Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day (40b)

History is A Set of Lies Agreed Upon (cont’d)

… As I noted in my previous post, on the basis of no hard evidence whatsoever, in his new D-Day book Landing on the Edge of Eternity the British military historian Robert Kershaw (no relation to unauthorized Capa biographer Alex Kershaw) has Robert Capa embedded “with Captain Edward Wozenski’s E Company, coming in late because only a small number of landing craft could get through the obstacles at any one time.” In fact, Capa arrived on the Easy Red sector of Omaha Beach in the 13th wave with Col. George Taylor’s headquarters command, to which he’d been assigned.

Then, Kershaw proposes, “[Capa’s] second and third pictures show two wading and one Sherman DD tank with men clustering around the left side.” Kershaw has mistaken his vehicles here; Armored Assault Vehicle 10, visible at the left in several of Capa’s images, with soldiers standing on its left side, was not a Double Duplex (“DD”) tank — those were of British design — but instead an American “wading Sherman” tankdozer that had accompanied Gap Demolition Team 10 to clear debris after those engineers had blown obstacles in that sector. Hence the numeral “10” painted on this tank, which Kershaw notes without understanding its meaning:

Robert Kershaw, Landing on the Edge of Eternity (2018), cover

Capa’s Contax was loaded with standard twelve-frame 35mm Kodak Super XX film. He seems to have snapped off five shots from the ramp of the landing craft, recording the men from his craft spreading out even farther as they approach the cover of the three stationary Sherman tanks. One of them is clearly designated number “10,” painted on the exhaust funnel of its wader.

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Of course, Capa’s Contax was not “loaded with standard twelve-frame 35mm Kodak Super XX film,” which doesn’t now and didn’t then exist. (Twelve-frame rolls of 120 film were standard for the 2-1/4″ Rolleiflex that Capa also carried, but never used in combat situations.) He had his Contax loaded with standard 36-frame 35mm Kodak Super XX film, which explains why his few D-Day negatives from his brief stay on Easy Red carry numbers from 28 up. Clearly Kershaw has never bothered to actually scrutinize contact prints of those negatives, though reproductions of them are readily available, as below.

Robert Capa, D-Day images from Omaha Beach, contact sheet, screenshot from TIME video (May 29, 2014), annotated.

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Kershaw continues his analysis of Capa’s images thus:

Injured soldiers can be seen floating in the surf, one face down, while half submerged soldiers hiding behind the metal hedgehogs are pulling others under cover.

Capa’s negative 32 (detail). Note G.I. floating behind his pack between two obstacles, lower left.

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Nothing in Capa’s images indicates that any of the few soldiers seen floating in the surf were injured; the one visible at the lower left, seen from behind, is most likely the G.I. whom Capa would subsequently photograph from the front in close-up, now known as “The Face in the Surf.” Furthermore, those “half submerged soldiers hiding behind the metal hedgehogs” are neither “hiding” nor “pulling others under cover”; as Charles Herrick proved conclusively, they’re engineers preparing to blow up these hedgehogs, and urging incoming troops to get away from these welded iron constructions and seek shelter elsewhere so that they can continue their crucial work.

Kershaw compounds this error in a subsequent passage:

Capa’s few surviving photographs of American soldiers pinned down on Omaha Beach are a remarkable document. All that is missing from these in part grainy pictures is the crack and thump of incoming fire, and the clunk of metal striking metal, whirring off steel obstacles. They were taken against a backdrop of disturbing noises, explosions, shouts, and insane screams. …

Modern terrain analysis of the crest lines and bluff shadows that form the backdrop to Capa’s first pictures reveal his landing place to be just right of WN 62. The spot is virtually beneath the east side of the present Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial at Colleville-sur-Mer. He turned left, taking two pictures from the lee of the tank, of clusters of infantrymen lying prone in about a foot of water behind a sloping phalanx array of wooden bench obstacles. They are probably cowering from fire, possibly aimed at them from Heinrich Severloh and Franz Gockel at strongpoint WN 62. The men, borne on the tide, are crawling toward the shoreline like mud-colored amphibians. This angle of the shot was to provide later inspiration for Steven Spielberg’s iconic movie film depiction of Omaha in Saving Private Ryan. …

I don’t know of any “modern terrain analysis of the crest lines and bluff shadows that form the backdrop to Capa’s first pictures” save for that of the aforementioned Charles Herrick, here at this blog, who deserves credit for same. As for those “clusters of infantrymen lying prone in about a foot of water behind a sloping phalanx array of wooden bench obstacles. They are probably cowering from fire … The men, borne on the tide, are crawling toward the shoreline …” — these are in fact the selfsame engineers Capa photographed from the rear as he approached the scene, still working on blowing those obstacles, now seen from the front, their role in the landing readily identifiable by the insignias on their helmets — visual evidence to which Kershaw proves himself oblivious.

