Everybody who watched films in the 1990’s remembers that moment at the start of Saving Private Ryan when the vomit-filled landing craft that had just carried a group of US soldiers across the English Channel approaches Omaha beach on the coast of Normandy and the steel ramp is slowly lowered, leaving the soldiers with absolutely nothing between them and the lethal piercing spray of German MG-42 machine guns.
Spielberg does a great job of dramatising it for the big screen but I can’t come close to imagining how those soldiers must have felt at dawn on that morning of June 6th 1944.
However, one man who knew exactly how it felt was Robert Capa because he was there, in one of those small boats. Capa was not a solider but a photographer. He was one of the only civilians on board those landing craft off the coast of Normandy that morning and therefore one of the only people not to have a weapon with which to defend himself; just a couple of cameras and a few spare rolls of film.
When that landing craft turns around and leaves (and Capa describes in his autobiography how he was literally kicked out of the boat by the boatswain as a result of his photographic dawdling) I guess the guys on Omaha Beach were left with no other option but to walk the most dangerous and technically challenging of tightropes, below which, on one side was bravery and on the other stupidity. But with the boat gone and nothing behind them but the cold, dark waves of the dawn tide lapping at their calves, they had no choice but to slowly trek up the steep slope of the beach, face first into the full might of the fascist military machine that wanted nothing more than their total annihilation.
”Fifty yards ahead of me, one of our half-burnt amphibious tanks stuck out of the water and offered me my next cover….Between floating bodies I reached it, paused for a few more pictures, and gathered my guts for the last jump to the beach.”
The luck was with Robert Capa on that day however and he managed to not only stay alive but capture 106 photographs on Omaha Beach while under heavy fire from the fortified German bunkers. Being an experienced war photojournalist by this point in his career, Capa would have had an inherent understanding of the historical importance of those 106 photographs and therefore rushed back to London with his rolls of film in order to get to the Life Magazine offices by the next publishing deadline.
Being the only photographs of the landing beaches under fire, Capa’s photographs went on to become hugely important cultural artefacts and I guarantee that you will have seen at least one of them at some point in your life as they have been published thousands and thousands of times; initially in magazines and newspapers, but then, in the decades since, they have graced the covers and leaves of coffee table books, hardback historical tomes, and museum pamphlets the world over.
What you probably don’t know however, and what is rather staggering when you start to think about it, is that those photographs were almost lost to us forever due to the accidental actions of a young darkroom assistant.
After they were rushed to London, the film negatives arrived at the photo lab inside the offices of Life Magazine and technicians set to work developing them. Unfortunately, in the final stage of the process, a 15 year old worker named Dennis Banks set the temperature of the dryer too high and before anyone realised, almost all of the photographs were completely destroyed. Only eleven individual photographs survived out of the 106 that Capa had taken on Omaha Beach while under German fire.
The remaining photographs, utterly invaluable to the cultural record of human history, came to be known as The Magnificent Eleven.
After D-Day, Robert Capa remained embedded with US forces as they advanced through Normandy. For a time he was roped into joining Ernest Hemingway in his madcap band of semi-mercenaries, roaming the countryside on the hunt for Nazis without any formal military escort.
Capa was no stranger to adventure, having taken photographs on the front lines of some of the most dangerous conflicts of the 1930’s including the Spanish Civil War and the Japanese Invasion of China. But in the end, Capa fell out with Hemingway due to his reckless adventures that appeared to border on nihilistic decadence.
The final straw that broke the camel’s back may have been an incident that sounds so crazy one might doubt it ever happened were it not for multiple eyewitness sources.
Hemingway and Capa were on a motorcycle together in the green country lanes of Normandy attempting to retake the tiny village of Saint-Pois from behind enemy lines before the allies could retake it from its opposite side. After turning a sharp bend, they suddenly found themselves face-to-face with a German 57mm anti-tank gun unit. The Germans fired a shell at the motorbike which overturned, throwing its riders into a ditch at the side of the road. Hemingway and Capa, lucky to be alive - although Hemingway reportedly suffered a minor head injury, managed to hide in the undergrowth and were forced to remain hidden there until nightfall when the Germans moved to a new location and they could finally walk back to the allied lines.
Hemingway was later quoted as saying in his infamous blackly comic style that he only asked Capa to accompany him so that he would have a world-class photograph taken of his body in the event of his death.
After the war, Robert Capa used the reputation he had developed taking some of the greatest photographs of the conflict to jointly set up a revolutionary new photographic agency called Magnum. The idea behind the agency was for it to be owned and managed by the photographers themselves and for the copyright of their photographs to remain with each photographer.
In the decades since, it has grown to become one of the most successful and renowned agencies in the world.
Tragically, Capa’s life was taken from him far too soon when he stepped on a landmine while on assignment covering the First Indochina War in 1954.
However, the extent to which the photographs he left behind changed the world cannot be overstated.
It’s worth considering the extent to which The Magnificent Eleven created our perception of the D-Day landings. Without Capa’s fearless photographs (and therefore probably without Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers given Spielberg’s admitted influence) would we have the same sense of the huge danger and sacrifice that those thousands of soldiers were faced with on that ill-fated day: the day of the largest and most violent seaborne invasion in human history?
