Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day (44b)

The Ones that Got Away (cont’d)

… Picking up where I left off in my previous post, no one in LIFE magazine’s photo department or editorial hierarchy would have learned of the “Fortitude South” deception, to which only a few in the military were privy — the top-secret effort by Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) to persuade the German high command in Berlin that the Normandy attack was merely a feint, with the real invasion yet to come at Pas de Calais. That disinformation campaign surely led to much unexplained and thus seemingly arbitrary military censorship of D-Day press coverage, including Capa’s.

However, the existence of the elaborate SHAEF military censorship system operative on D-Day, which Charles Herrick has described at length, was unquestionably well-known to both Morris and Capa. (Morris sketches his interactions with military censors several times in his 1997 memoir, Get the Picture, and Capa had accidentally triggered a major censorship crisis in 1942, detailed here by Herrick.) Just as certainly, its existence was known to and understood in general terms by LIFE picture editor Wilson Hicks back at that magazine’s New York headquarters. So LIFE‘s photo and editorial staff had long since accepted the rigorous military censorship process through which all press material necessarily passed — authorized to delete anything problematic from or impound entirely any such material without explanation, with those decisions not subject to appeal.

In this case, what remains of Capa’s work on the D-Day story, in the form of negatives, contact sheets, and caption notes held in the Capa Archive at the International Center of Photography, indicates that the censors held back at least half of the negatives on the rolls in that collection. (Click here for my analysis of those holdings.) Consequently, there’s no longer any reason to think that Capa had any need to shore up his status at LIFE by claiming that additional film got destroyed in the darkroom. Nor did Morris have any in-house self-protective need to claim that Capa produced more publishable images than he actually did, much less any motive to protect his friend Capa’s reputation by fabricating an explanation for missing film. To the contrary, had LIFE‘s New York office complained about any shortage of Capa imagery, both Capa and Morris could simply have blamed the censors.

Subsequently, no public comment on Capa’s images, or LIFE‘s publication thereof, required any public rationalization re lost/destroyed film. So censorship by SHAEF provided a sufficient, ready-made internal excuse at LIFE for the absence of any particular type of image or coverage of any specific subject, as well as for the overall amount of imagery surviving SHAEF’s redaction. Which brings us back to where we began — the origins of the myth.

•

The very first version of the Capa D-Day myth appeared in print in September 1944. In October 2015, in a much earlier post in this series, I wrote,

“As previously noted, Capa himself almost immediately began spreading his tale of a greatly exaggerated timeline and an account of a darkroom disaster — in conversation with LIFE correspondent Charles Christian Wertenbaker (which Wertenbaker paraphrases in his September 1944 quickie book Invasion!), and in a private letter to his younger brother Cornell, who relayed it to John McNamara for use in his young-adult book Extra! U.S. War Correspondents in Action, published in early 1945. But at first Capa disseminated it only anecdotally, not going on the record with it in his own words.”

Wertenbaker based the passage in his book involving Capa on an interview he conducted with Capa on June 9, just three days after the landing. Most of it Wertenbaker presents in presumably direct quotation from Capa, and in it one can see the photojournalist already rehearsing the version he would later put on paper for his 1947 memoir Slightly Out of Focus. (Notably, he does not claim therein to have gone in with the first wave, presumably because Wertenbaker, who also covered the landing, would have known that no journalists accompanied the first wave. But Capa does imply that he went in with the second wave.)

After the long, continuous quote from Capa about his experiences on D-Day, Wertenbaker adds this, in his own words:

“Bob Capa had taken 79 pictures of the fighting on the beach. They were the only complete photographic record of the worst hours of the invasion. A careless dark-room assistant ruined all but seven of them.” (P. 44.)

On June 9, of course, neither Capa nor Wertenbaker could have had any idea what had become of Capa’s films; LIFE‘s D-Day edition, datelined June 19, would not hit the newsstands in the States until June 12, and on June 9 what Morris has sent them was still en route to the New York office.

So Wertenbaker’s addendum re the supposed darkroom disaster postdates his interview with Capa. Only two possible sources for it propose themselves: Robert Capa and John Morris. Capa had already achieved celebrity status, certainly in war-correspondent circles; he and Wertenbaker would have treated each other as equals, whereas Wertenbaker — by then a senior correspondent and the magazine’s foreign editor — wouldn’t have had dealings with an underling like Morris in the normal course of events. So odds are that he heard the story of the darkroom accident directly from Capa.

