The orders came to Life war photographer Robert Capa in London from the United States Army in the last days of May of 1944: You are not to leave your flat for more than an hour at a time. Your equipment must be packed.
Capa was one of four photographers chosen to cover the first days of the United States Army’s massive assault on Hitler’s Europe; he had just enough time to hurry from his apartment on Belgrave Square to buy a new Burberry coat and a Dunhill silver flask. The need for bella figura had been at his core since his childhood in Budapest, where appearances and charm were means to survive.
Who didn’t trade stories about the mysterious Hungarian Jewish refugee with the mass of dark gleaming hair and velvet eyes? Child-like and beguiling, he was short and moved quickly, as if in flight, a cigarette invariably dangling from his mouth. His disguise was nonchalance. State-less, he glided through battle zones with a confection of papers. He was 30 years old and had already taken some of the most remarkable images of the century: the haggard faces of the Spanish Civil War, the plump air wardens serving tea in the London Underground during the Blitz, Italian children lost in the rubble of Naples.
As a child Capa wanted to be a writer; his best work has the intimacy of a storyteller’s gaze and passion. He would never cover any war in which he did not love one side and hate the other, noted his biographer Richard Whelan, but his compassion was not partisan. Capa’s special genius was to make himself invisible in the field while becoming conspicuously larger than life off of it. The helmet he carried through the 1943 Italian Campaign was inscribed “Property of Robert Capa, great war correspondent and lover.” No one ever disputed either claim. Leaving for D-day, Capa was determined to keep up the standard. “I was the most elegant invader of them all,” he would later write in his 1947 novel-memoir, Slightly out of Focus.
Rushing from his apartment early on May 29, Capa could not leave a note. Instead, he signed a blank check, on which he placed a large bottle of Arpège. The check was for his landlord, the perfume for his wartime love, Elaine Justin, a fragile strawberry blonde he nicknamed Pinky. She was recovering from a burst appendix outside London; Capa was not concerned about the lack of a proper good-bye. He chafed at the idea of permanence.
Besides his Burberry, he carried two Contax cameras. They provided some safety in the middle of a battle because he did not have to stop and look through the lens. He also carried his Rollei and Speed Graphic cameras, along with a telephoto lens, all packed in oilskin bags. At Weymouth, the sight of the harbor stunned him: thousands of battleships, troopships, freighters, and invasion barges mingled together—5,000 in all—the largest armada ever assembled. Capa was handed an envelope of invasion francs, a package of condoms, and a French phrase book that suggested he speak to the local girls by asking them, “Bonjour, mademoiselle, voulez-vous faire une promenade avec moi?”
He later made a joke about the book, but never about June 6, 1944. Capa’s 11 frames of blur and grit from D-day would become the collective vision of how it felt to be part of the “longest day,” the turning point of World War II.
‘D’ was army code for invasion day. In 24 hours, an elite assault unit of the United States Army, the amphibious 16th Infantry Regiment, First Infantry Division, would storm the beaches below the cliffs of Normandy. The outcome of D-day, the largest naval invasion in history, launched 70 years ago this June, would determine who won the war. The presence of Robert Capa with an infantry division was considered a talisman of luck.
On June 5, 1944, Capa roamed the transfer ship U.S.S. Henrico with his Contax, aware that the London bureau of Life was already frantically waiting for his film. Hundreds of assault troops were waiting, too. For Capa, here were “the planners, the gamblers, and the writers of last letters.” Capa captured soldiers playing craps in an aerial shot, grouped as if in a Cézanne. On the top deck, Capa found Sam Fuller, a young corporal from Brooklyn attached to the Big Red One, the nickname given to the First Infantry Division, commanded by Colonel George Taylor. Fuller, a screenwriter and pulp novelist, was collapsed on an ammunition box, trying to rest, the dread of dawn furrowing his face. Censors would block out the coastline in the background of Capa’s photograph of Fuller in bright-red ink. (One of Fuller’s future movies, The Big Red One, released in 1980, would celebrate the First Infantry Division.)
For the invasion Capa transferred to the U.S.S. Samuel Chase. At two A.M. on Tuesday, June 6, the loudspeaker on the boat broke up Capa’s poker game. Capa placed his invasion francs in his waterproof belt, grabbed his gas mask and inflatable lifeboat, and was served a pre-invasion breakfast of hotcakes, scrambled eggs, and sausages by the messboys of the Chase, dressed impeccably in their spotless whites. Later, many of the men of the Big Red One would say that Capa was insane to go in with the first wave of the invasion when he did not have to.
