South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
NATIONAL BESTSELLERS
HARDCOVER FICTION
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Not long after Allied troops landed on Normandy’s Omaha Beach during the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, the first photographs from the French battlefield were widely published in American newspapers, magazines and journals.
Those images were taken by U.S. Army
165th Signal Corps Capt. Herman V Wall, who was aboard one of the first landing crafts to reach the Easy Red Sector target zone amid a hail of bullets and deafening grenade and land mine blasts. Wall carried with him only his 35 mm Leica camera, a knapsack, a pistol and two canvas bags holding live carrier pigeons that he planned to send back to their home base with exposed rolls of film strapped to their bodies.
The carnage on the beach — where thousands of Allied troops died that day — was horrific, but Wall followed Army orders to keep dead bodies out of his photos. He snapped 13 black-and-white images of the packed landing vehicles motoring toward land and exhausted soldiers wading ashore. Then, as he raised his camera for another shot, everything went black. When Wall regained consciousness, he realized his left leg had been blown off, but his camera — and the film that captured the earliest moments of a battle that turned the tide of World War II — were safe.
This vivid story opens the picture-filled book “Herman V Wall: Standing on One Leg,” published by Wall’s daughter, Kathy Wall Panatone, and her husband, Stephen Peck. The couple assembled the book by combing through thousands of photographs, negatives, documents and
personal items she inherited from her dad, who died in 1997 at age 91.
Panatone, 71, said the book is a labor of love to her father, whose patriotism and bravery in the early hours of D-Day inspired others in his company to forge ahead. But it’s also a tribute to the man Wall became after the war. With the aid of a full leg prosthetic, he went on to a long, illustrious and adventurous career as a commercial photographer.
“He saw the worst on Omaha Beach, but he spent the rest of his life photographing beauty,” Panatone said, adding that Wall used the first initial of his middle name with no period as his photographic signature.
In 1947, Wall shot the first color photos published in Time magazine. In the 1950s, he traveled through the Middle East photographing remote villages, historic sites and Indigenous peoples for a library educational resources project. In 1964, Wall was named to Eastman Kodak’s list of the top 10 photographers in America. In the 1960s and 1970s, he became nationally known for his commercial floral photography. In 1974, he photographed a ranch’s last cattle drive in the