Welcome to Someone Talked, the official podcast of the National D Day Memorial where leading experts spill all the secrets of the Second World War with your host, doctor John C.

McManus.

Greetings, welcome to Someone Talk.

I'm your host, doctor John C.

McManus from Missouri, S and T.

Alongside is always are my dear friends and partners in mayhem.

I'll say this time April cheek Nessia and John Long from the National D Day Foundation, DJ Memorial Foundation.

How's it going, Oh wonderful, Mayhem continues, Yes, but all good, all good.

Good morning, looking forward to the Mayhem.

That's right, absolutely, and you know, and actually I think the word is appropriate given the topic.

We're talking about Omaha Beach to some extent, but of course specifically Robert Kappa in Omaha Beach.

And of course alongside to discuss that is Charles Eric, who has written a book called Into Focus, which is basically a play on words, because if you've ever read Robert Kappa's memoir, it's called slightly out of focus.

So and very much, you know, Charles's title is very much attuned to what he is he is getting after here trying to put into focus Robert Kappa's activities on D Day at Omaha Beach, which are sort of legendary but perhaps misunderstood too.

Just by way of background, Charles, I mean, remarkable military career.

A graduate of the United States Military Academy in nineteen seventy four.

He is, you know, was an infantryman, combat infantry badge, ranger, master parachutists, deployed.

It's a Panama, you know, a long and very successful military career, graduate of the Army War College, you know.

And oh, by the way, defense contractor two and now an author you know, as if he doesn't do enough.

Well, So, Charles, we're really honored to have you today.

Thanks for joining us.

Oh, thank you.

I'm glad to be here.

You left out my bad knees.

But the bad news are a legacy of everything I just mentioned as absolutely well, we appreciate everything you've done, and we appreciate the work you've done, of course on your book.

Back into focus, I guess maybe the place to start with us is what got you interested in the topic.

How did you come to it?

Well, I kind of backed into it.

I mean I'd always been a little bit suspicious of Kappus photos.

Anytime you see a cameraman ahead of the action in combat, it's usually a sign of a staged photo.

So Alan Coleman had a project over on his website Photo Critic International taking a look at cappus D Day experiences, and I smilear to comment over there on something and ended up getting wrapped into it and did several columns examining well, basically the major points that we're gonna be looking at today.

And that kind of been evolved into the book.

It wasn't planned, It was just a stumbled into it kind of thing.

Yeah, So Robert Kappa, you go into his background a little bit, and I think he wanted to kind of start there, give us an overview of who he was, how he comes to this point, you know, to be a photographer, you know, in this enormous invasion.

Yeah, he's got the reputation being the world's greatest war photographer.

And he did serve in a number of wars, covered them China, Spanish Civil War twice, almost all the theaters in World War Two in the western part of the war.

But he was also the head of Magnum Photos.

He created that he covered the foundation of Israel, and he was Jewish and that had great meeting for him.

And then he finally died in combat with the French forces into China in nineteen fifty four.

But he was born in Hungary and he was exiled when he was a late teenager, supposedly because of socialist revolutionary activity.

We don't know if that's true or not.

He embellished all of his stories.

They did end up in Germany.

He studied there in college for a little bit, ran out of funds, started kicking around, took an interest in photography.

When Hitler came to power, he moved to Well.

He eventually ended up in Paris.

He had several places in between, worked more in photography for a couple of companies there, newspapers.

There he met a girl name Gerta and I'm not even proud to pronounce her last name because I don't want to alienate any countries here.

But she was his girlfriend, and together they created a fictional character called Robert Kappa, and he was supposed to the head of their photo agency.

They thought that'd give it more respectability.

And Kappa posed is the dark room assistant, but he actually took the photos and Gerda would go and use her charm to get the photos published.

Well.

Pretty soon Kappa took over the pisana of Robert Kappa, the fictional person, and Gerda she changed her last name to Tarro and of course she was quite a photographer in her own right, and they ended up in the Spanish Civil War covering that very early on.

Kapa was only about twenty two, going on twenty three at the time, and that's where on his very first outing he took the very famous photo of the Falling Soldier or the death of the Militiaman.

Now that's come to be a very powerful image, became absolutely famous for it.

But when that was originally published in a view magazine over in Europe, it was published with a second photo, and that second photo showed a different man dying in almost the exact same position, at the exact same location, and very shortly before or after.

So it became obvious if you were over in Europe the dad these photos may not be quite what they purport to be.

The newspaper the magazine passed the office real compact photos, but if you're alert, you knew there was a problem.

Unfortunately, when the Falling Soldier was published in the US, they didn't publish the second photos.

So the US readers thought that was exactly what the caption said, and there'd always been kind of a question about its authenticity.

