The D-Day landings, in pictures

 The D-Day landings, in pictures

It was just after dawn on June 6, 1944.

Robert F. Sargent, a chief photographer's mate in the US Coast Guard, was aboard one of the many Higgins boats heading toward the shores of Normandy, France, at the start of the D-Day invasion. With him were soldiers from the US Army's 1st Infantry Division, cold and soaked from the choppy waters.

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"Smoke hung over everything," Sargent later told Coast Guard Combat Correspondent Thomas Winship, "and as the coxswain opened his throttle to drive into the beach we saw the enemy-placed obstacles, a tangled mess of timbers, barbed wire and hidden mines."

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From afar, the beach ahead of Sargent's boat looked lifeless and deserted. Then he glanced over at another nearby boat and saw the water between them being pelted by German bullets "like a mud-puddle in a hailstorm. It seemed impossible that we would make it without being riddled."

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When the boats reached sandbars, their bow doors dropped and their ramps went down, releasing the soldiers into shallow water that they would have to wade through while being fired at by German machine guns. Many would not make it to shore.

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This is the scene that Sargent captured with his famous photo "Into the Jaws of Death." It is one of the most widely reproduced photos from the Normandy landings, which laid the foundation for the Allied defeat of Germany in World War II.

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This year marks the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the largest amphibious invasion in history. There were many Allied casualties that day — around 4,440 Allied troops were confirmed dead, according to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, with more than 5,800 troops wounded or missing. But by midnight, the Allies had secured their beachheads and moved further inland.

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Sargent stayed on the boat, which returned to the USS Samuel Chase to bring more waves of troops to the shore. He carried his film in a metal milk can to keep it safe.

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"The coast of France this morning was certainly no photographer's party," he told Winship. Sargent died in 2012.

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