Seventy-three years ago today, when the first wave of American troops stormed Omaha Beach during the Allied invasion of Normandy, photo journalist Robert Capa was with them.  Capa took 106 pictures on D-Day but, because of an accident at a London photo lab, all but eleven of them were destroyed.

The eleven that survived, nicknamed the Magnificent Eleven, are a portrait of bravery and a tribute to the men who, on that morning, risked (and, in many cases, sacrificed) their lives to help defeat Hitler’s war machine.  By the end of D-Day, 4,014 Allied troops were confirmed to have been killed in action.

Robert Capa survived D-Day.  Though he initially swore that he would never cover another war, Capa accepted an assignment in 1954 to travel to Southeast Asia and cover the First Indochina War.  It was there that Capa was killed when he stepped on a land mine.  He was 40 years old.