After decades of obscurity, an American retiree is being fêted in New York as “The Face in the Surf” in Robert Capa’s iconic image of a soldier swimming ashore in the D-Day landing.

Huston “Hu” Riley, now 86, has been identified as the figure of grim determination captured by the celebrated war photographer as he crawled on to Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, in the first wave of the invasion of Normandy. The blurred black-and-white picture inspired the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg’s Second World War film.

Mr Riley, who still has a bullet lodged in his chest from wounds that he received during the landing, told The Times that Capa helped to pull him ashore. “I was surprised to see him there. I saw the press badge and I thought, ‘What the hell is he doing here?’ ” he said. “He helped me out of the water and then he took off down the beach for some more photos.”

The Hungarian-born Capa, the most famous war photographer of the 20th century and a founder of the Magnum photo agency, had landed on the Easy Red section of Omaha Beach with E Company at about 6.30am.

“From the air, ‘Easy Red’ must have looked like an open tin of sardines,” he later wrote. “Shooting from the sardine’s angle, the foreground of my pictures was filled with wet boots and green faces. Above the boots and faces, my picture frames were filled with shrapnel smoke; burnt tanks and sinking barges formed my background.” Soon afterwards, Mr Riley, a private in F Company, 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, jumped out of his landing craft about 50 yards offshore.

“When I came out of the boat I just dropped. I could look up at the surface and I could see the bullets coming into the water,” he recalled. “I went down about 14ft. I hit the bottom and pulled my life vest and came up. I noticed the main confusion was mainly to the right. I swam to the left. I took off the life vest to keep a low profile in the water. I could feel a lot of bodies. A lot of them — even some I recognised.”

As Mr Riley ran through shallow water, a burst of machinegun fire ripped into his right shoulder. Two of the four bullets exited but two lodged in his flesh. Mr Riley said that Capa “was right beside me when I got hit” but he thinks the photographer did not realise that he had been shot.

Capa shot 108 pictures in the first couple of hours of Operation Overlord. Unfortunately, a darkroom assistant at Life magazine set the drying oven temperature too high and melted the emulsion in the negatives, so that only eight blurred frames survived.

Mr Riley was evacuated back to Britain. He returned to the front line after a month in hospital and was wounded again in fighting at Aachen.

Mr Riley’s mother spotted him when Life magazine published the eight surviving Capa photographs in its issue of June 19, 1944, with a caption describing them as “slightly out of focus” — a phrase that Capa used as the title for his autobiographical account of the war. “My mother knew who it was. Mothers are that way,” Mr Riley said. “Nothing was ever said about it. We just went on our way.”

On the 40th anniversary of D-Day, Life published an interview with a former soldier named Edward Regan claiming to be the man in the photograph. But research by Lowell Getz, a former University of Illinois professor, showed that Mr Regan came ashore two miles from Capa and concluded that it was Mr Riley in the image.

Mr Riley, now retired from his career representing manufacturers of outdoors gear, was a guest of honour at the opening of a show of Capa’s work at the International Centre of Photography in New York this week.

Looking at the blown-up image on a museum wall, he said: “It brings back memories of a lot of guys I knew and all the noise and all the crap I went through. My wife and I went back for the 60th anniversary. I went back through the grave registry. There were just a hell of a lot of guys gone.”

Capa died in 1954 after stepping on a landmine while covering the First Indochina War in Vietnam for Life.

Caught on film

— Alfred Eisenstadt took no notes with his picture of a sailor kissing a young nurse on VJ Day, and it was not until the 1980s that Edith Shain identified herself. Carl Muscarello, retired New York policeman, was chosen from many claiming to be the sailor to recreate the picture in 2005

— Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of the raising of the US flag on Iwo Jima became an American icon and won a Pulitzer Prize. Three of the servicemen pictured died in the battle. The others were withdrawn from the front line to promote sales of war bonds

— Eddie Adams’s 1968 photograph of South Vietnam’s police chief, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, holding a gun to the head of a suspected Vietcong guerrilla came to symbolise the violence of the Vietnam War. Loan later emigrated to the US and ran a pizza parlour

Sources: www.defenselink.mil; www.iwojima.com; www.buddhistinformation.com; www.digitaljournalist.org; Times archives

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