CARLSBAD, Calif. — Not long after Allied troops landed on Normandy's Omaha Beach during the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, the very first photographs from the French battlefield were widely published in American newspapers, magazines and journals.
Those images were taken by U.S. Army 165th Signal Corps Capt. Herman V. Wall, who was aboard one of the first landing crafts to reach the Easy Red Sector target zone amid a hail of bullets and deafening grenade and land mine blasts. Wall carried with him only his 35 mm Leica camera, a knapsack, a pistol and two canvas bags holding live carrier pigeons that he planned to send back to their home base with exposed rolls of film strapped to their bodies.
The carnage on the beach — where thousands of Allied troops died that day — was horrific, but Wall followed Army orders to keep dead bodies out of his photos. He snapped just 13 black-and-white images of the packed landing vehicles motoring toward land and exhausted soldiers wading ashore. Then, as he raised his camera for another shot, everything went black. When Wall regained consciousness, he realized his left leg had been blown off, but his camera — and the film that captured the earliest moments of a battle that turned the tide of World War II — were safe.
