Casualties
Ships bring back wounded and dead
In Coast Guard LCT, medical officer, wearing two bars on his big Navy-type helmet, prepares to give transfusion to crewman hit by German shell fragments.
After photographer Capa made the acutely real landing pictures which appear on the preceding five pages, he left the hazardous beach in a Coast Guard LCT which was evacuating the wounded and dead to a hospital ship standing offshore. As he waded out to get aboard, his cameras were thoroughly soaked. By some miracle, one of them was not too badly damaged and he was able to keep making pictures. The excitement was not over by a long shot.
As Capa’s LCT pulled away from the beach, it was hit three times by shells from German shore batteries. Several of the Coast Guard crew were killed and others seriously wounded. The boat began to list badly, but it managed to get back to the hospital ship. There, most of the wounded were taken off, despite the list and heavy seas. One man, however, was too seriously hurt to be moved, and it was necessary for a medical officer to give him a plasma transfusion on the spot. As he prepared to do this, Capa snapped the picture shown above. The next picture, showing a few of the first men to fall in the invasion of Europe, was made by Capa after he had boarded the hospital ship.
The first dead of the invasion, shrouded in white bags, are laid in neat rows on the deck of a U.S. hospital ship, which takes them back to English graves.
Although the extent of the U.S. casualties in the Normandy landings has not yet been announced, they were generally lighter than expected. The wounded have received magnificent care. The evacuation chain set up by Maj. Gen. Paul R. Hawley, head ETO surgeon, appeared to be working smoothly. Invasion reporters who never got to France at all found a minor epic in the return of the wounded to English ports on the day after the first assault. Some of them walked off the ships, with their uniforms torn and their bandages hastily applied, but swiftly and safely carried out of the battle zone. Others came on stretchers carried by Negro litter bearers, their personal belongings piled beside them. some carried their boots, with French sand still clinging to the soles, on their litters. Many spoke of fine work done by medical men on the beaches. Said one man, “They’re right in there, giving morphine and bandaging wounds while the bullets whiz past their ears.” Another report told of a difficult abdominal operation performed in a pitching LST under improvised lights.
Three wounded Canadians chose an unorthodox but astonishingly simple method of getting themselves to a hospital in England. According to a dispatch to the New York Times, they walked out of a dockyard to which they had been brought and hailed a taxi. Their leader, Lt. C. R. Bond of the Royal Canadian Navy, said to hospital attendants, “We’re back from France.”