Robert Capa, D-Day negative 35, detail, annotated

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Eventually, Kershaw introduces a further bit of nonsense, this from Sam Fuller’s autobiography:

War photographer Robert Capa, having made his way ashore and near [Technical Sergeant Calvin] Ellis, focused his telescopic camera lens on a German officer on the bluff above them, probably at WN 62. He “stood with his hands on his hips, boldly barking out orders to soldiers behind him,” a depressing image he thought. “The sight of that cocky Nazi officer, so sure of himself, was heart stopping,” Capa recalled.

Capa never “made his way ashore.” Nor did he normally use (or even carry) a “telescopic camera lens.” Furthermore, given the distances involved, such a lens — of the power available for the Contax II — would not have enabled him to observe the body language and facial expressions of anyone that far away, much less to make an exposure of anyone on top of the cliff that would be readable. Finally, Capa never spoke the words that Kershaw attributes to him with the use of quotation marks in this passage; Kershaw is paraphrasing an account given by film director Fuller of an encounter with Capa in Hollywood after the war, in which (according to Fuller, paraphrasing the photographer) Capa claimed to have made such an exposure on the beach.

Following Capa biographer Richard Whelan’s lead, Kershaw places Capa aboard LCI(L)-85 when leaving Easy Red, then switching to LCI(L)-94 when LCI(L)-85 gets hit by German shells, whereas the filmic evidence our team uncovered places Capa uncontrovertibly aboard LCI(L)-94 from Easy Red all the way back to the ship on which he’d arrived, the U.S.S. Samuel Chase.

Fig. 10: Robert Capa holding cinematographer’s slate aboard LCI(L)-94, D-Day, frame from film by David T. Ruley

Additionally, another of U.S. Coast Guard cinematographer David T. Ruley’s D-Day clips shows LCI(L)-85 limping alongside LCI(L)-94 as they both head back from the beach toward the Chase, where LCI(L)-85 unloaded its passengers and crew before finally sinking. Indeed, Capa photographed that process from aboard the Chase after disembarking from LCI(L)-94.

Fig. 16: Robert Capa, view of LCI(L)-85 from USS Samuel Chase, D-Day. Screenshot from Magnum Photos website.

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As a final howler, Kershaw writes this: “Captain Edward Wozenski, whose E Company was badly mauled at the Colleville draw when he took photographer Robert Capa ashore, survived the war.” This implies that taking Capa ashore somehow caused the mauling of his company at the draw. That’s extremely inept sentence structure — on top of which, Capa did not go in with Wozenski’s troops, and in fact never actually set foot on dry land on Omaha Beach.

“This Is War! Robert Capa at Work” (2007), cover

Kershaw scatters references to Capa — a mix of extracts from and/or paraphrases of passages from Slightly Out of Focus and Whelan’s This Is War! — throughout his account. He does so uncritically, heedless of the established facts: Capa, an indefatigable self-promoter, heavily fictionalized his memoir in order to sell it to Tinseltown as a movie treatment, and Whelan, paid by Capa’s younger brother Cornell to promote the Capa myth, produced his tortured version of Capa’s D-Day experiences and the subsequent fate of his films to rationalize the gaps, inconsistencies, and outright falsehoods in Capa’s fabulation.

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. Granted, these Capa sections constitute a relatively small portion of the entire book. To what extent this careless pastiche methodology reflects Kershaw’s production system for the bulk of the book I can’t say. Perhaps it constitutes an anomaly. At the very least, however, it raises serious questions about the rigor with which Kershaw engaged with the primary source material, and about the integrity and credibility of the resulting work as a whole.

(Part 1 I 2)

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(For an index of links to all posts in this series, click here.)

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