Years later, the second photo popped up again and that kind of reignited the questions, and finally, I think it was two thousand and six, a professor spurge it was a Manuel superagate, I'm sure, butchering that as well, I apologize.

But he set out to find out where the photos were taken.

They were supposed to be taken at Sarah Mariano, where the combat was going, the front lines were fighting, but he actually located it to a place called Sara Sarah as Peyo, and that was thirty miles behind the lines, and that conclusively proved that this was a stage photo.

Is a purely a propaganda thing, And if you take a look at all of the the negatives in his film said, it's pretty clear that they're running back and forth, staging Marck attacks and this that and whatnot.

And as a result, the very first outing that he did for covering combat was just a fake, and he became famous for it.

And even today there are people who either don't know, don't care, or don't believe that was faked, and they still considered one of the great photos of war from all time.

So that's I guess that's how popular history goes, or popular legends.

Charles, Why do you think that was so not challenged at the time, that particular photo.

I know, we'll get into the Kappa photos, the later Kapa photos for D Day, but why was that one not challenged more at the time.

Well, I don't mean to get into politics, but I think a large part of it was a political thing.

The revolutionary or republican forces in Spain were fighting the fascist Franco.

You know, that was how that was portrayed.

They had the Abraham Lincoln Brigades romantically going over and intervening, and I think the popular perspective amongst most of the arts community, in the media community.

Was that.

This was a good thing.

It's a good cause, and so we're not going to look too closely behind the curtain, see what's what's back there.

And ever since then, you know, it's it's just been a legacy of it.

I mean, there's there's quite an ethical dimension to this whole thing from a journalistic standpoint, from a photographic standpoint, you know, it's hard to get really good handed photos of a combat zone you know better than we do, of course, But at the same time, you know the I mean, there's an artistic license too, And of course pictures do lie.

People say, well, the photo don't lie.

Actually they do in the sense of misapprehensions and what is misleading and captions that are wrong, and even a photographer may not know what the caption is going to be ultimately.

But but it seems as though what you're saying is that Kappa deliberately was deceptive here in staging the photo, and that's kind of what launches his career.

So it begins on a kind of deceptive base point.

Is that is that correct sum summation.

Absolutely now, And that's different from his D Day photos.

His D Day photos have been for craid just deceptively by the mostly by Life magazine and everybody ever since, ever since.

But in that case, he was actually there.

There are actual events, He's photographing actual events on the ground, So it's not so much that he was fortraying things as a lot, although in his later life when he wrote his book, he did weave it into this very fanciful fabric of a story, which was largely fictionalized.

Yeah, I mean that his his memoir has to be taken with a great grain of salt.

And you make that point in the book very well.

I mean it's I mean, I know, from from you know, kind of quote using it as a source, you really have to be careful.

But he's he's a vexing figure, honestly, Charles, because he was there, he had I mean he was he had certainly a great talent for photography, and he was involved in war events.

He ultimately did lose his life in South East Asia, and that's not going to happen if he's not there in a combat zone.

And yet he also has this really kind of almost crass self promotional side on some levels too.

He really mastered that, didn't.

I mean, he's even the name.

I mean, he creates this persona.

And so I think the book is interesting and that you really kind of delve deeply into who he was.

How do you think we should, you know, view his his photography as a whole, as a as a as a kind of centerpiece of of of understanding of World War Two, and it's kind of source material do you think we discarded do you think we do you think there's value in it at all?

I mean, how do you go with this?

A couple of different layers, aren't you know?

First of all, was he a good photographer?

And no, even his friend said, well, he wasn't technically very good, but he was always at the right scene and was able to capture the right image.

You look into that and see how many of those images were kind of staged, and they weren't nearly as far forward as he said he was.

So he has a good body of work.

But you know, during the war, he was never valued highly enough by any organization to hire him on as a staff photographer.

He was just a contract photographer.

They'd hired on for a few months of their time, and they'd fire or his contract would run out and they'd get somebody else.

It wasn't until after d Date that life took him on as a staff reporter or a staff photographer.

So he did some good work, some interesting photos.

You have to kind of look at them very carefully, but he was a master of I call it the shaky cam kind of photos, lots of blurry to add a dramatic flare and make it seem like more of a of a sense of action and drama and danger.

One of the things you don't mind me scrolling very quickly through these slides.

Okay, this is one of the first shots he took off the ramp of his landing craft.

And again he only took ten shots on the beach that day, five from the ramp and five in the water.

And you can see how shaky and blurry this is.

Now by comparison, there was a Coastguard still photo cameraman by the name of Robert Sargeant, and he landed in a wave.

Well he didn't land he coompanied the landing craft in a wave about forty minutes before Kappa, and they hit the beach just in front of WN sixty four as you would call.

