“THE MAGNIFICENT ELEVEN”

                It’s June 6 so I wanted to do a post on D-Day.  Since it is such a well-known event, I tried to think of an anecdote that was not familiar to most.  Be careful what you wish for.  I decided to look into the story behind Robert Capa’s famous photos from Omaha Beach – “The Magnificent Eleven”.  I had one of them in my WWII power point and always told my students what a loss it was to history when most of his pictures were ruined in the developing room.  Or so I thought.  In the process of researching this anecdote, I have discovered I passed on false information to hundreds of students!  This is particularly disturbing to me because for 39 years of teaching American History, I took pride in making American History more memorable by telling interesting stories and trivia.  When I retired, I started this web site to pass those anecdotes on.  There have been several times when I have posted a story that I wish I had known when I was teaching.  But much worse, I have occasionally encountered evidence that a story I fondly passed on was actually not true.  I apologize to my students for those.  What follows is one of them.

                Robert Capa is considered to be the greatest combat photographer in history.  He took photos in the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, WWII, the 1948 Israeli War for Independence, and the First Indochina War.  He risked his life to record history.  His most famous photo was “The Falling Soldier” taken in the Spanish Civil War.  “The Magnificent Eleven” were his amazing pictures from D-Day.  He went ashore in one of the early waves with the 16^th Infantry Regiment of the 1^st Infantry Division.  He took 106 photos, but when they were developed in the Life magazine lab in London a young technician overheated the negatives, destroying all but eleven.  Five of those appeared in the June 19 edition of Life, making Capa famous.  The story of the tragic loss of irreplaceable images from one of the most famous events in history became well-known.  And was not questioned for decades.  Today, we know that most likely Capa only took eleven pictures.  He sent several unshot rolls to the lab and claimed that most of the negatives were ruined.  And the story behind the pictures was false also.  He most likely came ashore with the regiment’s command group, in the 13^th wave, an hour and a half after the first invaders.  The section of beach he landed on was relatively quiet and he was not under fire.  (For example, one of the pictures was captioned as soldiers hiding behind a beach obstacle, but was actually a demo team cleaning up after the fight.  See below)  He stayed only fifteen minutes on the beach and then evacuated because of a panic attack or more likely to get his pictures developed quickly to beat the competition.  I am not a particular fan of historical revisionism, but I do believe in setting the historical record straight when new evidence emerges.  History is not written in stone.  Let’s not continue to believe the myth of “The Magnificent Eleven”.  Oh and by the way, “The Falling Soldier” was staged.

https://medium.com/exposure-magazine/alternate-history-robert-capa-on-d-day-2657f9af914

https://www.aarp.org/politics-society/history/info-2019/d-day-robert-capa-images.html

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