Glacial Errata, No. 74

[Editor’s Note: Last week’s newsletter featured the enigmatic bookplate of one Mell Efrid, about whom, Melissa Beck noted, little was known, other than presuming she had some connection to stage or screen. Reader Benjamin Clark got curious and tracked down this item about her, reprinted below, in case you were as curious as he and I both were! He also found a bunch of photos on Ebay of her and her husband Lloyd. Enjoy, and thanks, Benjamin!]

[And now, on to No. 74….]

One

On the morning of June 6, 1944, Martin Lederhandler stepped off LST-282 onto Utah beach with thousands of other men, following earlier waves of soldiers who’d secured the beaches at Normandy on D-Day. “You couldn’t see the sky—there were a thousand planes there,” he would later recall. “And for 360 degrees there was nothing but ships.”

Two

Lederhandler was 26 years old, and he’d followed his older brother’s footsteps into photography, working at the Associated Press before being drafted into the National Guard in 1940. Just as his tour was about to end, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and Lederhandler ended up extending his time in the military, joining the Signal Corps and ultimately ending up in England as part of the Normandy invasion.

Three

Once on the beach, Lederhandler took a quick roll of shots, including one of the LST-282 unloading troops (I’m not sure if the one above was included in that initial role, but it is definitely not the specific photo under discussion here—more on that soon), intended for Allied newspapers back home. But the voyage to Normandy was a one-way trip, and so the only way to get the negatives back was via carrier pigeon.

"I had been given two racing pigeons in England to send the film back,” Lederhandler would later explain. "I did my 10 pictures—that was all they could carry in a canister—attached it to the bird and threw it up in the air.”

The plan was that the pigeons would then fly home, as they were trained to do, and the negatives would be developed. Lederhandler, meanwhile, followed the invasion inland.

Four

And then, something strange happened.

Weeks later, in a small town in France, Lederhandler was stunned to come across the photo he’d taken that morning on Utah Beach…on the front page of a German newspaper.

As he later explained to the BBC, “because of a storm in the Channel, D-Day was put back to 6 June, and by that time the pigeons had gone four days without exercise. Apparently, they need exercise after three days, but they didn't tell me that.” Additionally, “when they haven't had any exercise, you are supposed to let them walk around first. But they didn't tell me that, either!" As a result, the pigeon, normally inerrant in heading home, had become confused, and instead of returning to England, the bird had flown inland. Eventually, the Germans had found it, along with Lederhandler’s negatives, which they had ultimately published.

Oddly, the German paper had properly credited Lederhandler, and explained that the image had come from an exhausted pigeon that had fallen into German hands. But it also claimed that the LST-282 had sunk shortly after the photo was taken, a clear lie for propaganda purposes.

Five

In a strange turn of events, however, the German propaganda turned out to be somewhat prescient, as the LST-282 was lost not long after, sinking as a result of a direct hit from a German bomb on August 16, 1944.

Lederhandler continued taking pictures for decades afterwards, capturing one of the most iconic photos of the Twin Towers burning. You can read more about his work here. He died in 2010.