He took this at age 83.
Posted on 03/26/2010 1:01:49 PM PDT by decimon
Marty Lederhandler, an Associated Press photographer who captured on film every U.S. president from Herbert Hoover to Bill Clinton, covered the D-Day landing in 1944 and climaxed a 66-year career with an iconic shot of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, has died. He was 92.
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Drafted into the Army in 1940, he became an officer and on June 6, 1944, led his Signal Corps camera team ashore with the 4th Infantry Division at Utah Beach, toting two carrier pigeons along with his camera gear.
But when he attached film canisters for the pigeons to return across the Channel to England, the second one, evidently confused, flew inland instead.
A month later, U.S. troops capturing Cherbourg found a German army newspaper left by fleeing Germans with one of the photos on Page 1, duly credited to "U.S.A. reporter, Lt. Lederhandler."
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(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
RIP
I guess now you can, ummm, focus?
He took this at age 83.
Lederhandler was from a time when the AP was the Gold Standard in reporting.
Carrier pigeons? wow. How many of them didn’t make it?
Do we have a war memorial to them?
He lived in different&difficult times, they made the best of what they had to work with.
RIP Marty
Even the Germans would give photo credit...
The German army, anyway. And he seems to have been Jewish and they probably knew that from his name.
US forces had the Stars and Stripes.
What was the name was of the German Army’s paper?
Michelin Guide? I don't know.
Normandy - 1944
One of his first shots - of colleagues coming ashore from their landing-ship tank - was to find itself on to the front pages of a newspaper... in Germany.
You couldn't see the sky - there were a thousand planes there. And for 360 degrees there was nothing but ships
He explains: "I had been given two racing pigeons in England to send the film back. But 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.
"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. Apparently, when they haven't had any exercise, you are supposed to let them walk around first. But they didn't tell me that, either!"
About three weeks later, his division captured a German command post, and one of the first things Marty spotted was a German newspaper - with his photograph on the front page.
"They gave me a byline and explained that it had come from a pigeon that fell exhausted into German hands."
RIP.
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