Daughter honours memory of war photographer father
Captain Herman V. Wall lost a leg shooting famous photos of D-Day invasion in WWII
Not long after Allied troops landed on Normandy’s Omaha Beach during the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, the very first photographs from the French battlefield were widely published in American newspapers, magazines and journals.
Those images were taken by Captain Herman V. Wall, of the US Army’s 165th Signal Corps, who was aboard one of the first landing crafts to reach the target zone amid a hail of bullets and deafening grenade and landmine blasts.
Wall carried with him only his 35mm 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 just 13 black-and-white images of the packed landing vehicles motoring towards land and soldiers wading ashore.
Then, as he raised his camera for another shot, everything went black. When Wall regained consciousness, he realised 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. Over the past year, the California-based couple assembled the book by combing through thousands of photographs, negatives, documents and personal items she inherited from her dad, who died in 1997 aged 91.
Panatone, 71, says the book is a labour of love to her father, who went on to have a career as a commercial photographer.
“He saw the worst on Omaha Beach, but he spent the rest of his life photographing beauty,” Panatone says, adding Wall used only the first initial of his middle name, Victor, with no full stop as his photographic signature.
In 1947, Wall shot the first colour photos ever published in
Time magazine. In the 1950s, he travelled through the Middle East photographing remote villages, historic sites and indigenous peoples for a library educational resources project. In the 1960s and 1970s, he became nationally known for his commercial floral photography. And in 1974, he photographed a ranch’s last cattle drive in the High Sierras.
Born in 1905 to German immigrant parents in Milwaukee, Wall moved with his family to Los Angeles in the 1920s and became a prolific amateur photographer. He was among the first class of students at the ArtCenter College of Design, where he later worked as an instructor alongside Ansel Adams and other famous photographers.
By October 1940, war was under way in Europe and Wall, then 35, signed up to join the Signal Corps so he could use his photography skills to both record history and support European Allied forces. Fourteen months later, Pearl Harbour was attacked and the US joined the fight.
When Wall awoke after the D-Day explosion, he found himself covered in the feathers of his dead carrier pigeons.
Although barely conscious, he clutched the roll of film in his hand all the way back to a medical ship. Army officials developed and disseminated the images to the American media in the following days. In keeping with government policy, Wall’s D-Day images were published only under the name of the US Army Signal Corps.
Wall spent a year recuperating from his leg amputation and other wounds at a medical hospital in Michigan. That’s where he met his future wife, switchboard operator Ruth Hawks. They married in 1945 and resettled in Los Angeles where their only child, Katherine, was born in January 1951. After Ruth died in 2014, Panatone inherited all of her father’s archives, but they were so voluminous she was overwhelmed at the thought of what to do with them.
Then, in 2021, she met Peck on a blind date. Like Panatone, he was widowed and they shared a common background as educators, avid readers, art lovers and travel aficionados. Peck says when he began exploring the boxes in Panatone’s garage last year, he came up with the idea to write a book about this unsung hero.
“It was a no-brainer,” Peck says. “She told the stories and I was the wordsmith.”
He saw the worst on Omaha Beach, but he spent the rest of his life photographing beauty
KATHY WALL PANATONE