In London, on the morning of June 6, Life picture editor John Morris awakened early. He opened the blackout curtains of his Upper Wimpole Street apartment and turned on the BBC: “Under command of General Eisenhower, Allied naval forces supported by strong Allied air forces began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France.” “This is it,” Morris whispered to himself, using the phrase The New Yorker’s A. J. Liebling called “the great cliché of the Second World War,” as Morris would note in his memoir, Get the Picture. Rushing to the Life office on Dean Street in Soho, Morris was concerned for Capa and harried about the magazine’s deadlines. For the world and for Life, D-day was the most important day of the entire war. Morris’s only hope to meet Life’s Saturday closing deadline and scoop the world was to get original prints and negatives into a pouch that would leave Grosvenor Square at nine A.M. on Thursday, June 8, by motorcycle courier en route to a transatlantic flight.
There was always a flutter when Bob Capa—or his rolls of film—would arrive in Life’s London office. “He never identified himself on the telephone,” the 97-year-old Morris told me not long ago. “He didn’t have to.” Educated in Hungarian, Capa—born Endre Friedmann in Budapest in 1913—spoke flawless German, wobbly French, and English with a tangle of phrases his colleagues called “Capanese.” Parachute jumps under fire with the 82nd Airborne out of Algeria; riding in jeeps through Italy with John Hersey and Ernie Pyle; pinned under fire with Ernest Hemingway: Capa would come back and gloss these tales with Budapest panache. He inevitably had flowers and candy for the assistants who spent hours trying to “Englishize” his captions, and he liked taking them to the pub next door for an afternoon of pink gin. A large part of Capa’s appeal was the darkness behind the self-invention: fleeing the Fascists of Budapest at 16, starving in Berlin and Paris while trying to get established, and losing the love of his life, the German-Jewish photographer Gerda Taro, in the Spanish Civil War.
Henry Luce’s Life, with its five million readers and splashy layouts, was Mount Olympus. The world’s premier photographers—Margaret Bourke-White, Carl Mydans, W. Eugene Smith, Alfred Eisenstaedt—fought to be featured in its pages. Capa had shot for the magazine since 1938. From Italy alone, he had produced eight full-length stories and had distinguished himself in the slaughter at Anzio. But Life paid him only standard rates, and, despite his fame, in the spring of 1944, Capa was still struggling for a long-term contract.
That May, a blizzard of invasion headlines and rumors brought Ernest Hemingway to London. Capa decided to celebrate. “I bought a fish bowl, a case of champagne, some brandy, and a half-dozen fresh peaches. I soaked the peaches in the brandy, poured the champagne over them, and everything was ready.” Capa prepared this concoction at his place on Belgrave Square. “At four in the morning, we reached the peaches. The bottles were empty, the fish bowl dry.” After the party, Hemingway’s car crashed into a steel water tank. A call came from the emergency room: Hemingway, with his skull split open and blood running down his beard. “After forty-eight little stitches, Papa’s head looked better than new,” Capa noted. At the hospital, Capa’s girlfriend Pinky pulled open Hemingway’s hospital gown, and the photographer caught Papa’s full wide-rumped glory.
‘I just kind of put my camera above my head . . . and clicked a picture . . . and when I came back, I was a very famous photographer.” The voice you hear in the archive of the International Center of Photography is a Carpathian mumble: the only known recording in existence of Robert Capa’s voice. Incredibly, it turned up for sale on eBay recently and was discovered there by a Capa curator at I.C.P. who had been searching for it for years. Here was Capa in October of 1947 on New York’s most popular radio show, Hi Jinx, with Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenburg. On the air, he was very clear about the moment he believed had changed his life. “That camera which I held above my head just caught a man at the moment he was shot. . . . That was probably the best picture I ever took.” Capa is referring to his most well-known—and perhaps most controversial—image, the dramatic photograph taken September 5, 1936, called The Falling Soldier. Who hasn’t seen the picture? The Loyalist volunteer, in his white shirt with sleeves rolled up, stands with his rifle and is gunned down, the impact causing him to collapse backward.
In the 1970s a British journalist challenged the authenticity of the photo, saying it was staged, a claim that has been debated. Another theory suggests that in fact Gerda Taro—the woman responsible for his transformation from Endre Friedmann into Robert Capa, mysterious “American photographer”—took the shot, an assertion that Capa scholars strongly dispute. Taro would die in Spain in 1937, the first female correspondent to be killed in combat. Capa never recovered from her loss. “Capa detested the picture. He did not want to have anything to do with an image that exploited death,” Morris told me.
