalist than had been the case in earlier years,” said Michael Kamber, a photographer whose work is frequently published in The Times. “Not sure where this comes from, but there’s no doubt in my mind. In Iraq, particularly in the early years, they were quite welcoming. The hostility has ratcheted up noticeably.”

Sounding as if he had just read the 1943 Washington Post editorial (he hadn’t), Mr. Kamber added: “People have attacked me for being unpatriotic for publishing pictures of wounded and dead Americans. I find this strange. Press control — censorship — is something that happens in Communist China, in Russia. One of the cornerstones of our democracy is freedom of the press. As journalists, we need to be able to work openly and publish photos that reflect reality so that the public and government officials have an accurate idea of what is going on. They can make decisions accordingly.”

Thirty years earlier, Mr. McCullin was moved by much the same spirit. “I wasn’t looking to become rich,” he said by telephone from his home in rural Somerset, England. “I was just looking to make people aware of the suffering and price of war. It does not come cheap. People must be informed. Unfortunately, it’s the family of the soldiers who pick up the bill at the end of the day. It’s not the photographer who’s responsible. It’s the government of the nations who declare war.”

And then he said something wholly unexpected.

“I feel I totally wasted a large part of my life following war. I get more pleasure photographing the landscape around my house in my twilight years.

“Have we learned any lessons from the countless pictures of pain and suffering? I don’t think we’ve learned anything. Every year, there’s more war and suffering.”