Author	Robert F. Sargent
Date	June 6, 1944
Medium	Printing on silver gelatin
Dimensions	7 in × 9 in
Location	National Coast Guard Museum, New London, USA

Source
Original caption:

"American invaders spring from the ramp of a Coast Guard-manned landing barge to wade those last perilous yards to the beach of Normandy. Enemy fire will cut some of them down. Their 'taxi' will pull itself off the sands and dash back to a Coast Guard manned transport for more passengers."

Context

"Into the jaws of death" is a historical photograph taken on June 6, 1944 by Robert F. Sargent, a photographer from the United States Coast Guard. In it we can see the soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division of the US Army disembarking from a landing craft on Omaha Beach during the Normandy landings in World War II.

More than 70 years ago the most important amphibious invasion in history happened, this operation accelerated the end of a catastrophic war that left Europe in ruins. Nearly 200.000 American, British and Canadian troops boarded 7.000 ships and headed towards Normandy where they encountered resistance from German positions along the French coast.

The landing craft we see in the photograph had left the attack transport USS Samuel Chase who was a few miles away from the Normandy coast at 5:30 a.m. The swell was a little strong, the waves broke continuously on the bow of the boat, and the soldiers inside were soaked in cold water from the ocean.

The photograph was taken at 7:40 AM, local time. We can see the soldiers who leave the boat heading towards the "Easy Red" sector of the beach with water up to the waist carrying up to 80 lb of equipment, they had to maneuver through 200 meters of exposed beach before reaching the coverage.

Source

Another photo of Sargent on the way to the beach, this time colored

The trip was very hard, Sargent says that the soldiers on board were silent and all were "cold and soaked to the skin" with waves crashing on the square arch of the small landing craft.

The American forces that landed on Omaha beach had to face the fiercest resistance, at the end of the day they suffered about 3.000 casualties (dead, wounded and missing in action). That's why this day remains alive in the United States.

My opinion

It is understandable what these young soldiers felt at that moment, the photo not only shows us a historical event, but also generates the sensation of being one of those fighters on the way to the beach. Trying to put ourselves in their situation for a moment is not very comfortable (at least for me), they are going directly to a possible death.

Was it worth it for some of them to sacrifice their life? maybe at that time they would have thought it well, joining the army should have been easy, it was trendy, those who didn’t join were considered cowards, it was also a way out of their monotonous life for those men who were looking for new adventures. Did they really want to die for the liberation of Europe? A continent thousands of miles from home, or maybe they were making a bet: death or glory.

I will not risk to put the price or value to the life of others, it’s a very complex philosophical question that we will not cover here, if those men were in that place at that precise moment it was in exercise of their freedom, but I am sure that at least one of them regretted his decision.

War seems to be inevitable, it’s part of our instinct, we can try to do everything possible to postpone it, but our thirst for blood will always be there, waiting for the opportunity to subdue whoever opposes us.

Curiosities

• The image was represented in the film “Saving Private Ryan” and appears on the cover of Stanley Lombardo's English translation in 1997 of the Iliad as a symbol of the universality of war.

• The phrase "Into the jaws of death" in the title of the photograph comes from a refrain from the poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson about the charge of the light brigade in the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War called "The Charge of the Light Brigade ".