Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day (2019)

medium.com

65 pointsomnibrain16 comments

Despite being uninterested in Capa, much less what stories he might have told, I was fascinated by the process described by the author to try to figure out what really happened. It was like a write up of diagnosing a tricky bug from logs and core dumps, or of tracking an intruder or other computer security issue.

Clicking through to the more detailed blogs was quite the unexpected rabbithole.

To me most significant is that the soldiers in the pic described as sheltering from gunfire behind a tank-trap thing were really combat engineers fixing to blow it up so equipment could be moved ashore faster.

A fascinating read. I was unfamiliar with the story of Capa, and found this Wikipedia article [0] on the "surviving" photographs to be interesting in that it mentions the fact that recent research has called into question the legitimacy of the overall story.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magnificent_Eleven

Fantastic read, thank you for sharing!

This perfectly fits my understanding of Robert Capa. "The Falling Soldier", probably staged, also taking credit for many photos by Gerda Taro... Not the icon they made him out to be.

Fascinating story of how the “fog of war” can obscure the facts, whether intended or not. Capa presumably had Life magazine as a client or employer, they sent him to get photos of the landing, on a tight deadline. Capa went, got photos, came back with his film, and some of the shots he got were delivered and printed, on deadline.

I see his actions and decisions as professional photo-journalism, and see the entire fabulous confection of misinformation, decoration, confusion, blame, and apparently outright lies as a classic coverup of misinformation - once the fable is public, all involved either have to go along, or to contradict it: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Does Capa share blame? Of course. But so do a dozen or more others who embellished, invented, and went along with the story. Should he have stayed on the beach, or with the command group and gotten more shots? Not if he wanted to get the shots he went for published on deadline.

This little incident has now tainted his entire oeuvre. The truth was fine, there was no need for all the fiction. When you work in journalism your reputation is everything.

EDIT: Reading much further into the rabbit hole there remains the possibility that there were more photos that were censored by the British government and that the players involved were fed a (weak) cover story that they were then sworn to uphold. I've had military relatives with cover stories, so it's not impossible.

>there remains the possibility that there were more photos that were censored by the British government

I believe that the photos would've run into the SHAEF censors and been permanently censored (deleted). SHAEF was not the British government but was instead the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force(s), with Gen Dwight D Eisenhower as commander and other Field Generals from all the branches of the Allied nations in the European Theater as subordinates. Thus it would've been purely a military censor in charge of allowing or disallowing publication.

One of my favorite passages about military censors comes from that awesome book "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller where Yossarian ends up in a position where he must censor correspondence leaving their camp and he gets pretty inventive with his methodology. The whole book is hilarious if you have never read it. His passage about censorship is pretty great.

I couldn't find my copy of the book but I did find this online mention for your enjoyment:

https://www.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2012/07/12/two-par...

Appreciate the correction. As a Brit I should have fact-checked myself better, and my knowledge of the war should be better. As a child I lived in a military retirement home which was practically all soldiers and civilians involved with D-Day and Dunkirk so I got to hear many first hand accounts of these events.

You're good. That sounds like an amazing childhood.

The article says the myth began to appear a few months later. Probably people asking, hey, you got some good pictures of D-Day, anything else we missed? But you can't say, oh I took a ton of pictures, but the darn censors wouldn't let me show it, because the first rule of censorship is you don't talk about censorship. But, you don't go to the beach and take only 11 pictures, so you need a story. And you can only dump so many film bags into the English Channel.

Then once the myth gets legs, well, the myth had legs. And you don't want to contradict it, because your reputation is everything, and the censors aren't going to rat you out. They would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids.

"In Scotland, there is at least one sheep, at least one side of which appears to be black from here some of the time."

It would be practically impossible in the 1940s to have faked the photographs but it's not difficult at all to misrepresent what they are photographs of, the circumstances in which they were taken, and how they came to be available.

Facts are true, and we should rightly ridicule people who insist otherwise, but the interpretation of those facts is subtle and subject to much mischief.

Most of the WW2 photographs I've spent time looking at were subject to an altogether more scientific consideration of this problem. They're aerial reconnaissance photos, so, hopefully they're pictures of something the enemy doesn't want you to know about, captured at great risk by expert pilots in unarmed aeroplanes (a camera plus film goes where the guns would otherwise fit in the plane). But in this case the answer to the question "What is actually captured in this photograph?" is known only to the enemy who've no intention of telling you, so you have to guess and you'd better guess right.

For example, suppose you've never seen a modern rocket. You've seen the powder-filled devices of course - still popular today as fireworks and sometimes for simple amateur rocketry (for beginners or children) but never a liquid fuelled rocket. Now, somebody shows you a photo with scale of a prototype German V-2 rocket and they propose this is a rocket, one of Hitler's vengeance weapons, with a range of perhaps 200 miles. It'd be so fast you can't hope to intercept or avoid it, once launched it is unstoppable. We must do everything possible to destroy them first, right? But on the other hand, whoever heard of a rocket with such ludicrous range - maybe it's a hoax, intended to do nothing more than divert Allied bombing away from valuable fuel and real military targets...

> (a camera plus film goes where the guns would otherwise fit in the plane)

I don't think that is necessarily true. I think the guns and ammunition were very heavy so removing them allowed you to fly faster and further. I don't think say a PR spitfire had cameras in the wings where the guns normally were, I think it was in the fuselage behind the pilots seat so always looking down at the ground.

Good point. I know that during WW2 there was a lot of innovation in this area, and indeed this article suggests a lot changes over those few year but yes, you're right I was incorrect to suggest that you'd rip out the guns from an existing fighter in order to fit cameras in the reclaimed space, the recon planes don't have guns for weight reasons and also to emphasise their mission purpose, if your plane doesn't have any guns you won't go looking for fights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_reconnaissance_in_World...

A variant on 'data and reality'

Reply on news.ycombinator.com