(Please note: one gets a far better sense of the photograph, when viewed in its enlarged form; one can see the larger image at the link, below, or by clicking on the image, above.)
The picture accompanies a story (in this coming Sunday's Times Magazine) about the journalist Ernie Pyle, who covered the Allied landing. The Times story notes: "On D-Day, as the invasion force fought for the beach, Pyle was trapped just offshore, on a ship transporting tanks...[He] wasn’t allowed to go ashore at Omaha Beach until the morning after."
The Times story quotes from Pyle's first column about D-Day, published six days later:
“The advantages were all theirs,” Pyle said of the German defenders: concrete gun emplacements and hidden machine-gun nests “with crossfire taking in every inch of the beach,” immense V-shaped ditches, buried mines, barbed wire, “whole fields of evil devices under the water to catch our boats” and “four men on shore for every three men we had approaching the shore.” “And yet,” Pyle concluded, “we got on.”
More than 4400 Allied troops, it is estimated, died on June 6th--American, British, Canadian. Approximately 2500 of those who died were Americans.
Ernie Pyle died the following April, on Okinawa, killed by enemy gunfire. He had accompanied the Marines, as they landed and then fought there.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/magazine/d-day-normandy-75th-ernie-pyle.html
(Photograph, above: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
