This “lost film” tale centers on Utah Beach. In brief, the D-Day film from that beach was supposedly entrusted to a courier who then accidentally dropped it into the ocean while climbing aboard a ship. This seems to be merely a miasma of self-reinforcing rumors with no factual basis. […]
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This sequence of events partially explains the mystery of why it took 15 hours after the Chase anchored in Weymouth Bay for Capa’s film to reach LIFE’s assistant picture editor John Morris in London. Seven to eight of those hours were consumed by the simple challenge of Capa getting off the USS Samuel Chase and getting his film to the press message center. […] [Editor’s Note: Combat veteran and amateur military historian Charles Herrick’s crucial earlier posts in this series corrected 70 years’ worth of miscaptioning of one of Robert Capa’s ten D-Day photographs from Omaha Beach, and pinpointed the exact location and approximate time at which he landed on the Easy Red sector with a later wave. In […] Capa scholarship has ignored completely the other photographic records of the morning of the invasion, neither comparing Capa’s images of the scene with documentation by others nor making any attempt to integrate them into the larger visual narrative of that day on Omaha Beach. […] Clearly, we still have much work to do if we hope to dislodge this fable from the mythology of photojournalism and photo history — not to mention the larger D-Day into which it has become so thoroughly woven. Yet there’s grounds for hope, that “thing with feathers.” […] |
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