The fact that this roll, along with the other films most likely classified top secret, got developed in LIFE‘s darkroom under the supervision of not just darkroom chief H. C. “Braddy” Bradshaw and LIFE staff photographer Hans Wild but also a SHAEF custody officer, precludes any possibility of some fatal neglect during processing. […]
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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. […] Between Charles Hangsterfer inaccurately placing his D-Day landing time at least an hour too early — an extremely common tendency in later oral histories — and his assertion that he saw Capa still behind a tank on the beach, his story has helped distort and confuse the Capa timeline. […] Prior to his centennial confession to James Estrin of the New York Times that our conclusions in this investigation have proved correct in almost every particular, John Morris worked feverishly to cover his tracks. This ill-conceived effort took the form of a series of madcap variations on his original fable of the famous emulsion melt that purportedly ruined Capa’s D-Day negatives. […] I can only describe the National Press Photographers Association’s Donald Winslow and Bruce Young, the writer to whom he assigned the magazine’s report on this blog’s investigation of Robert Capa’s actions on D-Day and the subsequent fate of his images, as severely compromised from the outset of their coverage of our research relating to Capa and his picture editor at the time, John Morris. […] |
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