Capa landed on Omaha Beach with the first wave of assault troops at 6:30 a.m. on the morning of June 6, 1944. In the sector designated “Easy Red” facing Colleville-sur-Mer, the photograph came ashore with the men of the 16th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division. On freelance assignment from LIFE magazine, his vocation is to document at the risk of his life what will later be the most significant event of the Second World War. The photographer took with him three cameras (a Rolleiflex and two Contax), 4 film rolls, and a waterproof oilcloth bag. Under enemy fire, through careful maneuvering to make it to land, where he alternated between taking cover and making pictures as troops made the same deadly journey to shore, he took as much photos as he could. In this fisrt minutes that he spent on the beach, Capa witnessed men shot, blown up and set on fire all around him. But his courage told him to continue this way.

A young GI, now known to be Huston Riley, disembarked from his landing craft into water and sank straight to the bottom, weighed down by his gear. By activating his flotation device, he became an easy target for German machine gun. Riley made his way to shore while bullets ricocheted off his helmet and pack. Just as he hit land and began to run, Riley caught four bullets in his right shoulder. Two men quickly came and helped him reach cover, one of whom, Riley later recalled, that one had a camera around his neck. The photographer was Capa, and somewhere between the moment when Riley reached the surf and when he was being lifted, wounded, out of the water, Capa made the photo that will later become The Face in the Surf, witnessing the chaos and the courage on D-Day. For more than an hour and a half long under the shells and between the bullets, he photographed the war as closely as possible. Alongside the soldiers, he took 106 photos. He finally leaves the beach of horrors around 8 a.m. in the direction of London, in order to have his films developed.

Upon landing back in England the next day, Capa sent all his film via courier to assistant picture editor John Morris at LIFE’s London office. This shipment included pre-invasion reportage of the troops boarding and crossing the English Channel, the just-mentioned coverage of the battle on Omaha Beach, and images of medics tending to the wounded on the return trip. When the film finally arrived, around 9 p.m., the head of LIFE’s London darkroom, one “Braddy” Bradshaw, assigned the task of developing these crucial four rolls of 35mm Omaha Beach images to his 15-year-old unexperienced members “darkroom lad” Denis Banks. After successfully processing the 35mm films, in his haste to help Morris meet the looming deadline Banks absentmindedly closed the doors of the darkroom’s film-drying cabinet, which inexplicably were “normally kept open”. As a result, after “just a few minutes”, that enclosed space with a small electric heating coil on its floor inexplicably became so drastically overheated that it melted the emulsion of Capa’s 35mm negatives. Notified of this by the horrified Banks, Morris rushed to the darkroom, discovering that eleven of Capa’s negatives had survived, which he “saved” or “salvaged,” and which proved just sufficient enough to fulfill this crucial assignment to the satisfaction of LIFE’s New York editors.

Only eleven photograph survived from the D-Day military operation. Eleven photo bravely taken by Capa at the risk of his life to document the Ally liberation of Europe. LIFE magazine printed five of the pictures in its June 19, 1944, issue, “Beachheads of Normandy: The Fateful Battle for Europe is Joined by Sea and Air”. Some of the images had captions that described the footage as “slightly out of focus”, explaining that Capa's hands were shaking in the excitement of the moment. Though the exact number of surviving frames is uncertain, the actual negative of the picture known as The Face in the Surf, along with another from the set, was lost sometime after the photo’s publication in the June 19, 1944 issue of LIFE. It is, in a sense, a testament to the incalculable hardship and violence of the Longest Day that the only surviving photographic record of the Omaha Beach landing from the beach itself are eleve hard-won, fragile, immensely powerful negatives.

But in 2014, photographs historians and theoricians A.D. Coleman, J. Ross Baughman and Rob McElroy questioned this magnificient story. Their project dismantles the 74-year-old myth of Robert Capa’s actions on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Thanks to testimonies and cross-references, we know that Capa left the combat zone by landing craft at 7:47 a.m., completely soaked. Having arrived with the first wave at 6:30 a.m., he would have stayed for an hour and a half before evacuating the landing beach. However, according to Coleman, this autobiographical detail belongs to the realm of cinematic fiction. The facts are indisputable: Capa landed on Omaha Beach with the second wave, which arrived between 7:20 a.m. and 7:40 a.m. This means that he spent between 7 and 27 minutes on Omaha Beach, resulting in only about ten photos taken with his small film camera. But it also concerned the reputation of LIFE magazine, for which Robert Capa worked. Indeed, the editorial team was likely disappointed by the low number of images and their poor quality. They needed a version that praised Capa but also protected the journal itself. In the end, it is highly probable that he only took those 11 photos, having panicked and feared for his life in the face of the onslaught of violence and death. Who can blame him? However, this is not the purpose of this incredible investigation. Furthermore, Robert Capa had, as with his other war coverage, the courage to go there, the courage to confront danger armed only with his lens. He was likely overwhelmed by human emotions.