That's the strong point guard on the east side of the E one drawn And this company took a lot of casualties to during the landing and the subsequent fighting.

But you see the quality of his photos.

They're very sharp, very clear, tell a great story.

I mean, that's tank.

Those are number nine and it's sitting in a clear gap through the obstacles at the beach.

I mean, that's a remarkable photo.

And if you look over look over there, there's a little roverboat that the engineers floated their demo in.

The ramp is coming up immediately you see the guys are on a sandbar here and they close get closer to the beach, are actually going deeper into the water, going into a rountel.

So to me, that's just a fascinating photo tells a lot.

It's high technical quality, and this is just a military cameraman who learned this trade shortly before that.

So a little bit Larry, I think you have to be a little bit Larry about the shaky cam impression.

It has some emotional appeal, but I'm not sure that it deserves all of the the honor and yeah, and crazy it gets.

I love the sergeant photo, by the way.

One we show pretty much every school group when they come up to the Memorial for a tour.

But let's uh, and there's so much to your book.

I wish we had time to talk about every page, but let's kind of skip into the middle.

You make a really a lot of very compelling challenges to the Kappa legend, but you start with where and when he landed on D Day?

So what did Kappa add all of his adherents.

Since then, what did they claim and what did your research show?

Well, he claimed that he landed in the first wave with company E.

But take a look at this photo here.

This photo is the one of the first five photos he took from the ramp of his landing craft.

Now in company he landed.

They landed six thirty ish and the tide at that point was about two two hundred and fifty yards shy in the obstacles.

Well that this picture here doesn't show that at all.

In fact, the picture shows that the tite is almost up to the shingle A bank, but there probably I don't know, fifty seventy five yard shy of it.

And that's exactly where the tide was when Colonel Taylor arrived on the beach with his rare command Echelon of the sixteenth Regiment, and that happened to be the boat that Kapa actually was in.

So they landed about the eight twenty.

They landed fifteen minutes late, So he landed almost two hours after eight hour.

And I got a tremendous pushback on that.

Surely I was wrong, It must be crazy.

You know, the photos don't lie.

All the details are there and frankly, I'm a little bit amazed for years that myth of the first wave the company has lasted, given all the visual evidence has just to helps it.

Now as of the country evidence of who's on what ship made absolutely.

Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, there's just so much confusion there.

His biographer was convinced that Kapa landed on Fox Green, the next beachctor over, but it's never really sat right.

And there's another good researcher, a guy named Peter Hute, and he's a d D tour guide and brents a wonderful website with lots of detail, and he'd taken a look at conpour matching, train contour matching, and he decided that Kappa landed on ENGI Red.

And so when I took a look at that, it seemed like a good solution.

But I didn't really have a lot of faith that you can really match concours with the change in terrain and vegetation and whatnot.

So I took a look at it a little bit differently, and I went out and found eventually three photos that linked Kapa's landing site to a known object on the beach.

And there's a set of ruins, called the Roman ruins by some folks, and so this was one of the three photos taken by Lieutenant Boucher's the officer serving the board a l c I, and it it had beached a little bit later in the day, and looking off to the right side of the l CI, you can see the Roman ruins there peeking above the shingle bank and it's outlined in the little white box.

Now to the left side you see tank does are number ten, which we've seen throughout the cap of Sauga.

And moving on to the next photo.

Next photo is off the left side of that same l CI, and you see two standard tanks with deep waiting kits, one of them dragging a M eight armored ammunition trader.

They're they're reloading their tank and a duplex drive tank and we'll see those a little bit more.

To notice first the the skyline, the details of the skyline there, and this then is the third photo Buscher took us as LCI was pulling out, as you can see another distinctive segment of the skyline.

So putting those together and then referring back to Kapas Froda from the ramp, you see the exact same picture of the skyline, and that pretty much definitely places where Capital landed, probably about one hundred yards to the east of the Roman Ruins, and that was halfway between the E three exit and at strong Points and the E one exit and at Strong Points.

And the result of that means that that was a pretty lightly defended area.

They just weren't getting much fire.

That's where Spalding's boat section landed, made it up to the crest of the bluffs, followed by Company G, which made it up to the crust of the bluffs almost intact, putting the two of them.

They fought their way through the bluffs and they then departed on their separate missions.

So that was a very key place, possibly the first penetration of the bluffs, but certainly the most critical.

I think they landed nine more battalions of reinforcing troops that day, and seven of them mounted the bluffs through exactly exactly that gap there.

Charles, I have a quick question, so going back to I mean, I have the deepest respect for anyone who landed on any part of Omaha Beach because I can't even imagine, but you you kind of make the point that he really didn't intend on landing on the beach itself.

So can you tell us a little bit about what how that happened?

