Men of the 16th Infantry Regiment seek shelter from German machine-gun fire in shallow water

behind "Czech hedgehog" beach obstacles, Easy Red sector, Omaha Beach.
© Robert Capa/Magnum Photos.

The Magnificent Eleven: The D-Day

Photographs of Robert Capa
"The war correspondent has his
stake — his life — in his own The Photographer: Bob Capa
hands, and he can put it on this
horse or that horse, or he can
When soldiers of the 16th Regiment of the 1st
put it back in his pocket at the Infantry Division landed at Omaha Beach on June 6,
very last minute ... I am a
gambler. I decided to go in with
1944, photographer Robert Capa, in the employ of LIFE
Company E in the first wave." magazine, was among them.

– Robert Capa
Perhaps the best
known of all World War II
combat photographers,
the Hungarian-born Capa
The ten photos selected from
the eleven surviving negatives had made a name for
and published by LIFE on June himself well before
19, 1944 ...
climbing into a landing
craft with men of
Company E in the early
morning hours of D-Day.
He risked his life on more
than one occasion during
the Spanish Civil War and
had taken what is
considered the most
eerily fascinating of all war photographs. The famous
image reportedly depicts the death of Spanish Loyalist
militiaman Frederico Borrell Garcia as he is struck in the
chest by a Nationalist bullet on a barren Iberian hillside.

Capa was known to say, "If your pictures aren't good

enough, you aren't close enough." On D-Day, he came
close once again. With Capa standing in the very stern,
his landing craft mistakenly came ashore at the section
of Omaha Beach dubbed "Easy Red." Then the ramp
went down.

"The flat bottom of our barge hit the earth of France,"

Capa remembered in his book Slightly Out of Focus.
"The boatswain lowered the steel-covered barge front,
and there, between the grotesque designs of steel
obstacles sticking out of the water, was a thin line of
land covered with smoke — our Europe, the 'Easy Red'
beach.

"My beautiful France looked sordid and uninviting,

and a German machine gun, spitting bullets around the
barge, fully spoiled my return. The men from my barge
waded in the water. Waist-deep, with rifles ready to
shoot, with the invasion obstacles and the smoking
beach in the background gangplank to take my first real
picture of the invasion. The boatswain, who was in an
understandable hurry to get the hell out of there,
mistook my picture-taking attitude for explicable
hesitation, and helped me make up my mind with a
well-aimed kick in the rear. The water was cold, and the
beach still more than a hundred yards away. The bullets
tore holes in the water around me, and I made for the
nearest steel obstacle. A soldier got there at the same
time, and for a few minutes we shared its cover. He
took the waterproofing off his rifle and began to shoot
without much aiming at the smoke-hidden beach. The
sound of his rifle gave him enough courage to move
forward, and he left the obstacle to me. It was a foot
larger now, and I felt safe enough to take pictures of
the other guys hiding just like I was."

Capa was squeezing off photographs as he headed for

a disabled American tank. He remembered feeling "a
new kind of fear shaking my body from toe to hair, and
twisting my face." With great difficulty his trembling
hands reloaded his camera. All the while he repeated a
sentence that he had picked up during the Spanish Civil
War: "Es una cosa muy seria" ("This is a very serious
 business").

After what seemed an eternity, Capa turned away

from the beach killing zone and spotted an incoming LCI
(landing craft, infantry). He headed for it. "I did not
think and I didn't decide it," he later wrote. "I just stood
up and ran toward the boat. I knew that I was running
away. I tried to turn but couldn't face the beach and
told myself, 'I am just going to dry my hands on that
boat.'"

With his cameras held high to keep them from getting

waterlogged, Capa was pulled aboard the LCI and was
soon out of harm's way. He had used three rolls of film
and exposed 106 frames. After reaching England, he
sped by train to London and delivered his precious film
for developing.

A darkroom technician was almost as anxious to see

the invasion images as Capa himself. In his haste, the
technician dried the film too quickly. The excess heat
melted the emulsion on all but 10 of the frames. Those
that remained were blurred, surreal shots, which
succinctly conveyed the chaos and confusion of the day.

The debate continues ...

A Capa photo of Omaha Beach several

days after the landings.

