1939–1945

SECOND WORLD WAR

In September 1939, Robert Capa closed the gate at number 37 rue Froidevaux, in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, and set off to Le Havre to take a ship to Chile. In his pocket he carried his precious visa to enter the United States. He left most of his work behind in the charge of his assistant and friend Csiki Weiss and his neighbour Émile Muller: negatives, prints, his typewriter and his letters, including the famous “Mexican suitcase”. In the United States he joined his brother and his mother, although, like so many Hungarian exiles, he was not well received on the other side of the Atlantic. 

He did not rest until he left the country to cover the beginning of the Second World War. In May 1941 he set sail for England to carry out an assignment for Collier’s magazine as German bombs fell on London: it was the Blitz, which Capa documented in a moving book, The Battle of Waterloo Road, written by the journalist Diana Forbes-Robertson.

Capa had to wait until the end of 1942 to reach the front, specifically North Africa, where the Allies had just landed. Accredited by the United States army, he followed the Americans in their offensive in Tunisia and accompanied them when they landed in Sicily, once again working for Life. His photographs of the liberated people of Naples, and most notably of the Battle of the Liri Valley, near Monte Cassino, recall his finest images of Spain, always captured as close as possible to the action. 

The day Capa had been waiting for arrived on 6 June 1944 with the Normandy landings. With D-Day on the horizon, Life had reinforced its team of photographers. Bob Landry was chosen for the landing at Utah Beach and Robert Capa for the one at Omaha Beach, a hell-on-earth scenario where American soldiers faced intense machine-gun fire: two thousand five hundred men died that day. As best he could, Capa photographed soldiers jumping into the water as they tried to reach the beach. He then climbed into another boat to take back his valuable rolls of film, certain that he had taken some great pictures. He only managed to see his D-Day images a month later, although he always maintained that the films were destroyed when a drying cabinet overheated, an account nowadays recognised as untrue. Only eleven “slightly out of focus” images survived, but no more were needed: he had the scoop of the century.

Having sent his photographs to London, Capa immediately returned to Normandy. His arrival in Bayeux took his colleagues by surprise—they had given him up for dead. Persisting in his search for fighting, he covered the entire two-month Battle of Normandy. On 25 August he entered Paris with General Leclerc’s Second Armoured Division. He subsequently followed the American forces and reached Berlin. In Leipzig, on 18 April 1945, as ever in the midst of the fighting, he managed to take a dramatic series of photographs of the last soldier killed in the war, marking the end of his four-year reportage of the conflict.