Refugees Cross Broken Bridge: Korean War's Human Cost

Max Desfor waded into freezing water with his camera as hundreds of North Koreans crawled across twisted steel girders, all that remained of a bombed railroad bridge over the Taedong River. Chinese forces were hours behind them. Parents passed children hand-to-hand above the ice. One woman carried her belongings in her teeth. Desfor shot eighteen frames before his hands went numb. The image won the Pulitzer, but it haunted him: he never learned if the people in his photograph survived. The bridge, near Pyongyang, was destroyed again weeks later. Desfor was a veteran Associated Press photographer who had covered the Pacific theater in World War II before being assigned to Korea. On December 4, 1950, he encountered the scene at the Taedong River as hundreds of refugees attempted to flee southward ahead of the Chinese advance on Pyongyang. The railroad bridge had been partially destroyed by bombing, leaving only the steel trusses spanning the frozen river. Refugees, including elderly men, women carrying infants, and children, were climbing across the twisted metal framework, some clinging to girders twenty feet above the ice with nothing but their hands and the clothing on their backs. Desfor photographed the scene from multiple angles, including wading into the partially frozen river to shoot from below. His photograph, "Flight of Refugees Across Wrecked Bridge in Korea," showed the silhouettes of refugees clinging to the bridge structure against a winter sky, an image that captured the human cost of the war with extraordinary emotional power. The photograph won the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for Photography and became one of the defining images of the Korean War. Desfor, who continued working as an AP photographer for decades, said in later interviews that he always wondered whether the people he photographed made it to safety. He died in 2018 at the age of 104.