Camera and carbine were the tools of the photo company. PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY

American photographer Sydney Greenberg spent World War II roaming the countryside of southern China carrying a carbine in one hand and a camera in the other.

As a member of the U.S. Army’s 164th Signal Photo Company, his job was to record in images the China-Burma-India Theater (CBI), one of the toughest but least-reported battlegrounds.

Between 1943 and ’45, he took thousands of photos, many of them tinged with warmth and including idyllic landscapes where the war might be suggested only by the presence of one soldier.

“Most of my dad’s images show how the Chinese had tried to stabilize life a little bit within a war zone, and how they dealt with everyday life as it appeared in front of them,” his son, Philip, wrote in an email to China Daily. “He photographed the people around him who were part of his life and part of the war.”

Sydney Greenberg, who died in January 2012, arrived in China in the southwestern city of Kunming and was “welcomed by another air raid,” he wrote in his diary. He was 23 at the time and had just spent more than a month at sea with his comrades in the 164th. When the vessel reached India, the 250-strong company — officers, soldiers of other ranks, photographers and darkroom technicians — was divided into two groups: One stayed in India, the other headed to China.