Figure 1 – Approaching Omaha Beach, June 6, 2014, From the US National Archives and in the public domain.

Today marks the seventieth anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Europe.  Photograph brings us back to those awful moments as if we had been there ourselves. And the new media abound with historic images of the landings.  I have chosen one from the Army Signal Corps Archive at the US National Archives.  I have often wondered about these powerful images that focus on the seconds before all hell broke loose.  The fear, apprehension, even the nausea of the men on board the amphibious landing craft is still palpable to us seven decades later. You need to focus on the little detail, like the “No Smoking” sign on the door of the landing craft.  In such details lie the essential humanity of the photograph.

There are a number of before and after, then and now series of D-Day photographs from the news services.  I am particularly fascinated by this one from the Canadian National Archives.  It so vividly shows the contrast between terrible war and carefree peace.  In a way it defines what that generation was fighting for on that day.  The photographs and movie strips do not allow us to forget these denizens of that black and white world, and in truth we owe them so much.  They are part of us, but in part by virtue of the monochrome, they are before us – from the age of Titans before the age of Gods and men.

“And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth’d his wrinkled front…”

William Shakespeare, Richard III, act 1, scene 1.