The next version of the darkroom-accident fabulation to go public appears in the McNamara book mentioned above. In this case, we know that it came to that author from Capa, via his younger brother Cornell, as indicated in the book’s credits. (The Capa Archive at the International Center of Photography holds a letter from Robert to Cornell, sent soon after D-Day, that claims his best images got destroyed in the darkroom.)

After that, this fiction shows up next at the end of the D-Day chapter of Capa’s 1947 memoir, Slightly Out of Focus.

So far as I have managed to discover, it does not appear in anything involving John Morris until much later.

It would seem, then, that Morris played no active role in originating the narrative of the darkroom accident. Rather, riding Capa’s coattails in relation to the D-Day myth, he perforce got roped into endorsing and elaborating it (though not at all unwillingly) once the myth started to embed itself in cultural consciousness, starting in the early 1960s.

•

It surprises me to find myself writing that, as it likely surprises those who have followed this investigation closely over time.

Early on, I came to the conclusion that Morris had concocted this tall tale spontaneously on the night of June 7 or the early morning of June 8, as an in-house way of explaining to Wilson Hicks in New York why Capa (and he) were supplying so few images of the actual landing. In which event it was both protective of his friend Capa and self-protective — understandable, even if not exactly admirable. But never intended for publication.

I reasoned further that because its specifics are so technically implausible — b&w film and drying cabinets simply don’t work that way — this scenario could only have come from the imagination of someone proudly ignorant of elementary darkroom procedures, like Morris.

Based on that, I figured finally that Capa eventually decided to make that story public in his memoir on the expectation that the average reader (and moviegoer, if he succeeded in selling this to Hollywood) would neither know nor care that this extremely visual moment was highly unlikely. So that Morris then got stuck with it thereafter — hoist on his own petard, as it were.

Knowing now that Capa and Morris had an unimpeachable excuse — the SHAEF censorship system — at hand for the paucity of Capa’ss coverage, I see no reason for Morris to invent some far-fetched alibi to explain what he sent to LIFE in New York from Capa. So I’m forced to conclude that Capa himself made the darkroom-disaster story up from whole cloth, on his own, weeks after the fact, trying out several versions in public before finally settling on the most cinematic (if also most improbable) variant for his memoir-cum-film-treatment.

This still leaves us with a question: Why did Capa concoct the tall tale of destruction of his negatives in a darkroom accident, and why did John Morris go along with it?

•

To begin with, the mere fact that Capa and Morris had to submit their efforts to a mysterious external oversight structure that left them powerless — SHAEF’s Ministry of Information — impeaches their self-presentations as autonomous actors in the D-Day drama. Thus it represents one good reason why neither mentions the SHAEF filter through which Capa’s negatives and caption sheets had to pass before reaching Morris’s hands and thereby entering LIFE‘s editorial pipeline.

For Capa, whose planned memoir required a dramatic D-Day chapter as its centerpiece, the plain facts of his actual D-Day experience would not suffice. Morris had an equally important reason to go along with Capa’s fiction: The truth underscores how little power and authority he had in his menial role as assistant picture editor in LIFE‘s London office, the minimal control he could exert in that position.

• He could not hire or fire any staff photographers or freelancers. He had not hired and, most likely, could not have fired darkroom chief H. C. “Braddy” Bradshaw. I doubt that he could even have fired any of the teenage “darkroom lads” hired and trained by Bradshaw. All such decisions were well above his pay grade.

• He could propose to the staff photographers ideas for stories, which they were free to accept or reject, and vett and pass along any proposals that came in from freelancers, but final approval of any proposal, as well as of any finished assignment, would come from above — Wilson Hicks, back in New York. Meanwhile, the staff photographers could propose and arrange feature stories without consulting him, as Bob Landry did.

• For the magazine’s D-Day coverage Morris had no say over the assignments of the staffers and Capa, who, in consultation with SHAEF, decided to which units they’d attach themselves for the invasion.

• Listed among the magazine’s “staff photographers” on the masthead, he had — the evidence suggests — no executive authority whatsoever.

• SHAEF censors would do the first edit of their results, and Morris would have no right of appeal; indeed, he would never even lay eyes on what the censors held back. He could only select the best images from whatever they let through, caption those for the press pool and the New York office, and meet the deadline for the flight to the States.

• Yet, before Morris turned his materials over to the courier on the morning of June 8, he had to get them approved a second time by the censors — a process he does describe, albeit briefly and dismissively, in Get the Picture.

