Comment by dmckeon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmckeon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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