And you know that he the fact that maybe he had no actual intention of setting foot in France on D Day necessarily, can you talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, Apple wasn't really despite what he portrayed, he wasn't really all that anxious to be the front line of combat.

When he got to England.

He was his first assign to the US Army Air Forces, and his bureau volunteered him to jump in with the paratroopers on D Day.

Yeah, he didn't volunteer, and so he just kind of refused to go to jump school.

So they ended up reassigning him, and I guess he thought he'd he resigned back to the Airs.

Instead they assigned them with the Ground Forces photopool.

Two guys were in that photo pool on Omaha Beach and their job wasn't to land with the troops.

Their job was to ride in, get initial photos of the landing, ride back in their landing craft, and get the photos on the wire to Stateside as quickly as possible.

Well, when Kapa's boat hit the shore, everybody got out and Kapa stood on the top of the ramp there and started taking pictures.

Well, you saw in Sergeant's photo how quickly they raised the ramp and were retracking off the beach.

The ramp was lightly armored and the only protection crew had, so they wanted to get that up.

Well, by Kapa's story, one of the crew men came up and booted him off the ramp.

I guess they thought he was hesitating or a coward or whatever, But yeah, he accidentally ended up on the shore.

He had not intended to go there.

That was not his job, and quite frankly, it kind of unnerved the guy.

And you can understand why wasn't prepared for it.

He wasn't wearing a normal combat kit.

He was just there with the camera bag.

And you take a look at all his photos from the beach, all the five of them are pointed off door.

He was looking for a way to get out of there.

No photos of the fighting the shore.

Yeah, and you got to understand that he in one of his versions of the story frankly admitted he had a failure of courage and fled as fast as he could.

And that's not a knock on him.

I think I would have done that for the same situation.

Well, another interesting point that I think is counterintuitive to a lot of people who who know D Day is you assert that where he landed in front of the room in ruins, which was you know, the wreckage of a house there just past the beach, but it was much less of a killing zone than other parts of Omaha Beach on D Day.

And again I don't I don't want to disparage any anyone because if they're on Omaha Beach, they're in danger.

But yeah, the truth of the matter is there are some parts that were much heavier fire than right there where where he was actually landing, and says where he was claiming to land.

So uh, unpacked that for us and give us, you know, a little bit of a description.

What was it like for the men around Kappa on on D Day.

We have to have realized that there were about one hundred plus men in the the wave that Kappa landed with.

Uh.

Every single man in that wave waded through the store or waded through the surf and made it to the shingle embankment without a single casualty, not a one.

So that gives you an idea that that was not that the bloody killing zone that he protrayed later in it.

Yeah, a soul team Stan had landed there.

If we go back to this photo, you can see their tank doz are right there and these the two standard tanks with deep waiting kits that landed with that team, and they didn't come under fire for the first twenty minutes on the beach.

They were able to set up all their demolitions and blow their first shot without receiving a single round of fire from the Germans.

It was only after that shot that explosion went off that the Germans started paying attention to them, and despite that, they were able to open up an additional double wide lane beyond the one they initial did.

That gives you a good idea of just how light the fire was at that place.

Now, they did receive fire, but the Regimental medical section would spend all day on the beach treating casualties.

They only had one man wounded out of about twenty folks.

So that area was I won't say it was a be call it paradise, you know.

And I don't want to say that Omaha Beach was not absolute hell.

In lots of places, But the German strong points were concerned with defending the the exits and that's where their fire was mostly concentrated, and they just had attention for the other areas on a secondary basis.

They were trying to conserve ammunition, they were trying to focus where they need to put the fire, so that part of the beach did not And that's why Colonel Taylor landed there.

He's in almost at the Fox Green and said, oh, this is this is not a place to land.

I can't do anything to a certain control here.

So he cruised up the beach until they found a calm spot, which was where he landed, and that was deliberate.

Yeah, I ma ay, I can give you a little bit of an update because you use some very good statistics in your books page one ten, one eleven or so, uh for the losses of the sixteenth and you say that the eighty first Chemical Mortar Battalion had two men killed on D Day.

On our wall at the National DDA Memorial, we actually have nine men from that unit.

Uh.

And the UH Medical Detachment.

Uh, we have nine men from that unit also killed, including four officers.

Now, UH, you of course we're dealing with the beach itself, and I have I don't know without doing a lot of digging exactly what the uh you know, where those losses happened.

They could have been in the channel, uh before they got to the beach.

They could have been later, hours later past the beach.

I don't know.

Uh, but uh, you know, I don't want to give the impression that, uh, you know, these these units that you know, maybe had light losses on the beach were unscathed, because again, anyone who's landing on Omaha Beach uh is facing up just a mail stream of fire.

Absolutely, yeah.

And I took my figures from the the after action reports of that day, and of course, uh, I'm sure in the weeks after that they cleaned those up some right.

Well, of course, you know, we'd like to brag about this on our podcast.

That's the National D Day Memorial Necrology Project is the only list in anywhere in the world of every man who's been identified as dying on D Day.

And we're still working on that, still researching plus years.

Yes, uh, still still researching exactly and uh you know, in fact, got up got folders on my desk right now of men that we're we're considering, and it's a it is and it's endlessly fascinating, but it's also very important because you know, we we want to see that every one who died on D Day uh recognized and name them individually on our wall.

Yeah, no doubt.

I mean that's incredible, exacting work with remarkable blend of source material.

It's amazing how hard it is to pin down, you know, to this day, exactly when somebody was killed.

And you know, I mean, this is this enormous, well documented event.

Still to this day there's there's unanswered questions, just as there are about Robert Kappa, who you know?

I mean sure that that's what's so fascinating about this conversation, Charles, is that, I mean, we think we know Kappa, and we kind of do, but but maybe we don't.

And that that's sort of the takeaway from your book is you're really delving into the various dimensions of him.

It's not just about Omaha Beach.

It's about his career on some level during World War Two, but also his actions on Omaha Beach.

So you know, as you mentioned, his job is not necessarily to stay there and antake pictures.

His job was to, you know, basically, stay aboard one of the boats, take some pictures, and then get out of there and get them get them on and moved on.

In the book, one of the things I learned that I didn't know because I'm not you know, well verse on how you know the the photographers work in terms of getting their pictures out to the various media sources and all that.

You go into some depth about how he really did have to get out of there in order to get the pictures to the various media sources in any kind of timely matter.

And so this is a pretty serious issue for him, not you know, absent the danger.

Once he's on the beach, he could be maroon there and then it's kind of useless he's taking these pictures and then never get out where his camera could be destroyed or whatever.

So how long in your estimation was he actually on the beach, and then what's the process by which he gets out of there and then gets the photos out to the world.

Well, he landed with Taylor about eight twenty in the morning.

He was on LCI eighty four.

The LCI fled to when it was hit, retracting at eight point fifty The maximum, he was there for about thirty minutes now judging by the height of the tide and his various photos in Piedro's one foot every eleven minutes, so based on his own photos, it looks like he's only taking photos for about six minutes at the max.

And I think at that point he then went to LCI eighty four right after a beach.

He boarded it right at that point.

Certainly he was not on the beach in my opinion more than ten or fifteen minutes.

Now.

The parents sports are supposed to start hauling their landing craft back up at ten thirty in preparation for a departure about one o'clock, so Cap had a very narrow window to get back to his transport to get back to England.

So that accounted for his urgency on getting the heck off the beach as fast as he could.

So he boarded the LCI eighty four that went back to the transport area.

He caught another landing craft over to the USS Chase and or Chase and he came with and then that was in a convoy that returned back to the UK.

Convoy didn't leave until about eighteen thirty.

That night.

Everything was delayed that day.

Now they were so anxious to get the photos that the Press Corps had or Press division had a plane awaiting in Weymouth for the first guy with film, and kap was really hoping to make that get the great scoop, maybe you'd finally get a finding a staff job.

Unfortunately, one of the leading ships in that convoy had a guy named Bert Brandt who was also in the photo pool, and Brant had also written on a landing craft he claimed he got out of the beach.

His photos don't show it, but regardless, Brant's ship got into Weymouth earlier and unloaded about two three hours before Kappus did, and Brandt's film got flown to London.

Brent got flown to London, did a series of high profile interviews, and Kappa was arriving at d Weymouth pretty bitter at all, and so he turned around, got the next ship and went back to Omaha Beach.

The film then went to London.

I'll spare you all the details of the the inventorship process, but eventually got put on a plane that was a special courier plane that flew to New York retruction to d C.

And then it was carried up to the Life magazine studios in New York and it made it on the wire and into the evening newspapers on the West Coast on seventh June.

So not too bad.

Some of the photos were sent by radio telephoto available to all the news agencies, but the first ones that made it on the news were the papers in the evening on the West coast.

So, Charles, I know, we've given many, many, many maniurs at the memorial, and we always hear about you know, people just say, oh my goodness.

You know, it's so sad what happened to the Kappa photos the dark room incident.

So let's let's talk about that for a minute, because for decades, the Kappa story insisted that this his relatively light production of photos on D Day was due to the dark room accident.

Explain what this was and why this has been reevaluated in recent years.

Well, supposedly, the photos they were good, a big rush to go ahead and develop the photos and get them out, and they turned the photos over to a teenage lab assistant who in his rushed to get them developed, put them in a drying cabinet and turned the heat up quickly, and supposedly the heat caused the emulsion to run and run a whole bunch of the film and blah blah, blah, blah blah.

Ross Bowman very prominent photographer.

He was the youngest Culoser Prize winner photography in the history of that award.

A very distinguished career, but about twenty fifteen he got an Alan Coleman's Photo Critic International website and challenged that.

He said, this doesn't make any sense, and he's The two of them were later joined by Rob McElroy and Christin Dacouna, and they did a series of experiments using film.

At the time he emerged in Sea War, et cetera, et cetera, cetera, and decisively proved that you just can't ruin the film that way.

A lot of pushback, a lot of arguments back and forth on that, and the big guy had been pushing the darkroom accident theory was John Morris.

John Morris was the photo editor of the for the Time Life Organization in London and the lab reported to him, and so he'd pushed his story about you know, he'd seen what happened, et cetera, et cetera.

And so he bought back against this very hard, but finally he just had to admit that, yeah, the lab back its story was not proud.

Kapa apparently only took the ten photos from the beach, and well, that was a good admission, but it didn't really explain then what happened to the rest of the photos, and so that's always been kind of the lingering question out there.

When Kapa got to the beach, his first photo was negative forty nine out of what would be a total of thirty eight from that role of film.

We've got no idea what was on the preceding twenty eight images, probably pictures of them approaching the beach, moving from the chase to the beach, et cetera.

But we don't know.

In his book, when Kapitol has pretended he landed at six thirty, you know, he pretended that it was too dark to take photos that period.

But again that was written three years later when he was trying to work around the first wave of Company E and the lad backs and stories, so we don't know what he really thought on that.

So I mean, the whole darkroom thing, I mean, in the book, of course, you dismantled that, and others have too.

It's just you're right, it makes no sense.

But what you know, you mentioned a moment ago there were other photos.

What do you think happened to them?

How do we account for that?

Well, now, after he got on the LCI and for the rest of the day, he's working off a different camera as roly Flex, and he took sixty photos of those.

We have most of the negatives of that, so that's kind of a separate group.

But as far as the landing photos, it's just speculation.

Kappa was not in good favor with the sensors.

He'd been involved in the Norton Bombsite Security League.

He'd taken photos of B seventeen's early in the war and intervertently captured an image of the Nordon Bombsiteas didn't go through the sensors, he passed it directly to his editor.

His editor put it on the front page and they printed four hundred thousand copies and they had to destroy all those.

And Kapa based an inquest about why was this to me alien?

You know, Hungary was part of the access at that point.

Why was this enemy alien taking pictures of the Nordon bomb side, and that delayed him getting accredited for weeks and perhaps even months.

So when the photos got back to London, they didn't go to the lab initially, they went to the sensors for initial review, and the censors were supposed to take a look at the caption notes.

Well, Kappa neglected to fill out caption notes for any of his D the Eight Landings.

So you got this film coming in from a guy who's already got a bad reputation.

It's got no caption notes.

So they decided, in my opinion, to treat it as a temporary as top secret.

They had a mechanism for things that they thought might be too sensitive, and that would put it in the hands of a pestidy officer and he'd take it back to the news agency lab and he would oversee it being developed with nobody else president in the dark room, and that I think accounts for why John Morris had no idea what happened in his dark room that day, because he couldn't go in there for it.

The sensors took the film back and for review, and we had Operation Fortitude going on.

We were trying to convince the Germans that D Day was just the preliminary diversionary operation and the big landing pat Kela would happen later the summer, and the sensors were really throttling back what images got through and what stories got through.

If you take a look at the images that made it to the media in the days after D Day, there weren't many and they didn't show very much.

They were very vague.

So my belief is that the Photoscap took on the way he just showed too much of the size and the scope of the invasion.

The few photos that did made it through make it through were only showed only a couple of landing crafts.

You know, there were thousands of landing craft out there that day.

So what did make it through is it looked like the invasion was stalled at the beach.

She had casualties, you had a sinking ship, you had guys being loaded into two body bags.

Is rack ruin and destruction.

So all the words were you know, we've landed and who are who are kinds of things you'd expect.

But the visual images of the record that the the German open source intelligence would look at was very new to it was there was so tight on security when the time when Life published its first edition after the landings, they had a comment in their text said, hey, you know, just be aware that everything we're reported its coming from the German sources Shafest and telling us anything.

And that's how tight security it was at the time.

And it wasn't there you know, I mean you mentioned that, you know there's no captions.

Wasn't there then a disconnect like at the at the New York level of Life magazine excitedly looking at Kapus Photo and saying, oh, this is first wave I mean obviously because they don't know any better, And I mean, isn't that where that comes from?

More so than Kapa misrepresenting it at the time?

Now later of course like that out of focus he does, so is that a fair representation it is?

The film arrived in an assistant editor there.

He had the job of putting captions on it, and he didn't know any better.

He probably had an idea of generally what had happened on Omaha Beach, and the news there was not really good.

I mean, they understood how bad the first day was, and so he incorporated that stuff and he put some marketing spin in there.

I mean word Life magazine.

We've got the best reporters, we've got the best record offers.

If they're going to be anywhere, they're going to be at the point of the spear.

So there's a little bit of good brand pushing there.

But they originated the landing of the first wave thing, and they were very specific when they were talking about waves.

They weren't talking about the wave in the general sense of the first regimen enter the first day's landing.

They were talking about the first group of boats.

In so.

But that fit pretty well with Kapa's self groomed image, and so he embraced it in his book and he linked it to any company that fictional story.

So Kaptain was an interesting character.

He's you know, he's the kind of guy that it is how many He had written the greatest four photographer in the world, you know now that was a quote that came from another paper that had published his photos.

Who are you know again?

Marketing height And he's also talked about, you know, the greatest lover in the world.

He's that kind of guy.

And as you know, those kind of guys fall into one or two categories.

They're the people you don't talk to or the people that just great charm and you know, you just love it because it's not serious, but that's just the way they are, and you're kind of swept along as a great rock.

And Raccontrury always telling stories and they're always outline.

There's a little bit of munch OUs in there.

So he was quite a legitimate character.

I mean, there's there's no doubt about that.

He was an interesting figure.

And Charles, even though there are not very many photos, he is this iconic figure and we do think of those images when we think of D Day.

You know, it kind of reminds me of Joe Rosenthal with you know, the flag raising at Eejima.

You know, this iconic photo that's a little different than you know when you get to the backstory, but it's it's still this iconic photo that really defines that particular battle.

So how would you then, in the end, how do we remember Robert Kappa?

And you know, beyond embellishing his legend and glossing over some of these inconvenient facts, what did he do right as a wartime photographer?

He had a good body of work.

There's no denign that.

I do have to think that do you have to see though, that you had to carefully look at his images to make sure that what you're seeing is what you say or they say.

You just can't believe the captions.

There's one famous image of two troops hustling across the street in a little village.

It looks like they're under fire.

Well that's been cropped.

The full image showed another guy sitting on a cart looking just exhausted.

There, so we don't know why these two guys were hustling.

Maybe they're sergeant was screaming at him.

But you got to understand that pictures are cropped to tell the story that the news story or the magazine wants told, So you can't really actually believe everything as it's presented or the caption.

Now, Kapa had some great photos on the beach, but they're only the ten and there's so few from the beach that they've become iconic almost by default, and we're never going to get those out of the public image, nor should we, nor should we, but it's always best to kind of understand the context.

Now, my personal belief is his best photos were taken when he finally did do a parachute job across the Rhine River, which I think it's seventeenth Airborne Division, right, that's right.

That to me has a lot of feelings of genuine action as he wandered around the drop zone and the organization.

They weren't spectacular, but they were honest and as a broken down old infantrymen, to me, they resonate a lot more than but they're not the kind that newspapers normally love.

Newspapers will love much more of the ones that we see on the screen here.

So yeah, and of course you know that was Operation Varsity, and that was no walkover that it was a pretty dangerous dropped for some of those guys.

That was in March nineteen forty five.

So yeah, the book is called back into focus by Charles Herrick.

There we go.

Tremendous read for anyone who's interested, certainly in Omaha Beach, the nuts and bolts of Omaha Beach, especially in the early hours of D Day, but also a really interesting exploration of war, photography, reportage, journalism, ethics, and and a kind of iconic figure.

And you know, ultimately the reader can decide what he or she thinks.

You know, you've you've stated your position really well, and I know there's all sorts of people who push back and who are anti cap a pro cap at whatever.

I mean, He's he's a liking Rod on some level too.

But I think I think you've really gotten to the heart of it, and we we are Yeah, we really enjoyed the book and we appreciate you sitting down with us today, Charles.

That means a luck to meet.

Thank you very much, and so m a of you.

Yeah, you too, Thanks so much.

John Long, Please tell us today's we salute you today?

And are we salute your feature.

I would like to zoom in on that question of reporters on the beaches and honor the service of Peter m.

Paris, a gifted young soldier who was a reporter for Yank magazine and who fell on Omaha beat John D.

Day.

Peter Milton Paris was born in nineteen thirteen in Brooklyn, the son of Polish immigrants who spoke primarily Yiddish.

He attended the legendary Boys' High School in Brooklyn, which by the way, was the same high school attended by Aaron Copeland, Isaac Asimov, Howard Cosell, and hosts of other luminaries, and in high school he excelled in his studies and achieved a reputation as an artist.

