D-Day 80 years on

“I am a gambler,” the photographer said. “I decided to go in with Company E in the first wave.”

That was Robert Capa, in his memoir Slightly Out Of Focus, written when the mental scars he earned on D-Day would still not have been healed by the balm of passing time.

Capa did go in with the first wave with the 1st US Infantry Division, onto Omaha Beach and into a storm of lead and shrapnel a little after dawn on June 6 1944.

Capa survived the day (more than 700 Americans on that beach alone did not) but he was evacuated with “battle shock”. By then a clumsy darkroom assistant had already ruined the hundreds of images he had shot by turning up the heat too high in the dryer ... leaving the world with the iconic and terrifying smears of American infantry dying in the shallow water of France’s Normandy coast.

This week marks the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Think about this: the youngest possible survivor who fought on either side that day would be 95 or 96.

This year 23 British veterans will be in Normandy to mark the occasion. Five years ago 255 veterans returned to the battlefields, which are now pleasant French seaside towns and war cemeteries rolling over grassy hectares.

By the time the 85th anniversary of this World War 2 battle comes around, who of those soldiers who went ashore in 1944 will be left to remember their comrades who never made it off the beaches?

My grandfather, another war correspondent with an unfortunately high tolerance for personal risk, did make it off the beaches, but not out of Normandy. He died — the day Paris was liberated — from wounds received in a German ambush days before. As the French would have said: “C’est la guerre.”