VI

The white city of Algiers looked even whiter from the air, and the blue harbor was black, jammed with boats of all kinds and sizes.

At Eisenhower’s public relations headquarters, the pressroom was deserted, the usual crowd of newspapermen vanished, and the press officers gone. I tried to find out what was cooking but the few sergeants on duty were noncommittal. They would say only that the P.R.O. officers were at Eisenhower’s campaign headquarters. I asked them to connect me on a direct wire. It couldn’t be done, they said; headquarters had been sealed since the day before.

I put a few numbers together and figured out that the invasion of somewhere was going to happen any minute, much faster than I had expected. I was too late. I was left out of the invasion, and I would get no scoop and no new job. The news of my being fired would catch up with me right in Algiers. After all the ado, I had gained nothing. Instead of from London, I would be shipped home from here.

I hung around the P.R.O., hoping desperately for my usual miracle. It happened in the men’s room. I found there a war photographer, a colleague of mine, in very sad shape. He had the “GI’s,” or C-ration diarrhea, and was so much on the run that he had to stay in one place. He told me he had been trained for several months for a very special job: to jump with an airborne division on their first big mission. He had been assigned to the invasion, but had got so sick that they had sent him back at the last moment.

He was rather philosophical about the whole thing. He didn’t particularly like parachute jumping anyway. Here was my chance to save two birds with one case of “GI’s,” and I asked how I might be able to replace him. He sent a message to airborne headquarters, they sent a plane to get me, and I was flown to a big improvised airfield near Kairouan in the middle of the Tunisian desert, where hundreds of transport planes and gliders were lined up and ready for the take-off.

I was shown to the public relations tent, and there was my London friend, Captain Chris Scott, who was now the public relations officer for the 9th Troop Carrier Command. I told him my whole story.

“So you are still an enemy alien, Capa? Still chasing pink girls?” I showed him the picture of Pinky. He looked at it for some time. “It’s really too bad that you’re going to be killed in this invasion. I’ll have to fly back to London and break the sad news to the pink girl. But for you, Capa, I’ll do it.”

He took me over to Major General Ridgway, the commander of the 82d Airborne Division, and introduced me. The general was very friendly.

“As long as you’re willing to jump and take pictures of my division in combat, I don’t care whether you’re Hungarian, Chinese, or anything else. Have you ever jumped before?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, it isn’t natural, but there’s nothing to it.”

Back in his tent, Chris gave me the whole dope. The destination was Sicily. The 82d Airborne Division would be flown in by the 9th TCC six hours before the main seaborne landing. We were scheduled to jump at 1:00 A.M., and the barges would hit the beach by daybreak.

Chris had an idea. I would fly in the lead plane and take flash pictures of the paratroopers both during the flight and as they jumped. I wouldn’t jump myself but would return to Kairouan with the empty transport plane. If I took the picture of the first man to jump, I would have the picture of the first American to land in Sicily. My plane would get back to the base by 3:00 A.M. We would develop and radio the pictures to America and they would be there before the news of the invasion itself. My pictures would hit the presses simultaneously with the first big headlines.

The plan appealed to me in every detail. I began to like Chris very much.

In a short while we were called in for the official briefing. The planning staff outlined to the pilots and paratroop officers the different phases of the operation. They told us that when we reached the target we could expect a lot of flak and a lot of Germans. This is where we would “discover our souls.” They made sure that everyone understood what he was supposed to do and we were trucked over to the waiting planes.

Chris said good-bye and told me he would wait for my return on the airfield. I didn’t give him Pinky’s picture, but—just in case—I gave him her address. We took off.

There were eighteen paratroopers in the plane. I wasn’t going to jump and sat in the front end of the plane so that I wouldn’t be in the way of the jumpers when the time came. The plane was blacked out, but there was no objection to my taking flash pictures once we got over the target. There would be plenty of other kinds of explosions, and my flashbulbs would be just a small part of the show.

We flew low over the Mediterranean and the plane rocked badly. Inside it was dark and silent. Most of the boys were sleeping or maybe just closing their eyes.

Soon I heard peculiar noises. A few of the boys were already beginning to “discover their souls” and were puking violently all over the plane. The boy next to me had been very quiet up to now. But now he turned to me and asked, “Is it true that you’re a civilian?”

“Yes,” I answered.

He went back inside himself, but in fifteen minutes he asked me again, “You mean to say that if you didn’t want to, you didn’t have to come?”

“That’s right.” But silently I added, “If you only knew.”

IN A PLANE EN ROUTE FROM KAIROUAN, TUNISIA, TO SICILY, JULY 1943.

These American paratroopers are about to launch the Allied invasion of Sicily.

 

He was quiet again, but this time the interval was shorter. “If you had wanted to, could you have flown back to the States tonight instead of this?”

