Bob Capa was on assignment in Algiers when he
learned that the troops moving into Sicily had already landed before he arrived.[1] However,
the 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers had not yet left for Sicily,
so Capa asked to go with them. An issue came up when it was discovered that
Capa had never jumped from a parachute before this time. There was a solution
to the problem: he would travel with “one of the transport planes, photograph
the men as they jumped over Sicily, and return with the empty plane to the base
in Tunisia.”[2]
Knowing Collier’s magazine was dropping him and requesting he return to New York, Capa waited for news that Life magazine would hire him and send him into Italy. It was a good thing he disobeyed Collier’s orders, because the pictures he took “of the 1st Division provided the definitive images of the Americans’ battle for Sicily: a twenty-one-day race, with the enemy, Capa noted, always a few miles in the lead.”[3] Capa stated that in “less than three weeks we reached our main objective. We were at the outskirts of Palermo.”[4] Capa mentioned in his memoir that the “two commanding generals, Terry Allen and Teddy Roosevelt, were friends of mine, but division headquarters was hardly safe for me. By now, everyone knew that I had no right to pose as an accredited war photographer. So I carefully avoided headquarters and fell in with the 16th Infantry Regiment.”[5] Eventually, Teddy Roosevelt caught up with Capa and informed him that Life magazine had hired him to cover the war in Italy.[6]
Capa “set foot in Europe, after five years’ absence, at the small port of Paestum in September 1943, two weeks after the first American troops…He had missed out on the invasion itself but now had the chance to be the first photographer to record the liberation of the first major European city.”[7] Capa joined the 82nd Airborne as they advanced towards Naples.
On October 2, 1943, he “photographed a schoolhouse converted into a morgue with twenty boys arrayed in twenty crude coffins shouldered by men in black fedoras; keening women blotted their eyes and held up photographs of their dead children.”[8] Capa’s images of “the black-clad, grief-stricken women mourning these boys are among his most wrenching of the entire war.”[9] Therefore, it was emotionally compelling scenes like these that Capa tried to capture to show the devastation of war.
[1] Richard Whelan, Robert Capa: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 194.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Alex Kershaw, Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa (New York: DaCapo Press, 2002), 105.
[4] Robert Capa, Slightly Out of Focus (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1947), 75.
[5]Ibid., 77.
[6] Kershaw, Blood and Champagne, 105-106.
[7] Ibid., 107.
[8] Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007), 240.
[9] Whelan, Robert Capa, 201.
Knowing Collier’s magazine was dropping him and requesting he return to New York, Capa waited for news that Life magazine would hire him and send him into Italy. It was a good thing he disobeyed Collier’s orders, because the pictures he took “of the 1st Division provided the definitive images of the Americans’ battle for Sicily: a twenty-one-day race, with the enemy, Capa noted, always a few miles in the lead.”[3] Capa stated that in “less than three weeks we reached our main objective. We were at the outskirts of Palermo.”[4] Capa mentioned in his memoir that the “two commanding generals, Terry Allen and Teddy Roosevelt, were friends of mine, but division headquarters was hardly safe for me. By now, everyone knew that I had no right to pose as an accredited war photographer. So I carefully avoided headquarters and fell in with the 16th Infantry Regiment.”[5] Eventually, Teddy Roosevelt caught up with Capa and informed him that Life magazine had hired him to cover the war in Italy.[6]
Capa “set foot in Europe, after five years’ absence, at the small port of Paestum in September 1943, two weeks after the first American troops…He had missed out on the invasion itself but now had the chance to be the first photographer to record the liberation of the first major European city.”[7] Capa joined the 82nd Airborne as they advanced towards Naples.
On October 2, 1943, he “photographed a schoolhouse converted into a morgue with twenty boys arrayed in twenty crude coffins shouldered by men in black fedoras; keening women blotted their eyes and held up photographs of their dead children.”[8] Capa’s images of “the black-clad, grief-stricken women mourning these boys are among his most wrenching of the entire war.”[9] Therefore, it was emotionally compelling scenes like these that Capa tried to capture to show the devastation of war.
[1] Richard Whelan, Robert Capa: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 194.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Alex Kershaw, Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa (New York: DaCapo Press, 2002), 105.
[4] Robert Capa, Slightly Out of Focus (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1947), 75.
[5]Ibid., 77.
[6] Kershaw, Blood and Champagne, 105-106.
[7] Ibid., 107.
[8] Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007), 240.
[9] Whelan, Robert Capa, 201.