Cameron’s future mate during the Korean War, Bert Hardy, chief photographer for Picture Post, did go in at Normandy a few days after D-Day and went on to brilliantly cover the Liberation of Paris, and the crossing of the Rhine. Among his other notable coverages for Picture Post were his sterling Blitz photo essays, one of which earned him the first photographer credit in that magazine’s history. Hardy was a sergeant in the Royal Army Photographic Unit from 1942-46.

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Picture Post’s founding editor, the Hungarian Jew Stefan Lorant, had been imprisoned by Hitler in 1933, and his attacked Hitler early and often. Its publisher/owner Sir Edward Hulton helped found the Home Defence School, which played its part in effective home front defence. And in addition to the stable of legendary photographers Picture Post employed, some of the best writers of the day wrote for it.

British and American journalists working in Britain during the war developed what writer James Tobin has called a’structure of solidarity.’ Despite the rivalries that existed between Allied reporters of various nationalities, there was also a keen sense of shared obligation, not only to report their stories and take their pictures well, but also to push hard for Allied victory. All of them wanted to report well on actions like D-Day and the war generally–and help eliminate the Nazis.

In the end, the legendary American reporter Ernie Pyle, who went in on 7 June at Normandy, wrote the best summary of the early impact of D-Day: ‘…it will be some time before we have a really clear picture of what has happened or what is happening at the moment. You must experience the terrible confusion of warfare and the frantic nightmarish thunder and smoke and bedlam of battle to realize this.’

More than 150,000 Allied troops took part in the D-Day assault, and 9,000 of them died on 6 June. Eleven more grueling, bloody months passed before Germany surrendered, but surrender it did. V-E Day is still celebrated every year, and though the war was not fully won until August 1945’s atomic bomb blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for the British people, the long, hard battle with their biggest nightmare, Nazi Germany, ended on 8 May 1945.

This article was written by David Marcou for British Heritage magazine.

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