• In short, he was little more than a gofer, a glorified office boy, still running errands for Hicks, only now from across the Atlantic. In the parlance of the times, he was low man on the totem pole.

• Hardly surprising that in all of his accounts over the years he omitted any mention of SHAEF’s initial edit of Capa’s D-Day take, since it both gives the lie to the melted-emulsion fable and demonstrates how little editorial autonomy he actually exercised in that situation. Small wonder that he welcomed the spotlight that Capa’s public initiation of the darkroom-disaster myth shone on him, offering as it did an unexpected starring role in the drama to one otherwise relegated to the ranks of the bit players.

•

In hindsight, I can see where I went wrong when I began my effort to sort out fact from fiction in the various accounts of Capa’s D-Day experiences and the fate of his negatives.

First, I let myself get seduced by narrative — to whose temptations I confess myself no less vulnerable than most. In place of the established myth, with its enticing melodrama, I supplied an alternative tale with its own attractions, an intricate skein of personal and interpersonal motivations: fear, failure, guilt, self-protection, camaraderie, white lies. No less rewarding, I’d like to think, just in a different way. But also no less obfuscating.

Second (and definitely related to the first), the undeniably nice guy who resides beneath this crusty, critical exterior wanted some reason for the myth’s creation and perpetuation with which I could empathize — something that, though not ennobling, would humanize the protagonists without diminishing them. Not big events, but large emotions, complex motives.

Instead, I end up — and you along with me, dear reader — with something nowhere near tragic, merely sordid and bathetic: Constrained by logistics, Capa did the bare minimum that the job required, then exaggerated his D-Day experiences and made up the darkroom-disaster story so that he could maintain his professional reputation and flog his memoir to Tinseltown: a clear-cut case of stolen valor. And Morris, who had no significant editorial role in the making of LIFE‘s D-Day feature but merely packaged what he received from SHAEF, went along with Capa’s histrionic version because his professional reputation depended mostly on his association with Capa, especially on that particular shared historical moment in both their lives, and the fish story that Capa concocted and loosed on the world turned this 27-year-old desk jockey from a marginal character into a central one.

All logistical and pragmatic. Not much of a story. Hardly worth the telling, much less the retelling.

How disappointing.

•

And one more letdown. In Slightly Out of Focus Capa wrote,

“[Before leaving London for the invasion] I bought an English Army raincoat at Burberrys, and a silver pocket flask at Dunhill’s. …

“At 2:00 A.M. the ship’s loudspeaker broke up our poker game. We placed our money in waterproof money belts and were brutally reminded that the Thing was imminent.

“They fixed a gas mask, an inflatable lifebelt, a shovel, and some other gadgets around me, and I placed my very expensive Burberry raincoat over my arm. I was the most elegant invader of them all. …

“I was going in very elegant with my raincoat on my left hand. I had a feeling I would not need that raincoat. I let go of it and it floated away and I hid behind some tanks that were firing on the beach. …”

This is pure bullshit. Capa believed in and advocated a policy of never carrying photo gear or other equipment that you would not use. He intended to reboard the Chase as soon as possible, so as to return to England that day with his film. He would certainly have no need of a high-end raincoat that morning.

So he took no pack or other items with him save for his cameras and film, leaving all the rest of his kit on his bunk back on the Chase. The film clips by USCG cinematographer David T. Ruley made on the return trip to the Chase from Omaha Beach show him unencumbered by anything other than his cameras and leather shoulder bag. He wrote this vignette — like the one about the melting emulsions on his films, another resonant but fictional visual image — with his plan to sell the book to Hollywood in mind.

(Part 1 I 2)

•

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

•

Special offer: If you want me to either continue pursuing a particular subject or give you a break and (for one post) write on a topic — my choice — other than the current main story, make a donation of $50 via the PayPal widget below, indicating your preference in a note accompanying your donation. I’ll credit you as that new post’s sponsor, and link to a website of your choosing.

Include  a note with your snail-mail address (or email it to me separately) and I’ll include three (3!) copies of The Silent Strength of Liu Xia, the catalog of the 2012-13 touring exhibition of photos by the dissident Chinese photographer, artist, and poet, who, after eight years of extralegal house arrest in Beijing, finally got released and expatriated to Germany in 2018. The first-ever publication of her photographic work, it includes all 26 images in the exhibition, plus another 14 from the same series, along with essays by Guy Sorman, Andrew Nathan, and Cui Weiping, professor at the Beijing Film Academy. Keep one for yourself, share the others with friends.

Donation Amount:
(Currency: USD)