Capa's D-Day photos have become classics. One of

them, depicting a GI struggling through the churning
surf of Omaha Beach, has survived as the definitive
image of the Normandy invasion. He went on to
photograph the Arab-Israeli war in 1948. He also
photographed his friends Ernest Hemingway and Pablo
Picasso, as well as film star Ingrid Bergman, with whom
he reportedly had a love affair.
 After that, having cheated death so many times, Capa
vowed never to risk his life in wartime photography
again. In 1954, however, he agreed to supply LIFE with
some photos of the escalating conflict between the
French and the Viet Minh in Indochina. That spring,
while attempting to get as close to the fighting as
possible, he stepped on a land mine and was killed at
the age of 40.

Capa's shot of a victorious Yank graced the May 14, 1945 cover of LIFE.

Robert Capa is one of many wartime photographers

who have risked their lives and made the ultimate
sacrifice to capture the essence of desperate combat on
film. Frozen in time and etched in our collective
memory, the D-Day photos speak volumes about
courage and sacrifice.
Reprinted from World War II Magazine
 to top of page

The Editor: John Morris

Something woke me early on the morning of
Tuesday, June 6, 1944. I drew the blackout curtain and
saw that it was just another dull, gray day, colder than
an English spring had any right to be. The streets were
empty, and I was alone in the flat I shared with Frank
Scherschel on Upper Wimpole Street in London's West
End. He had departed — vanished, actually, without
saying a word — several days earlier for his battle
station, a camouflaged airfield from which he would fly
reconnaissance over the English Channel to
photograph the largest armada ever assembled. My
job was to stay behind, to edit those and other photos
for LIFE as picture editor of the London bureau.
John G. Morris, 1998
"I had rehearsed my part in every
detail, from the moment the raw I dressed as usual in olive drab, turned on the radio,
film arrived in London to the made tea and read the papers, which of course had
transfer of prints and negatives
to the courier who would take nothing to report. Then, at 8:32 London time, the
them to the States — with a stop bulletin came over the BBC:
at the censor's office in
between."
"Under command of General Eisenhower,
– John G. Morris Allied naval forces, supported by strong
Allied air forces, began landing Allied
"Dennis came bounding up the
stairs and into my office, armies this morning on the northern coast
sobbing. 'They're ruined! Ruined! of France."
Capa's films are all ruined!'"

– John G. Morris "This is it," I whispered to myself, uttering the very

words that Joe Liebling of The New Yorker later called
"the great cliché of the Second World War." I hurried to
the TIME-LIFE office in Soho, even though there
wouldn't be much for me to do — for many hours, as it
turned out.

I had been waiting eight months for this day. There

had been a false alarm on Saturday, when a young
telegrapher in the Associated Press London bureau,
practicing to get up her speed, had put out an
erroneous bulletin:

URGENT PRESS ASSOCIATED NYK FLASH

EISENHOWER'S HQ ANNOUNCED ALLIED
LANDINGS IN FRANCE

It had been corrected within a minute — "Bust that

flash" — but it had sent a wave of panic through both
Allied and German headquarters. Now it was for real.
Tuesday was a good D-Day for LIFE. Our job was to
furnish action pictures for the next issue, dated June
19, which would close on Saturday in New York, and
appear the following week. Wirephotos, of poor quality
and limited selection, would not do; besides, they
would be available to newspapers through the pool.
Our only hope to meet the deadline was to send
original prints and negatives, as many as possible, in a
pouch that would leave Grosvenor Square by
motorcycle courier at precisely 9:00 a.m. London time
on Thursday. The courier would take it to a twin-
engine plane standing by at an airdrome near London.
At Prestwick, Scotland, the base for transatlantic
flights, the pouch would be transferred to a larger
plane. After one or two fuel stops, it would arrive in
Washington, D.C., and our pictures would be hand-
carried to New York on Saturday.

