It is from these two real observations that the story of “Bloody Omaha” was constructed and that it spread very soon after the landings: the most deadly beach overall and the shock of the first wave on certain sectors. It is by following the history of the construction of this narrative that we can understand how Capa’s famous photographs were received and interpreted, and where the (false) idea that they were taken during a terribly deadly assault, that of the first wave at Omaha Beach, came from. […]
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[Back in August of 2021 Patrick Peccatte introduced me, via email, to Philippe Villéger. Villéger is a member of the informal collective devoted to annotating the historic WWII images of Normandy posted online at PhotosNormandie, another internet project to which Peccatte contributes. (For more about Peccatte, Villéger, and the PhotosNormandie project, see the details at […] [Back in August of 2021 Patrick Peccatte introduced me, via email, to Philippe Villéger. Assiduous followers of this investigation will remember Peccatte, a specialist in photographs of Normandy, as the reader who, at his own his French-language blog Hypotheses, published a response to the Capa D-Day Project that sent it viral in France in summer […] The challenge consists not so much in proving that Landry did not come ashore on June 6 but in finding evidence that he did land on D-Day. So far, the evidence for a D-Day landing is scant, error-prone, and far from convincing. […] Given the vague, highly generic and often clearly incorrect details of his narratives, it appears that much of LeSueur’s reporting was merely a mishmash of secondhand accounts which he gathered from those who landed before he did, and which he imperfectly incorporated into his own story. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |