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. […] For those die-hards who cling to Capa’s “First Wave With Company E” myth, Fuller’s inaccuracies have become sacred truths. The fact that Capa himself affirmed he was on the Chase, not the Henrico, has had no effect on their delusions. […] 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. […] This makes the Capa portions of Landing on the Edge of Eternity a sorry display of little more than copying and pasting that masquerades as historical research and analysis. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |