The missing “lost roll” of film that Capa exposed on the beach would be the only proof that he, indeed, made it to the beach to photograph the scene, as he claimed in his memoir. Clan Coleman claim that he lied about getting to the beach and he lied about the second roll. They say it never happened. Here’s what we know. Capa brought two Contax II 35mm film cameras with him that morning. He finished the first roll in the first camera [Contax A] after he was booted off the LCVP. Negative 38 proves that.
After he made it to the beach, he took out his second Contax II [Contax B], and shot an entire roll until the film jammed (which is what it feels like at the end of a roll when you try to advance, if you haven’t had that experience). He said he went to change film, which means that he had to rewind the roll back into its canister before removing the back. At this point he would have put that exposed roll into his camera bag or a coat pocket, before putting in a fresh roll of film.
So here is how this all went….
In his memoir, Capa described making it to the beach “behind the human cover of the last two guys.”
Once on the beach, he described an encounter with a lieutenant he met at poker the evening before, then he saw the padre, after which, “I took out my second Contax camera and began to shoot without raising my head.” He lifted the camera, keeping his head down, and made exposures. He took a picture of the priest and the regimental surgeon, Tegtmeyer. The same Major Tegtmeyer who received the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions that morning. (blog post 8)
He described shells landing close and stated, “I didn’t dare to take my eyes off the finder of my Contax and frantically shot frame after frame. Half a minute later, my camera jammed – my roll was finished. I reached in my bag for a new roll, and my wet, shaking hands ruined the roll before I could insert it in my camera.”
This requires scrutiny. Wet hands would not ruin a fresh roll, because all the film except the leader would be protected in the cannister. The film would get wet and ruined only by submersion, but he was not in water at this point.
He continued, “I paused for a moment, and then I had it bad,” describing his emotional state. He described shaking with fear. He saw the same scene Colonel Taylor did, "Dead and wounded men – some face-down, some face-up on arched backs – littered the waterline and the sands." 23 Mortars rounds landed all around, blowing men into pieces.
Capa was straightforward about his frame of mind at this point. After the war, while writing Slightly Out of Focus, Capa ran into a fellow veteran of D-Day, Samuel M. Fuller, the filmmaker. Years later, in Fuller’s memoir, A Third Face, Fuller recalled the conversation as they talked about Capa’s D-Day pictures:*
“I was ashamed of myself at Omaha,” said Capa.
“Why should you have felt ashamed? I said. “We’d been training seven months for that morning. We’d rehearsed every goddamned thing. We were armed to the gills. You landed with only a camera and some lenses. That took real guts.”
“I was scared out of my mind.”
“Holy shit, so were we!” I told him. “Look, Robert, write exactly what you felt. Describe the fear. Every single soldier who survived D day will appreciate the honesty.”
AI-generated image of Robert Capa on Omaha Beach the moment that he experienced his panic attack.
Capa knew he had at least two great pictures (negatives 29 and 37 from Contax A), and several more usable pictures. He knew he had accomplished his task, and then some. He saw an LCI in the water that had just beached and disembarked its troops. He remembered his imperative to get pictures back to London. He instinctively stood and ran into the water toward the boat.
LCI(L)-94
In his memoir, Capa said, “I held my cameras high above my head,” presumably to keep them dry. Capa's account is confirmed by Charles Jarreau onboard LCI(L)-94 who saw Capa running toward him. He said, "Poor fellow, he was there in the water, holding his cameras up to try to keep them dry, trying to catch his breath." (25)
AI generated image of Capa wading out to LCI(L)-94
Capa held a camera in each hand and probably let the camera bag that contained his film hang off his shoulder. This would have rested about hip height, which would have caused it to get drenched in the conditions he described. Or he might have stowed the roll in a pocket. Either way, the roll from Contax B, the film that would become the “lost roll,” was drenched in seawater.
Clan Coleman say none of this ever happened. There is no proof that it did, nor is there proof that it did not. Personally, I don’t think it matters if Capa made it to the sandy beach or not. That wasn’t his goal or his job. His job was to get invasion pictures back to London as soon as possible. The Signal Corps had embedded photographers whose job it was to go ashore and stay with the troops. The Clan judge Capa to be a big chicken for checking out quickly. I say, no matter what happened, it took tremendous courage to be anywhere near that beach that morning.
But, I believe that a deep understanding of the “lost roll” will show that it is entirely plausible, if not likely, that Capa made it to the beach that morning to take more pictures. In the next post I present the darkroom mishap story as told by Capa and Morris, and retold by many people and institutions since 1944. I will give a fairly detailed description of darkroom procedures to lay the foundation for a perfectly plausible explanation of what really happened that night in London.
*Coleman dismisses this conversation as two prevaricators bolstering each other’s embellished memoirs.
Fuller, Samuel M. A Third Face My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2002.
Accessed through Internet Archive on May 27, 2025. https://archive.org/details/thirdfacemytaleo00full/page/n3/mode/2up?q=chase
23. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-man-who-took-omaha-beach-107509/
25. Ambrose, p. 395