He remembered feeling "a new kind of fear shaking my body from toe to hair, and twisting my face." With great difficulty his trembling hands reloaded his camera. It was a foot larger now, and I felt safe enough to take pictures of the other guys hiding just like I was."Ĭapa was squeezing off photographs as he headed for a disabled American tank. The sound of his rifle gave him enough courage to move forward, and he left the obstacle to me. He took the waterproofing off his rifle and began to shoot without much aiming at the smoke-hidden beach. A soldier got there at the same time, and for a few minutes we shared its cover. The bullets tore holes in the water around me, and I made for the nearest steel obstacle. The water was cold, and the beach still more than a hundred yards away. The boatswain, who was in an understandable hurry to get the hell out of there, mistook my picture-taking attitude for explicable hesitation, and helped me make up my mind with a well-aimed kick in the rear.
Waist-deep, with rifles ready to shoot, with the invasion obstacles and the smoking beach in the background gangplank to take my first real picture of the invasion. The men from my barge waded in the water. "My beautiful France looked sordid and uninviting, and a German machine gun, spitting bullets around the barge, fully spoiled my return. "The boatswain lowered the steel-covered barge front, and there, between the grotesque designs of steel obstacles sticking out of the water, was a thin line of land covered with smoke our Europe, the 'Easy Red' beach. "The flat bottom of our barge hit the earth of France," Capa remembered in his book Slightly Out of Focus. With Capa standing in the very stern, his landing craft mistakenly came ashore at the section of Omaha Beach dubbed "Easy Red." Then the ramp went down. The famous image reportedly depicts the death of Spanish Loyalist militiaman Frederico Borrell Garcia as he is struck in the chest by a Nationalist bullet on a barren Iberian hillside.Ĭapa was known to say, "If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough." On D-Day, he came close once again. He risked his life on more than one occasion during the Spanish Civil War and had taken what is considered the most eerily fascinating of all war photographs.
Perhaps the best known of all World War II combat photographers, the Hungarian-born Capa had made a name for himself well before climbing into a landing craft with men of Company E in the early morning hours of D-Day. When soldiers of the 16th Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division landed at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, photographer Robert Capa, in the employ of LIFE magazine, was among them. The ten photos selected from the eleven surviving negatives and published by LIFE on J. I decided to go in with Company E in the first wave." Photographs of Robert Capa "The war correspondent has his stake his life in his own hands, and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute. The Magnificent Eleven: The D-Day Photographs of Robert Capa Men of the 16th Infantry Regiment seek shelter from German machine-gun fire in shallow waterīehind "Czech hedgehog" beach obstacles, Easy Red sector, Omaha Beach.