I had rehearsed my part in every detail, from the

moment the raw film arrived in London to the transfer
of prints and negatives to the courier who would take
them to the States — with a stop at the censor's office
in between. Clearing the censors at the Ministry of
Information was by now a familiar routine. Their office
was on the ground floor of the University of London's
tall central building, which backed onto Bedford
Square. Available twenty-four hours a day, the censors
were cooperative, as censors go, permitting us to sit
alongside them as they worked. Our photographers
knew to avoid the faces of Allied dead, shoulder
patches that revealed unit designations, and "secret"
weapons (although by now most were known to the
enemy) — so the work was for the most part pro
forma. But it was tedious in the extreme, since every
single print had to be stamped, after which the censor
bundled all the acceptable material into an envelope
and sealed it, using a special tape imprinted with the
words PASSED FOR PUBLICATION. Without the tape, it
could not leave the country.

Getting the packet by car to the courier at Grosvenor

Square, about a mile from the ministry, looked simple
on the map, but the most direct way, down Oxford
Street, was often jammed with double-decker buses,
so I devised a parallel route on a series of side streets:
Hollen to Noel to Great Marlborough to Hanover to
Brook (I can remember every turn five decades later).
This put me onto the wrong side of Grosvenor Square,
but the final fifty yards could be covered on foot —
while running at top speed. I left the little two-door
Austin sedan Time Inc. had given me to its own fate. It
was not uncommon for joyriders to take it out for a
spin when I worked late, but that was no problem. A
call to Scotland Yard was all that was necessary. The
car would invariably be found as soon as the thief ran
out of what little petrol was in the tank.

For the Normandy

invasion, there
were twelve
photographers
accredited for the
wire services and
six for LIFE. (In the
photo at left, taken
one week before
disembarkation in
Normandy, are
(top) from left to
right: Bob Landry, George Rodger, Frank Scherschel,
and Bob Capa. Bottom, John Morris (Editor) stands
between Ralph Morse and David Scherman.) Only four
press photographers were supposed to land with the
first wave of American infantry on D-Day itself, and we
managed to get two of the spots, for Bob Landry and
Robert Capa. Both were veterans — Capa would be on
the fifth front of his third major war. Although often
unlucky at cards and horses, Capa nevertheless used a
gambling metaphor to describe his situation on D-Day
in his 1947 memoir-novel, Slightly Out of Focus: "The
war correspondent has his stake — his life — in his
own hands, and he can put it on this horse or that
horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very
last minute ... I am a gambler. I decided to go in with
Company E in the first wave."

Bob Landry also felt obliged to accept this dubious

privilege. The other LIFE assignments sorted
themselves out. Frank Scherschel stuck with his
buddies in the Air Force. David Scherman chose the
Navy. George Rodger accompanied the British forces,
under General Bernard Montgomery. Ralph Morse's
assignment was General George Patton's Third Army,
but since it would not hit the beachhead until later, he
boarded a landing ship whose job it was to pick up
casualties — of which there would be plenty.

Who would get the first picture? Bad weather

prevented good general views from either air
(Scherschel) or sea (Scherman). Rodger, landing with
the British on an undefended beach, "walked ashore in
a blaze of anti-climax," as he put it in typically modest
understatement. All day Tuesday we waited, and no
pictures. It was rumored that one Signal Corps
photographer had been killed in the first hours, but it
turned out that he had "only" lost a leg. Late on
Tuesday night Bert Brandt of Acme Newspictures,
having scarcely gotten his feet wet, returned to
London with a first picture!, but not a terribly exciting
one, of a momentarily unopposed landing on the
French coast, shot from the bow of his landing craft.
Landry's film — and his shoes — somehow got lost. A
disaster. I had been told that AP would have the fourth
first-wave spot, but not one of their six photographers
landed that day. So it was entirely up to Capa to
capture the action, and where was he? Hour after hour
went by. We were now waiting in the gloom of
Wednesday, June 7, keeping busy by packaging the
"background pictures," all of relatively little interest,
that now flooded in from official sources. The
darkroom staff — all five of them — had been standing
by idly since Tuesday morning, their anxiety about the
pressure they would be under growing steadily by the
hour. This nervousness would soon result in an epic
blunder.

At about 6:30 Wednesday evening, the call came in

from a Channel port: Capa's film was on the way. "You
should get it in an hour or two," a voice crackled over
the line before fading into static. I shared this
information with pool editor E. K. Butler of AP, a feisty
little martinet whose nickname was "Colonel." He
snapped back, "All I want is pictures, not promises!"
Around nine, a panting messenger arrived with Capa's
little package: four rolls of 35-millimeter film plus half
a dozen rolls of 120 film (2 1/4 by 2 1/4 inches) that
he had taken in England and on the Channel crossing.
A scrawled note said that the action was all in the 35-
millimeter, that things had been very rough, that he
had come back to England unintentionally with
wounded being evacuated, and that he was on his way
back to Normandy.

Braddy, our lab chief, gave the film to young Dennis

Banks to develop. Photographer Hans Wild looked at it
wet and called up to me to say that the 35-millimeter,
though grainy, looked "fabulous!" I replied, "We need
contacts - rush, rush, rush!" Again I phoned Butler
through the AP switchboard, but he could only bellow,
"When do I get pictures?" Brandt's wirephoto of troops
landing apparently unopposed had scarcely satisfied
the West's desperate need to believe in the actuality of
invasion. A few minutes later Dennis came bounding
up the stairs and into my office, sobbing. "They're
ruined! Ruined! Capa's films are all ruined!"
Incredulous, I rushed down to the darkroom with him,
where he explained that he had hung the films, as
usual, in the wooden locker that served as a drying
cabinet, heated by a coil on the floor. Because of my
order to rush, he had closed the doors. Without
ventilation the emulsion had melted.

I held up the four rolls, one at a time. Three were

hopeless; nothing to see. But on the fourth roll there
were eleven frames with distinct images. They were
probably representative of the entire 35-millimeter
take, but their grainy imperfection — perhaps
enhanced by the lab accident — contributed to making
them among the most dramatic battlefield photos ever
taken. The sequence began as Capa waded through
the surf with the infantry, past antitank obstacles that
soon became tombstones as men fell left and right.
This was it, all right. D-Day would forever be known by
these pictures.

One more ordeal lay ahead. We now had only a few

hours to get our picture packet through the censors,
and in addition to Capa's we had hundreds of other
photos, the best from Dave Scherman of matters just
before the landing. The British and Canadians had
covered invasion preparations for days, as had the
U.S. Army Signal Corps and the Navy and Air Force
photographers. Nobody really cared now about such
pictures, but we dutifully sent them on.

At 3:30 on Thursday morning, pictures in hand —

including Capa's precious eleven — I drove my Austin
 through deserted streets to the Ministry of
Information, where I had to wait my turn. Ours was
the largest picture shipment of the week, and I almost
wished I could throw all but the Capa shots overboard
in the interest of time. Finally, about 8:30, the censor
finished putting his stamp on all the pictures. I stuffed
the big envelope, and then it happened. The censor's
specially imprinted tape stuck fast to its roll. It simply
would not peel off. We tried another roll. Same result.
This went on for minutes that seemed hours, and I had
to deliver the packet to the courier, a mile away, by
nine o'clock — our only chance to make the deadline
after eight months!

I left the ministry at about 8:45 and drove like a

maniac through the scattered morning traffic, down
the little side streets, reaching the edge of Grosvenor
Square at 8:59. I ran the last fifty yards and found the
courier, in the basement of the Service of Supply
headquarters, about to padlock his sack. "Hold it!" I
shouted, and he did.

Just after LIFE's Saturday-night close, the editors

cabled,

TODAY WAS ONE OF THE GREAT PICTURE

DAYS IN LIFE'S OFFICE, WHEN CAPA'S
BEACHLANDING AND OTHER SHOTS
ARRIVED.

I could only think of the pictures lost. How was I going

to face Capa?
Copyright © 1998 by John Godfrey Morris. All rights reserved.

to top of page

"All but eleven of Capa's

negatives were spoiled by an The Photos
overly eager darkroom worker
in the London office of Time
Inc. who turned up the heat in
the drying cabinet too high.
When LIFE published the
photographs, a caption
disingenously explained that
the 'immense excitement of
[the] moment made
photographer Capa move his
camera and blur [his] picture.'"
– Aperture Magazine

to top of page
 Who is the GI?
Who was the GI in the surf immortalized in Bob Capa's
most famous D-Day photo? Was it Edward Regan or
Alphonse Joseph Arsenault?

