Talk:The Magnificent Eleven

He was in Second wave, not first wave on D-Day

Without getting intohe falling soldier or missing frames issues, there is no question that Capa was in the second wave on DDay, not the first. The current citation for first wave is not from an authoritative source on D-Day, but just a general Time Magazine article citing Capa own claims. More expert sources on the war have established he was in the second wave. We know what beach he landed on and what time. It was second wave: http://www.nationalww2museum.org/learn/education/for-students/ww2-history/d-day-june-6-1944.html (just search text "Robert capa")Explainador (talk) 04:02, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

AD Coleman's 2019 Publication

While the whole D-Day story has long been somewhat suspect, respected critic AD Colemen has recently published a thorough dismantling of the whole story. He's published a lengthy article in Exposure Magazine, and also a longer and more detailed discussion on his web site (nearbycafe.com) across many articles. I have taken a clumsy stab at correcting the article, but it needs work.

The original narrative probably should be left in place, but it needs to be made clear that -- while it is an important part of the story, and is indeed widely supported by citations -- it is also likely false. Whether Coleman's research will be the final chapter here we cannot be sure, of course, but it is important, thorough, scholarship which is published and therefore citable, but also accepted by the larger community of experts. Amolitor99 (talk) 17:03, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for this. Here's a link to that discussion at nearbycafe.com. -Lopifalko (talk) 17:29, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

I have just read through Coleman's posts about this and I must say this should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Coleman speculates a lot, points to several irrelevant facts (for instance, he claims he exposed the "fakery" of ruined frames by TIME, when they were quite obviously generic visual props), throws around unsubstantiated accusations at several people and uses aggressive tone incompatible with the neutral tone expected from a researcher (which he claims to be). He throws around a lot of inconsistencies (which absolutely any story told about 70 or 80 years ago will have) as if they were "proof" that the entire story was fabricated. He's clearly a man on a mission and once you shake all of the speculation out, little remains. By Coleman's own account, Capa remained on the beach for at least 45 minutes (0815-0900). So he claims Capa sat on his hands until the ramp went down, got up, took 11 frames within seconds of each other, and then got back to sitting on his hands until the landing craft he was holed up in left? These exposures were by chance at the end of one roll, the beginning of which was lost, *not* in the darkrook incident, but some other way, somehow?

I don't mean to say definitively that the canonical story is right. Coleman's hypothesis that all that Capa took was 11 frames and the rest was made up to cover up his failure is extremely implausible. Be it through the darkroom incident, a mechanical failure or any other human failure along the way, including Capa's, it's virtually impossible that all Capa took in those 45 minutes (at least) were 11 frames a few seconds of each other. It stands to reason that at least several frames before those and likely several after were indeed lost. With all that said, Coleman's hypothesis does deserve a place in the article; just not with the definitive tone that it's currently getting in the introduction. Rkieferbaum (talk) 19:30, 3 January 2024 (UTC)