 “Not impossible,” I said.

Now he was direct. “How much are you getting paid to do this?”

“A thousand a month,” I lied.

From then on he didn’t have much time to think about my job. The Promised Land emerged from the darkness, well lit by burning houses and flaming oil dumps. Our bombing force had preceded us by half an hour so as to impress the enemy reception committee.

Unfortunately, it hadn’t been sufficiently impressed, and the Germans were filling the sky full of colored tracer bullets. Our pilot swerved right and left, trying to find a hole between the tracers.

The green light in the front of our plane came on. It was the signal to get ready to jump. The boys all stood up and straightened the static lines of their parachutes. I got my camera ready. Then the red light came on—the signal to jump. My neighbor was the last one out. He turned back and yelled at me: “I don’t like your job, pal. It’s too dangerous!” He jumped, and the plane was empty.

I was alone with eighteen broken static lines blowing through the open door. I felt lonelier than hell. I would have given a lot to be with the guys floating down through the darkness below.

* * * *

Chris was waiting for me back at the airfield. He had rigged up a darkroom in a small tent. Under the blacked-out canvas, the heat was suffocating. To keep the developer from boiling, Chris commandeered two huge blocks of ice from the mess sergeant, who protested that they were intended for the next day’s ice cream.

We stripped and went to work. Sweat poured down from us into the developing juice. Our first wet prints were ready just as the last hunks of ice melted away. We tore the tent flap open and hit the cool breeze of the desert dawn. Chris had his jeep ready in front of the tent. We threw shirts and trousers on our wet bodies, and Chris drove full speed along the empty road. We headed for Tunis, for a forward press camp, where radio facilities and censors had been set up for the Sicilian show.

While Chris concentrated on the bomb-cratered road, peering through the semidarkness, I took a look at my pictures. They were slightly out of focus, a bit underexposed, and the composition was certainly no work of art. But they were the only pictures to come out of the invasion of Sicily so far, and it would probably be days before the seaborne photographers managed to send their stuff back from the beaches.

At 7:30 we reached Tunis. The censors, without any argument, stamped my pictures through for radio. We entered the mess room of the press camp just as the loudspeaker was announcing officially that the invasion of Sicily was under way. As the newshounds leaped to their feet at the news, I quietly announced that I’d just returned from there. The only source of first-hand information, I immediately became the center of attraction. I was pressed for details, and I gave a minute-by-minute account of the flight, and described how the invaders’ minds and stomachs had behaved from take-off to jump time.

During the interview, Chris left the mess room. He returned just as I was attacking a pair of fresh eggs. From the doorway, he motioned to me. The eggs were beautiful, but Chris was waving a slip of yellow paper.

Outside, Chris said, “Well, this is it.” He gave me the slip, and I read the short message:

“PR ALGIERS INFORMED BY COLLIER’S ROBERT CAPA NO LONGER WORKING FOR THEM. HE IS ORDERED TO RETURN TO ALGIERS BY FIRST AVAILABLE TRANSPORTATION”

I was licked. I had got the pictures, but they would do me no good. The picture pool which had got me fired from Collier’s would use them with a great splash—without my name—and wouldn’t have to pay a single penny for them. “Nuts, I’m going back and eat my eggs,” I said.

“Wait a minute,” said Chris. “Are you still ready to jump? There’s one more mission tonight: we’re going to jump the reinforcements in. If you go with them, they won’t find you for weeks, and meanwhile I won’t acknowledge receipt of the message until tomorrow morning.”

So I left my fried eggs and Chris drove me back along the same road, back to the camp where the reinforcements were preparing for the night’s work ahead.

* * * *

Chris had no trouble getting me in, and I was given a chute for the asking. At midnight we took off. For the second time in twenty-four hours, I was en route to Sicily. This time I was rigged with the rest of the jumpers, and this time I found my soul like everyone else. All I knew about jumping was that I was supposed to step out of the door with my left foot, count 1,000...2,000...3,000, and if my chute didn’t open, I was to pull the lever for my emergency chute. I was too exhausted to think. I didn’t want to think anyway, and I fell asleep.

They woke me up just before the green signal flashed on. When my turn came, I stepped out with my left foot forward into the darkness. I was still groggy, and instead of counting my thousands, I recited: “Fired photographer jumps.” I felt a jerk on my shoulder, and my chute was open. “Fired photographer floats,” I said happily to myself. Less than a minute later, I landed in a tree in the middle of a forest.

For the rest of the night, I hung from the tree, and my shoulders found out the weight of my behind. The general was right, it wasn’t natural. There was a lot of shooting going on around me. I didn’t dare yell for help. With my Hungarian accent, I stood an equal chance of being shot by either side.

