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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Nothing about this time-consuming yet vital censorship process was included in Morris’s version of the film saga. It is Morris’s deliberate avoidance or trivialization of the topic that raises suspicion that there must have been much more than he was willing to discuss. […] Capa’s surviving photos gave no evidence of the onslaught that had hit the beaches, and instead would raise doubt about the strength and significance of the landings. In short, they were precisely the kind of images the Allies wanted the Germans to see. And there’s small chance that was a matter of coincidence. […] Morris’s various tellings of the saga of Capa’s films omitted entirely a vital matter, that of censorship by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF). Any undeveloped film coming in from correspondents at the front was assumed, as a minimum, to be classifiable as secret material, so the handling of Capa’s film would both begin and end on the censors’ desk. […] 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. […] |
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