The Magnificent Eleven

The Magnificent Eleven are a group of photos of D-Day (6 June 1944) taken by war photographer Robert Capa. Capa was with one of the earliest waves of troops landing on the American invasion beach, Omaha Beach. Capa stated that while under fire, he took 106 pictures, all but eleven of which were destroyed in a processing accident in the Life magazine photo lab in London. The surviving photos have since been called the Magnificent Eleven. However, recent research has suggested that only eleven photos in total were taken, and that no photos were "missing" or destroyed. The pictures have been widely celebrated, and Steven Spielberg is said to have been inspired by them when filming Saving Private Ryan. Taking the pictures Capa came ashore with the men of the 16th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division on 6 June 1944 (D-Day) in an early wave of the assaults on Omaha Beach (reported variously as the "first wave" or thirteenth, though just an hour behind the first wave). He used two Contax II cameras mounted with 50 mm lenses and several rolls of spare film, and returned to the United Kingdom within hours in order to meet a publication deadline for Life magazine's next issue. Publication 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. Capa denied this in his biography, but also Capa stated that his "empty camera trembled in my hands", preventing him from loading a new roll of film. Capa used this phrase as the title of his autobiographical account of the war, Slightly Out of Focus. The captions were written by magazine staffers, as Capa did not provide Life with notes or a verbal description of what they showed. The captions have since been shown to be erroneous, as were subsequent descriptions of the images by Capa himself. For example, men described by Life as soldiers taking cover behind a hedgehog obstacle were members of Gap Assault Team 10 – a combined US Navy/US Army explosives demolition unit tasked with destroying obstacles and clearing the way for subsequent landing craft.