• The Case for Alphonse Joseph Arsenault

to top of page

[http://www.skylighters.org/photos/robertcapa.html]

How LIFE Covered D-Day

June 2004

by John G. Morris

Courtesy of The International Herald Tribune

June 6, 1944: In Remembrance

The nights had been quiet since February, but London was still
living under blackout that fateful spring of 1944. Street lights
emitted only moonlight. We drew thick curtains across our
windows at dusk. In February, night after night, up to a hundred
German planes had dropped bombs in the so-called "little blitz."
Censors revealed that 50,324 Britons had been killed so far in
the air war, and 163,075 wounded.

I shared a flat in the West End with Frank Scherschel, a Life

magazine photographer. I was his editor, but didn't think of
myself as his boss. Frank had crash-landed in Kent when
returning from covering a raid on Stuttgart in a Flying Fortress.
Thirty-five American planes were lost that day.

Our apartment at 24 Upper Wimpole Street belonged to a

dentist, who had evacuated his practice but not his hydraulic
dentist's chair. We were splendidly served by a downstairs
couple, Lloyd and his wife. Lloyd had been a professional
toastmaster for state occasions and during air raids he would
call up to us, "Gentlemen, would you care for a cup of tea?"
Meaning, get the hell downstairs, to take shelter in the
basement kitchen until the all-clear sounded.
Tuesday, June 6, began like any other
dull gray day, except that it was colder
than London had any right to be in June.
The alarm awakened me about eight. I
was alone. Frank had simply disappeared
a few days earlier, without saying
goodbye -- as he had been ordered not to
do. I knew he had reported to his Air
Force battle station. I went to the window,
drew the blackout curtains and looked
down on the quiet street. Then I made a
cup of tea and turned on the radio. Portrait of
photographer and
About 9:30 a bulletin came over BBC: journalist Robert
"Under the Command of General Capa (1914 - 1954)
Eisenhower, Allied naval forces, in a military style
supported by strong air forces, began jacket and helmet
landing Allied armies this morning on the as he leans in an
armored vehicle,
northern coast of France." "This is it," I Portsmouth,
muttered to myself, using the words that England, June 6,
Joe Liebling of The New Yorker later 1944. He carries a
called "the great cliche of the Second camera over his
World War." shoulder and has a
canteen on his left
hip.
I dressed and drove my little company Photo by David Scherman/Time Life
Austin to the office of Time and Life on Pictures/Getty Images

Dean Street, in the film district of Soho. At 27, I was already a

Life veteran. I had started as a CBOB (college boy office boy)
in the New York office on Rockefeller Plaza, had worked a bit in
Washington and a year in Los Angeles. I was there when the
Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, on my 25th birthday, and I
had scored a scoop when in February, 1942, a Japanese
submarine fired a round of shells into an oil storage depot near
Santa Barbara. My hand, holding a gorgeously jagged
Japanese shell fragment, made the frontispiece of Life.

In the fall of 1943, with the war at its worst, I had volunteered to
go to London, leaving behind my wife and daughter and a
healthy embryo. Thus I now had a six-months-old son I had
never seen. My wife and I parted, resolutely without tears, at
Grand Central. With John Scott of Time I took the train to Saint
John, New Brunswick, where we boarded a small Norwegian
freighter. Its young captain, a veteran of over fifty wartime
crossings, preferred to sail without convoy but that forced him
to detour almost to the Azores before we finally made port in
Liverpool.

My job in London, as I had been told in no uncertain terms over

a last drink in the Men's Bar of the Waldorf, was to "get the
pictures" of the eventual invasion of Western Europe. In the
days before television, Life called itself "America's most
powerful editorial force." We were shameless propagandists for
the Allied war effort. I was given a terrific team of six
photographers to cover the big day.
 It turned out that I was eight
months early. That gave us
plenty of time for feature
stories -- essays on The
Church of England and the
Houses of Parliament, news
stories on a by-election in
John Morris in the Time Life Derbyshire, on the Miss
office in London during D Day London Beauty Contest, on
Photograph courtesy John Morris collection
Irving Berlin's "This is the
Army" when he and it played the Palladium, and on the funeral
of Sir Dudley Pound, where I saw Winston Churchill walk
quietly in the cortege.

We also managed to enjoy ourselves. We ate well on expense

accounts, and drew the same cigarette rations as officers -- war
correspondents had the "assimilated rank" of captain in case of
capture. There were lunches at The White Tower and parties at
The Dorchester. The most memorable party was one given by
Life photographer Robert Capa, the legendary war
photographer, to honor his friend Ernest "Papa" Hemingway, a
correspondent for Collier's. They had covered the Spanish Civil
War together. The party lasted until four, when the punch ran
out. "Papa" ended up in hospital after being driven into a water
storage tank on the way home.

Capa would once more make history. Life belonged to a photo

pool, with the three picture wire services, who added another
twelve photographers to Life's six. Capa, however, was the only
press photographer who managed to go in with the first wave
of infantry on D-Day. He landed at dawn with Company E of the
2nd Battalion of the l6th Regiment of the 1st Division on the
"Easy Red" section of the beach code-named "Omaha," near
Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer in Normandy. His memoir Slightly Out of
Focus light-heartedly described his landing: "My beautiful
France looked sordid and uninviting, and a German machine
gun, spitting bullets around the barge, fully spoiled my return.
The men from my barge waded in the water. Waist-deep, with
rifles ready to shoot, with the invasion obstacles and the
smoking beach in the background." Things soon went from bad
to horrible. After shooting four rolls of film, Capa "had it bad,"
and made it back to England with a shipload of wounded, only
to immediately return to Normandy after handing off his film.

Back in London we waited. No word from our photographers all

day Tuesday. That night Bert Brandt of Planet/ Acme, the
United Press picture wire service, returned to London with a
"first picture" taken from a landing craft. It only whetted the
public appetite for action pictures.

All day Wednesday we waited, until finally about six in the

evening I got a call saying that Capa's film was on the way to
London from "a channel port" by courier. Hours later a
motorcycle messenger arrived with a small packet of films. A
handwritten note from Capa said, "John, all the action is in the
four rolls of 35 mm." I ordered the Life darkroom to "rush, for
Godssake." I had to have contact prints for editing; four prints
of each chosen negative had to be made to pass censorship,
and we were nearing our deadline for shipment to Life in New
York..

A few minutes later a lad from the darkroom rushed, almost

hysterical, into my office, screaming "the films are ruined.
Ruined!" He explained that he had hung them in the locker
which served as a drying cabinet, normal practice, but because
of the rush had closed the doors. There was too much heat; the
emulsion melted. I ran back to the darkroom with him. I held up
the films.. Nothing but gray soup on three of them. But on the
fourth there were eleven discernible images.

Those are the images that made the lead story in Life, for June
19, 1944: "BEACHHEADS OF NORMANDY: The Fateful Battle
for Europe is Joined by Sea and Air." They are the images that
Steven Spielberg studied
for "Saving Private Ryan,"
the film that probably re-
creates D-Day as it really
was. Those are the
images by which we now
remember D-Day: June 6,
1944. A Tuesday.

Top row, left to right: Bob Landry,

George Rodger, Frank Scherschel,
Robert Capa; bottom row, Ralph
Morse, John G. Morris, David E.
Scherman

Recently I returned to Omaha Beach. There is a golf course

nearby, and the beach looks peacefully dull. Most peaceful of
all is the cemetery where the American dead lie, row upon row,
under neat white tombstones. For the first time I also visited the
German cemetery, not so far away, where other thousands of
men and women lie, in clumps of five, many with names
unknown.. The French now honor them, as they do the
historically unrecognized thousands and thousands of French
civilians who also died in Normandy. Now, 133 years after the
 Franco-Prussian war ended in the Treaty of Frankfurt, 86 years
after the Germans capitulated in a railroad car at Compiegne,
59 years after they surrendered in a little red schoolhouse in
Reims, it is clear that there will never again be war between
France and Germany.

Let it set an example to the world.

© John G. Morris

[email protected]

John G. Morris, who was Robert Capa's Life magazine editor

on D-Day, has also edited pictures for Magnum Photos, Ladies'
Home Journal, National Geographic, the Washington Post and
the New York Times. He is the author of Get the Picture, A
Personal History of Photojournalism, University of Chicago
Press, 2002.

robert capa tells the story himself in his book "slightly out of focus".

Read John G. Morris's book "Get The Picture." The first chapter tells the whole story.