Now, at dawn on June 6, 1944, Capa was on the deck of the Chase. Fuller, just behind on the Henrico, took out a condom and put it over the end of his rifle, desperate to keep it from getting wet. In the gray light stood the great Allied fleet off Normandy’s five invasion beaches, in silhouette. No one was prepared for the noise—the grinding of hundreds of engines, bombers flying overhead, the screams of men loaded with as much as 300 pounds of equipment falling off assault boats into the high surf, as author Cornelius Ryan observed in The Longest Day. Capa and Fuller stood frozen as the bullhorns blared, “Keep in line, keep in line! Don’t forget the Big Red One is leading the way.”
Troops jammed the rails of the Chase, waiting to climb down the nets into the roiling assault boats, bobbing up and down on the giant swells, while others slipped on the ladders with their guns, shovels, and bedrolls. Frigid water filled the boats, and the seasick were covered in vomit, their own and everyone else’s. Trying to take in the scene, Capa blocked out the sound. “Two thousand men stood in perfect silence,” he later wrote. “H-hour,” the moment of invasion, was set for 6:30 A.M., and the waves of landing craft were set to launch at precise 15-minute intervals. The 3,000 men in the first wave had little idea they would face an avalanche of mines, rockets, and flamethrowers. No one had predicted that the Allied bombers would get blown off course and not knock out the Germans’ beach defenses, or that one day earlier a crack division of German troops would move to Omaha for practice maneuvers.
The coast of Normandy was miles away when the first sounds of popping forced Capa down in his assault boat. In front of him, a mass of crossed steel girders formed an impossible barricade that ran the entire length of the Normandy coast and was loaded with as many as six million mines Hitler had ordered placed there with slave labor. As Capa got closer, massive explosions rocked the shore. Smoke rose from every side in vast plumes. Men, on fire, tried to escape the inferno. Jumping up, Capa stopped to take his famous picture of the platoon of men from his assault boat wading into the carnage that awaited them in the water. Mistaking his hesitation, the boatswain kicked Capa in the rear.
“Bullets tore into the water around me,” Capa wrote. The beach was 100 yards away, and the steel barriers rose like the remains of a ghostly city in a mist. Capa ran through a barrage of shells with his Contax and waited behind the nearest steel obstacle. “It was still very early and very gray for good pictures, but the little men dodging under the surrealistic designs . . . very effective,” Capa wrote. He clung to the pole, his hands shaking, shooting picture after picture. In front of him, on the beach, rose a half-burned amphibious tank. Capa dropped his Burberry raincoat into the water and made for the tank. All around him bodies floated in a sea of blood and vomit. It was not possible to retrieve the dead, and the living were unable to advance. Crawling on his stomach, he joined two friends, an Irish priest and a Jewish medic, and then began to shoot with his second Contax. “The foreground of my pictures was filled with wet boots and green faces,” he wrote.
Suddenly, from the boil of the red ocean, Capa caught the face of a young, helmeted soldier under fire, manning his position half submerged, with the eerie towers of German obstacles behind him. Capa raised his camera and caught what would emerge from Omaha Beach as arguably the iconic image of the war. “I didn’t dare to take my eyes off the finder of my Contax and frantically shot frame after frame.” Then his camera jammed. In front of Capa, hundreds of men were screaming and dying, body parts flying everywhere. Sam Fuller, on the landing boat behind Capa, temporarily lost his hearing from the noise. In his memoir he describes Capa taking out a telephoto lens to shoot a German officer on the hill with his hands on his hips, shouting orders.
“I held my camera over my head. . . . I stepped into the sea between two bodies . . . and suddenly I knew I was running away,” Capa wrote. As he reached a medical transport boat, he felt an explosion and found himself covered with feathers from the down jackets of the men who had just been blown apart. As the boat pulled back from the beach, the skipper cried; his assistant had literally been exploded all over him.
On the transport back to Weymouth, as Capa helped to load stretchers, the messboys in their white jackets and gloves, now covered in blood, were sewing up the dead in body bags. Capa got out fresh film to take one last shot. He used his Rolleiflex to record an emergency plasma transfusion on the deck and then collapsed. He later awakened in a bunk with a piece of paper around his neck: “Exhaustion case. No dog tags.” The total time Capa spent on Omaha Beach was approximately 90 minutes.
At Weymouth, Capa positioned himself so he would be ready to photograph the medics coming for the wounded. Instead, when the bow doors opened, there was another Life photographer, David Scherman, waiting to capture the faces of the injured. Scherman hugged him and took the picture of Capa with his cigarette in his hand, his helmet at a jaunty angle, and a triumphant smile on his face. Capa scribbled a note to Morris telling him that the action was all on the 35-mm. rolls, then got on board the next transport back to Normandy. Capa, who prided himself on not knowing what he shot, knew exactly what he had that day: four rolls full of what could well be the most stirring images of warfare ever created.
