By Chuck Herrick | 4 min read
Every once in a while, a simple story or anecdote will balloon into a popular legend that captures the public’s imagination. This metamorphosis, however, is seldom a spontaneous event that relies solely on the inherent power of the anecdote itself. Instead, most often the change is a result of the original story passing through a number of lenses which enlarge, reshape and recolor the original details, and just as often insert fictional details as well. A perfect example of this is the “Magnificent 11” picture set Life photographer Rober Capa shot on Omaha Beach early June 6, 1944.
”The objectivity of a photograph is only an illusion. The captions that provide the commentary can change the meaning entirely.”
—Gisèle Freund
The Popular Legend
The popular legend (based largely on versions Capa gave in a contemporary interview, and three years later in his autobiography Slightly Out of Focus) has him electing to land in the first wave of assault troops, an incredibly brave act. After spending as much as two and a half hours under fire on the beach, he boarded a newly arrived Landing Craft, Infantry and began his trip back to the UK, hoping for a scoop with the first photos back from the beach. He was disappointed though, as another photographer beat him by two hours. Worse news was to come, as, so the legend says, all but 11 of his pictures were ruined by a mistake in the laboratory, leaving just those few images to document the horror and valor of that beach.
But that popular legend turns out to be a far cry from reality. Instead of volunteering to go in on the first wave, he rode to the beach in the landing craft of the regimental commander in Wave 13 – as ordered. He reached the shore almost two hours after H-Hour, and did so at a section of the beach that was relatively lightly defended. In fact, he was not supposed to have landed at all, as his job was to immediately rush initial images back to the UK. It appears he landed accidentally, falling out of the landing craft when, standing at the ramp with his eye glued to the viewfinder, the craft was suddenly slammed into reverse.
Instead of moving to dry land, he took shelter behind a tank in the surf until he sought refuge in the nearby Landing Craft, Infantry. His total time on the beach was likely as little as 15 minutes. He claimed to have exposed two rolls of 35mm film on the beach, but the evidence indicates he exposed only a single roll. This reality wasn’t a particularly inspiring story.
The First Lens
And this is where the first lens came into play. The military’s censors reviewed this single roll of film and apparently confiscated the first 28 exposures of the 38 on that roll, images believed to have been shot during the movement to the beach and which could have disclosed the full scale of the invasion fleet. The FORTITUDE SOUTH deception plan for D-Day presented the landings as a moderately sized diversionary assault, with the full scale main landings to come in the following weeks. So, photos of the landings were carefully culled to show as little as possible of the actual strength of the forces and materiel coming ashore.
The Second Filter
The second filter was that of Life magazine, which had to make the best it could of the 10 remaining photos he exposed on the beach, many of which were duplicates of the same scenes. Life used only five of those images in its photo story; the other five it used were shot on Coast Guard craft after Capa left the beach. It was Life that placed Capa in the first wave, and it was Life that invented the idea that the rest of his photos were lost, initially attributing it to his cameras being immersed in seawater. A frankly disappointing performance was transformed into a dramatic photo story simply by couching it in false context.
The Third Filter
The third filter was Capa himself, and it took the form of his 1947 autobiography, Slightly Out of Focus. Written in hopes of becoming a screenplay, the book included many exaggerations and not a few completely fictional anecdotes, in the finest tradition of Hollywood’s ‘inspired by true events’ style of screenwriting. He embraced Life’s invention that he landed in the first wave and crafted his retelling of the incident to make himself sound as heroic as possible, which perfectly fit his self-generated image of the fearless and devil-may-care war correspondent. He also came up with a new explanation for the ‘lost’ film. Life’s seawater explanation might reflect poorly on Capa’s fieldcraft, but his new version shifted the blame to a teenaged intern who supposedly ruined the film in the drying cabinet, causing the emulsion to melt on all but 10 frames from the two rolls he said he shot. All in all, it was a much more heroic version. The drama of this version benefitted from the irony that film that had survived the horrors of D-Day was lost due to simple youthful error, and further teased the public to ponder what other great images there must have been among the lost negatives!
“Doctored photographs are the least of our worries. If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don’t need Photoshop. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don’t need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption.”
