Bert Brandt sent the first photos from France on D-Day

When we think about photographers on D-Day, Robert Capa usually is the first to come to mind. But as Capa's Life magazine editors anxiously awaited his film from Normandy, they saw another photographer's shots from the scene come across the wires first.

Bert Brandt, born Dec. 11, 1915 in Winnipeg, was a seasoned war photographer for ACME Newspictures who had seen plenty of action in Italy, but Omaha Beach was something else entirely.

"It was hotter than hell over there. I was at Anzio but Anzio was nothing like this," Brandt told United Press correspondent James McGlincy the following day in London.

Bert Brandt is on the left, loaded down for the D-Day landings

McGlincy's account of Brandt's experience ran in newspapers nationwide. The 28-year-old managed to deliver the first pictures of action on the ground in France, including a shot looking down the ramp of a landing craft that recalls the instantly recognizable "Into the Jaws of Death" by Coast Guard photographer Robert F. Sargent.

Brandt went ashore with one of the later waves, landing in the early afternoon and spending about 30 minutes on the beach. He caught a ride back to a transport on a craft ferrying the wounded out for treatment, and then on to England from there.

“The courier service broke down completely because of the hard fighting, and the only pictures that got back at all were those that three of us took back ourselves,” Brandt said in a speaking engagement in Pittsburgh months later. “I didn’t know whether mine would be first or last, but I bent every effort to get them in as soon as possible.”

Brandt's photos haven't held up like Sargent's iconic shot, nor Capa's legendarily grainy pictures from the surf, but they ran in hundreds of newspapers in the days and weeks following the landings after being distributed across all the news services thanks to the pool agreement in place for D-Day coverage.

“It made me feel pretty good when all the London papers used my pictures on the front page, because they’re pretty ‘sticky’ about American stuff,” he said.

Brandt would return to Normandy to cover the advance to Cherbourg and beyond, and was in Paris for the liberation in August. He finally returned home to the U.S. in November for a brief break before heading back to Europe to see out the rest of the fighting there.

Brandt remained a news photographer through 1953, when he moved to Houston and began doing commercial work. Among his projects, he documented the construction of the Johnson Space Center from start to finish. He died of an apparent heart attack in 1975, two days before his 60th birthday.