By the time New Yorkers were waking up on the morning of June 6, 1944, the first and second waves of American troops had come ashore under relentless German fire on the beaches of Normandy. A handful of Army Rangers had climbed the cliffs of Pointe Du Hoc, destroying the Nazi guns that threatened the breakout of American forces storming Utah Beach on what would be the largest air, land and seaborne invasion in history. Operation Overlord was a crucial Allied victory, the beginning of the end of World War II in Europe. News of the invasion spread quickly that morning. New Yorkers and the rest of the country had their ears glued intently to radio stations while New York Times editors rushed to put out a special 6 a.m. edition, with a front page headline announcing the “Great Invasion is Under Way.” The commander of one American base in England, TIME would report the next week, summed up the morning to his men: “This is what we have been waiting for.”
It would take just a little more time for photography from the beaches to make it into the American press; Robert Capa’s iconic image of a soldier in the surf, for example, appeared in the June 19 issue of LIFE. Now, 75 years after D-Day, those photos remain urgent reminders of what happened that day.
One person who knew well the risks taken to capture those images was U.S. Army Ranger and combat photographer Phil Stern — but when D-Day arrived, he was nowhere nearby. Shipped stateside after being wounded in Sicily, he could only wish he were there.
“I got a feeling for what our men are going through — the same feeling I got when I fought beside them before I was discharged for wounds in North Africa and Sicily. Two years of camera-toting on the frontline and here I am, stuck back in the States just when the best shooting of the war gets under way!” Stern once told the newspaper PM. “Also, my heart is with the guys who take the pictures we see, fellows who are so in the thick of things that they have to drop their cameras for their guns.”
Antsy to snap some photos on that historic day, Stern instead took to the streets of New York City. A selection of his images from that day, lost for decades, are seen here.