I’ve come to Normandy with John Morris on a sunny November day to rewalk Capa’s Omaha. Morris, dressed elegantly in tweeds and still indefatigable, has made a one-man industry of recounting the story of Capa at D-day, reminding the world of the moral power of great photography and, as well, the arbitrary nature of who and what survive. Morris has visited Normandy many times, and June 6 is etched permanently in his mind. As the news of the invasion swept the wires, Morris, like the entire world, was in a fraught state. “All that day, I waited and waited. I heard nothing. Everyone in the darkroom was poised. All that night, I did not sleep, waiting for Capa and his film.”
At 6:30 on Wednesday night, June 7, a call finally came from the Channel: “You should get it in an hour or two,” then static destroyed the line. Around nine P.M. a small package was finally delivered; it contained the four rolls of 35-mm. film and six rolls of 120 film that Capa had shot in England, on the Channel crossing, and at Omaha. Rushed to the lab chief, the film was given to a young lab assistant named Dennis Banks, whose name would enter photography history. Morris waited upstairs, trying not to look at the clock. Then, from the darkroom the first call came from photographer Hans Wild, who had seen the astonishing images on the film and said, “Fabulous!” Morris had no time: “We need contacts! Rush, rush, rush!” More time passed. Then Dennis Banks burst into Morris’s office, sobbing, “They’re ruined! Ruined! Capa’s films are all ruined.”
Banks had put Capa’s films into the drying cabinet as usual, but was so frantic he closed the door with the heat on high, believing that would speed the process. Without ventilation, the heat melted all of the emulsion off the film. Morris held up the first three long strips of film one at a time. “It just looked like gray soup,” he told me. But on the fourth roll, 11 images miraculously survived, and Morris was astounded by their power. (It is thought that Capa shot a total of 106 frames at Omaha.) The blurring from the drying cabinet had imbued the images with seismic drama. (Capa also said that shaking his camera magnified the impact.) Morris saw for the first time the men of the Big Red One from behind, trying to move through the minefields and the spectral steel fortress wall that jutted from the English Channel as they dodged an avalanche of rockets and bullets; the clusters of infantry stalled under the crossed iron barricades; the face of an unknown soldier, half covered in water, determined to advance on a day that would see 4,414 Allied troops die at Normandy.
Morris knew they were remarkable, but he had no time to study them. Grabbing the prints of the surviving 11 images, he placed them in glassine envelopes, in four different sets—one for Life’s London office, one for the British government, one for the Pentagon, and one for the New York office, which would also receive the negatives. Morris then sped in his Austin through the deserted London streets. It was 3:30 A.M., Thursday. At the Ministry of Information, he waited for all the images to be stamped, and tried not to implode when the censor’s roll of cellophane tape jammed. Finally, he had 15 minutes to reach Grosvenor Square in time for the nine A.M. courier. Zigzagging through the backstreets, Morris ran the last 50 yards and found him about to lock his sack. “Hold it!” Morris shouted, just in time.
The film would then have been put on a transatlantic flight that would make two stops (Scotland and Newfoundland) for refueling before arriving in Washington. “Sometimes weather forced stops in the Azores or Labrador, even Greenland,” Morris told me. “Upon landing, the film would go straight to the Pentagon for a quick look.” There, the pictures would be cleared by censors and then couriered via train or shuttle flight to the New York office.
Just after Life’s Saturday close, the editors cabled, TODAY WAS ONE OF THE GREAT PICTURE DAYS IN LIFE’S OFFICE, WHEN BOB CAPA’S BEACHLANDING AND OTHER SHOTS ARRIVED. and other shots arrived. The prints had made it in time. The June 19, 1944, issue of Life bannered, “BEACHHEADS OF NORMANDY; The Fateful Battle for Europe Is Joined by Sea and Air.” The accompanying story told how Capa had gotten his shots: “Immense excitement of moment made Photographer Capa move his camera and blur the picture. . . . As he waded out to get aboard, his cameras were thoroughly soaked.”