He then went on to earn a degree in Fine arts from Syracuse University and started a career as an illustrator.

However, of course, in nineteen forty one, he was drafted into the US Army and was posted to Fort Belvoir with the Corps of Engineers and where he illustrated the base newspaper.

Of course, war came to the US by the end of that year, and in nineteen forty two an interesting opportunity appeared for the talented young artist.

An army officer named Egbert White had proposed a new publication for soldiers that would be written by and for the enlisted man, in contrast to Stars and Stripes, which some privates thought concentrated a little too much on The brass Yank magazine, as it came to be called, would become an institution in this new war for the grunts and combat boots.

In the inaugural issue, President Roosevelt noted that the new publication cannot be understood by our enemies.

It is inconceivable to them that a soldier should be allowed to express his own thoughts.

The first man to report for duty on the editorial board of Yank magazine was Sergeant Peter Paris.

Paris went on to a varied career with Yank, acting as a writer, photographer, and illustrator in the European theater.

He covered combat operations in North Africa and Sicily, and made history by being the first Army reporter to write a cover story about an African American unit.

By nineteen forty four, he was embedded with the first Infantry Division in the Headquarters Special Troops and was assigned to land on a beach code named Omaha.

By most accounts, Sergeant Paris stepped on a land mine on June sixth, nineteen forty four, and has had his leg nearly severed.

What happened next, however, is a bit murkier.

Many versions of his story say that he was evacuated to an LST and that the LST was subsequently sunk by German fire in the Channel, with the loss of all aboard.

However, there's simply no such sinking of an LST that occurred on D Day.

Furthermore, records of the American Battle Monument's Commission indicate Paris was buried in the temporary cemetery in France, which of course became the iconic Normandy American Cemetery, which suggests that he never left France alive, and that further ABMC reports that his remains were repatriated and buried in New York after the war.

Whichever version is most accurate, the talented photographer and artist was dead, one of more than three hundred men to fall from the Big Red One on D Day.

Peter Paris is remembered at the National D Day Memorial on plaque W eighty five of our Necrology Wall.

He's also memorialized in Bio, France at the Memorial Day Reporters, which honors journalists killed in combat zones around the world.

Sergeant Peter Paris, we salute you, thank you for your service, and thank you for doing your part to save the world.

Yeah.

I mean, I've always thought he bled to death on the beach from a wound that bad, but I don't know.

I mean, that's what stands to reason.

It also shows that these reporters were right there, many of them, and I they're seeing combat and then they're making this sacrifice too.

And I would say this Yank magazine has endured today.

It's just a great resource for understanding soldiers World War two, and they nailed it in terms of getting to the soldier's voice.

It is absolutely and you could make a distinction, of course between the civilian journalists and photographers like Kappa and the soldiers who were photographers or writers like Peter Paris.

But in the end of the day, they're doing a very important work for a public at home that was desperate for any kind of news, especially the kind of image of what it was like this this is the most anticipated event of the war in nineteen forty four, and many people, you know, thought, is my son there, what's he going through, what's he seeing, what's he experiencing?

And I think it's hard for us in this day and age, when you know, we have twenty four hour news cycles, we have instantaneous images from across the globe.

It's hard for us to understand how important that was for the audience.

Absolutely, and it's a mass media age.

I mean, if you think about it, you know, we're eighty years beyond World War Two, and you know we've got our twenty four to seven cycle and social media and all that stuff.

They're eighty years you know, think about was eighty years before then.

It's Civil War era, which is a mass media age of its own, but very different.

And in terms of the imagery, the World War two generation expected a lot of imagery, a lot of moving pictures and photographic images that we're going to convey the actual event.

And maybe that's a little bit of the backdrop to what happens with Kappa's photos and the expectations surrounding them.

So yeah, yeah, interesting discussion.

So our guest today again has been Charles Eric, author of Back into Focus, subtitle is the Real Story of Robert Kappa's D Day.

Charles, it's been an absolute pleasure to sit down with you.

We're honored to have you and thank you so much, very much.

Pleasure, truly a pleasure.

Well, if you can email our team at podcasts at DDA dot org.

Again, that's podcast at dday dot org.

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Everybody Pick Care.

Someone Talked is a production of the National D Day Memorial Foundation, recorded at Media Squatch in Bedford, Virginia.

The views expressed are not necessarily those of the Foundation, Media Squatch or program sponsors.

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This program was supported by a grant from Virginia Humanities, headquartered at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

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Located in Bedford, Virginia, the community that suffered the highest known D Day loss per capita in the United States, Congress warranted the establishment of the Nations Monument to Dday in this emblematic American home front.

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Join the conversation email our team at podcast at dday dot org for the National d Day Memorial Foundation, and someone talked, I'm Angela Hatcher Lynch dows.

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