Top Photo: US troops’ first assault on Omaha Beach during the D-Day landings. Normandy, France. June 6, 1944.  © Robert Capa © International Center of Photography | Magnum Photos

Early on the morning of June 6, 1944, photojournalist Robert Capa sailed with American soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division towards the Easy Red sector of Omaha Beach. Before the day was through, American and Allied forces had secured a foothold on the Normandy coast of France, and Capa had taken some of the most famous combat photographs of World War II. 

Capa was born Endre Friedmann in Budapest to a Hungarian Jewish family on October 22, 1913. After being arrested for leftist political activity in 1931, he fled Hungary for Germany, where enrolled as a journalism student in Berlin. Less than two years later in 1933, after watching Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rise to power, Capa again fled, this time for Paris, where he took on the name Robert Capa and began his lengthy career as a photographer. 

During the late 1930s, while still in his 20s, Capa covered the Japanese war in China and the Spanish Civil War. His photograph of a Spanish Loyalist soldier falling to the ground after being shot became one of the most famous images of the conflict. 

After the United States entered World War II, Capa photographed the growing presence of American troops in Great Britain for the magazine Collier’s. He also chronicled daily life in a country that was still reeling from waves of German air attacks. When American troops landed in North Africa near the end of 1942, he covered US air and ground operations during the campaign. 

After moving from Collier’s to Life magazine, Capa covered the Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy, where his photographs captured the daily lives of American and Allied soldiers and the effects of war on Italian civilians. He returned to England in early 1944, just in time for the massive planned Allied invasion of Europe, Operation Overlord. 

US troops’ assault Omaha Beach during the D-Day landings. Normandy, France. June 6, 1944.  © Robert Capa © International Center of Photography | Magnum Photos

Capa left Weymouth, England, for Normandy aboard USS Samuel Chase, along with members of the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division. In his 1947 memoir Slightly Out of Focus, he observed the behavior of soldiers on the eve of the invasion. While some planned their actions once they reached the shore over and over, down to minute details, others gambled or wrote final letters home to their families. Though not a soldier himself, Capa did all three, as he and the soldiers aboard the Chase waited for the order to board landing craft and go ashore.1 

After a brief delay, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower ordered Allied troops to land on the shores of France on the morning of June 6. Recalling that moment after the war, Capa compared the day of the D-Day invasion to the Jewish holiday of Passover, on which it is tradition to ask, “What makes this day different from all other days?” As he and the soldiers of the First Infantry Division’s 16th Infantry Regiment, approached the beach in the early morning hours, Capa recalled, “None of us was at all impatient, and we wouldn’t have minded standing in the darkness for a very long time. But the sun had no way of knowing that this day was different from others, and rose on its schedule.”2 

US troops’ assault Omaha Beach during the D-Day landings. Normandy, France. June 6, 1944.  © Robert Capa © International Center of Photography | Magnum Photos

American troops landing at Easy Red met fierce resistance from the German defenders. Recalling the moment when the men of E Company, 16th Infantry Regiment, hit the beach at Easy Red, Private Harry Parley told historian Stephen Ambrose that, “As our boat touched sand and the ramp went down, I became a visitor to hell.”3  Despite careful planning, many things went wrong for the Americans at Omaha Beach that morning. American casualties that morning were the heaviest of any of the five beaches assaulted by Allied forces on D-Day. 

When he landed on Omaha Beach that morning, Capa was returning to France for the first time since the start of World War II. But as he wrote in Slightly Out of Focus, “My beautiful France looked sordid and uninviting, and a German machine gun, spitting bullets around the barge, fully spoiled my return.”4 Taking cover behind beach obstacles and a disabled tank, Capa began snapping photographs with one of several 35mm Contax cameras he carried with him. After the war, Capa remembered that, as he tried to replace a spent roll of film, his hands shook uncontrollably, and that he ruined a new roll before he could load it to take more pictures. In that moment, he felt “a new kind of fear shaking my body from toe to hair, and twisting my face.”5  

When Capa saw an LCI approaching the beach to evacuate wounded soldiers, he climbed aboard and took more photographs as it pulled away from the beach and of the wounded on board, before collapsing. He awoke hours later to find himself in a bunk, covered in a blanket and a piece of paper reading “Exhaustion Case. No dog tags.”6  

Upon returning to England, Capa sent his photographs off to be developed, and soon returned to Normandy, where he rejoined American forces and continued photographing the Allied campaign to liberate France. He was there as American forces battled German troops around Saint-Lô, liberated Paris, turned back the German counteroffensive in the Ardennes, and parachuted into Germany in the final months of the war. 

US troops’ assault Omaha Beach during the D-Day landings. Normandy, France. June 6, 1944.  © Robert Capa © International Center of Photography | Magnum Photos

Of the more than 100 photographs Capa took on Omaha Beach on June 6, most were lost, but a few survived and were published in the June 19, 1944, issue of Life, giving Americans a window into the violence and chaos of the D-Day landings. Crediting Capa by name, the accompanying article stated that his “best pictures were made when he photographed the floundering American doughboys advancing through the deadly hail of enemy fire to goals on the beaches of Normandy.”7 

Capa survived the war and continued to work as a photographer. He worked in Hollywood for a time but also covered major international events of the 1940s and 1950s, including the early years of the state of Israel and the French war in Indochina. On May 25, 1954, he was killed while accompanying French troops on patrol in what is today northern Vietnam. 

Capa’s photographs of American troops landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944, became some of the defining images of that fateful day. But their influence was particularly strong on director Steven Spielberg, whose 1998 film Saving Private Ryan, starring Tom Hanks, powerfully recreated the same landings that Capa photographed. Spielberg and Hanks attended the grand opening of The National D-Day Museum, now The National WWII Museum, in New Orleans on June 6, 2000, 56 years to the day since Capa took those pictures. 

While touring the Museum’s original D-Day exhibit, Spielberg told Nick Mueller, the Museum’s Founding President & CEO Emeritus, that Capa’s photos, “with all the vibration, the unsteadiness, that informed every single inch of the photographic approach to Private Ryan. Every single frame of that movie was inspired by those shots.”

• 1

  Robert Capa, Slightly Out of Focus (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), 136-137. 

• 2

  Capa, Slightly Out of Focus, 139. 

• 3

  Stephen E. Ambrose, D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (London: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 335. 

• 4

  Capa, Slightly Out of Focus, 140. 

• 5

  Capa, Slightly Out of Focus, 148.

• 6

  Capa, Slightly Out of Focus, 149. 

• 7

  “Beaches of Normandy: The Fateful battle for Europe is Joined by Sea and Air,” Life Magazine, Vol. 16, NO. 25 (June 19, 1944), pp. 25.