— Errol Morris
The Next Lens
The next lens was John Morris, who was the Life photo editor in London and Capa’s boss. He would also become Capa’s lifelong friend and employee after the war. After Capa was killed in Indochina in 1954, it was Morris who became the spokesman for the growing legend. Morris uncritically supported Capa’s exaggerations in Slightly Out of Focus, and then made himself the central heroic figure in the effort to get those photos prepared and delivered to the US to beat the Life magazine deadline. His additions to the legend were rife with omissions, exaggerations and frankly false details. It was Morris who claimed there was an eleventh surviving negative, but it wasn’t worth printing. There is no other evidence this additional negative ever existed, but such is the power of filters that these 10 images are popularly known as the “Magnificent 11.” For decades, the story was Morris’s and his alone, as the world simply accepted the darkroom accident story at face value. Until, that is, 70 years later, when A. D. Coleman’s Alternate History: The Capa D-Day Project proved that story technically impossible. Morris then retracted some parts of his narrative.
The Final Lens
The final lens took the form of Richard Whelan, Capa’s official biographer and consulting curator of the Robert and Cornel Capa archives. He penned two major works on Capa. The first, Robert Capa, was honest enough to call out a number of the fabrications Capa had penned in Slightly Out of Focus, but was generally a faithful retelling of the by-now fanciful D-Day legend. His second book (This is War! Robert Capa at Work) was a different matter. Adhering more closely to the story in Slightly Out of Focus, Whelan’s second book went to great pains to invent convoluted and improbable circumstances to support some of Capa’s worst fabrications. It was an attempt to defend the indefensible.
And so it was that an uninspiring and disappointing effort to document the landings morphed into a popular legend, the key elements of which are largely false. As the initial story passed through five successive filters – each filter serving its own needs – it became a legend out of proportion to the truth. Ten poor quality photos taken from the last wave of the assault regiment, at a lightly defended part of the beach, became symbolic of the actual horror so common at other parts of Omaha. And in the process stole the credit rightfully due cameramen who landed earlier and on much more lethal sectors of the beach.
Comparison No.1: How Context Skews Perception.
This D-Day photo snapped by Life’s Robert Capa became iconic, due initially to the public being told it showed the first wave landing on Omaha beach, and later, by Capa’s bloody description of his landing. The blurred, hurried impression conveyed by the image supposedly captured the emotion-charged moment of men under deadly fire. Yet the photo was actually taken almost two hours after the first wave landed, and on a stretch of beach that was relatively lightly defended. The wave Capa landed with suffered only one casualty for all of D-Day: a single wounded man. False context led the public to read into the image that which it did not contain. (Robert Capa © ICP/Magnum Photos)
By comparison, this similar photo, taken by Coast Guard Chief Photographer’s Mate Robert Sargent, was part of a series shot 70 minutes after H-Hour (40 minutes before Capa’s photo above), and in front of a German strongpoint. The unit pictured, Company A, 16th Infantry Regiment, suffered 64 casualties, two thirds of which were suffered just getting off the beach. So, which is actually the ‘better’ photo? The technically poorer quality image presented in false context, or the technically better image taken under worse conditions? Is an image with false emotional impact to be valued over a technically and contextually more accurate image? (‘Into the Jaws of Death’, US Coast Guard Collection, National Archives and records Administration)
Comparison No.2: The Censor’s Selective Filtering.
As part of the comprehensive deception plan for the D-Day landings, the censors tightly controlled what images made it into the hands of the press. The intent was to filter out information that could disclose the size and power of the invasion. This photo (L) was taken by Life’s Robert Capa, looking generally westward off Omaha Beach on D-Day. It was passed for publication, appearing in Life’s 19 June edition (on the newsstands 12 June). True to the censor’s intent, it shows virtually nothing of the invasion shipping.
(Robert Capa © ICP/Magnum Photos)
By comparison, the photo on the left was snapped by Captain Herman Wall (commanding the 165th Signal Photo Company), also looking westward off Omaha Beach on D-Day. Naturally, the censors did not pass this image for release to the media. The one roll of 35mm film Capa exposed on Omaha Beach saw only the last 10 images survive (starting with the first illustration above). The preceding 28 frames probably documented the ride into the beach, and it is believed they were held by the censors because they, like Wall’s photo here, showed too much of the invasion shipping. (‘Normandy Invasion on Omaha Beach’, US Army Signal Corps Collection, National Archives and Records Administration)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles R. Herrick graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point in 1974. Commissioned in the Infantry, he earned the Ranger tab, Master Parachutist’s wings and Combat Infantryman Badge. He served in a variety of positions from company grade to the Pentagon. After retiring from the Army in 1996, he continued to work on defense issues as a contractor. He has worked in East Asia, Latin America, the Balkans, Africa and Central Asia. He holds an MBA from the University of California at Los Angeles and graduated from the US Army War College. After fully retiring in 2018, he lives in Kansas with his wife, where he pursues his passion for military history.
WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT Capa’s D-day? Be sure to read BACK INTO FOCUS by Chuck Herrick.
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