In the spring of 1944, the Brooklyn-bred son of Russian Jewish immigrants had been recuperating at Tilton General Hospital at Fort Dix, N.J., courtesy of machine gun slugs from General Erwin Rommel’s Panzers. He’d go on to fight in North Africa, Tunisia and Sicily. Soon bored with taking pictures of two-star generals, Stern joined up with the 1st Battalion Darby’s Rangers unit for training in Scotland. When the war came, Stern’s unit of 10 Signal Corps men were the first to be sent to England in the early summer of 1942. At night he took photos of dead bodies for the Police Gazette at $3.00 a pop. Soon he began working in a cheap, grimy photoengraving shop on Manhattan’s Canal Street. Photography became my life.”Īfter school, he worked in photo labs and art studios, sweeping the floors and cleaning dark rooms, mixing chemicals and loading film-plates for bulky cameras. “I was fascinated with the images it made. “It was one of those box cameras,” Stern later recalled. Stern’s lifelong passion for photography began when his mother came across an advertisement in the newspaper offering a free, brand-new Eastman Kodak camera to any 12-year-old. A selection of his images from that day, lost for decades, are seen here. “Also, my heart is with the guys who take the pictures we see, fellows who are so in the thick of things that they have to drop their cameras for their guns.”Īntsy to snap some photos on that historic day, Stern instead took to the streets of New York City. Two years of camera-toting on the frontline and here I am, stuck back in the States just when the best shooting of the war gets under way!” Stern once told the newspaper PM. “I got a feeling for what our men are going through - the same feeling I got when I fought beside them before I was discharged for wounds in North Africa and Sicily. Shipped stateside after being wounded in Sicily, he could only wish he were there. Army Ranger and combat photographer Phil Stern - but when D-Day arrived, he was nowhere nearby. One person who knew well the risks taken to capture those images was U.S. Now, 75 years after D-Day, those photos remain urgent reminders of what happened that day. It would take just a little more time for photography from the beaches to make it into the American press Robert Capa’s iconic image of a soldier in the surf, for example, appeared in the June 19 issue of LIFE. edition, with a front page headline announcing the “Great Invasion is Under Way.” The commander of one American base in England, TIME would report the next week, summed up the morning to his men: “This is what we have been waiting for.” New Yorkers and the rest of the country had their ears glued intently to radio stations while New York Times editors rushed to put out a special 6 a.m. News of the invasion spread quickly that morning. Operation Overlord was a crucial Allied victory, the beginning of the end of World War II in Europe. A handful of Army Rangers had climbed the cliffs of Pointe Du Hoc, destroying the Nazi guns that threatened the breakout of American forces storming Utah Beach on what would be the largest air, land and seaborne invasion in history. By the time New Yorkers were waking up on the morning of June 6, 1944, the first and second waves of American troops had come ashore under relentless German fire on the beaches of Normandy.
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