In the chaos of the D-day landings, Capa’s 11 frames were almost the only images to survive. That Capa’s film survived at all was wholly because he carried it to England himself. The unknown soldier submerged in the water took years to identify. He was mistakenly assumed to be Edward Regan, but in the 1990s it was discovered that he was actually a private first class, Huston “Hu” Riley, 16th Regiment, Company F, who had landed on a sandbank not far from Capa. Stalled for half an hour, Private Riley made a run for it and was hit by machine-gun fire in his shoulder. In Richard Whelan’s This Is War!, Riley says he was saved by “a buck sergeant . . . and a photographer with a camera around his neck. . . . All I could think of was, ‘What in the hell is this guy doing here?’ ”
‘I don’t think Capa ever fully forgave me,” Morris said. When Capa returned to London a month later, he learned what had happened to his four Omaha rolls. “The little which got printed is nothing compared to the material which they got ruined,” he wrote in a letter to his brother Cornell back home in New York. But Capa became a member of the Life staff. “Mr. [Wilson] Hicks at my great surprise offered to me the great honor of joining the staff and believe it or not $9,000 a year, so I had to accept. I do not like the idea very much but I have not much choice.”
He would have one more iconic World War II moment to record. As the Allies swept through Europe in April 1945 he had already captured his remarkable image of the shaved heads of the women collaborators of Chartres. (Coming into Paris with the army, Capa spotted his concierge from before the war in the cheering crowd. “C’est moi! C’est moi!” Capa yelled from his jeep.) But he had no interest, he wrote, in covering “the looting war.” Nor did he have any interest in shooting the concentration camps, for they “were swarming with photographers, and every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect.” But he was determined to get to Leipzig with the Second Division as it fought its way across the Zeppelin Bridge. Leipzig was the hometown of his great love, Gerda Taro. At the bridge, Capa saw an elegant four-story apartment building. He climbed to the top floor “to see if the last picture of crouching and advancing infantrymen could be the last picture of the war for my camera.” While he was there, a young sergeant near him was caught by a German sniper. In the horrifying sequence of images, blood from the dying soldier becomes a puddle on the floor. As author Kati Marton observed, this moment closed Capa’s war decade, which had begun in Spain with Taro and The Falling Soldier.
Not long after, Ingrid Bergman came to Paris on her way to Germany to entertain the American troops. On a lark, Capa and novelist Irwin Shaw wrote to Bergman at her hotel on June 6, 1945, nearly a month after V-E Day and precisely one year after the D-day landings: “We were planning on sending you flowers with this note inviting you to dinner, but after joint consultation, we discovered it was possible to pay for the flowers or the dinner. We took a vote and dinner won by a close margin.” They signed the note: “Worried.”
Bergman had heard of neither Capa nor Shaw, but she was dazzled by their wit and went to dinner. In her autobiography, she described the fun she had that night “dancing and drinking”; she left the next day for Berlin. Two months later, Capa went to Berlin to photograph the ruins and discovered Bergman there, in despair over her marriage to the dictatorial Petter Lindstrom. Capa reminded Bergman of her father, a bon vivant who had died when she was 13. She fell madly in love with him and wanted to leave her husband; Capa resisted. But all that summer, Capa and Bergman were together as Capa shot the black markets of Berlin, making just enough money to pay off his debts and follow Bergman to Hollywood. There, Capa felt like an outsider in Bergman’s world and disliked the frivolity of it. Life assigned him to cover Bergman, now starring in Hitchcock’s Notorious, but it quickly became clear that Capa could not exist without the adrenaline of war. (Hitchcock would later use the Bergman-Capa romance as the spring for Rear Window, which starred James Stewart as a Life war photographer.)
In 1947, Capa was awarded the Medal of Freedom, and also saw the birth of a long-held dream: a cooperative for photographers called Magnum. By the early 50s he had told photographer Marc Riboud, “Photography is finished. Television is the future.” He worried that his travels on assignment with John Steinbeck in the Soviet Union would get him blacklisted. In 1954, at 40 and in debt to Magnum for medical bills, Capa accepted an assignment from Life to go to Japan. While he was there, John Morris suggested to Capa that he cover the struggle in Indochina that would become the Vietnam War. Capa could not turn down the chance—or the money: $2,000. “Price subject to considerable upraising,” Morris wired him, “if becomes hazardous.”
On the beach at Omaha, Morris cannot stop his tears. After giving the Indochina assignment, he had second thoughts: “I called him. I said, ‘Bob, you do not have to do this. It is not our war.’ ” Morris has told of this encounter often. But Capa had made up his mind. “This is going to be a beautiful story,” he told two reporters traveling to the Red River Delta in northern Vietnam. Then he leapt off the jeep to photograph French artillerists lobbing shells at the Vietminh. A few minutes later, an explosion rocked the convoy. Then a Vietnamese shouted out: “Le photographe est mort!” Capa, his left hand clutching his camera, became the first American war correspondent killed in the Vietnam conflict. In one of the last photos taken of him alive he is striding along with a French officer at a landing strip, his camera around his neck.