When morning came, three paratroopers discovered me and cut me down. I said good-bye to my tree. Our relations had been intimate, but a little too long.

* * * *

Our four-man task force wasn’t eager to engage the enemy, and we advanced cautiously from tree to tree, and only after long deliberation. As the forest thinned out, our confabs grew longer. From behind the last tree, we saw a little Sicilian farmhouse. It was out in the open field some two hundred yards away. In the best military fashion, we crawled up to the house on our stomachs. The three soldiers surrounded the house and occupied strategic positions, ready to fire with their tommy guns. Having no tommy gun, and being the linguist of the group, I was given the job of knocking on the door.

AGRIGENTO, SICILY, JULY 17-18, 1943. Life resumes in the liberated, but badly damaged, city.

 

An old Sicilian peasant in a long nightshirt opened the door. He looked at me as if I had dropped from the sky. My jumpsuit was a new uniform to him. We all wore American flags as shoulder patches, but my dark, slightly Mediterranean face must have impressed him more than anything, for he suddenly screamed, “Siciliano! Siciliano!” and threw his arms around me. My army lowered their tommy guns and we quickly entered the farmhouse. I didn’t know any Italian, so in broken Spanish I tried to explain to the old man that only my great grandfather was Sicilian. He answered with a stream of strange words. There was one word he kept repeating, “Brook-a-leen.” One of my troopers caught on and pointed to himself. “Me, Brooklyn.”

The conversation became easier and we established that Americans like Sicilians and Sicilians love Americans; that Americans don’t like Germans and Sicilians hate Germans. These preliminaries over, I came to the point. Where were we, and were any Germans around?

We laid our silk invasion map on the table. The Sicilian peasant, after first admiring the quality of the fabric, put his thumb on a point way inland, some twenty-five miles beyond our official dropping zone. Some German units had passed on the road leading to the coast during the night, he said, but they hadn’t stopped and he didn’t think there were any more around.

He gave us food and wine and we returned to the forest. We remained there for three days, sleeping in the daytime and creeping out at night to blow up little bridges. On the fourth day, the spearhead of the 1st Division caught up with us. They were not terribly impressed with our military prowess, and as for the photographer—the whole bloody thing had been absolutely useless to me. The only picture I had was a portrait of the old Sicilian farmer.

* * * *

The Sicilian campaign turned out to be a twenty-one-day race. In the lead was the Italian Army. They were afraid not only of the Americans, but of the Germans too, and ran in every direction. The Germans were slower than the Italians, but they retreated steadily. Close on their heels came the jobless enemy alien, who in turn was chased by the whole public relations force of the American Army. Behind us all, pushing us relentlessly forward, General Patton’s tanks rumbled in the dust.

In the course of things, I shot a great many exciting pictures. But the only way to get them censored and shipped was through the very P.R.O. from which I was running. Besides, the only place I could ship them was the picture pool, and that wouldn’t help me a bit. The exposed rolls piled up in my bag and the chances of getting them published dwindled every day.

In less than three weeks we reached our main objective. We were at the outskirts of Palermo. The Germans had withdrawn, and the remaining Italian forces didn’t insist on fighting. The jeep I was in followed the first tanks of the 2d Armored Division into the town. The road leading into the city was lined with tens of thousands of frantic Sicilians waving white sheets and homemade American flags with not enough stars and too many stripes. Everyone had a cousin in Brook-a-leen.

I was unanimously pronounced a Siciliano by the cheering crowd. Every member of the male population had to shake my hand, the older women had to kiss me, the younger ones filled the jeep with flowers and fruit. None of this exactly helped my picture taking.

We arrived at the gates of Palermo without firing a shot. The lieutenant in charge of the tanks got in touch with headquarters by radio and asked for orders to enter the city. When headquarters found that there was no resistance in the town, they ordered us to stop and wait for the commanding general. We called headquarters unprintable names and waited. In a short while, the corps commander, General Keyes, arrived surrounded by aides and swarms of military police. The MP’s promptly took over and blocked off any further advance by tanks, soldiers, or war correspondents.

General Keyes ordered the MP’s to bring forward a few of the celebrating Italian gendarmes. The gendarmes were produced. General Keyes said he didn’t give a damn about their innocence; all he wanted was the Italian general in command of Palermo. The gendarmes nodded and said, “Yes, yes,” but did not move. The exasperated Keyes asked for an interpreter and I offered my services. I got the point over to the gendarmes somehow. I explained that the general wanted to avoid any unnecessary bloodshed and wanted the Italian general to announce the terms of surrender to the populace. The gendarmes nodded “Si, si,” climbed into a jeep with a couple of MP’s, and took off toward the center of town.

MONREALE, ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF PALERMO, SICILY, JULY 1943. Welcoming the American troops.